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Acts of Poetry: American Poets' Theater and the Politics of Performance
Heidi R. Bean
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American poets' theater emerged in the postwar period alongside the rich, performance-oriented poetry and theater scenes that proliferated on the makeshift stages of urban coffee houses, shared apartments, and underground theaters, yet its significance has been largely overlooked by critics. Acts of Poetry shines a spotlight on poets' theater's key groups, practitioners, influencers, and inheritors, such as the Poets' Theatre, the Living Theatre, Gertrude Stein, Bunny Lang, Frank O'Hara, Amiri Baraka, Carla Harryman, and Suzan-Lori Parks. Heidi R. Bean demonstrates the importance of poets' theater in the development of twentieth-century theater and performance poetry, and especially evolving notions of the audience's role in performance, and in narratives of the relationship between performance and everyday life. Drawing on an extensive archive of scripts, production materials, personal correspondence, theater records, interviews, manifestoes, editorials, and reviews, the book captures critical assessments and behind-the-scenes discussions that enrich our understanding of the intertwined histories of American theater and American poetry in the twentieth century.
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
One. Repeating Gertrude Stein
Two. “Everyone is watching us!”
Three. From Poets’ Theater to “Antitextual” Theater
Four. Sounding the Revolution
Five. Carla Harryman and the Ethics of Performance
Across the top appear the words “Lincoln Assassination” and a quotation from John Wilkes Booth: “What a glorious opportunity there is for a man to immortalize himself by killing Lincoln.” Below is a profile of Abraham Lincoln’s head and shoulders. Suspended in air behind him is a small pistol, pointed at his head.
Two stylishly-dressed, well-coifed women stand on either side of a dressmaker’s form on which hang festive-looking beads, scarves, feathers, and eyemasks.
Newspaper photo of Bunny Lang (credited here as “Anne”), right front. Three behind pose behind her on stage, wearing stage costumes. The caption reads in part, “Burlesque takes on avant-garde overtones in the Poets’ Theatres’ first fall production, ‘Fire Exit.’ Showgirls, models, and dancers from Boston have been imported for the strip numbers.”
A visual portrait of Gertrude Stein by Christian Bérard appears on the left, and facing it, musical notation for “Miss Gertrude Stein (as a young girl)”, a musical portrait of Stein by Virgil Thomson.
The two pages include a verbal portrait of Virgil Thomson by Gertrude Stein, and facing it, two hand-drawn portraits of Thomson, one by Christian Bérard and one by Kristians Tonny.
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