Seattle Repertory Theatre put on Heidi Schreck's What the Constitution Means to Me as a part of their 2022 season. The play is an illuminating 100 minute almost solo-show of Heidi Schreck recounting her personal story of what the US Constitution, promises and gaps, means to her and the women of her family. This retrieval is prompted by the questions she received at US Constitution debates she attended all over the country, but specifically at the American Legion Hall in Wenatchee, Washington. Struck by Schreck's implementation of "Greek tragedy wailing", I argue that she signals the existence of intergenerational trauma in white American women. More so, that there is little interpersonal communication amongst white American women about their shared cultural traumatic experiences. How does she do this? I draw on theory and evidence around intergenerational trauma put forth by historical and contemporary accounts of the weaponization of white femininity, feminist interpretations of Euripides' Medea, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper, literary trauma theory, and trauma theory, all of which may show us how to descend into the next step of dissecting these seemingly patterned behaviors. I formulate this argument from my phenomenological experience with the play, but support it through a semiotic analysis focusing on Heidi's "Greek tragedy wailing", her sock monkey, and the use of yellow for her blazer and promotional material. I wonder: did the play resonate with the white women in the audience? Obviously, not with the woman I passed on my way out, as she said she "didn't understand the point of the sock monkey." Is this an exact example of what Schreck is trying to point to, highlighting the oversight or lack of conversation about this topic? I am interested in theatre as a site of healing and discussion of unresolved trauma. This paper is to help us better understand Schreck and uproot white supremacy, the patriarchy, and the violence this trauma inflicts on white American women and black people in America. 

One of the most revolutionary points of Annie Baker’s The Flick is the way it insists that everyday actions, occurrences, and feelings matter. In fact, they do not just matter in a passing, superfluous way - they are deeply significant and meaningful. Art often takes on the role of importance-giving in our society, showing us which aspects of our lives and the world around us are important enough to be recreated and talked about. Annie Baker answers the all important question of what here deserves to be illuminated in a relatively uncommon way. She chooses an atypical topic, three employees of a small town, small time movie theater and chooses to spend the next three hours with them. The Flick, by virtue of its very existence, says that these people, and their experiences matter. This is a radical statement in a world that denies the importance of billions of people’s common, everyday experiences, and audiences have noted that resonance. In this essay I will explore exactly how Baker achieves this effect, and explore various audience reactions to the lifting up of “ordinary” activities through a phenomenological analysis of reception. To do this, I will consider a wide range of reviews of The Flick, with an eye turned towards reactions to the unassuming content and how audiences may have recontextualized their own lives and experiences within the new hierarchy of importance offered by this play. It is my belief that this is a monumental question to consider because art and other forms of representation have an undeniable impact on how people understand themselves and their relation to the world, often in terms of importance. If making powerful, insightful plays about ordinary people can impact our own relationships to ourselves, that has the potential to offer a guiding light for theater in the 21st century.

Larissa FastHorse originally wrote The Thanksgiving Play in response to theatre-makers' complaints that they could not produce her other works due to a lack of indigenous actors. The Thanksgiving Play, therefore, does not include any indigenous roles and instead centers itself around the very issue of pursuing representation without the people you are trying to represent. Upon first watching the show, audiences may leave the performance having come to the same conclusion as the characters: true representation is impossible to do well, and it’s better to say nothing than to try “too hard.” But is that really what FastHorse is asking of her audience? Is The Thanksgiving Play a snarky way of telling white people to keep their noses and “activism” out of places where they don’t belong and stay as passive spectators? A closer reading of the play reveals the characters to be continually contradicting themselves; they seem to care deeply about social issues, but are completely oblivious of their own ignorance and intolerance; they are attempting to create dialogue, but can’t communicate with one another. I have taken a deconstructive and phenomenological approach to understand how the binary of passivity/activity represented in Larissa FastHorse’s The Thanksgiving Play works against the perceived message around political activism, yet somehow still succeeds in calling audiences to find a space of truly meaningful engagement. The results of my analysis will provide a glimpse into one way that the controversial topic of modern casting practices is being discussed in contemporary theatrical productions. Along with an analysis of the text itself, I will bring in information on historical activist theatre to understand the ways in which The Thanksgiving Play both follows and contradicts the conventions of its genre in order to further its message, especially in relation to Brechtian Epic Theatre. I will also include information from three different receptions of one LA production of the show in order to understand what audiences seemed to get out of it, and how their interpretations interact with each other and the ideas of Cultural Activism.