Michael Schweikardt

Welcome to Theory Speaks, the podcast of Prompt: a journal of theatre theory, practice, and teaching. I’m Michael Schweikardt, and I am joined here by Jeanmarie Higgins and by our very first Theory Speaks podcast guest, Jane Barnette. Dr. Barnette is a theatre historian and dramaturg who specializes in literary adaptation and the scholarship of teaching and learning. Barnette's production work includes dramaturgy, acting, and directing for original adaptations of literature, classic and contemporary plays, and musical theatre.  Her book, Adapturgy: The Dramaturg's Art and Theatrical Adaptation, published with Southern Illinois University Press (Theater in the Americas series) in 2018, is the first of its kind to address the theory and practice of adaptation dramaturgy. 

Jeanmarie Higgins

Well, we're really excited for you to be here as our first interviewee for our podcast. 

Jane Barnette 

What an honor, thank you.

Jeanmarie Higgins 

Yeah. Well, we're we we were really excited to talk to you about your research. But really, when we think about our journal, we think about Prompt we think about the, the coming together of you know, theory and practice and teaching. And so having a dramaturg here and a scholar of dramaturgy is really good fortune. So how do you think of those three practices of you know, theory and practice and teaching coming together through dramaturgy?

Jane Barnette 

I'm, I'm just so grateful that you are a person who is helping to promote the fact, not the idea, but the fact that dramaturgy does combine those things. Because I think a lot of times when people don't know enough about dramaturgy as a practice, they, they think of it in these sort of, I don't know airy ways that have nothing to do with practice or with materiality. And so, to me, when I started to really click with theory was in a classroom setting, it was in grad school, in Charlotte Canning’s theory class. And what I started to realize is that anytime I could make a connection to some kind of production, so some kind of actual theater event, and draw a direct line between the theory we were talking about in the event I was referencing, that I got it, and once I got it, I was very excited to teach it. And so one of the first things that I, I guess, took on as a teacher, was the recognition that there were probably people in the classroom who were like me, especially people in theater, people who are drawn to theater, like to do things. You know, like to make things like physical things, but also ideas, we like to make them to manifest them. And so I just, I think a lot of people come into theater, and if they see theory in a classroom setting, their first thought might be, oh, gosh, no, no, that's not my, that's not my jam. But if they have a teacher who I suspect, like you, Jeanmarie, and certainly, you know, it's been one of my hallmarks has been that I only teach theory through practice, and or through, you know, material examples. And, and I didn't realize that all of that was, in fact, super connected to dramaturgy until I started writing Adapturgy. 

Jeanmarie Higgins 

Yeah.

Jane Barnette 

Right, because I just sort of took for granted that these were sort of obvious things. I think that sometimes when you learn something strongly enough, you start to recognize that it's a thing that you learned, and you start to think that it's just a thing that you do, or that you know, and that was the process. You know, writing is a way of knowing, right, in a way of discovery. And through writing that book about adaptation dramaturgy, I came to realize that a big part of what I do as a dramaturg is very much like what I do in the classroom, which is to, to marry or to connect big ideas, small ideas, but ideas, with, with things with action with the making of theatre so that it's concrete, and that things are coming together more clearly.

Jeanmarie Higgins 

Yeah, what I really appreciate about the book is that it articulates a process without prescribing a process. And that to me strikes, it strikes me as a really dramaturgy way to be. Right. And I remember when I first encountered dramaturgy, just in general, there was only one book and it was that Susan Jonas book. So, you know, what motivated you to write this book? You know, what is it about adaptation? Why do we need a book about adaptation dramaturgy? What where does that adaptation figure into our practices? And you know, why did you want to do it?

Jane Barnette

Gosh, this is, you've got a question that's all up in my feels. Because I'm so passionate about it. I actually have goosebumps all over my body right now because I'm so excited. So what drew me to write the book, I'll start there, because that's that's sort of an easy one is that I, I kept talking about the work that I was doing at Kennesaw State University as the resident dramaturg there, and what I realized is that people were keying into the reality that, again, I had taken for granted, that every year we did at least one adaptation. And I didn't recognize how unusual that might be as a resident dramaturg, as someone who's doing the entire season, to have regularly at least one adaptation a year if not two. And so and then I started to think, well, maybe there's something different about what I'm doing. And this sort of brings me to the other part of your question, which is why do we need adaptation? And/or what is it about adaptation, connected with dramaturgy, that unlock something new. And that was the big discovery for me is that adaptation, and dramaturgy had a lot in common. They were both nouns and verbs. Right? They were both ideas and things that you do. So this is coming also back to your very first question. What I started to recognize is that adaptation, like dramaturgy, was such a sort of all-encompassing word that people didn't really have anywhere to more themselves within it, especially in theater. Because, you know, there's an oft repeated, true observation that all theater is adaptation, right? Because every single night you do a show, it's a little bit different. You're adapting to the audience. You're adapting to the reality of, I don't know, a fire alarm goes off in the middle or something happens. 

