Performing Dream Homes

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xvi

   PDF

2. Introduction

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 1-1

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   2. Introduction: Welcome Home

      • Emily Klein, Jennifer-Scott Mobley, Jill Stevenson

      Pages 3-17

3. Family Homes on Stage

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 19-19

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   2. “‘The History of America Is the History of Private Property’: The Politics of Home in Clybourne Park and Beneatha’s Place”

      • Jocelyn L. Buckner

      Pages 21-44

   3. Home as an Activist and Feminist Stage: Women’s Performative Agency in the Drama of Susan Glaspell

      • Lourdes Arciniega

      Pages 45-64

   4. Home Games: Contesting Domestic Geographies in Marie Jones’s A Night in November

      • Amanda Clarke

      Pages 65-84

4. Making Home Material

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 85-85

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   2. Making Room(s): Staging Plays About Women and Houses

      • Ann M. Shanahan

      Pages 87-105

   3. Staging Recovery as Home Work in Rachel’s House

      • Jessie Glover

      Pages 107-121

   4. The Making of “Attawapiskat Is No Exception”: Positions, Implications, and Affective Responses

      • Ursula Neuerburg-Denzer

      Pages 123-141

5. Home as Public Performance

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 143-143

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   2. The Genius of a House: Grey Towers as Nineteenth-Century Stage for Twentieth-Century Conservationism

      • Iris Smith Fischer

      Pages 145-170

   3. Pitching Home: Medicine Shows and the Performance of the Domestic in Southern Appalachia

      • Chase Bringardner

      Pages 171-195

   4. Nostalgic Cartography: Performances of Hometown by Pittsburgh’s Squonk Opera and San Francisco’s Magic Bus

      • Emily Klein

      Pages 197-225

6. Coda

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 227-227

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   2. Coda: Home(less)ness

      • Jill Stevenson, Jennifer-Scott Mobley, Emily Klein

      Pages 229-231

7. Back Matter

   Pages 233-238

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This anthology explores how theatre and performance use home as the prism through which we reconcile shifts in national, cultural, and personal identity. Whether examining parlor dramas and kitchen sink realism, site-specific theatre, travelling tent shows, domestic labor, border performances, fences, or front yards, these essays demonstrate how dreams of home are enmeshed with notions of neighborhood, community, politics, and memory. Recognizing the family home as a symbolic space that extends far beyond its walls, the nine contributors to this collection study diverse English-language performances from the US, Ireland, and Canada. These scholars of theatre history, dramaturgy, performance, cultural studies, feminist and gender studies, and critical race studies also consider the value of home at a time increasingly defined by crises of homelessness — a moment when major cities face affordable housing shortages, when debates about homeland and citizenship have dominated international elections, and when conflicts and natural disasters have displaced millions. Global struggles over immigration, sanctuary, refugee status and migrant labor make the stakes of home and homelessness ever more urgent and visible, as this timely collection reveals.

• American Dream
• Property
• Precarity
• Clybourne Park
• Beneatha’s Place
• Feminist Theatre
• Susan Glaspell
• Marie Jones
• Rachel's House
• Realism

“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 of praxis 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)

• Department of English, Saint Mary’s College of California, Moraga, CA, USA

  Emily Klein

• School of Theatre and Dance, East Carolina University, Greenville, NC, USA

  Jennifer-Scott Mobley

• Department of Theatre Arts, Marymount Manhattan College, New York, NY, USA

  Jill Stevenson

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).

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