For and In Behalf Of: A New Skin (Part 1)

This is a continuation of the performance piece I have written. I invite you to read Scene 1: In the Beginning... and Scene 2: The Fall if you have not yet done so.

III. A New Skin

[With lights out, projection reads: “III. A New Skin”. Lights rise on female figure]

D: I don’t care what anyone says: Clothes make the man. Naked people often have little to no influence in society.

[Projection reads: “I don’t care what anyone says: Clothes make the man. Naked people often have little to no influence in society.”  – Mark Twain, 1905]

D: Mark Twain, 1905

[Light fades on D. D exits and Allan re-enters. Lights up on Allan]

For and In Behalf Of: In the Beginning... (Part 2)

This is the second part of the first scene of the script for a performance piece I've written called For and In Behalf Of. If you haven't read it yet, you should probably start with the first part of scene one. Enjoy

Allan: When I was a small child, I had asthma. Respiratory conditions were not new in my family; I inherited them from my father and his mother. I remember receiving breathing treatments on a consistent basis, whether or not anything was wrong with me—just a necessary prescribed procedure. Every night, my mom would take this plastic box out of my closet, the Nebulizer, plug it into the wall, turn it on, and give me this nozzle to breathe in and out of. I grew out of asthma, but when I go home for Christmas breaks, I see this old dance play out with my nephew; though his Nebulizer is much smaller and is shaped like a penguin—it lacks the flashy 1980s aesthetics of my greyish, “portable” Pulmo-Aide, a model the Internet tells me was discontinued in 1993. I can still hear the old motor in that clunky square box, humming as it transforms my medication into wet air. And an old smile presses my cheeks as I see the slight puffs of white smoke billowing out the nozzle. It was an entertaining way to breathe as a kid.

But there were nights when my treatment was not enough. There were nights when I had attacks. Nights and attacks that warranted my parents purchasing my Nebulizer in the first place. I can remember a few times when my parents rushed me into the bathroom, turning on the shower and hoping the steam might help me breathe easier. But what I remember more is my dad taking me outside into the night air. He’d hold me in his arms and walk around our little boxed-in yard that was part of our townhouse apartment when we lived in Texas.

For and In Behalf Of: In the Beginning... (Part 1)

Hello friends. So I have recently written a script for a performance piece that I am currently organizing to be staged twice by the end of this year. First, in a scaled down version, at an academic theatre conference in Baltimore. And then again at the University of Maryland towards the end of December. I figured since there are some people who would see this piece if they could but will not be able to, so this is a chance for some to read it. Also, last year I posted part of a paper I wrote on race in The Mormon Miracle Pageant in Manti. That paper not only helped me get accepted into a summer fellowship program but also resulted in me receiving a graduate student paper award. So feel free to leave comments. It's a script in progress so is subject to change. I would appreciate feedback as I work on it. I will divide it according to scenes, and quite honestly this runs long so scenes will be divided too. But yes, here is the first part for my new script For and In Behalf Of.

Oh and here's the dramatis personae

Allan
A: Male
B: Female
C: Male
D: Female
E: Male
F: Female

For costume design, while Allan should appear in business casual academic conference attire (preferably with a cardigan and tie), all other characters should wear all white. The type of slacks, shirts, skirts, blouses, and dresses Mormons change into at the temple. As they take on various roles, a small add-on like a scarf, tie, or shawl should be sufficient.

For set design, the stage should be bare for the exception of some form of baptismal font at either center/center stage or center and upstage. Either a back wall or large screen should be used for projections.

Playing Lamanite and Saving Whiteness: Embodied Disruptions of Post-Racial Rhetoric

The concluding entry for my series on the Mormon Miracle Pageant. If you have not read the Introduction, Part 2, or Part 3. You should do so before enjoying this epic finale.

The Mormon Miracle Pageant is not the only pageant that operates with recognition from the institutional LDS Church. In addition to Manti, there are five official pageants featured on the LDS Church’s website: two in Utah, one in Arizona, one in Illinois, and one in New York. Each expresses a different focus of church and sacred history. To examine how the bodies in Manti’s pageant disrupt the LDS Church’s post-1978/post-racial rhetoric, I am primarily interested in highlighting the difference between Manti and Palmyra’s Hill Cumorah Pageant.

Both pageants address the racial projects embedded in the religion’s foundational sacred text; however, the Hill Cumorah Pageant tries to refrain from representing racial distinctions. Palmyra employs costume designs to signify some relationship between Native Americans and The Book of Mormon civilizations, but they avoid the make-up. I point to the distinction not to commend Palmyra’s performance as a more ethical consideration of racial identities, but rather to assert that brownfaced bodies of Manti’s pageant challenge the post-race rhetoric the Hill Cumorah Pageant strives to assert.