Jeanmarie Higgins 

Yeah, yeah. 

Jane Barnette 

So we adapt as as nature of making live theater. But then, when you start to think about it as a practice of taking something from the page and making it for the stage, then it becomes a very specific process that people have looked at, but not dramaturgically, not at all dramaturgically.

Jeanmarie Higgins 

Interesting. 

Jane Barnette  

And, and that seemed to me to be a huge oversight because dramaturgy, of course, I mean, this is not surprising to anybody who knows me. I believe dramaturgy is essential, and frankly done for every single theater production, whether or not they recognize that they're doing it, right? But when you have an actual person on board who has been trained in dramaturgy, then you've got the possibility of unlocking layer after layer of extra meaning that can be made available for your audience and for your cast and crew. And so, I started to think about adaptation dramaturgy as between new-play dramaturgy and production dramaturgy. Because new-play dramaturgy is focusing on, really, the playwright and what the playwrights intentions are. And then, of course, production dramaturgy is more about the director, the creative team's ideas of what needs to happen. With adaptation dramaturgy, the challenge is that you actually have to be in both places at once. So that's sort of the Janus chapter, right? Is that notion of Janus is the God who is the doorway God, who looks in both directions at once. And that's exactly what an adaptation dramaturg does, and it's one of the biggest challenges is that you have to be really aware of what those early source intentions, if you will, and I recognize that a problematic idea, but just this sort of notion of what is the place of this source material, let's say as Moby Dick. How has Moby Dick or Herman Melville come to mean in our world, right? And now, I also have to simultaneously hold in my head what it is that this director wants to do. And it sort of all came together with me when I started to transform the the primary question of dramaturgy, why this play now, into the question of adaptation, which is why this play this source as this theater, so in this case, as this medium, now, so why the source is this medium now, that allows it to be flexible, so the medium could be danced, the medium could be stand-up comedy, the medium could be performance art, or traditional theater, whatever it might be, but understanding why that medium, as well as why this source, now.

Jeanmarie Higgins 

Yeah, that's something, again, that you hear that, and you say, Yeah, of course. But it really is good to hear it said out loud that-

Jane Barnette 

Yeah. 

Jeanmarie Higgins 

Often a struggle, I think in teaching, and I wonder if you could speak to this a little, in teaching is that students come to us often with the idea that a text is a complete work that is finished that so a play is done. And to sort of teach the teach them that, you know, a play is a map for for performance can be a real challenge, but that once they realize that it can really free them up. I mean, do you do you? How do you sort of, I guess what I'm asking is, how do you teach play texts with your students? You know, what are some of the ways that you find to talk about the ways that plays are perhaps different than, say, a novel? Or a poem or a score?

Jane Barnette 

Yeah, and I'm glad you asked that question, because it further solidifies, I think, some of the connective threads here because adaptation, that was the other thing, that was happening at Kennesaw, is that I got a chance to teach a dramaturgy class, and my very first instinct was to use adaptation as the method. And what I started to realize is that I was using adaptation as a method of teaching a lot of texts for the exact reason that you just mentioned, Jeanmarie, which is that they had come to understand that texts had, you know, a fairly closed set of possibilities in terms of what it's supposed to mean, you know, like, it's supposed to be x or y. And why are you even looking at the beginning of the alphabet? Right? And, and I am so anxious for them to see the rest of that alphabet, that sometimes, I found that the quickest way to do that was creative, right? To get them, especially in theater to get them to make something to get them to think about making something. And so to kind of go backwards, right? So, when I teach play text, you mentioned looking at them, and what was it that you just said as a set of instruction of a-

Jeanmarie Higgins 

Like a map, like this sort of a guide to how you might then, you know, produce the play, if you think of it that way or, you know, create a performance from it.

Jane Barnette 

I love that. I have used the metaphor of recipe. 

