so let's let's go ahead and learn about them that's one of the ways that we can open up the gates here are some very successful female identifying theater makers uh we're gonna start in the contemporary world we're gonna start with wendy wasserstein uh who's a very comedic playwright and she she became famous because her plays really started portraying real women characters women who were dealing with career love children and family as well as artistry how do i be how am i an artist she wrote a lot of her characters were female actors actually um and she won the pulitzer and tony for her play the heidi chronicles in 1989 which again gave a very realistic portrayal of what a woman's daily life was like at that time um ann bogart and tina lando are two very creative directors who created an entire new acting style called viewpoints which has a lot to do with choreography and movement and ensemble building rather than being so strictly text and character based like stanislavski was very very mental theirs is very physical and it's a beautiful style that has been many theater companies and many college systems actually teach viewpoints as their acting system mary zimmerman is a very successful uh she owns she runs a theater company in uh chicago she's chicago based but her play metamorphosis which we're actually looking at a picture of on the screen um told 10 different greek myths and roman myths um but wove them together in this beautiful storytelling way and the entire play was based around a swimming pool there you can see the water on the stage uh there was a swimming pool in the middle of the stage and uh the characters got wet they splashed the audience but they they morphed into different um creatures and and characters based on the water in the pool it was a really really um beautiful and innovative directing style she actually won the 2002 tony for best director for this player metamorphoses um and julie taymor who is famous for her incredible application of boom raku japanese poetry to tell this tale of the lion king the most successful musical uh ever created and uh won the 98 tony award for the lion king her creativity is incredible in that piece um she's also famous because she was behind the debacle spider-man turn off the dark the musical you may never have heard of where uh one actor actually passed away during the died during the rehearsal process but many were injured this was a very acrobatic lion king times 20 kind of production and unfortunately the rehearsal it failed miserably the rehearsal process was so scandal written they fired julie taymor from the process and then she sued the company saying my creative work has gone into this so you can't fire me without keep paying me they settled the lawsuit but she sort of became it really that lawsuit and that that uh tragic rehearsal process really tarnished her reputation in on broadway and in the theater world which is a shame and she frequently was quoted as saying you know had i been a male this would never they never would have attacked my work um or they they would have covered this up for for what was going on so uh lots of lots of um bitterness and and difficulty there but julie taymor is an incredible artist and has gone on to direct several films and and still makes theater just uh has never had the same success on broadway and lastly susan strowman who is a very successful broadway director and choreographer she was actually the first female to win the tony for director and choreographer on the same production um and which yeah was a very uh but people might recognize the name bob fosse who often won uh had that distinction but this was the first female director and choreographer to do that uh let's go on to black american theater makers we've already studied zora neale hurston who again was not a very famous theater maker but uh we've looked at some of her theater tradition um august wilson is sort of the grandfather of black american theater and he created a really neat cycle of plays called the century cycle where um there were 10 different plays and they all took place except for two of them but but those two were were also centered in this area they all took place in a very specific neighborhood in pittsburgh pennsylvania that was a traditionally black american neighborhood and each play took place during a different decade of the 20th century and hence why it's called the century cycle and sometimes characters were related to each other throughout the plays or sometimes you there might be a connection between the plays but sort of like the marvel universe in in the mcu it was more just about the connections being made between this area and the themes that were being described um august wilson in doing this created a whole wealth of very rich beautiful um deep black american characters that then could employ black american actors on broadway um i believe two of his plays maybe three won the tony i think he has one pulitzer to his name but these were incredible plays you're looking at a picture from uh his play fences which took place in the 1950s starring denzel washington and viola davis and then they went on to create a film version of this play which did very well at the oscars as well lorraine hansberry some of you might be familiar with her play a raisin in the sun which was actually based off of her grandparents um real experience there was a lawsuit that went to the supreme court based on um a black family in chicago trying to move out to a suburb and uh