Performing Dream Homes

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).

“The essays are informative and varied, and in the aggregate, they function as a kind of conversation on which eavesdropping is a very engaging and, in the best chapters, thought provoking use of one’s time. … this one is an invitation to further scholarly and critical conversation. In the large arena of theatre representing homes—whether palaces, bourgeois houses, hovels, tenements, or squats under bridges—there remains much room for discussion, analysis, and innovation in production.” (Dorothy Chansky, Theatre Journal, Vol. 73 (2), June, 2021)“Performing Dream Homes is a useful text for practitioners who want to more deeply consider their own stagings of home and for students seeking examples ofpraxis and practical critical analysis. Individual essays within the volume will also appeal to theatre scholars based on their shared interests with the contributors’ examples and/or approaches.” (Janet Werther, Theatre Topics, Vol. 31 (1), March, 2021)“Performing Dream Homes is an extremely useful collection that will benefit both scholars and theatre practitioners. It will especially be of interest to feminists, performance studies scholars, theatre artists, and material culture scholars. The essays are relatively short and very readable, making the collection easily accessible for students and non-scholars, while still presenting theoretical insights that professional scholars will value. The book admirably engages a theoretically rich, complex set of ideas.” (Phillip Zapkin, Etudes, Vol. 5 (1), December, 2019)

• 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.