NewCrit 2014 End-of-Year Roundup

It's been a great year for NewCrit! Check out a sampling from our pieces in 2014:

I kept coming back to Fun Home in high school, in college, and the book found me as I navigated my own thresholds and changes in identity. I came out by degrees, first to my first boyfriend, then to my family, and finally as a bona fide queer person, and Fun Home was there all the way. Hugely, and disquietingly, I see elements of my relationship with my father uncannily replicated in the story of Alison Bechdel and her own parent. Fun Home, though it’s Bechdel’s story, also feels like my story.
—Rob Oronato, Anyone Can Whistle: Fun Home and New Musical Theater

But what happens when the question of beauty and the question of identity are fused into one? What if the question when we saw our own faces was not, “Who am I?” but rather, “Am I beautiful?” This fusion, it seems to me, is at the heart of German playwright Marius von Mayenberg’s The Ugly One, at Tarragon Theatre’s Extraspace and co-produced with Toronto-based company Theatre Smash.
—Matt McGeachy, Confronting an Ugly Truth: Beauty, Conformity, and Ethics in Marius von Mayenberg’s The Ugly One

Stephen Temperley’s Souvenir: a Fantasia on the Life of Florence Foster Jenkins, is a tender send-up of delusional self-belief. The British playwright sets the action in 1964, nearly two decades after the death of the New York heiress and socialite whose absolute lack of musical talent was no hindrance to her will to be heard. She became famous, holding concerts where she performed the most difficult works of opera with an extraordinary and astonishing lack of skill. She even filled Carnegie Hall. People came to laugh.
—Patricia Davis, Florence Foster Jenkins: The Unlikely Soprano

The New York Neo-Futurists are a group of performers who are best known for their long-running show Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind, which is their attempt to do thirty shows in sixty minutes, which runs every weekend at the Kraine Theater. In The Complete & Condensed, the actors perform only Eugene O’Neill’s stage directions from a variety of plays. There is a narrator reading the stage directions aloud as the performers try to embody the often- over the top directions in between the dialogues (sample this: as “He prepares to crush her with his eloquence” from And Now I Ask You). To get a better idea of what we can all expect from this next volume, I asked creator Christopher Andrew Loar a few questions about this latest piece.
—Bess Rowen, New York Neo-Futurists: An Interview with Christopher Andrew Loar 

Here, Caliban is portrayed by a white actor and an actor of color and the racial hybridity of bodies seems to liberate Caliban from a theatrical history of stereotypes and type-casting. He is referred to in jesting horror by Stephano as a creature with “four legs and two voices; a most delicate monster” and American Repertory Theater’s Tempest finds a fitting way to manifest this description.
—Srila Nayak, Pulling a New Rabbit Out of an Old Hat: The Tempest at American Repertory Theater 

It was by now quite obvious that this was the beginning of the show we were all there to experience: Cynthia von Buhler’s immersive staging of her grandfather’s unsolved 1935 murder. A cross disciplinary artist who spans installation, illustration, children’s books, film, and now theater, Buhler began this project by creating an intricate and fully functioning dollhouse-sized speakeasy, complete with dolls and interior sets, that replicated the characters, places, and situations from this historical and autobiographical murder mystery, hence the name: Speakeasy Dollhouse.
—Bertie Ferdman, A Murder Mystery and a Party in Cynthia von Buhler’s Speakeasy Dollhouse

Three key values—dialogue, diversity, and quality—figure into every aspect of the Sibiu International Theatre Festival with a consistency that has made it the powerful engine it has become. Art and culture have contributed decisively to the economic growth, sense of local identity, and international stature of Sibiu, Romania a modest city of 300,000 located a few hours from the capital Bucharest. A major boost came in 2007, when the EU named Sibiu that year’s “European Capital of Culture.”
—Mark Jackson, Dialogue, Diversity, and Quality—A Report From the Sibiu International Theatre Festival

