Location: Zoom Room C

https://us06web.zoom.us/j/2520107866?pwd=Z7R43MTNhjgQvzQPTQjuzkaQYq7H91.1

Moderator: Robin C. Whittaker

• Marcia Blumberg, “Staging the Liminality of Exile in Janusz Glowacki’s Antigone in New York”

Staging the Liminality of Exile in Janusz Glowacki’s Antigone in New York (1992).

Liminality is a state of transition or in-between-ness, marked by disruption, uncertainty, or disorientation. It acknowledges a previous spatiotemporal position and assumes a new, more stable state, once the liminal threshold has been traversed.  I employ Edward Said’s Reflections on Exile (1984) that they “are cut off from their roots, their land, their past . . . . [and] take on an urgent need to reconstitute their broken lives. . . . Homecoming is out of the question” (177).  This final phrase troubles the usual notion of liminality since being in-between in the play appears to remain resolutely in the present as the only destination for these exiles.
My paper interrogates how liminality operates in the underlying forces of exile through an exploration of Glowacki’s play which focuses upon unhoused exiles, who are denizens of a New York City Park. His re-visioning of Sophocles Antigone transforms an Ancient Greek tragedy into a multiply faceted liminal genre that includes black comedy, vaudeville, slapstick, farce, and absurdist theatre.  Although it enacts a comedic dynamic the trajectory of Glowacki’s play leaves no doubt about the devastating situation of the characters, Anita (erstwhile Antigone) from Puerto Rico, Flea from Poland, and Sasha from Russia. They exhibit a tenacious will to survive amidst the daily chaos and police raids despite the severe form of dislocation that homelessness imposes.  Clive Barnes maintains that for Glowacki: “Homelessness. . . . is more than just the lack of a roof. It’s a condition of the soul” (235). How does Glowacki stage this liminal exilic condition of the soul?

• Cal Smith, “Synecdoches for Home?: National Consciousness in Othello and Visions of Home in Harlem Duet”

Harlem Duet demands its audience consider the representational power of Harlem as a synecdoche for home. What, then, is the power of its absence in Canada? Visions of Harlem and significant moments in African American history expound via the speeches, songs, and interviews that begin each scene of Harlem Duet, and this paper wrestles with how these historical cues function in a Canadian context. I begin this paper by considering how Harlem Duet’s source texts, Shakespeare’s Othello also negotiates visions of internationally distant spaces. I ask what it means for Shakespeare, as he did with almost all of his plays, to stage Othello in Venice and Crete, as the paper also considers the nature of identification within the play. Following this discussion of Othello, I question how Harlem Duet’s vision of Harlem differs substantially from Othello’s Venice. I inquire on Sears’s vision of an Afrodiasporic home that is equally physical and symbolic, a home located beyond Canada, beyond national borders, beyond Harlem. In part, that home is on the stage. While Ric Knowles writes in “Othello in Three Times” that “Harlem Duet is not centrally concerned with Canada,” (371), this paper challenges that claim. I argue Harlem Duet negotiates Harlem’s significance in a broader North American context as a longing for a space that feels like home. This paper will interrogate the nature of this longing as well as how the play situates itself in relation to its “Canadian” audience.

• Keren Zaiontz, “The Russian Play after the Full-Scale Invasion of Ukraine”

The Russian Play is a date stamp of a formative moment in Hannah Moscovitch’s maturation as a playwright. First performed in Toronto’s SummerWorks Festival, in 2006, The Russian Play won the jury prize for Outstanding New Production, and was later produced as a double bill, in 2008, with Essay, at Factory Theatre, establishing Moscovitch as a fixture on the mainstages of the city’s theatre scene. It is in The Russian Play that we can glimpse many of the representational pressure points that recur in
Moscovitch’s writing: the story of a young woman living on the margins carrying an unwanted pregnancy; the visual staging that shows that same young woman aborting the pregnancy on her own; and the heterosexual desire that precedes both pregnancy and abortion and culminates in calamity. In this paper, I discuss how The Russian Play sets into motion both Moscovitch’s reputation as a playwright who infuses well-made plays with explicit theatricality and establishes her recuring interest in romantic desire
and devalued women. But for all it sets into motion, I also use this paper to discuss what might appear to be a provocative, but necessary question: is it time to shelve The Russian Play? Set in a “small Russian town,” the imagined place of “Vladekstov,” The Russian Play features the protagonist, Sonya, a sixteen-year-old flower girl who falls in love with a gravedigger, Piotr. While not intended to function as a historical drama, the play references life in “new Russia” under Soviet dictator, Joseph Stalin, and describes
Sonya’s arbitrary interrogation and imprisonment by the secret police. Almost two decades after it was first produced, what stands out about The Russian Play is not its pathos but its wild inaccuracies and the eroticization of regime violence under Stalin. These issues carry additional weight in the current geopolitical context. Almost three years after Russia’s full-scale invasion and partial occupation of Ukraine, The Russian Play stands out for who—outside Russia’s borders, but within its Soviet empire—is not
depicted onstage. How should we mark the Ukrainian absences in The Russian Play? Or do some plays have a shelf life?

Biographies

Marcia Blumberg

Dr Marcia Blumberg is an Associate Professor in the English Department at York University, Toronto. She specializes in Contemporary International Drama, theatre from South Africa, and international re-visionings of Ancient Greek Classics.  She co-edited a book on South African theatre with Dr Dennis Walder and  has published widely and presented papers at many conferences internationally. Her contact email is blumberg@yorku.ca

Cal Smith

Cal (he/him) is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. His research explores early Canadian queer comics in collective zines from the 1980s and 1990s. His research interests include contemporary North American literature and theatre, and the prevalence of AI in what we read and write.

Keren Zaiontz

Keren Zaiontz is an Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia. She is the author of Theatre & Festivals and co-editor of Sustainable Tools for Precarious Times: Performance Actions in the Americas, winner of the ATHE Award for Excellence in Editing. Her current book project is a cultural examination of global north authoritarian power from the perspective of dissident artists who risk everything and model
perseverance in the face of repressive rule.