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America in the Round: Capital, Race, and Nation at Washington, DC's Arena Stage by Donatella Galella (review)
Theatre History Studies Pub Date : 2020-12-31 , DOI: 10.1353/ths.2020.0024
Kathy L. Privatt

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:

  • America in the Round: Capital, Race, and Nation at Washington, DC’s Arena Stage by Donatella Galella
  • Kathy L. Privatt
America in the Round: Capital, Race, and Nation at Washington, DC’s Arena Stage. By Donatella Galella. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2019. Pp. ix + 314. $90.00, paper.

Mirroring the various viewpoints audiences experience in arena-style staging, Galella purposely creates this critical history of Arena Stage by considering its ongoing legacy through the lenses of money, diversity, and place/relationship to the nation. Rather than replicating or commenting on Maslon’s The Arena Adventure: The First Forty Years, this work builds from that source and a myriad of others, as well as effectively leveraging the author’s “insider” status as a summer dramaturgy intern to obtain some internal documents and include first-person accounts. A very clear structure guides the reader, and thorough documentation provides strong support for the author’s arguments.

The book is structured in three thematic sections drawn from the title: Capital, Race, and Nation. Each section could be read alone based on a reader’s interests, but consuming the whole text feeds the richness of the argument, as the inevitable overlapping between sections deepens the conversation. For example, in the “Race” section, Galella identifies Arena’s “commitment to the local black community” as part “social conscience” and part “economics,” thus echoing the previous section on “Capital.” Each section looks at Arena from that particular vantage point and includes an in-depth consideration of a production. [End Page 263] The introduction, chapter intros, and epilogue sections each repeat the framework and major claims of the author’s arguments so, even in detail-dense sections, the reader keeps a sense of context and how the moment-in-time being discussed fits into the larger argument. The author consistently draws from multiple sources for each of the critical frameworks used, and the text includes sufficient explanation to allow the reader unfamiliar with the sources to keep reading or easily find more information. This approach also offers great clarity about the influences on the author. For example, as the author addresses national identity as “competing claims for communal definition and inclusion,” she bookends her conclusion with relevant works by S. E. Wilmer and Jeffrey D. Mason (156– 57). With similar thoroughness, Galella also considers absences or gaps as relevant parts of this critical examination, such as the time gap between the first and subsequent productions of a play by a Trinidadian playwright (107).

As Galella brings the book to a close, she concludes that “nonprofit status, blackness, and an inclusive definition of Americanness” allowed Arena to survive through the decades and reminds the reader that her text has established the ongoing tension between “glimpses of equity” and times that Arena “capitalizes on the minoritized” (225). She begins the book with the suggestion that Arena, and other regional theatres, have been largely unexamined because they reside in the middle, between high and low art goals (7). She finds Arena particularly worthy of consideration because it exhibits and exemplifies racial liberalism as further evidence of this “middle,” and she traces that concept through the theatre’s engagement with race, its location in the nation’s capital, and its status as a nonprofit entity (8–9). The first section, “Capital,” includes a chapter on the change from for-profit to nonprofit status and Fichandler’s ability to navigate the tension between art and commerce. Chapter 2 presents the productions of The Great White Hope as racial liberalism enacted by presenting significant black characters and carefully orchestrating the difficult topics raised, which led to a Pulitzer Prize (60–61) and financial success (68). “Race,” the second section, traces the development of a producing mission that began with a global emphasis and shifted to an explicitly African American emphasis. By using today’s eyes to look back, Galella identifies the limitations of early activities aimed at diversifying the theatre, including an in-house publication designed to educate staff “about histories of people of color in the United States and anecdotes of perseverance and microaggressions that staff of color had personally experienced” (114). The next chapter is an in-depth examination...



中文翻译:

轮回中的美国:华盛顿特区竞技场舞台上的首都,种族和民族作者:Donatella Galella(评论)

代替摘要,这里是内容的简要摘录:

审核人:

  • 一轮美国:华盛顿特区竞技场舞台上首都,种族和民族作者: Donatella Galella
  • 凯西·普里瓦特(Kathy L.Privatt)
一轮美国:华盛顿特区竞技场舞台上的首都,种族和民族。多纳泰拉(Donatella Galella)。爱荷华市:爱荷华大学出版社,2019年。ix +314。90.00美元,纸。

Galella反映了观众在竞技场舞台演出中的各种观点,故意通过金钱,多样性和与国家的关系/关系来考虑竞技场舞台的持续遗产,从而创建竞技场舞台的这段重要历史。该作品不是复制或评论马斯隆的《竞技场历险记:第一四十年》,而是根据该来源和无数其他内容而建立的,并且有效地利用了作者作为夏季戏剧实习生的“内幕”身份来获取一些内部文件和资料。包括第一人称帐户。一个非常清晰的结构指导读者,详尽的文档为作者的论点提供了有力的支持。

本书分为三个主题部分,标题分别为:《首都》,《种族》和《国家》。可以根据读者的兴趣来单独阅读每个部分,但是由于整个部分之间不可避免的重叠会加深对话,因此消耗整个文本可以丰富论点的内容。例如,在“种族”部分,加莱拉将阿雷纳斯的“对当地黑人社区的承诺”标识为“社会良知”和“经济”部分,从而呼应了之前关于“资本”的部分。每个部分均从该特定角度审视Arena,并包括对制作的深入考虑。[完页263]引言,章节介绍和结尾部分均重复了作者论点的框架和主要主张,因此,即使在细节密集的部分中,读者也可以保持上下文意识,并能适时地讨论所讨论的时刻争论。作者始终从所使用的每个关键框架的多个来源中汲取资源,并且本文包括足够的解释,以使不熟悉该来源的读者可以继续阅读或轻松查找更多信息。这种方法还非常清楚地说明了对作者的影响。例如,当作者称国家身份为“竞争对公共定义和包容的主张”时,她将其结论与SE Wilmer和Jeffrey D. Mason(156-57)的相关著作进行了表述。具有相似的彻底性

当加莱拉(Galella)结束这本书时,她得出的结论是,“非营利地位,黑暗性和对美国性的包容性定义”使阿雷纳斯得以生存数十年,并提醒读者,她的文字已经确立了“公平一瞥”之间的持续紧张关系。竞技场“资本化为少数族裔”的时代(225)。她从书中提出这样的建议,即竞技场和其他区域剧院在很大程度上没有受到检查,因为它们位于介于高和低艺术目标之间的中间位置(7)。她发现竞技场特别值得考虑,因为它展示并举例说明了种族自由主义,以此作为这种“中间”的进一步证据,并且她通过剧院与种族的接触,其在美国首都的位置以及其作为非营利实体的地位来追溯这一概念( 8–9)。第一部分,“资本”,”中的一章介绍了从营利性状态变为非营利性状态以及Fichandler克服艺术与商业之间紧张关系的能力。第2章介绍了“白色大希望”是种族自由主义的表现形式,它表现出了重要的黑人人物,并精心策划了提出的难题,从而获得了普利策奖(60-61)和财务上的成功(68)。第二部分的“竞赛”追溯了生产任务的发展,该任务从全球重点开始,然后转移到明确的非裔美国人重点。通过今天的眼光回顾,加莱拉(Galella)找出了旨在使剧院多样化的早期活动的局限性,其中包括一份内部出版物,旨在教育工作人员“关于美国有色人种的历史以及工作人员的毅力和微侵略的轶事”颜色经历了亲身经历”(114)。下一章是深入的研究...

更新日期:2020-12-31
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