Playing Lamanite and Saving Whiteness: Progressive Pageantry and Embodied (White) Morality

This is the third installment of my paper on the repertoire of Mormon racial projects in the Manti pageant. If you have not read the Introduction or Part II, you will want to do so before continuing. Enjoy: 

Pageants, as a medium, have their own historical and cultural context informed by a particular preoccupation with white bodies. Pageants were large, outdoor theatrical spectacles, primarily popular in America between 1905 and 1925. They responded to social and cultural shifts of the era. When modernization, urbanization, and immigration threatened a perceived cohesion of American identity, pageantry offered a salve through playful engagement with history and democratic principles. Progressive social reformers argued that the pluralistic society that played together would work together. According to historian David Glassberg, professionals of various backgrounds and often contradictory philosophies found common ground in pageants because they believed that “history could be made into a dramatic public ritual through which the residents of a town, by acting out the right version of their past, could bring about some kind of future social and political transformation.” History, physical education, democracy, community—all were proposed antidotes to a (fear about the) dissolution of American morality. While physical exercise was touted as a way to discipline the moral behavior of individuals and communities, the morality they trained was white. Contemporary Mormonism does not ascribe to all aspects of the Progressive era, but the utilization of pageants has continued to function on convictions regarding the necessity of disciplining the (white) morality of bodies.

The Pageant of the North-West at Grand Forks on the campus of the University of North Dakota. May 24, 1914. Over 200 performers represented more than 300 characters. And a river flowing through campus separated the stage from the audience. They floated actors down it on canoes pictured here.

Playing Lamanite and Saving Whiteness: Early Republican Content and the Whiteness of Lamanites

This is the second installment of my paper on the repertoire of Mormon racial projects in the Manti pageant. If you have not read the introduction, you will want to do so before continuing. Enjoy:

During the early years of the American Republic, white men, as Philip Deloria explained, utilized “noble” Indian identities to explore new American identities. They needed to articulate themselves as separate from Europe. Putting on costumes styled after Indian tribes and enacting their version of Indian rituals facilitated cultural engagement with new economic markets and political parties forming the nation. Donning the costumes and performing the rites allowed the white Americans to suggest that “in their dying moments, Indian figures offered up their lands, their blessings, their traditions, and their republican history.” [1] Many of these narratives course through the national and racial projects of The Book of Mormon as a text of the 1830s. 

The Book of Mormon primarily gives the account of two civilizations that lived on the “American continent” between 600 B.C. and 400 A.D. The Nephites and the Lamanites, initially related, came from Semitic families exiled from Jerusalem. God led the families to America and revealed to them tenants of Christianity centuries before Christ’s birth. The account is a record of the Nephites; however, they die out by the end, leaving the Lamanites to live on to become the primary ancestors of the Native Americans. The narrative of The Book of Mormon effectively hands the baton of stewardship from the white Nephites to the white European settlers. 

Playing Lamanite and Saving Whiteness: Embodying Racial Projects in the Mormon Miracle Pageant

Over the next few days or week, I will be sharing parts of my paper that I have recently submitted for an academic theatre pre-conference. The American Theatre and Drama Society (ATDS) will host a two day event in Orlando before the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) conference officially begins. This paper was part of my application and if selected, I'll get to do some networking with other scholars interested in American theatre and performance as well as receive feedback from them regarding my ideas. By I figure why wait until then; people of the Internet (who follow our blog or are stumbling across it now), share with me your responses as I unfold my ideas. This first part is my introduction. There are three more parts to come. Enjoy:

In June 2011, I received a text from Brett. It read, “Blackface might not be socially acceptable; but in Manti, brownface is alive and well.” He attached a photograph of a young, white man dressed in some sort of eclectic, Pan-American Indian costume, equipped with a wig of long, black braided hair. He also wore make-up, browning up his skin. Brett sent the text while sitting in the audience of the Mormon Miracle Pageant in Manti, a town in the dead center of Utah. Every year, in a matter of hours on each weekend night at the end of June, the pageant manages to chronicle the foundation of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS Church), the contents of the five hundred page Book of Mormon, and the exile of the Mormon pioneers from the United States to the Utah territory. The subject of my friend’s photograph—and ridicule—was a member of the nine hundred person cast. Specifically, he was a Lamanite: a Semitic ancestor of the Native Americans discussed in the Book of Mormon. 

