Kim Marra

Queer Aging Bareback: A Ride with the Parthenon Sculptures

Lesbian, equestrian, and scholarly desires merge through riding, literally and figuratively, with the mounted Athenian soldiers portrayed in the Parthenon frieze. The aging embodied, affective experience of barebacking on a retired cavalry-trained horse offers a key to understanding the queerness of these naked white men’s riding performance.

Elsie De Wolfe Circa 1901: The Dynamics of Prescriptive Feminine Performance in American Theatre and Society

Despite the many admirable qualities of Mr. Clyde Fitchs play, The Way of the World at the Victoria Theatre is not so much a dramatic entertainment as a social function. Any well-ordered comment upon it must take cognizance of the audience as well as of the mummers who perform on the far side of the footlights. They are as much a part of it as the stage setting, and the result of their presence is that the five-act drama and its four intermissions and final curtain form a continuous performance the like of which New York has never seen before.

LGBTQ Historical Scholarship: What Was It Like Twenty Years Ago?

We developed our project on gays and lesbians in American theatre history from two very different institutions and career stages in our home state of Iowa long before we ever dreamed that we would be able to marry our partners legally in our own backyards. The original catalyst came from what Bob Schanke, then professor and chair of the theatre department at Central College in Pella, Iowa, learned while on a coast-to-coast book signing tour for his 1991 biography Shattered Applause: The Lives of Eva Le Gallienne. People were really interested in how the same-sex sexual desires of this actress impacted her life, her art, and her career. He envisioned a collection of essays on other such figures that he would coedit as a gay male scholar with a lesbian scholar, hence his recruitment of Kim Marra, then a new assistant professor at the University of Iowa, whom he had met at the Mid-America Theatre Conference. Although the University of Iowa in the early 1990s led the Big Ten in establishing health coverage for same-sex domestic partners, administrators were under fire by politically appointed regents for condoning the use of sexually explicit gay-themed materials in classes, which contributed to an anxious climate for untenured out faculty. Bob was long tenured, but he endured homophobic vandalism of his office multiple times on his small, religious campus as his scholarship made his personal proclivities more public. Thus, we both had to consider certain risks in pursuing this project, but those risks fueled our sense of need for such work ultimately to combat homophobia.

Massive Bodies in Mortal Performance

In an ongoing London run, a Tony-winning run at New York’s Lincoln Center, and tours of North America, Australia, Ireland, the UK, Berlin, and, China, the hit play War Horse (2007) powerfully conjures equine bodies in the First World War to highlight the unprecedented slaughter and devastation and critique the ineffectuality of military action. The play was adapted for the National Theatre of Great Britain by Nick Stafford from a children’s book by Michael Morpurgo told, a la Black Beauty, through the eyes of a war horse called Joey. Morpurgo wrote the story in tribute to the eight million equines who were killed, more than one million from England alone, as traditional cavalry formations came up against the modern technologies that would render them obsolete. When the army takes Joey for service, Albert Narracott, the Devon farm boy who raised him, vows to find him. In a Brechtian epic style, using life-sized horse puppets created by South Africa’s Handspring Puppet Company, the play dramatizes Joey’s and Albert’s interwoven journeys across the combat zone. Its storytelling engages audiences on both sides of the Atlantic as the centenary of the First World War and the sesquicentenary of the Civil War, the costliest American conflict in human and equine blood, proceed.1 In so doing, the play evokes not only an explicit history of horses in war but also an unacknowledged parallel history of horses on stage dramatizing war.

Wild and Dangerous Performances: Animals, Emotions, Circus by Peta Tait (review)

In this compelling and useful study, Peta Tait illuminates the complex nexus of animals, emotions, and circus. The “wild and dangerous performances” of her title refer to circus acts of exotic, as opposed to domestic, animals, chiefly big cats and elephants, which headlined tours of major companies in Europe and North America from the late nineteenth century through the peak decades of the 1920s to the ’60s. Drawing on animal-trainer and circusowner memoirs, newspaper articles, reviews, photos, fiction and films, circus programs, magazines, and ads, Tait explores not only the awe, fear, and excitement that these acts aroused in audiences, but also the emotions imputed to the animals, as well as those felt and projected by their trainers and mobilized for publicity and various forms of social and political activism.

The Cambridge History of American Theatre, Vol. II: 1870-1945 (review)

This second book in a three-volume set continues the ambitious and praiseworthy efforts of editors Don B. Wilmeth and Christopher Bigsby to present a comprehensive examination of United States theatre history “with a full awareness of relevant developments in literary criticism, cultural analysis, and performance theory” (i). Like the first volume, also reviewed in this issue, Volume II includes an editorial introduction that sets forth broad themes; a lengthy overview essay, in this case by Thomas Postlewait, covering multiple strands of development throughout the period; and eight subsequent chapters, each dealing with particular aspects of theatrical production. Generally well written, this volume presents an extraordinary synthesis of information as it works to capture the theatre’s role in a rapidly changing, modernizing nation.