Barrett's Blog

 Sitrep 12: April 27, 2025: Theatrical Proctology Holly Hughes’s admiration of Karen Finley for, among other things, “going into the dark part of sanity” and “pokin’ around in there” (182) has given me an aspirational label for my own CV: Barrett Hileman, Theatrical Proctologist. It maybe doesn’t fly in polite company, or even reflect any lived reality, the fact of which probably reveals my own ties to the darker part of sanity, but in whatever way others view my creative output, I know my work is at its best when it is poking around, trying to find out what I don’t already know. If successful, I can assemble the findings into some kind of form that makes it shareable with others. Hughes was new to me, World Without End was new to me, and I tried to just let it all wash over on the first pass. There is an intellectual response to this work, but that feels like standing on the edge of the pool and dipping a toe in at a safe distance. Work like Hughes’s is best absorbed by belly...

 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 ...