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Henry Bial

Autor(a) de The Performance Studies Reader

6 Works 106 Membros 3 Críticas

About the Author

Obras por Henry Bial

Etiquetado

Conhecimento Comum

Nome canónico
Bial, Henry
Nome legal
Bial, Henry Carl
Sexo
male

Membros

Críticas

Bertolt Brecht is one of the most prolific and influential writer-directors of the twentieth century. This fascinating anthology brings together in one volume many of the most important articles written about Brecht between 1957 and 1997. The collection explores a wide range of viewpoints about Brecht's theatre theories and practice, as well as including three plays not otherwise available in English: The Beggar or The Dead Dog, Baden Lehrstuck and The Seven Deadly Sins of the Lower Middle Class.… (mais)
 
Assinalado
RKC-Drama | Mar 24, 2011 |
Stella Adler, Dustin Hoffman, Mel Brooks, Tony Kushner, Wendy Wasserstein—what do they have in common? They all work in various ways in the American Theatre and they are all are Jewish. Their contributions, along with others, prompt Henry Bial to explore how “mainstream” American entertainment is a crucial site for understanding the relationship between Jews and American culture” (5). Bial offers fresh insights regarding the changing representations of Jews in contemporary American popular entertainment.
Jerry Seinfeld might say his long-running situational comedy was “about nothing,” or just the foibles of a group of preposterous people living in Manhattan. Henry Bial would say that Seinfeld’s “nothing” really signifies “nothing new” with regard to Jewish comedy. Bial points to the insignificance at the heart of Seinfeld’s world as really about the significance of the larger Jewish American culture. Seinfeld situates in a contemporary, secular context, the scenarios, themes, and gags emblematic of the past century of Yiddish theatre. With his show he exposes a remarkably Jewish New York and yet avoids the overt identification of Jewishness in order to appeal to a wider mainstream American audience. The identification of this strategy, that intentionally renders Jewishness invisible, is the starting point of Bial’s analysis of contemporary Jewish representation.

In his chapter “How Jews Became Sexy, 1968-1983,” Bial examines how Jewishness came to be perceived (at least in part) as sexually appealing in American popular entertainment. Bial points to Barbara Streisand’s central role in this evolution. Beginning with the October 1977 issue of Playboy which contains Streisand’s “First in-depth interview” (86) and her photograph on the cover (she is clad in white shorts and a T-shirt adorned with the Playboy logo) which reads, “What’s a nice girl like me doing on the cover of Playboy?” (86), Bial explains how everyone’s favorite “Funny Girl” represents the exaltation to divinity “of an evolution in the way the Jewish body is perceived by an American audience” (86). Bial investigates the negotiation of ethnicity and explores what it means to be Jewish for Jews and non-Jews. He crafts a pertinent analysis of various methods of “acting Jewish” without the recourse to religiosity (the manifestation of identifiable Judaistic performative elements). Bial terms this performance of Jewishness in mass culture that is able to speak to at least two incongruous audiences, “double-coding” (3). This term predates Bial’s use. Bial investigates this phenomenon’s meaning in productions from 1947 into the new millennium for how American Jews observe and enact their religious beliefs.
Acting Jewish is partitioned into six chapters. The first addresses reactions by “the American entertainment industry to the crisis of Jewish identity in the immediate postwar era” (4). The film Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) is examined and its treatment of the question of Judaistic discriminatory practices. The Goldbergs (1949-53), a situational comedy centered around a traditional American Jewish family and Arthur Miller’s seminal play, Death of a Salesman (1949) are also explored. The latter play is analyzed in terms of the debate revolving around its “Jewishness, or lack thereof, over the last century.” Bial explicates how these models endeavor to address the “double bind, acknowledging the value of Jewish difference while simultaneously stressing the universal brotherhood of all peoples” (31).

The third chapter, “Fiddling on the Roof, 1964-1971,” continues Bial’s discussion of double coding. There he focuses on the 1964 stage version and the 1971 film rendition of Fiddler on the Roof, and contrasts the reception of Jewish and gentile audiences. Bial uses Stuart Hall’s “Encoding and Decoding in Television Discourse” (61) as a “communications model of mass culture in which ideological messages are produced, circulated, consumed, and subsequently reproduced” to explain how messages are “polysemic.” Thus, Bial posits that we derive multiple meanings while analyzing a text because of the “reading positions” we occupy as “decoder-consumers” (61).

In the fourth chapter, “How Jews Became Sexy, 1968-1983,” Bial shows how performances of Woody Allen and Barbara Streisand “reconfirm a belief in the desirability of passing and the impossibility of doing so” (106). He extends his discussion of double coding, contrasting Allen’s and Streisand’s careers and how their “work both drove and benefited from a change in how the sexual attractiveness of the Jewish body" (5) was viewed by both Jews and gentiles. Allen exemplified “the Jew as Sexual Schlemiel . . . . the little man with the big libido and the even bigger sexual neurosis” (92), serving as the stereotype of Jewish sexual insecurity while showing that insecurity as sexually attractive. Similarly, while Streisand does not claim that her Jewish features are classically attractive, Bial notes that “she implies instead that beauty and sexual attractiveness are, like ethnicity, based in performance. She is beautiful because she chooses to act beautiful and sexy” (101). Bial illustrates how the Jewish body has become increasingly recognized as sexually appealing, how it contributes to an au courant circumscription of “sexual attractiveness in American culture more generally” (5).

Bial’s fifth chapter, “The Desire to Remember, 1989-1997,” explores the plays of David Mamet, Wendy Wasserstein, and Tony Kushner. Bial traces how to “look at history as a guide to acting Jewish at the millennium” (5); he thereby underscores the Jewish predilection to represent a vanished or potentially lost Jewish culture. He argues that “the desire to remember,” is a fundamental component of acting Jewish. As Bial shows how the memories of a culture are dynamic and contingent, new questions surface to generate a narrative informed by the present and exposing the contested views of the past.

Bial’s sixth chapter, “You Know Who Else Is Jewish”? encourages readers to discover new approaches for applying a “Jewish-specific reading strategy to a performance text” (138) while remain[ing] “willing . . . to suspend, though not discard conventional binaries . . .” (141). He cautions us to avoid interpeliating Jewishness “into existing theories and conversations about ethnic, racial, and religious identity in the United States” (141). Here Bial explains that the act of decoding Jewishness serves two purposes. First, it eliminates the essentialized boundaries of ethnicity and religion. Secondly, it asserts a belief in Jewish as a distinct means of identification, a predilection to conceive oneself as part of a Jewish community of readers. Together these reading strategies facilitate the opportunity for one to imagine a meaningful Jewish culture in the absence of the lived experience of being Jewish.

Bial’s study is a fresh contribution in the examination of performance, as he addresses the performance of racial authenticity, Bial mines new interpretations from the past sixty years of Jewish American performance and finds new insights.

Acting Jewish is a respectable contribution to performance studies and an invaluable resource for social historicists and literary and cultural contemporary theorists. The text is readable and moving, unpretentious, and candid. Bial skillfully compelled this reader to keep the pages turning, an accolade for the surprising subtleness of this book, a book that I enthusiastically recommend.
… (mais)
½
 
Assinalado
perfectganesh | Oct 24, 2006 |
original essays by prominent theorists in performance studies. Accompanies Performance Studies: an introduction by R. Schechner
 
Assinalado
mmckay | May 9, 2006 |

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Estatísticas

Obras
6
Membros
106
Popularidade
#181,887
Avaliação
½ 4.5
Críticas
3
ISBN
17

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