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Book review for Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism.

Excerpt: Theatre and Aural Attention does not present a ubiquitous conclusion about what it means to hear theatrical sound. Rather it is a provocation to contemplate the complexity of perception. As such, Home-Cook successfully argues and demonstrates that to be “a listener-spectator is not to be statically immersed in the theatrical µsoundscape’, but to feel our way around the designed theatrical environment . . . by means of an ongoing, intersensorial process of dynamic embodied attending´ (13).

This articles examines a number of early Living Theatre productions. I argue that the use of humor and comedy by the company has been significantly under-appreciated and theorized as a vital part of the aesthetic and dramaturgical approach chosen by the company throughout its career.

Theatre Annual, Volume 72

This paper argues that while Ellen Ripley is the undisputed hero of James Cameron's Aliens, the film also essentializes Ripley in ways that reinforce a patriarchal world-view and that frame Ripley within a narrative of redemptive motherhood. I first examine how the film's fictional word reifies gender stereotypes by focusing on a number of details, scenes, and shots. I then map Laura Mulvey's psychoanalytic theories from her influential essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" onto the film. My use of her work is no strictly about theories of spectatorship, and I would agree with those who have concerns about the mythical "male spectator." However, a return to her work is warranted here because many of the narrative and visual structures that Mulvey outlines in her essay are apparent in the film. Even if there is no singular, intrinsic, or uncomplicated male gaze in operation for the actual spectators of Aliens, the very fact that it can be mapped so closely to Mulvey's theories is evidence that the writing, directing, and editing are in service to a particular kind of male gaze.

Working through the lens of backlash discourse as outlined by Susan Faludi in her book Backlash, this essay argues that the Lapine & Sondheim musical Into the Woods is part of that same backlash pattern that emerged in the 1980s. My focus is on how representations of the Witch and the Baker's Wife represent the "perils" of feminism and female desire, as well as how the Baker's journey mirrors a desire to reassert himself as a patriarchal head of the household. Setting the characters, plot actions, and lyrics within a context of this backlash discourse demonstrates that the play uses the magic of musical theatre and fairy tales to normalize gender relations in many of the same ways that Faludi identifies  in her examination of 1980s entertainment and media.

Review of the The Living Theatre's re-staging of The Brig upon their return to NYC in 2006.

Excerpt: The Living Theatre  is one of America's oldest, continually operating theatre companies. Created by Julian Beck and Judith Malina in 1947, the company has performed throughout the world, created landmark moments of theatre history, and maintained a fierce ideology of love, justice, and pacifism. In the right—well, rather the wrong—hands, the Living could easily be turned into a cash cow, parlaying their artistic and cultural capital into a venerable, established company making slightly edgy, but ultimately empty theatre. For sixty years, however, the Living has resisted such a move, remaining on the fringes of the theatre world and kept alive by passion and spit, blood and tears, and the belief that theatre really and truly matters. That theatre can make a difference. That theatre can change the world. The Living Theatre is a dream of our better selves, lost in the recent decades of rabid capitalism, exploding media outlets, and the heat-death of theatre as a vital force for change in this country. Lost perhaps, but still there, still niggling, still living.

Book review for The Journal of American Drama and Theatre. Click the image for the full review.

Excerpt: Theatre and Cognitive Neuroscience emerged from a series of five conferences organized by the editors between 2009 and 2013, each essay resulting from “a series of encounters, collaborations, and mutual influences between researchers hailing from different geographical and disciplinary contexts” (xiv). In a collection representing scholars from seven countries and thirteen research areas, the editors do a good job at providing a wide range of scholarship as well as a structure that binds the twelve essays—divided into four parts—into a relatively coherent whole.