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Working in the Wings

Working in the Wings

New Perspectives on Theatre History and Labor

Edited by Elizabeth A. Osborne and Christine Woodworth

Series: Theater in the Americas

264 Pages, 6.00 x 9.00 in, 9 illustrations

Paperback
9780809334209
Published: 04/27/2015

$45.00

BUY

eBook
9780809334216
Published: 04/27/2015

$25.99

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For Professors: Exam Copies

Description
Contents
Authors
Praise
Contributors

Theatre has long been an art form of subterfuge and concealment. Working in the Wings: New Perspectives on Theatre History and Labor, edited by Elizabeth A. Osborne and Christine Woodworth, brings attention to what goes on behind the scenes, challenging, and revising our understanding of work, theatre, and history.

Essays consider a range of historic moments and geographic locations—from African Americans’ performance of the cakewalk in Florida’s resort hotels during the Gilded Age to the UAW Union Theatre and striking automobile workers in post–World War II Detroit, to the struggle in the latter part of the twentieth century to finish an adaptation of Moby Dick for the stage before the memory of creator Rinde Eckert failed. Contributors incorporate methodologies and theories from fields as diverse as theatre history, work studies, legal studies, economics, and literature and draw on traditional archival materials, including performance texts and architectural structures, as well as less tangible material traces of stagecraft.

Working in the Wings looks at the ways in which workers' identities are shaped, influenced, and dictated by what they do; the traces left behind by workers whose contributions have been overwritten; the intersections between the sometimes repetitive and sometimes destructive process of creation and the end result—the play or performance; and the ways in which theatre affects the popular imagination. This collected volume draws attention to the significance of work in the theatre, encouraging a fresh examination of this important subject in the history of the theatre and beyond.

Contents

List of Illustrations and Table
Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Work of Play in Performance
Elizabeth A. Osborne and Christine Woodworth

Part One
Working Conditions

1. Driving Race Work: The UAW, Detroit, and Discrimination for Everybody!
Chrystyna Dail
2. Working Together: The Partnership of Les Waters and Annie Smart
Sara Freeman
3. Advertising and the Commercial Spirit: Cataloging Nineteenth-Century Scenic Studio Practices
Tom Robson
4. Don’t Quit Your Day Job: Situating Extratheatrical Employment in the Performance Archive
Christine Woodworth

Part Two
Inscription, Erasure, and Recovery: Palimpsests of Labor

5. Retooling the Kitchen Sink: Representing Domestic Labor in American Performance after 1963
Dorothy Chansky
6. Beaten, Battered, and Brawny: American Variety Entertainers and the Working-Class Body
Max Shulman
7. Hidden in Plain Sight: Recovering the Federal Theatre Project’s Caravan Theatre
Elizabeth A. Osborne
8. African American Waiters and Cakewalk Contests in Florida East Coast Resorts of the Gilded Age
Jerry Dickey

Part Three
Myth, Memory, and Manifestation: The Work of the Public Mind

9. Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon and the Work of Republicanism
Elizabeth Reitz Mullenix
10. Myth Made Manifest: Labor, Landscape, and the First Washington Theatre
AnnMarie T. Saunders
11. Labor, Theatre, and the Dream of the White City
Rosemarie K. Bank

Part Four
The Creative Work / The Work of Creation

12. Blue-Collar Bard: Recalling Shakespeare through the Rhetoric of Labor
Melissa Rynn Porterfield
13. Songs of Salaried Warriors: Copyright, Intellectual Property, and John Philip Sousa’s The Free Lance
Tracey Elaine Chessum
14. Working on a Masterpiece: Rinde Eckert’s And God Created Great Whales
Jonathan Chambers

Conclusion: Waiting in the Wings—Work
Elizabeth A. Osborne

Contributors
Index

Elizabeth A. Osborne is an associate professor of theatre studies at Florida State University and the author of Staging the People: Community and Identity in the Federal Theatre Project. She has also published articles in Theatre History Studies, the Journal of American Theatre and Drama, and Theatre Symposium.

Christine Woodworth is an assistant professor of theatre at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. She has written essays for Theatre Symposium, Theatre History Studies, and Theatre Annual, among other journals.

Contributors include Rosemarie K. Bank, Jonathan Chambers, Dorothy Chansky, Tracey Elaine Chessum, Chrystyna Dail, Jerry Dickey, Sara Freeman, Elizabeth Reitz Mullenix, Melissa Rynn Porterfield, Tom Robson, AnnMarie T. Saunders, and Max Shulman.

“The decline of industrial labor unions, the turmoil among public workers’ associations, the economic collapse of 2007–8, the marketing of ‘right to work’ as a positive benefit, and the increased salary discrepancy between workers and executives have all coalesced to ignite a reconsideration of ‘work’ across labor sites and academic disciplines. Working in the Wings injects theatre and performance into this discourse by foregrounding the work of backstage laborers and assessing how theatre work contributes to cultural myths in the public imagination. Working in the Wings is not only a timely book; it is an important one.”—Barry B. Witham, professor emeritus, University of Washington

Elizabeth A. Osborne
Christine Woodworth
Chrystyna Dail
Sara Freeman
Rosemarie K. Bank
Jonathan L Chambers
Dorothy Chansky
Tracey Elaine Chessum
Jerry Dickey
Elizabeth Reitz Mullenix
Melissa Rynn Porterfield
Tom Robson
AnnMarie T. Saunders
Max Shulman

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Working in the Wings

New Perspectives on Theatre History and Labor

Working in the Wings

New Perspectives on Theatre History and Labor

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