Back From Pittsburgh

In an earlier post, I blogged about the first day of the Mid-America Theatre Conference in Pittsburgh. Well, the conference has concluded, I’m back in New York, and my trip was quite eventful.

My own paper, delivered on Thursday, dealt with toy-theatre versions of Pizarro by Richard Brinsley Sheridan. People seemed interested by my handouts showing exotic, imagined visions of South America that were marketed to the youth of Britain.

Friday morning, I attended a session on the State of Pittsburgh Theatre, which featured Clare Drobot, Artistic Director of City Theatre Company and a fellow graduate of Carnegie Mellon University. She told us Pittsburgh audiences are getting fewer subscriptions these days, and are more likely to buy individual tickets. Fortunately, they can more easily find out what’s playing through the new website goseeashowpgh.com, which also includes discount codes.

Though I was accepted to the conference as part of the theatre history track, I was also interested in seeing some of the new plays being presented, so next I headed over to see the Dramatist Play Lab. Attendees presented staged readings of The Plagiarized Words of God Almighty by Nino Greene, Lysistrata Upstairs by Jen Plants, and Peanut Butter Androgyny by Johann Choi. My favorite was probably the first of these, which featured a neuro-atypical poet being left by the woman he loved.

In the afternoon, I attended a panel on Women in U.S. History. Richard Sautter delivered a paper on Ida Murdoch, the daughter of American actor James E. Murdoch, who was a contemporary of the famed Edwin Forrest. Rebecca Schmidt spoke about Maude Adams, who was a star of producer Charles Frohman and played Joan of Arc in a mammoth outdoor production of Friedrich Schiller’s The Maid of Orleans at Harvard Stadium. Last, Sidney Curran told us about the male impersonator Annie Hindle.

Later, at the American Nostalgia panel, Yuko Kurahashi gave her opinions of the musicals Hamilton, Parade, Suffs, and Floyd Collins. More informative was Ruby Dudasik’s paper on David Belasco’s Girl of the Golden West, which features a heroine who actually ends the play heading back east, away from the frontier. The most intriguing paper of the session was the one by Vicki Hoskins, which discussed a running feature in Playbill about “The Program Girl” which was printed in the first decades of the twentieth century.

I had intended to go to a talk in the evening on August Wilson, but other events intervened. Saturday, I caught the end of a panel on musical theatre, and then went to a session on Labor and Theatre-Making. Jennifer Sheier gave a fascinating talk on how union categorization has shaped how we think of stage management in the U.S. Alissa Bidwell then looked at children as a site of ideological struggle, focusing on the Depression-era children’s play The Revolt of the Beavers.

Sunday, I was able to catch up with some old friends, and now I’m back in New York. It was a whirlwind conference, to be sure.