the suburb trying to get them the community association of the suburb not wanting to integrate at the time this was back in the um early 50s so uh interesting and a beautiful play um has been turned into a movie um that did very very very well and uh has been revived many many times uh in the mid 60s to mid 70s there was also a movement sort of similar to the harlem renaissance uh called the black arts movement uh and two playwrights that were very prominent in that were amir baraka and adrian kennedy and the black arts movement remember this is during the height of the civil rights movement um 1965 right uh the civil rights act and um these these artists said you know it's wonderful to be promoting integration and and desegregation and sort of fitting in and getting accepted into mainstream society but also we should be celebrating black culture in and of itself and so they wrote some plays uh that dealt with uh black identity but also uh celebrated uh the africanness of uh african-american identity or even the caribbean-ness of caribbean-american identity as opposed to trying to um ingratiate the black arts into white society at the time which again was a huge part of the civil rights movement was integration suzanne lori parks is still alive today and still writing um won her pulitzer prize in 2002 for her play top dog underdog i believe and suzanne laurie parks is interesting because she was actually born in germany her parents were military and she was born on a german air force base i believe and so she has a very interesting take on american identity being a black female playwright who was born abroad as an american and a lot of her works uh talk about a sort of america what it is to be american and how race fits into that and how culture fits into that and lastly lynn nottage um who we're reading in this unit uh we'll read her play las vegas um won the pulitzer prize in 2009 and 2017 she's the only female playwright so far to have won two pulitzer prizes um which is which is pretty wonderful and each of her plays is so unique las meninas we're going to talk about is about um 18th century french royalty um in 2009 she won the pulitzer for her place ruined which was about uh the former democratic republic of congo and the women who were uh ravaged by the civil war there and 2017 she won for her place swet which was about blue collar factory workers in america so um always does her research and very involved in the causes that she writes about moving on to asian american theater um we are going to start with frank chin and i will be the first one to say i don't know a lot about frank chin but he's sort of credited with being one of the pioneers of bringing asian culture and specifically chinese culture to the american stage in his play chicken coop which as you can probably tell from the title is uh was a comedic piece very stand-up comedy driven um where he shared it was he shared narratives he shared stories about stereotypes of chinese people um in new york in america and um how you know through humor he sort of brought this culture to the mainstream uh theater theater stage we then have david henry huang who's a very successful um currently still writing he's done a lot of work with disney as well but he won the tony award in 1988 for his play m butterfly which was a retelling of the opera madame butterfly uh and you can see a picture from a recent revival here on the screen uh and in 2007 he wrote a very controversial play called yellowface where um i'm sure we've all heard of the extremely sensitive topic of blackface in american culture which has a very difficult history um but yellowface was sort of this interesting play where he turned this on its head and said well you know we all know that people shouldn't put black makeup on their face and pretend to be black people on stage and that's horribly offensive but why is everyone okay with um characters who are not of asian descent doing the same thing to play asian characters on stage which in theater has been happening for a very long time and yellowface sort of sort of brought that to to the front and and questioned that um and and got a lot of attention because of that um bb wong is a successful actor uh won a tony award for performing and butterfly i believe he also won the tony award for snoopy and you're a good man charlie brown some of you might recognize him from i believe it's law order svu i think he plays the one of the lawyer one of the lawyers um but very successful theatrical actor of asian descent and lastly robert lopez uh who has an egot an emmy grammy oscar and tony all won in one decade for a famous disney song that has about three words to its title um yes robert lopez wrote let it go for frozen um but also wrote avenue q which was a very successful and funny play on broadway um about the puppets of sesame street after their lives in sesame street um and you might be looking at robert lopez's name and say hold on mr canner that looks like it's a latinx name but robert lopez is actually filipino so he does he is asian and is a very successful asian american theater maker and filmmaker now speaking of latinx uh clearly we probably uh recognize that guy in the front but we're going to talk about him in just a sec first we're going to talk about maria irene fornes who won a lot of awards for her work off-broadway her more experimental work uh including fethu and her friends in 1977 which was a very innovative way to do theater um the play takes place in four