​CRITICAL writing
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“A Beacon I Will Remember”: Paula Vogel’s Indecent as a Historiography of Queer and Jewish Culture 

ABSTRACT: Paula Vogel’s 2015 play, Indecent, traverses the performance history of Sholem Asch’s 1906 Yiddish play God of Vengeance, making it already a complex and meta-theatrical drama. In this thesis, I will argue that the play acts specifically as a performed historiography, focused especially on queer and Jewish culture and their numerous intersections. The exploration of the play’s dramaturgical structure through textual and performance analysis will form a baseline for this argument. Then, in tracing the salient historical moments Vogel visits in her play and relating them to relevant research in the fields of history, Jewish studies, and queer theory, I hope to illuminate how her dramaturgical method is itself a historiographical one which wields a masterful consciousness of the events and persons it so intricately represents. In doing so, I believe the unique capacity for theatre to act as a historiographical medium will also become apparent. 

The full thesis is 5 chapters, 58 pages. This excerpt includes the Introduction and Chapter One.

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Pain in Performance: Dramatizing Pain Experience and the Creation of a Chronic Pain Dramaturgy in the UK 

This article examines the expression of the chronic pain experience in the performance arts through a comparative analysis of four pieces by practitioners living with chronic pain, pieces which utilize theatre and performance as modes of communicating the intangible experience of chronic pain. Furthermore, in the development of a chronic pain aesthetic in performance, I argue that these practitioners have begun to foster an entirely new form of dramaturgy–one which is new, innovative, and multifaceted.

The full article is 28 pages. Included here is the first chapter.



​The Arts in the Warsaw Ghetto: Cultural Life in a Dehumanizing Place

This essay surveys the historiography of theatre and performance in the Warsaw Ghetto. Drawing on a range of primary and secondary sources, it explores the many functions the arts had within the context of ghetto life. So, too, does the essay examine the imbalance between the prevalence of the arts in the ghetto and their prevalence in critical scholarship.

The full paper is 28 pages. Included here are the first 10 pages.


​plays​
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Most of these samples are excerpts from longer pieces. If you are interested in reading any of these pieces in full, please contact me!

THE MYTHWEAVER'S LIBRARY

"Someone, I tell you, even in another time, will remember us."
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In an ancient, crumbling library somewhere between life, death, and memory, three women – Maddalena Campiglia, a Sixteenth-Century Italian poet and dramatist; Anne Lister, a Nineteenth-Century English diarist; and Lorraine Hansberry, a Twentieth-Century African-American playwright – meet. In a space that reverberates with the words of Sappho's poetry, the women find their writings among the dusty tomes and must discover the reason they find themselves a part of this mystical collection.

The full play is approximately 70-80 minutes. Included here are the first 17 pages. You can see a staged reading from an earlier draft of this piece on the MEDIA page.

WORDS LIKE TOMORROW

"I love you that way– maybe the way they said I loved you. I don’t know."
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Lillian Hellman's 1934 play The Children's Hour follows Karen and Martha, two teachers whose lives and careers are destroyed by a vindictive student's lie that she saw them kissing one another. When at the end of the play, however, Martha realizes she does have romantic feelings for Karen, Karen rejects her, horrified, and Martha proceeds to kill herself. Hellman herself stated that Martha's “unacknowledged desire is her fatal flaw” and that her death is what provides a sense of justice to the story.

Words Like Tomorrow is a meta-theatrical take on Hellman’s play. In the century since the play’s inception, the accessibility of queer self-actualizing language has broadened greatly, as has the relative safety of being “out” in a professional environment. The play follows two same-sex desiring actresses playing Martha and Karen across five different time periods during which The Children’s Hour had a seminal production, exploring and juxtaposing their discovery and navigation of queer identity as influenced by those different time periods.

The full play is approximately 90 minutes. Included here are the first 28 pages, including all the scenes from the first time period (1934/35) and the first scene of the second (1952).

PLEASE NOTE: this piece is still in development 

IN RELATION

This is a devised performance piece exploring themes of interconnectedness and time as varied, non-linear entities. By connecting performers with string threaded through a violin, it becomes impossible to create sound individually. Only through one’s connection to and cooperation with another can sound be produced; and, only through collective connection and cooperation among everyone, can more varied, layered, and intricate sound be produced. 
 
The sound processing, influenced by themes of non-linear timelines and repetition in film montage editing, explores live looping and granular processing. Direct sound is taken from the violin pickup before being looped in delay pedals, pitch-shifted and frozen in a real-time granular synth. The layers build throughout the piece, combining both past and present existences. This processing of raw sound expresses a disintegration of time as any one discernible entity. At the end, the processed sound is torn away, together with the strings, and is replaced by a pure vocal hum that grants everyone individuality while still connecting them sonically in a shared present moment.

This piece is intended to run 5 minutes. The full "script" is included here. Please note this is not a "traditional" play script as it has no spoken text, rather it is a written guide to the emulation of this devised performance piece. A video of the original performance is viewable on the MEDIA page.
BRIAR

"Sometimes I think I could sleep for a hundred years."​

Briar is a short play for young audiences which asks the question: what if, when the princess pricked her finger, she woke up?
 
The play follows Talia, a young girl with a condition causing chronic pain and fatigue who has fostered an obsession with a book of Grimms’ fairytales, seeing her own experiences with chronic illness reflected in the magic ailments. While in the hospital again, a routine finger prick transports Talia to the world of her favourite fairytale, Sleeping Beauty, where she finds her beloved storybook suddenly filled with blank pages. She embarks on a journey alongside a confident prince to save the Sleeping Beauty, determined to meet her favorite fairytale princess, and soon to discover the fairytale hero inside her.

The play runs approximately 30 minutes. Included here are the first 2 scenes / 10 pages.

PLEASE NOTE: this piece is still in development