Jeanmarie Higgins

Uh huh. 

Jane Barnette 

And, but the reason I have found that useful, and it doesn't always work, it depends on what kind of person you are about cooking, right? Like, if you're the person who believes that recipe is a science, and you're sitting there measuring it right, and I get it, baking is different. But really, when you get into cooking, it definitely changes. Every single time you make a dish, it's going to be a little bit different based on what everything else is happening, how your oven is working this particular day, what the sort of, you know, general sort of moisture in the air, like all of it matters, just like with theater. And so, I think that teaching it as a recipe allows to kind of go backwards and be like, "Alright, well, how do we figure out what those ingredients might have been?". We're looking at the dish right now. We're eating the dish, let's deconstruct the dish. We can tell it's spicy. So, let's try to figure out what kind of spice, you know, we can tell that it's got a lot of protein, let's figure out what that protein is. So kind of going backwards in that way, is, to me very akin to thinking about adaptation, because you've got to figure out what all those parts are, in order to figure out which ones you're going to keep and which ones you're going to get rid of when you make something a new from that source.

Jeanmarie Higgins 

Yeah, it's so interesting that you, and you talk about it as a source. Of course, you do, you know, source text, and, you know, this, this idea of, as long as you're still sort of tethered to that source text, you can sort of float as far away from it as you need to. So this is now- Okay, so now we have recipes, we have Maps, now now we're in space. Now we're doing space travel, but it's like, as long as you're still tethered to the ship, it's okay. You can float out in deep space as long as you know you can get back somehow. 

Jane Barnette

Right. Right.

Jeanmarie Higgins 

Yeah, to that text. Yeah. You know, I think about some of the adaptations that are the most I guess, radical, like I think of the Wooster group, right, so I think yeah, I think of, you know, well, where is Phaedra in "To You, The Birdie!"? You know, where is this Arthur Miller play in this crazy, you know, you know, psychedelic lovin' that's being staged, right? Oh, that's so interesting. And baking, you know, you make me think about, like it's not baking because baking is all about, there has to be exactly this much.

Jane Barnette 

Exactly. It's precision. You know, there are some times when you can think about certain kinds of setting of choreography on different dancers, you know, as a, almost an attempt at baking, right? But it's never, like you can't recreate. That's the beauty, of course, you know, of what we do in theater, whether it's live or live streamed. You know, trying to adapt, trying to adapt. But there is something about dance. So I started with dance before I got into theater. And there is something about dance that has a little bit more similarity, I would think to baking, right? Because I think about ballet, right? Like, there, there literally is a movement vocabulary, it's closed. And there's a right and a wrong way to turn out. Right, there's a right or wrong way to have your first position, second position, and so on. And for your hands. Like there's something very specific about how the hands look in ballet versus how they might look in certain Eastern dance forms or, or whatever, right. But the precision, I think of certain kinds of choreography, reminds me of baking, whereas the open the sort of organic nature, I guess, I would say, of most plays. And I'm sort of hesitating, because I'm also thinking about musical theater, which has, because of the musicality, it also creates a certain kind of baking idea, because there's a rhythm. And you all know this, right? With musical theater, there are certain, you know, lines that get spoken that have to be done in a very precise rhythm in order to get ready for that next bar.

Jeanmarie Higgins 

Yeah. Well, something that you might not know, Jane, is that Michael is a baker. And is kind of a fantastic Baker, and also a chef, but certainly a baker. And, you know, often, back in the old days, when we were in the building, sometimes on special days, there might be just sort of a bag of cookies attached to my doorknob, you know? You know, that's how it goes. Yep, yep. And there's a big tradition of food in our culture at Penn State.

Michael Schweikardt 

For me, the baking has been actually sort of like a gateway into other types of cooking. I mean, I went to baking first, because I was terrified of cooking meat, because you know, you could kill somebody, make somebody sick, you can't, there's really not that danger in baking. So that sort of prescribed nature of how to do it was the gateway for me into other types of cooking, right? Understanding that sort of structure is what gave me the freedom ultimately to start to experiment with other types of foods. So it's an interesting parallel.

Jane Barnette 

Well, Michael, I'm glad you said that, because that's part of my teaching philosophy as well is that I believe that a certain amount of discipline in the classroom allows for the freedom and joy that I want to actually create. So I work hard to create rules that we can trust so that there is a community that then begins to feel free enough that they can expand and that they can become what they really need to be. But I find that students are actually a lot happier, with understood, and you know, well, and certainly very transparent, rules. Because then they know what those are, right? And it's a little bit like what you're saying it's a little bit makes it a little less scary to do the thing.