different locations in a country house four different rooms and the audience moves from room to room and depending on which part of the audience you're in you'll see each room's scene in a different order so she wrote this place so that maybe group a sees the bedroom first and then the kitchen whereas group c might see the dining room first then the bedroom then the kitchen and the story still makes sense no matter what order you see it see it so she was very innovative and very creative in her uh playwriting milo cruz uh is another cuban-american playwright just like maria irene fornes uh currently splits his time between miami and new york city won the 2003 pulitzer prize for anna in the tropics um a play that i actually got to work on it's pre-broadway um tryout in the mccarter theater in princeton um nila cruz is a very poetic playwright very lyrical wright uh uses a lot of dreamscapes um in his in his writing and is often praised for that jose rivera puerto rican playwright um and very magical realism is a style that's very prominent in latinx um literature and including some film work um guillermo del toro if you are familiar with uh films like pan's labyrinth or uh the shape of the shape of water uh is a is a big proponent of magical realism and jose rivera's plays matasol or references to salvador dali make me hot are great examples of magical realism in references to salvador dali make me hot uh the main characters are an iraqi war veteran and his wife um and he's suffering from ptsd so very real characters in the real world but they also there's a talking cat a talking coyote uh who's trying to seduce the cat uh the moon talks and plays the violin and tries to seduce the the wife um there and there's a young neighbor boy who's sort of crazy so there's all sorts of blending reality with magical elements um that's part of his style kiara alegria judes who won the 2012 pulitzer for water by the spoonful uh her play about um contemporary very contemporary characters very real characters dealing with addiction loss and family um and uh she also won the 2008 tony award for her book of in the heights the musical in the heights that many of you are familiar with uh kiara alegria who does writes very real characters but has touching um interactions between them um and uh really is all still writing plays and is very celebrated for her work and lastly we have lin-manuel miranda um who obviously we are all familiar most of us are familiar with his work hamilton which he won the 2016 pulitzer and tony award for as well as his 2008 play um in the heights the musical in the heights now he's uh writing for disney and and has done in kanto and and moana so he is very successful and a brilliant example of latinx theater makers celebrating latinx culture um and he's very big about changing the narrative just like august wilson let's employ uh encanto i think is famous for being the first animated disney feature that that employed all latinx character actors um to play the characters that were from um from latin america so so he's very big about representation and obviously hamilton where we sort of looked at the founding fathers of america and and their um significant others and literally change the color of their skin right added by pop voices and global majority voices to a story that traditionally had been white caucasian males um so interesting uh the way that we can change those narratives indigenous peoples uh yes there are indigenous peoples native americans um writing plays william s yellow robe jr is uh an assiniboine was an assiniboine playwright he just passed away last year actually um was a professor at university of maine as well very um prolific has public published over i think over 50 or 60 plays um and created his own american indian theater troupe there's an interesting story that uh he tells where he said when he was getting started in the theater industry as an actor he would go and audition at theater companies and they they would say we're sorry um sir there's not a lot of they're not enough american indian roles there's not enough native american roles for you to play and then he went and started writing um plays that focused on life on the reservation and american indian life and culture and the theater companies would say we're sorry we can't produce these there's not enough american indian actors native american actors to play the roles so he said this this was this catch 22 that he specifically worked to try to fix that also there's a really cool group of women called the spider woman theater you're looking at three of them in this picture on the right um six indigenous women creating theater poetry and music their play power pipes is a really neat musical dramatic lyrical poetic celebration of womanhood of um indigenous cultures of creation mythology of love it's a really great piece that i i really enjoyed reading it and these ladies are still kicking it they're still producing theater even today which is wonderful i believe they're based out of the southwest in new mexico and then um another example is liane howe who wrote a play called indian radio days which is a satirical radio radio show actually um but she has this quote which i thought was very interesting american indian playwrights and writers tend to create stories from the experiences of our people in turn our work belongs to our ancestors and the next seven generations of american indians i call this indian process tribology and why i think this is so important