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Salzburg Global Fellow RĂ©ka M. Cristian explains how American drama and theater can shape the perception of global cultural boundaries
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This op-ed was written by RĂ©ka M. Cristian, who attended the Salzburg Global American Studies program "Beyond the Nation-State? Borders, Boundaries, and the Future of Democratic Pluralism" from September 19 to 23, 2023.
In terms of cultural borders and borders in culture, American drama and theater are important loci for understanding boundaries through shaping one’s idea of outer and inner thresholds. Theater as a social art, and as the most comprehensive art form, has always been a complex realm of various border-crossings, fostering many intradiegetic (that is, within the literary text having its internal boundaries) and extradiegetic (such as actors, stage design, backstage, pit, acting methods, casting, directing, light and effects, dance, music, props, technical device, audiences, criticism, adaptation, etc.) connections and even more transgressions of various boundaries due to its performative nature.
Dramas, in essence, have had similar cross-boundary properties as the textual base of theatrical performances. American drama, in particular, enjoyed a special niche with its transgressive presence, or rather absence, in the American literary canon. Considered a “bastard art” until the 1990s, American dramatic literature finally overcame the lack of attention and the critical bias in academic and critical circles by becoming an important paradigm in literary studies and beyond its primary discipline. For example, in 1979, Gene Wise employed a dramatic metaphor in his seminal essay which mapped the cultural and institutional history of American Studies as a movement. Here the author employed the concept of milestone “representative acts” as “paradigm dramas” in the field of American Studies through a series of “trans-actional interplay[s] in doing cultural history”; this emphasizes the practical, interdisciplinary potential of the dramatic environment as a useful paradigm in charting and interpreting essential events, publications, phenomena, people, etc. that shaped the field of American Studies in becoming the discipline known today. In a similar manner, previously, sociologist Ervin Goffman adopted the theatrical metaphor of “dramaturgical action” to describe the performative nature of human interaction using it successfully in a sociological perspective in the 1950s.
The versatility of interdisciplinary boundary-crossings is quite imminent, especially in the case of modern American dramas, with a considerable number of plays that were adapted to the silver screen, with film adaptations disseminated globally and making them part of the international cultural canon with profound impact on audiences across the world.
With its ritualistic roots, drama and theater are typical cultural habitats for trespasses on liminality, and for rites of passage and contact zones (Arnold van Gennep, Victor Turner, Mircea Eliade, Michel Foucault, Mary Louise Pratt) that have provided distinct representational grounds for many social, economic, political, and cultural issues of individuals and groups of people. By encapsulating and intersecting multitudes of identities both on stage and beyond, modern American drama has contributed to pushing the boundaries of understanding the construction of various identities.
Moreover, the boundary-pushing potential of contemporary drama concerning the employment of metatheatrical devices, as shown in the example of Thornton Wilder’s 1941 play The Skin of Our Teeth, has enabled the proliferation of the most current subgenre of the so-called climate change plays. This is further enhanced through the collaborative and participatory potential the dramatic text offers, including improvisational performances and the alienation effect that breaks the fourth or the fifth wall. These climate change plays involve a great number of texts written by Indigenous peoples in North America but also from other parts of the world; this corpus of works includes dramas regardless of nation boundaries that reflect the dynamics and anxieties of various societies living across political boundaries.
What Shelley Fisher Fishkin envisaged in her 2004 ASA presidential speech on “Crossroads of Cultures” as “the transnational turn” in American Studies was anchored in practice also in the dramatic arts. This was particularly done by the aforementioned climate change dramas which, due to the global topic they discuss, adhere completely to a transnational strategy. Further pioneering initiatives beyond the borders in this context are, to give just two examples, the Arts and Climate Initiative and the Climate Change Theater Action, which are platforms managing the dissemination of information and texts on climate change plays and performances, as well as reviews and criticism on the topic. These dynamically proliferating sites foster dialogue between professionals and non-professionals about the global climate crisis, through which they create “an empowering vision of the future and inspire people to take act” by breaking the boundary between fiction and non-fiction to build bridges among people and groups of people. As a result, as Christophe Sohn puts it, the action theater opens a cutting-edge territory where boundaries are seen more as resources than dividing elements, actively disseminating knowledge and building social awareness, thus engaging people in the process, and serving as a practical bridge between entertainment and learning.
Réka M. Cristian is an associate professor of American studies at the University of Szeged, Hungary. She is the author of Cultural Vistas and Sites of Identity: Literature, Film and American Studies (2012) and co-authored (with Zoltán Dragon) Encounters of the Filmic Kind: Guidebook to Film Theories (2008). She founded and is general and editor of AMERICANA e-Journal of American Studies in Hungary.
Réka attended the Salzburg Global American Studies program on “Beyond the Nation-State? Borders, Boundaries, and the Future of Democratic Pluralism” from September 19-23, 2023. The 2023 Salzburg Global American Studies Program focused on the contestations and renegotiations of boundaries beyond the nation-state, and how they are changing the representation of democratic pluralism.