“Making America Great Again: Selling the American Dream to Transnational Game Show Publics”
CBS Television City, Hollywood is a space which promises that any person off the street can go from “rags to great wealth”. The Price is Right (1972 —) illustrates this paradigm, allows audiences to participate in the American Dream, and then to escape the struggles of everyday life. My paper will ask, how has the game show form been used by publics to support radical and right-wing worldviews in the U.S. and Germany? I will draw from critical race theory, whiteness studies, and cultural analyses like that of Olaf Hoerschelmann on game shows and hegemony to identify why the game show form is currently seeing a renewed interest among networks in 21st century television programming. I will also reflect upon my own experience as a contestant on Price in 2018 as a white, American, middle-class man. U.S. publics voted for Donald Trump, a kind of game show host in the 2016 presidential election. In Germany, the right wing Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) currently sees popularity of around twenty percent. The German RTL television network’s reality show Zahltag (2018) features families on welfare, provides them with a suitcase of cash, and asks, can these families pull themselves out of the welfare trap? Can these poor Germans go from rags to great wealth? Right-wing ideology in both countries is supported by white, working, middle-class voters who support policies that mark and exclude others, all the while consuming narratives that promise them access to more privilege and power.
Originally presented: Right Wing Publics for Theatrical Performance Working Group. ASTR 2019, Arlington - Theatre’s Many Publics.
“Protecting Memory and Whiteness in German Narratives of Nation Strategies of Protection through Memory and Whiteness in German Narratives of Nation”
In light of the Munich McDonalds rampage that left 10 dead in 2016, and the series of theatrical productions that attempted blackface in three Berlin theaters in 2012, this paper examines how the complicated, multi-dimensional nature of whiteness continues to maintain control over narratives of the German nation in the 21st century. This paper exists at the intersection of memory, narratives of nation, and whiteness. Those narratives that are remembered reflect those who have the power to tell a nation to remember the past in a certain way. The collective mentality of Germans has required them to scapegoat non-white individuals in order to preserve their hegemonic interests.
Memory and desire determine how a nation defines itself. Alon Confino, professor of history at the University of Virginia, writes that it is near impossible to separate the memory of WWII in a given European society from how that society developed the cultural idea of “memory” after 1945 to understand the past. This paper will examine images, myths, and values of whiteness that serve to erase distinctions and spread the myth that white people and non-white people are the same; unaffected by a history of racist discrimination.
In today’s Germany, Ina Kerner, professor of diversity politics at Humboldt University, urges in her essay “Challenges of Critical Whiteness Studies," that too much is expected from individual self-reflection among white people in whiteness discourse. Kerner identifies three different, interrelated, and mutually reinforcing dimensions of racism in an attempt to intervene into this conversation. Contemporary German whiteness in this paper vacillates between narratives of sameness and difference solely to protect itself. This history and behavior reaches back to the Enlightenment project, when humans were categorized into hierarchies along with other species, in order to establish the supremacy of whiteness. Confino, Girard, and Kerner are necessary voices to understand the surfacing of Blackface in Berlin and the desperate attempts its non-white citizens will take to become part of their nation’s story and penetrate white narratives that remain protected.
Originally presented: Residual Transgressions Working Group. ASTR 2017, Atlanta - Extra/Ordinary Bodies: Interrogating the Performance and Aesthetics of “Difference”
“Playing to Win: Strategies of Whiteness at Play through the American Game Show”
This paper examines game shows found within RuPaul’s Drag Race as strategies to unmask how the American game show form reflects the larger agenda of whiteness and its inseparable linkage to concepts of winning. The game show form in the twenty-first century allows this paper to examine a site where “race” is not explicitly addressed. This form presents narratives of success within reach of its audience. It offers a narrative that strips contestants of identity, presumes every player begins the game with nothing, are therefore equal, and presumes to offer each of them an equal and fair opportunity to not just mobilize forward economically, but to win it all. The game show is complicit in defining the American Dream as a quick and speedy journey from nothing to everything. By winning in this arena, you gain access to more desirable spaces. This form offers a space to strive for that.
Originally presented: Panel: Make it Work: Competition Reality Shows in Theory and Practice. Theory and Criticism working group. ATHE 2017, Las Vegas - Spectacle: Balancing Education, Theory, and Practice.