The kind face that launched a thousand ideas about what to write about this event.

On Fairy Tales and Netflix

A few days ago, I returned to Maryland from my Christmas break in Florida. I found most of my vacation rejuvenating if for no other reason than because I spent most of it in bed with the cold that would not end. I was not stuck in bed long before I decide to renew my Netflix account. Originally, I planned to spend my time in Florida learning how to drive and possibly taking a test to get my driver's licence. Instead, I worked through three seasons of Doctor Who in two or three days (it's hard to remember exactly because there was a lot of coughing, spitting up phlegm, and watching Community as well). I was not in a state to spend much time with anyone in a meaningful way, but the desire to recuse myself into the comforting realm of episodic narratives probably devoured more hours than it needed to as 2012 drew to a close. These circumstances--as well as behaviors in the past that inspired me to delete my account a few weeks ago--prompted my desire to articulate a New Year's Resolution that addressed my addiction to Netflix marathoning. 

However, on the penultimate day of my trip--a point by which I had felt better for a while--I used my Netflix account for good. I introduced my six-and-a-half year old niece to Stephen Sondheim's Into the Woods. Notes on my niece and Sondheim's masterpiece are important. Stella lives with my parents and has enjoyed a Disney upbringing. From seeing her Christmas presents and room decorations over the years, I can assure you that Disney has more to offer girls than their stock princess line. In fact, they almost design the princess model for an older aged girl, the age Stella is becoming now. Prior to that there's a big emphasis on fairies--Tinkerbell and her cadre of friends. It's the line of products that comes before the princess parade. Which now that I think of it is genius not only for marketing purposes (I think three to five year old girls would be inclined to like fairies more than princesses) but also for consumption--the switch will mean that the same customer will be willing to buy a new line of merchandise since they no longer are interested in the previous permutation you sold to them. Well, there's Uncle Allan and his jaded but realistic understanding of the Disney corporation's economic agendas. The point is Stella is a child of the Disney demographic and is getting ready to enter her era of the princess. As a card-carrying feminist, I have my feelings about the princess persona which are fairly predictable; so I don't feel like I need to rehearse them here. 

Pictured: Spice Girls Reunion Tour Poster

Agamemnon in Aulis: Please Bless Allan and His . . . Work

“It has been said that the myth is a public dream, dreams are private myths. Unfortunately we give our mythic side scant attention these days. As a result, a great deal escapes us and we no longer understand our own actions. So it remains important and salutary to speak not only of the rational and easily understood, but also of enigmatic things: the irrational and the ambiguous. To speak both privately and publicly.” 

--Mary Zimmerman, Metamorphoses

Soldiers wait on the coast. Drums no longer beat, their vigor lost to stillness. The air refuses to breathe life into the warrior’s sails. No plea will abate its silence. No sacrifice will appease its indifference. The wind obeys its god. Not like men. Men slay hosts without abandon. Futures fall to swords of desire. Death hangs across the bows of ships that will not return from Troy’s shores. And still, men—lusting after blood born of war—strike down the beasts of Artemis. Her fury matches the brightness of her brother’s light. She stays the air of glory, accepting no recompense for her slain treasure. And the Greeks wait. Enticed by promised victory, a thousand faces look on at dreams unable to launch.

In a vengeance forged by Hephaestus’ flames, Artemis extends an offer to man’s general, Agamemnon: the winds will blow and the boats will sail, but only at the price of royal blood. For Agamemnon’s eternal glory to live, his daughter Iphigenia must die. Honor. Glory. Gold. Women. Immortality. Prizes for a daughter’s heart. Agamemnon’s nation calls upon him to lead the way. If he denies them and saves her life, others will overpower him, offering them both to Artemis. War claims its victims. It will always start at home. A daughter’s tears will not beat back ambition. Agamemnon’s knife sinks into Iphigenia’s chest, but it severs the ties of families—Priam’s and his own. Iphigenia’s blood stains the altar’s stone. The winds blow. Troy falls. Agamemnon gets everything he ever wanted. What is a daughter’s life to a father’s immortality?

Pioneer Story: A Short Play

So again, I had an assignment to work on an adaptation to produce a play. We could take a poem or prose to write a 5 to 8 minute play. I decided to take a story from Joanna Brooks's recent memoir Book of Mormon Girl. This is probably the closest I will ever come to writing something remotely resembling fan fiction. I do not know Dr. Brooks nor did I receive permission from her to adapt the story. I was simply touched by what she wrote and wanted to work with some themes that I found particularly striking in her experience dressing the body of her deceased grandmother. I hope on the off chance that Joanna Brooks finds out about this that it will not disappoint or disgruntle her. I'm also hoping that if you're reading this that you won't be disappointed or disgruntled. Without further ado, here is my adaptation entitled Pioneer Story.

