Performing Dream Homes

This anthology explores how theatre and performance use home as the prism through which we reconcile shifts in national, cultural, and personal identity. Whether examining parlor dramas and kitchen sink realism, site-specific theatre, travelling tent shows, domestic labor, border performances, fences, or front yards, these essays demonstrate how dreams of home are enmeshed with notions of neighborhood, community, politics, and memory. Recognizing the family home as a symbolic space that extends far beyond its walls, the nine contributors to this collection study diverse English-language performances from the US, Ireland, and Canada. These scholars of theatre history, dramaturgy, performance, cultural studies, feminist and gender studies, and critical race studies also consider the value of home at a time increasingly defined by crises of homelessness - a moment when major cities face affordable housing shortages, when debates about homeland and citizenship have dominated internationalelections, and when conflicts and natural disasters have displaced millions. Global struggles over immigration, sanctuary, refugee status and migrant labor make the stakes of home and homelessness ever more urgent and visible, as this timely collection reveals.

Auteur
Emily Klein is Associate Professor of English at Saint Mary's College of California, USA. Her book, Sex and War on the American Stage: Lysistrata in Performance 1930-2012 (2014), was featured in The New York Times, Ms. and Vice. Her work has also appeared in Frontiers, Women and Performance, and Theatre Journal.
Jennifer-Scott Mobley is Assistant Professor of Theatre at East Carolina University, USA. She is the author of Female Bodies on the American Stage: Enter Fat Actress (Palgrave, 2014) and co-editor of Lesbian & Queer Plays from the Jane Chambers Prize (2018).
Jill Stevenson is Professor of Theatre Arts at Marymount Manhattan College, USA. She is the author of Sensational Devotion: Evangelical Performance in 21st-Century America (*2013/2015) and *Performance, Cognitive Theory, and Devotional Culture: Sensual Piety in Late Medieval York (Palgrave, 2010).

Contenu

1. Emily Klein, Jennifer-Scott Mobley, and Jill Stevenson; Introduction: Welcome Home.- 2. Jocelyn L. Buckner; 'The History of America is the History of Private Property': The Politics of Home in Clybourne Park and Beneatha's Place.- 3. Lourdes Arciniega; Home as an Activist and Feminist Stage: Women's Performative Agency in the Drama of Susan Glaspell.- 4. Amanda Clarke; Home Games: Contesting Domestic Geographies in Marie Jones's A Night in November.- 5. Ann M. Shanahan; Making Room(s): Staging Plays about Women and Houses.- 6. Jessie Glover; Staging Recovery as Home Work in Rachel's House.- 7. Ursula Neuerburg-Denzer; The Making of 'Attawapiskat is no Exception': Positions, Implications, and Affective Responses.- 8. Iris Smith Fischer; The Genius of a House: Grey Towers as Nineteenth-Century Stage for Twentieth-Century Conservationism.- 9. Chase Bringardner; Pitching Home: Medicine Shows and the Performance of the Domestic in Southern Appalachia.- 10. Emily Klein; Nostalgic Cartography: Performances of Hometown by Pittsburgh's Squonk Opera and San Francisco's Magic Bus.- 11. Coda: Home(less)ness.