Barrett's Blog

 Sitrep 11: April 20, 2025: Still Kind of Lousy Marie Clements’ Unnatural and Accidental Women is one of those “accumulation” plays where the rising action is achieved by stacking up stories until the audience begins to be emotionally impacted by the volume of dramatic incidents rather than the tension of a taut singular storyline. This technique is especially evident in the Act 1 climax. Here, the relentless unspooling of historical newspaper quotes builds up the needed sense of scale to tell a larger historical story and transcend any singular protagonist’s journey. Admittedly, these kinds of plays can be difficult to read on the page. Given my level of tiredness this past week, yet still desirous to engage with the material, I sought help from several online production photos for ideas about how Clements’s play might at least be visually organized. The dollhouse-like set designs helped me contextualize how each of the different women’s stories are both part of the accumulatio...

  Sitrep 10: April 13, 2025 I enjoyed revisiting Passing Strange this week. It is one of those “limited run” Broadway shows that has a certain level of sophistication in the writing and uniqueness in the storytelling that will get it to Broadway and have audiences dancing along but won’t ever draw in enough of the mainstream tourist crowd to keep it open for very long.   The writing covers a lot of ground while still managing to be a coming of age/coming of artist story that has universal reverberations, all wrapped up in a rock concert that really does rock. And it makes me miss my mom. In the context of the course, I also feel like it was a fortuitous pairing with Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean . Juxtaposing Stew/Heidi Rodewald with Wilson “advances a complex representation of the operations of blackness” (20), the importance of which we have been discussing throughout the semester. Gayle Wald also takes pains to point out this significance in her article. Though Wald is discu...

  Sitrep 9: March 30, 2025: The Currency of Pessimism One only needed to look at the title of Abby Schroering’s article to see what kind of tone was going to initiate some of this past week’s discussion. Like Sarah perhaps, I am a little unclear how Churchill’s experimental use of theatrical form in The Skriker “trains the spectator to decenter anthropocentric perceptions” (183) in ways that automatically invoke Schroering’s ecodramaturgical concerns (“Nobody Loves Me and the Sun’s Going to Kill Me”). But. The apocalyptic tone of the play and accompanying article had me resonating with Ricardo’s comment that part of The Skriker’s affective power stems from the fact that “pessimism is always current.” I had already been thinking about Churchill’s play in relation to the human tendency towards eschatological anxieties, how every generation seems to have its Y2K, its 2012 phenomenon, its Trump, to just skim the surface of the past quarter century. Social media algorithms certainly ...

Sitrep 8: March 23, 2025: “Your success isn’t up to you.” – Chris Smith, “Enduring Skills and the Future of Work” Inside Higher Ed’s 2023 collection of articles titled Job Search Success in Today’s Dynamic Higher Education tries to casually walk in the direct center of the fence, portraying the difficult realities of the job search market today in higher ed, while also reassuring the reader that they have some agency in the process. Their ads promise that “While your competition sips their morning coffee, you’ll have already applied and be on your way to a productive and rewarding day – and possibly a new job too” (3), while at the same time Katie Smith offers three pages of do’s and don’ts for writing a single introductory email to a perspective employer: “In conclusion, writing effective emails during the job search requires time and effort” (6). If one masters the process of writing an email that includes developing templates, researching the names, titles, and pronouns of anyone...

 Sitrep 7: March 16, 2025: Musicals It didn’t really take much convincing for me to agree with Stacy Wolf that the gesamtkunstwerk quality of the American musical should earn musical theatre a (pleasurable) space in canon-constructed university courses, even in disciplines outside of theatre. My earliest experiences with theatre of any kind, as a spectator and performer, involved musical theatre, and those formative moments likely have inspired the inclusion of musical theatre into my pedagogy. When I taught film studies, I gave space to “the musical film” as one film’s canonical categories, and I certainly include musicals in my Intro to Theatre and Acting courses. That being said, I also found Hye Won Kim’s article less relatable and at times problematic. Not because she doesn’t raise valid points about representation and creating spaces for diverse performers and narratives in commercial theatre (and the troubled history of the canon in this regard), but more because I’m lef...

  Sitrep 6: Mar. 9, 2025: The Audience of Patricia Ybarra                 I found Patricia Ybarra’s article on how to read a Latinx play a helpful primer. Ybarra asserts that the article targets non-specialists and also those who teach plays (50), so I consider myself to be among the intended audience. Their synthesis of themes and topics within Latinx plays, such as family structures and dynamics, legacies of generational violence, the infrastructural resources (and lack thereof) of the barrio, and the quest for cultural belonging help situate these plays while pointedly resisting the frequent homogenization of Latinx plays in educational framings that often unintentionally tokenize and reinforce the notion that Latinx works are lumped into a culturally ‘other’ experience for readers (49). Reconsidering her article now, I’m thinking about the specific content of the article, but also why it feels particularl...