“Fearing Citizenship Liberating the Homosexual in Three 1950s Plays”
This paper examines how dramatic and performative strategies worked to liberate oppressed bodies in a homophobic America and on a 1950s theatrical stage. I will identify strategies that were used by authors to unmask desire and liberate the bodies of Martha, Tom, and Brick in the 1950s plays Tea and Sympathy, Cat on A Hot Tin Roof, and the 1950s revival of The Children’s Hour. Reality is irrelevant on this stage. America’s perception of the homosexual in this decade is what audiences feared. I am concerned with how these oppressed characters react to the work of hegemony to marginalize them as they attempt to cross the border and gain a fuller sense of citizenship. This paper will examine the working relationship between gay characters, artists, and audiences on the theatrical stage of the 1950s.
Audiences saw a kind of fear come to life on stage as characters were punished if perceived as gay. This was done without proper regard for evidence, the homosocial continuum, and the consequences to those who attempted to challenge heteronormativity on stage. At face value, it appears these plays are solely working to exclude characters from notions of citizenship in American culture. But that alone would be misleading. These three tragedies do not celebrate the destruction of the homosexual, but mourn it as they ask audiences to sympathize with the destroyed individual. Because power in American culture allowed no solution to this perceived threat other than alcoholism, suicide, or adultery, I reveal dramatic and performative strategies that served as a prerequisite and catalyst to what would later be framed as gay liberation.
Originally presented: Debut Paper Presentation. Theatre and Social Change working group. ATHE 2016, Chicago - Bodies at Work: Performance, Labor, and ATHE at 30
“Ambiguities of Witnessing in Max Frisch’s Firebugs”
This paper examines how Max Frisch’s 1953 play The Firebugs can be used as an object of study to examine how cultural memory is formed after a moral dilemma. I will read the text against commentary of Frisch, dramatic analysis, and theory in memory studies in order to understand how witnessing is ambiguous. Astrid Erll uses the term “cultural memory” to understand the place of an individual’s remembrance in light of historical understanding, so as not to co-opt the memory of an individual and force that memory, solely, upon the greater community.
Cultural memory is on display in two ways in this play. Firstly, the nature of this study asks us to consider how we seem to remember The Firebugs as a play. In one respect, we can read this play with the rise of the Nazi Party in mind. However, Frisch wrote The Firebugs after having been inspired by the 1948 events in Prague when a communist takeover destroyed any hope for a democratic government in Czechoslovakia. Secondly, this study asks us to consider how memory is contested among the characters. Although Biedermann sees it as his duty to help humanity, to remain kind, and to show these arsonists how civilized individuals behave, this behavior runs contrary to the that of the other characters as their memory asks them not to trust these strangers. Because Biedermann does not see this as an opportunity to protect the community but his own interests, he remains an example of someone who individually, intentionally ignores the collective remembering of those around him. Explaining how memories are socially constructed, manipulated, and based on the personal experience of individuals who belong to a certain category, cohort, or organization is with what this study is most concerned.
Originally presented: Memories and Archives working group. IFTR 2016, Stockholm - Presenting the Theatrical Past. Interplays of Artefacts, Discourses and Practices
“Adaptation and Appropriation: How Scholarship Influenced Performance, as a New Play was Created from Moliere's Tartuffe.”
The purpose of this discussion, in light of Critical Nostalgia, is to forge a bridge between artistry and scholarship in the context of my new play *Congratulations President January*, an adaptation/appropriation of Moliere’s Tartuffe. This play was produced as the culmination to my MFA thesis, which details the process of creating, developing, and rehearsing a new script. I now propose a micro case study that explores how scholarship influenced this adaptation/ appropriation, and how scholarship can impact future performances. It was Henry Lancaster, in his book A History of French Dramatic Literature in the Seventeenth Century, who lists six essential plot elements for this play that I preserved in my adaptation/appropriation. I will present a side-by-side dialogue comparison, which will include the original French, Wilbur’s English translation, my first adaptation/appropriation, and my most recent rewrite of Congratulations President January, in order to best illustrate how scholarship influences performance. I would like to suggest that this play is not finished and will greatly benefit by asking questions about how scholarship and dramaturgy can further aid its development. My hope is that this project will serve as a catalyst for a conversation about the role of scholarship in performance, about whether this new play is more of an adaptation or an appropriation, and about how this play can help us look at the past through a fresh lens.
Originally presented: Roundtable Discussion/Presentation. Theory and Criticism working group. ATHE 2015, Montreal - Je me souviens - I Remember