This year’s Presidential Theme inspired the American Theatre and Drama Society to consider the ways that theatre in the Americas has portrayed the joys and sorrows of marginalized communities. The American theatre (broadly configured) is still contending with the continued challenge of dismantling the white supremacist structures that have helped to build and perpetuate it. To this end, it feels timely to consider the ways that the theatre has celebrated, represented, and exploited the joys and sorrows of BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ communities. Each of the four papers in this this session looks at the ways that contemporary theatre has dealt with moments of historical joys and sorrows to make larger points about the function of theatre at these extremes of emotion. The panel will consist of four 15-minute papers and then 15 minutes for questions.

Louise Geddes, who will chair this session, has proposed a paper called “Frankensteining Joy on the Contemporary Stage” about drag artist Salty Brine’s reimagining of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Geddes looks at Brine’s Bigmouth Strikes Again within the framework of the Native American narrative technique of “survivance,” which positions joyful storytelling as active resistance. Brine “frankensteins” the sorrowful texts of his own narrative, pieces of queer culture, and Frankenstein together to create a joyful celebration that refuses the sorrow of many queer narratives. In a moment of increased legislation against LGBTQ people, this is certainly an important topic that shows how performance (which is being directly threatened by new laws) can be a method of survival and survivance.

Eh-Den Perlove’s paper, “Time Changes Everything: An Analysis of the Effects of Time on the Noir Play, Bloodshot, by Elinor T Vanderburg” looks at the way that times of sorrow have a direct impact on the way that we interpret theatre. As her title shows, her case study is a play called Bloodshot, written by a Black playwright in 2018, performed in January of 2020, and then virtually produced in 2023. A play written about Black men before the murder of George Floyd and the Covid-19 pandemic has different connotations in the present day. Perlove not only looks at how the Black male community showed within the play shifts contexts through the changes in the sorrowful American context of race, class, and mental health within those five years, but also about how Vanderburg uses elements of Afrofuturism to introduce some hopeful joy into the narrative space.

Valerie Joyce’s concept of “living historiography” is about using joy as a refusal of the traumatic narrative that has become the singular representation of pre-Emancipation Black women in the United States. Her paper, “Striving Beyond Sorrow: Black Women, Embodiment, and Living Historiography,” discusses two case studies from her book and performance project, I Will Speak For Myself, which discusses the process of restoring agency, power, and life to Black women whose names remain on the pages of history, but whose stories were not recorded. Joyce will show how embodied performances based on historically likely details restore joy to these real people (and the actors who have the chance to play them), which is an important way of expanding the narratives of early Black Americans beyond the repeated portrayals of Black trauma.

Jason Fitzgerald’s paper, “‘Thats Not a Play’: Political Trauma and Acting Out in Suzan-Lori Parks’s 365 Plays/365 Days,” focuses on Parks’s diary plays as a place to witness trauma as the meeting place of joy and sorrow. The plays were initially a response to the Iraq War, and Fitzgerald uses Dominick LaCapra’s concepts of “working through” and “acting out” to tie Parks’s theatrical work to larger discussions of mourning and melancholia. Yet he also manages to locate the joy that Parks finds in theatricalizing the place of displacement in the silences of history. By connecting Parks’s experiences of marginalization as a Black woman with leftist politics to the overall right-ward shift of the Iraq War, Fitzgerald makes a compelling argument about the political uses of sorrow and joy within the theatre.

These papers take up important topics that will have appeal beyond those interested in theatre and performance alone.