Connecting experimental drama, drag, the claimed ancestry of the French symbolists, Pride week in Boston’s South End: none of this was coincidental or exploitative marketing on Meehan’s part. Her decisions were principled and formal—truly based on a wrestle with ideas, and not cosmetically celebratory.
—Allison Vanouse, Chosen Family: A Festival of Plays, for Pride Week in Boston

It’s almost like musical theater, but in this case when the emotions get too high, the characters don’t sing, they wrestle... The play is an interesting mix of pseudo-naturalism and larger-than-life theatricality.
—Cory Hinkle, Wrestling with Character and Theatricality: Thoughts on Mickey Birnbaum’s Backyard

The 40th anniversary of the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown, South Africa (July 3-13, 2014) was characterized by this collision of past, present, and future. It makes sense that questions of legacy and history were central to much of the 2014 festival program. Nelson Mandela’s death in December 2013 and the April 2014 celebration of the twentieth anniversary of South Africa’s first democratic elections have prompted a reflective turn in the nation’s public and cultural life.
—Paul Adolphsen, Past, Present, and Future Collide: The 40th Annual National Arts Festival in Grahamstown, South Africa

Latin Americans bring a wider breadth of theater-going experiences than we are used to in the U.S. Latin American theater does not terminate at some artificial geographic border; Hispanic (Spanish-language dominant) and Latina/o (English-language dominant) works are transnationally cross-fed in content, form, and affect in a south to north axis.
—Teresa Marrero, Theater as Necessity: The 29th International Hispanic Theater Festival of Miami

At this moment, the play transcended its story; the play was Scotland, and all of Scotland was the play... The climax of over seven hours of theater, this felt like the political rallying cry that the independence movement, as much as the “ungovernable” clan leaders on stage, had been waiting for.
—Talya Kingston, The Scottish Independence Debate at the Edinburgh Festival, Part Two

After the play, I raised this question to my theater companions, and all tried to explain to me the obvious humor behind the song. I nodded my head…yes…I get it. Of course I get it, but in certain contexts jokes lose their humor, and from my vantage point, I again had to ask myself what exactly was funny about that song being sung in historically racist Greenville, South Carolina?
—Stephen Quigley, When Avenue Q Goes Local: Racism and the Production of Plays that Joke about Race

Andrei Belgrader directs this riveting, hilarious, and ultimately heartbreaking production of one of Beckett’s masterpieces. Playing a Beckett heroine is a departure for Brooke Adams—she’s never acted in a Beckett play before—but she is perfectly at home in the lyric cadences and verbal pratfalls that characterize this punctuated monologue, this "cri du coeur," this most challenging of roles.
—Brighde Mullins, Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days at The Theatre @ Boston Court, Pasadena

How do we harness the power of arts to inscribe places with cultural value? How does that valuing affect the wellbeing of our communities? That day, many of us brought with us the knowledge of estate’s unclear fate. The performance gave us the symbolic power to determine its future in our town.
—Haley Honeman, Biking Beyond Linear: Past and Future in The Kirkbride Cycle

Given the rise in drug addiction everywhere—in Maine alone, heroin and/or morphine deaths increased seventeen percent in 2012 according to the National Institute of Drug Abuse January 2014 report—I wonder if playwrights might not think about ways in which we might be useful. Can we educate the public about why drug addiction is a prevalent as it is? Can we make them feel? Can we use our skills to help people in recovery tell their own stories?
—Amy Merrill, Sweet Dreams, Mr. Heroin in Lewiston, Maine

So why in fields that are both devoted to awe and transport, does the norm seem to be an unspoken separation between church and stage? Could this be exactly because of their similarities? Could the theater offer to both theater artists and theatergoers a kind of substitute for the awe they felt as children towards a religion that they no longer can as readily accept intellectually or morally?
—Jonathan Mandell, Does God Exist On Stage? Theater and Religion