Moderator: Kimberly McLeod
Location: Room 4265 – 3200 rue Jean-Brillant – Université de Montréal
(Building 27 on the UdM map)
In-Person Session
Sponsored by the Department of Theatre – Concordia University
She-wolf: An Irish Ghost Story
If you are seeing ghosts, eat a dish of wolf meat. And if the haunting takes to your dreams, sleep with a wolf’s head beneath your own. But what if there’s no meat, no fanged heads to sever? What if the wolves are gone? Ireland’s wolves were systematically exterminated by decree of the puritan Cromwellian government from the mid-seventeenth century. By 1800, they were extinct. They serve as an easily read metaphor for the brutal colonization of Gaelic Ireland during the same period. British playwright Helen Edmundson’s The Clearing (1993), recently directed by Jessica Carmichael at the 2023 Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake, explores the nightmare of Ireland’s bloody seventeenth century through the device of an illegal mixed marriage and an archetypical “wild Irish girl.” Wolfwalkers (2020), the final instalment in the Irish folklore trilogy of acclaimed animation studio Cartoon Saloon, follows Robin Goodfellow, daughter of a professional English wolfhunter come to Ireland to make bounty. While her father is out killing, Robin is lonely in her new Irish town, until she makes a strange friend in the forest, Mebh Óg MacTíre, half-girl, half-wolf. This paper takes a storytelling approach to the intersection of the lupine and the feminine; it casts around for wolf-meat, trying to hush the voices of the colonized, of the women, of the wild creatures, who wish that history had been different, who will not stop whispering “what if?”
Emer O’Toole, Concordia
Dr. Emer O’Toole is Associate Professor of Irish Performance Studies at the School of Irish Studies, Concordia University. She is author of the books Contemporary Irish Theatre and Social Change (Routledge: 2023) and Girls Will Be Girls (Orion: 2015) and co-editor of the collection Ethical Exchanges in Translation, Adaptation and Dramaturgy (Rodopi: 2017).
Enslavement, Tyranny, and War in Drury Lane’s 1804 Cinderella Pantomime
This paper will address unexpected forms of conflict and injustice that underpin the earliest British stage version of the tale known as “Cinderella.” The “grand allegorical pantomimic spectacle” of Cinderella; or, The Little Glass Slipper was an afterpiece at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane and took fascinating liberties with the plot structure and characters in Charles Perrault’s “Cendrillon” (1697). A combination of dumb show, dance narrative, recitative, and song, it was one part of a lengthy evening of entertainment that would seem to offer welcome diversion from the volatile political climate of 1803-04—while referencing current events in subtle but powerful ways.
Britons had enjoyed a brief respite from war before conflicts with Napoleon had been reignited in May 1803. Days earlier, Horatio Nelson had been given command in the Mediterranean and fortification of England’s southern coastline was underway in response to threats of invasion. Nelson was England’s greatest naval hero but also known for his personal affairs, having left his wife Fanny to live with Lady Emma Hamilton—whose story of social elevation rivalled Cinderella’s. The pantomime’s debut also occurred two days after Haiti (formerly Saint Domingue) declared independence from France, the culmination of a successful uprising against the proposed reintroduction of slavery.
I will explore information from the pantomime’s script/s, ephemera, and reviews to discuss the ways that these specific figures and political events reverberate in Cinderella. Easy to overlook, a preoccupation with various forms of tyranny emerges with particular force as we trace intertheatrical and intertextual linkages.
Jennifer Schacker, University of Guelph
Jennifer Schacker is Professor in the School of English & Theatre Studies, University of Guelph. She has published widely on the history of fairy tales in print and performance, including Staging Fairyland: Folklore, Children’s Entertainment, and Nineteenth-Century Pantomime (2018) and the Routledge Pantomime Reader, 1800-1900 (2021, with Daniel O’Quinn).
Magic, Art, and Supernatural Probability Distributions in Comedy and Tragedy: More Lysistratas and Less Lears
Art is magic. Whether painting, sculpture, music, dance, poetry, or drama, ethologists such as Ellen Dissanayake argue that art depicts a supernatural metareality, a what-if reality beyond nature. Few today, however, associate art with the supernatural. Perhaps, with a different point of view, the magic is still there. Consider whether drama is a kind of magic that, by depicting chance, tames chance. Because luck is either good or bad, two forms of drama arose: comedy to explore good luck and the sunny side of chance and tragedy to explore bad luck and the dark side of chance. By dramatizing the chiaroscuro of chance, drama tames chance because whoever controls the depiction controls the object of depiction.
Edwin Wong
Edwin Wong has been dubbed “an Aristotle for the 21st century” (David Konstan, NYU) and “independent and provocative” (Robert C. Evans, AUM) for exploring the intersection between risk and theatre. He has published two books (The Risk Theatre Model of Tragedy / When Life Gives You Risk, Make Risk Theatre) and over a dozen articles and book chapters on this topic. In 2022, he was one of three international academics to receive the Ben Jonson Discoveries Award for his work on Shakespeare’s Hamlet. In 2018, he founded the Risk Theatre Modern Tragedy Playwriting Competition, the world’s largest competition for the writing of tragedy (risktheatre.com). Wong has talked at venues from the Kennedy Center and the University of Coimbra to conferences hosted by the National New Play Network, Canadian Association of Theatre Research, Society of Classical Studies, and Classical Association of the Middle West and South. He was educated at Brown University and is on Academia at https://brown.academia.edu/EdwinWong
Performing Reproductive Justice, Race, and Radical Motherhood in the Television Adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale
A group of women dressed in red robes with white bonnets descend on Capitol Hill to defend abortion rights. This may seem like a scene from Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) or its television adaptation (2017), but it is only one of many real-world protests that have mobilized the handmaid costume from Atwood’s stories. White women have been quick to embrace the visual power of Atwood’s narrative to fight for access to abortion, but this vision of justice is incomplete and highly racialized. Reproductive justice extends a white feminist focus on abortion to fight for three basic rights: the rights to have, not have, and parent a child in a safe and healthy environment (Ross and Solinger 2017). Set in the future, The Handmaid’s Tale imagines the United States as a theocracy that enslaves women and forces them to reproduce, but it gives short shrift to the racism that would surely underpin this world. Just as The Handmaid’s Tale novel has been critiqued for appropriating a slave narrative, the television adaptation has come under scrutiny for its race-blind casting. The novel, the TV show, and the political protests all ignore racialized reproductive rights and experiences by presenting white women’s concerns as universal.
Kailin Wright, St. Francis Xavier University
Kailin Wright is an Associate Professor, Jules Léger Research Chair, and award-winning teacher at St. Francis Xavier University (StFX). She is the author of Political Adaptation in Canadian Theatre (McGill-Queen’s Press, 2020) as well as the critical edition of Carroll Aikins’s The God of Gods: A Canadian Play and articles in Theatre Journal, Canadian Literature, Theatre Research in Canada, Canadian Theatre Review, and Studies in Canadian Literature. Kailin is also Associate Editor of Canadian Theatre Review and Fiction Editor at The Antigonish Review.