2019 LMDA Chicago Conference

Within the past thirty years, regendered versions of Shakespeare’s characters in adaptations of same, especially of those famously male, have become frequent. Suniti Namjoshi, queer Indian author/poet/activist, in her 1984 book From the Bedside Book of Nightmares wrote a poem cycle entitled “Snapshots of Caliban”. Namjoshi regenders Caliban as female using she/her pronouns, and has her develop a relationship with Prospero’s daughter Miranda. Namjoshi’s poem cycle is one of many in the long-thriving tradition of the adaptation, reworking, and regendering of William Shakespeare’s plays; however, it also is one of the first, (if not the first) to regender Shakespeare’s “savage and deformed slave” (1623 Folio). Even the term “regender” signifies a notion of revision, of adaptation, to which a multitude of Shakespeare’s characters, especially in modern day, have been subject, most commonly in recent productions. Through Namjoshi’s poem cycle and its regendering of Caliban, the performativity of gender – what is and what isn’t “savage” - is called into question. Through close reading and textual analysis, “(Fe)male Caliban: Suniti Namjoshi’s ‘Snapshots of Caliban’  and Performativity of Gender” aims to focus on Namjoshi’s revision of Caliban as female, and devise its post-effect on the performativity of gender in Shakespeare’s Tempest.
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The World is Your Stage: How to be More Than Mere Players is from a 60 minute motivational speaking lecture. It delves into what it is truly like for a young artist seeking to find their place in the arts. From the challenges and potential pitfalls that seem to rear themselves as we search for what Aristotle calls a catharsis. It is purging of the emotions that are generated through the arts. This short presentation looks at the convergence of life and art. It is an interactive lecture style approach that involves audience participation couple with real life stories told by the presenter. Audiences are put into impromptu situations that allow them to see how to find balance in life and art. In this motivation speaker style of delivery, the speaker will give the audience practical advice on how to navigate through the treacherous waters of life and art. At times the two can be total in sync and create a unicorn type euphoria but more often than not the artist is forced to choose life over the art. When one realized that the world is their stage, the fullness of their potential can be realized if they approached it as more than player.
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While working on the dramaturgical adaptation of an Indian classic novel, I struggled to answer, each time I was asked- What’s a dramaturg? What is her role in the process of creation? Are you translating the play? Are you the playwright of the play? The proposed paper will be an effort to dig deeper and unearth these answers- rummaging through the process of rehearsals and endless hours spent with the actors, the director and the designers to locate the possible sites and occasions where dramaturgy was called to action; to try and address the paramount question of what is dramaturgy in Indian theatre today.
The paper will explore the capacities in which the dramaturg may function, the fluid outlines of the niche that the dramaturg occupies, the shape-shifting, often indeterminate quality that this role within a collaborative exercise has, and the water-tight borders of dramaturgy, adaptation, translation et al that the dramaturg must traverse and transgress. Is dramaturgy a craft? Is it research? Is it desk-work, or is it playmaking? Or is it all of these in parts? How are the parts calibrated in relation to each other? My paper, will endeavor the addressal of the question in the literary and cultural context of Indian theatre- What is the task of the dramaturg? 
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Playwrights have been drawn to the human phenomenon of suicide stretching back to the Greeks. However, only recently have medical paradigms shifted towards taking legitimate stock of mental health, the various illnesses by which it can be compromised, and suicide as a phenomenon brought on by these illnesses, with new discoveries being made every year. We now know that the mishandling of suicide portrayals can lead to ideation in vulnerable individuals and considerable efforts have been made to address the way suicide can be safely discussed and portrayed in journalism, film, and television. Therefore plays containing portrayals of suicide, of which there are many in dramatic cannon, must be re-examined to square dramatic interpretation with what science has proven to be true about suicide. This must be done with a particular eye towards the safety of vulnerable audience members. This essay seeks to begin this work by focusing on two 20th-century plays portraying a suicide pivotal to their respective plots: Lillian Hellman’s "The Children’s Hour" and Velina Hasu Houston’s "Tea". Comparing the ways in which they succeed and fail to mesh with contemporary notions of suicide, we will begin to unpack the risks for theatre artists wishing to tackle the material today.