is one of the major reasons why we don't know a lot of american indian playwrights or plays is because the goal is slightly different there is not that same drive for commercial success or recognition or let's get this show to broadway instead i think what lianghao is talking about is very important here which is the goal of theater in this oral tradition is to pass down that tradition to our next generations is to keep the traditions going and that if anyone who knows anything about native american culture we understand that oral tradition is a big part of their culture and i i think that's a very powerful statement about theater from these people and lastly i do want to touch on lgbtq plus community and and their involvement in theater many of you are probably thinking well come on theater is always been lgbtq friendly look at shakespeare and even the ancient greeks etc but um it's not always been the case and specifically in european and american theater many lgbtq plus playwrights had to actually keep their identify identities under wraps look at tennessee williams for example um very famous playwright that many suspected of being gay but had to sort of keep his life in the closet until very late in his life and that caused a lot of problems for him including alcoholism and addiction but we're going to talk about holly hughes who is a solo performance artist she does a lot of solo work specifically started in new york city in greenwich village uh telling stories about her own sexuality she identifies as a lesbian and um her coming her coming out process and her coming to terms with that um and wrote some really incredible shows unfortunately she was targeted in the early 90s by the american government um congress specifically for she along with three or four other artists were targeted for receiving funds from the national endowment of the arts the nea which is grant funding um to produce their works and and some members of congress didn't like the subject matter that they were um creating with this government funding and called it obscene so she actually went uh was called before congress and and faced these sort of obscenity trials and and therefore uh the the settlement at the result of this was that the nea no longer funds artists specifically or companies specifically they have to fund projects and that was a big change as a result of holly hughes and her work in um in the early 90s tony kushner um much more uh successful and commercial his famous plays angels on america which you're looking at a recent production with andrew garfield um which sort of brought the aids epidemic to main stage awareness and and crisis and also was one of the first plays dealing with the notion that aids could happen to people who weren't gay um and in fact was happening was people who weren't gay uh and that was a big revelation in the early 90s uh late 80s early 90s to the american people tony kushner is also a screenwriter just rewrote the screenplay for west side story if you're familiar um and has had a lot of success both on broadway and in film uh rent many of us are familiar with the musical the rock musical wrench from 1996 won the pulitzer and the tony and brought the plight of um lgbtq community as well as aids as well as drug addiction just dealt with bohemian artists living in new york city's greenwich village and how they were getting by in life um brought that to the main stage through a rock score by jonathan larson who actually died either opening day or the day before the show opened and so he won the tony uh and the pulitzer posthumously once he was dead the laramie project which is a really incredible um piece of verbatim theater a theater company went out to laramie wyoming after the matthew shepard tragedy and interviewed conducted interviews with over 200 people in the community ranging from all different kinds of people and then they created a piece of theater where they actually use all language that was from these interviews they don't write anything original it's all actual verbatim text from what people said and they recreate a lot of these characters to create a portrait of this town and what it was like um in the days following the matthew shepard murder and i do want to add terence mcnally um who was a very successful comedic playwright um and actually wrote a lot of um humor and and dealt with things like the aids crisis um what gay life in new york city was like um through humor and and helped tell very satirical um moving stories but allowing uh his audiences to laugh with the characters um he won four tony awards and actually was very successful as the book writer for musicals as well so i'm going to end this conversation by asking you three questions how does cultural identity affect and determine an artist's work do you think it does maybe it doesn't according to you but what elements of an artist's work are affected by their cultural identity how does cultural identity affect our own implicit biases as audience members does does our does my culture impact the way that i see a piece of art and lastly how does cultural identity relate to aristotle's six elements of theater how is plot character theme um music and spectacle how are the and language even how are these all um affected by the element of cultural identity all right so those are questions i want to leave you with maybe we'll talk about those in the discussion board and thank you for your time we're going to be talking about las meninas by lynn nottage next