Scene: A mortuary dressing room in Southern California. Everything inside is pink, from the seashell pink wallpaper to the mauve couch to the pink box of pink tissues resting on the faux mahogany sidetable. The room is illuminated by internal lighting; however, there should also be a sense of the afternoon sun shining through the windows. At center stage there is a gurney. A small body, covered by a white drape, rests on the gurney. A door opens and a woman enters the room as a man hold the door opened for her. She takes in the room and the body before returning to the presence of the man. She provides an appreciative nod which he returns before leaving.

The woman is in her mid-30s. She is pregnant, 2^nd trimester. In addition to an expectable grief, she carries measures of both composure and trepidation. After engaging with situation of being in the room, she removes herself partly by pulling out a cell phone.

Memorial

It's been nearly two months since I wrote "Towards a Mormon Male Sexuality, Part I." I have not forgotten that I have wanted to write Part II, and I intend to do that soon. But the whole grad school thing has necessitated other demands--particularly in the requirement to write other things like 3 separate 15 page papers in 2 weeks on top of other reading and writing assignments. I keep telling myself, one more month and 75 pages to write left.

Point is, most of what I send my time writing is not necessarily blog worthy. But luckily that somewhat changed this week. In one of my classes, we received a challenge: write a 5 minute play only using the dialogue from a page out of the yellow pages. Remember the yellow pages? They're still a thing.

So yeah, I started thinking that I would write a funny comedy about two secretaries working for a superhero or a supervillian: the banality of office work juxtaposed against the grandiosity of comic book heroics. Trite, I know; but it was a 5 minute play, tropes felt fine. Somehow that whole idea fell away and instead I was thinking of Joan of Arc and Antigone. Also, it's kinda hard to write 5 minutes worth of dialogue from on piece of paper, so I ended up writing Eugene O'Neill-esque stage directions. The stage directions are more beautiful to me than what I necessarily crafted with the dialogue; but the images definitely stemmed from the dialogue. Hope you enjoy the story play I have entitled Memorial:

Towards a Mormon Male Sexuality, Part I

Emma: Do you think about genitals all the time? I do. I think it's odd that everyone has them. Don't you? [...] People act as if they don't have genitals. I mean, how can men and women stand in a room and discuss business without even one reference to their genitals. I mean everybody has them. They just pretend they don't.

--Maria Irene Fornes, Fefu and Her Friends

I. A Night at the Theatre

About a week ago, I attended a staging of Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues. The production has almost become a tradition at the University of Maryland. They have organized and performed this memory, rant, and prayer for 13 years now. This is the case across many campuses because Ensler has permitted her work to be used in a larger effort to recognize V-Day: a global activist movement to end violence against women and girls. Rather than collect royalties for the use of her script, Ensler permits groups to stage her play if they follow some strict guidelines that she outlines (like which monologues must be used) as well as donate the proceeds to a cause which addresses violence committed against women. At the University of Maryland, the ticket sales of the annual performances of The Vagina Monologues have consistently supplied the majority of the operating budget of SARPP: the university's Sexual Assault Response & Prevention Program. Beyond providing education and workshops to prevent assault, SARPP also addresses some very practical concerns like the initial medical bills that victims of sexual abuse accrue or the cost of changing locks on doors. These are organized responses which hope to confront the troubling dynamics of rape culture on the macroscopic level of society while helping women, men, and children as individuals according to their own needs.

On Masturbatory Rage

Septimus: I am sorry that the seed fell on stony ground.
Thomasina: That was the sin of Onan, wasn't it, Septimus?
Septimus: Yes. He was giving his brother's wife a Latin lesson and she was hardly the wiser after it than before.

--Tom Stoppard, Arcadia

A few months ago, I spent the evening in Baltimore attending a production of a play called Church. The New York playwright, Young Jean Lee, grew up the daughter of Korean immigrants who were devout Evangelical Christians. Like most teenagers, she rebelled against the world she knew with the onset of adolescence and young adulthood; her rebellion consisted of strident atheism. A little older and wiser, Young Jean Lee entered a stage in her life where animosity towards her former faith subsided and she started reflecting on her formative years with greater complexity. Church represents her attempt to look at Christianity and spirituality with new eyes.

Young Jean Lee