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27
result(s) for
"Wolff, Tamsen"
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Women's Work: Gender and Dramaturgy
The ways in which dramaturgy has been marked as female labor in America demand rethinking since that feminization has made it difficult for the profession to generate and receive the respect it deserves.
Journal Article
THE PROXIMITY OF THE PAST: EUGENICS IN AMERICAN CULTURE
In 1935, as the Nazis’ state-of-the art eugenics exhibition from the Deutsches Hygiene Museum was concluding its American tour, a decision had to be made about whether to return the displays to Germany or to house them in an American museum. After the American Academy of Medicine decided against the display because of its political implications, the director of the Buffalo Museum of Science, Carlos Cummings, himself a physician, offered his institution as the exhibition's permanent home. “What is the astounding eugenics program upon which Chancellor Hitler has launched the German people?” Cummings wondered aloud. “As a matter of public interest, without endorsement,” he added, “the Museum will display in the Central Hall throughout this final quarter of 1935, a set of fifty-one posters and charts . . . which gives Americans a graphic explanation of Germany's campaign to rear in posterity ‘a new race nobility.’” Seven years later, with war raging, the museum received permission from the company that had insured the exhibition, to dismantle it from its permanent home in the museum's Hall of Heredity. An exhibition about eugenics, Nazi eugenics no less, that had been enthusiastically received as it had traveled the United States in the mid-1930s, had seemingly fallen victim to the war against eugenics launched by cultural anthropologists and geneticists. In light of the broad scholarship on eugenics, this certainly would be a plausible reading of the deinstallation of the Nazi eugenics exhibition. But the three books under review here suggest a more complex reading, one that suggests that eugenics and racism, considered as ideological systems, were less easily dislodged from American culture than from Buffalo's Museum of Science.
Journal Article
\Eugenic O'Neill\ and the Secrets of \Strange Interlude\
Playwright Eugene O'Neill, who was interested in developing complex relationships between the past and present on stage, found a ready resource in hereditary theory. This essay traces where popular ideas about heredity and eugenics emerge in O'Neill's 1928 play \"Strange Interlude\" in order to see how those ideas contribute to the playwright's creation of new dramatic form.
Journal Article
Mendel's theatre: Performance, eugenics, and early twentieth-century American drama
American theatre and the American eugenics movement both reached the height of their popularity from 1910–1930. Mendel's Theatre examines forgotten affinities between these two phenomena and poses the question: how did the hereditary theory of the eugenics movement inform the structure, uses, and directions of drama and the stage? Modern dramatists found a ready resource in hereditary theory because of similar intellectual preoccupations. They shared with the eugenics movement an interest in the presence of the past in the embodied present, an abiding concern with visibility and spectatorship, curiosity over the question of autonomous identity and agency, and a fascination with the processes of generational transmission. The first chapter, “Predecessors,” explores how European playwrights Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, George Bernard Shaw, and Eugène Brieux, whose plays emphasized heredity thematically and metaphorically, fed the burgeoning American fascination with heredity and influenced modern American drama. Chapter two, “Fitter (and Fitting) Families,” analyzes the eugenicists' reliance on the stage and on audience reaction to confirm human differences, in events ranging from the Fitter Family Contests held at fairs nationwide to eugenic propaganda plays. Major and connected dramatists Susan Glaspell and Eugene O'Neill are the subjects of chapters three and four, entitled “Experimental Breeding Ground” and “Plotting Genetic Family Secrets.” In what ways is the originality of these playwrights traceable to their simultaneous assimilation of and resistance to eugenic ideas and rhetoric? The answer lies in their creation of new dramatic forms, notably Glaspell's The Verge (1921) and O'Neill's Strange Interlude (1928). Chapter five, “A Genealogy of American Entertainment,” follows with a reading of Oscar Hammerstein II and Jerome Kern's musical, Show Boat. In itself a history of American entertainment from the 1880s to the year of its presentation in 1927, the musical is girded by contemporary beliefs about race and heredity. A final coda locates similar patterns in the work of more recent playwrights like Thornton Wilder, Arthur Miller, and Suzan-Lori Parks. Throughout, Mendel's Theatre means what it says. The ideas that heredity illuminates for modern American drama are enduring ones.
Dissertation
Wendy Wasserstein (1950-2006)
Wolff discusses Wendy Wasserstein's tremendous body of work on feminism, ideas about gender and patterns of behavior. Although Wasserstein has passed away, the public is not past the need for what her work has to offer.
Journal Article