Jeanmarie Higgins 

Yeah, so we're super excited to talk to you about your amazing book and your teaching practice and your dramaturgy, but honestly, we're kind of geeking out about talking to you about your new research area.

Jane Barnette 

I have wanted to write about witches for over a decade. But it's such a tricky area. As you might imagine that you know, it helps to have tenure. It helps have tenure to write about witches. And I, I also hadn't I didn't really realize that I wanted to write about them until I, I went through the process of writing Adapturgy, and realizing that one of the reasons I have been so fascinated with adaptation comes down to and of course, I'm saying this in Kansas, so it's so stereotypical, but it comes down to the Wizard of Oz, the millions and millions of ways that the Wizard of Oz has been adapted. And, of course, at the center of the Wizard of Oz, is not just any witch, but the idea of the good and the bad witch. And that dichotomy, that bomb made available to popular culture was a huge shift in the thinking. And I didn't realize that then. But I certainly knew that as a child, whenever it would come on television, I was glued to the screen, I knew almost every single word. I was fascinated with all of the different sort of changes between the actual book and the illustrations and the 1939 film. And then it blew my mind to figure out that there were all these interim, theatrical and film adaptations before you got to the 1939 one. So that's sort of how it started. But it was also two years ago, I directed a play called Sycorax, written by Susan Gayle Todd from Austin, Texas. And it was the first time it had been produced outside of Texas. And it's, you know, as you might imagine, it's a play that's a prequel to The Tempest. It's from the perspective, it's really the question of who is Sycorax? And what was her life like before Caliban before what we get to know in The Tempest? I've always loved The Tempest. I think it's, you know, I mean, we can sort of fight about this, I guess. But it's, I think the the most accomplished of Shakespeare's pieces, it should be, it's his last one. But I think part of the reason I love it is the ambiguity of Sycorax and the way that people have chosen to either represent Sycorax or not. But you know, what happens to this, this figure who Prospero is talking about all the time, but is not actually shown on stage. That fascinated me. And then to direct it, I just started to write about it and think about it, and ultimately, what I found myself drawn to, and, and Jeanmarie, I don't know if you know this about me, but I was a makeup artist for several years. So I trained with Estee Lauder. And I worked at a counter, right, a makeup counter in a department store, but then I sort of went from there to work on film for a little bit. And of course, theater makeup. And so that part of me had just sort of lay, laying dormant. And all of a sudden, I started thinking: What if I could combine these loves have this question of the character of the witch and how she's typically depicted? And then the question of how makeup and headgear and, you know, all the different kinds of pieces that you can add to the face or above the head, how that could sort of change the images and ideas of the witch. And that's how I started was looking at what I, at that time, was calling witch face. It has shifted just by nature of the beast, as you know, research changes and takes you in a different direction. But that's what started it. That's what started it.

Michael Schweikardt

That's so, that's really awesome. You know, we, Jeanmarie and I, have been talking about the ways in which we all get mental pictures, pictures in our minds when we think of witches, the word "witch." I'm sure a lot of that is actually found in that 1939 Wizard of Oz film but not exclusively. 

Jane Barnette 

Yes. 

Michael Schweikardt 

So I mean, I'm curious then about how things become a part of that, right? We imagine, with witches, we imagine cauldrons and broomsticks and pointed hats and, as you say, green face. What do things have to do with witches for you?

Jane Barnette 

I love the question, and I think they they are part of the spell that she casts. So if you think about witchcraft as a practice, in a similar way that we sort of shift gears and think about dramaturgy as a practice. In order to cast a spell, a witch needs things. You know, and you can kind of go to the Scottish play and you can think about that very famous set of scenes right with the three weird sisters right, "double double" and all of the little, like ticky tacky things, but today in 2020, still, in order to do any of the witchcraft that a witch might want to do, she's going to have to have an altar, which is itself a thing, it's going to have to be placed in a way that is thoughtful, which is itself a certain kind of design, right? And then on that altar, what is placed on there, every choice is part of her magic. Every item that she puts or decides not to put there is, is not done without intention. I mean, that's the whole sort of nature of witchcraft is taking things to make action.

Michael Schweikardt 

That's amazing. Love that.

Jane Barnette 

And it's interesting that you talk about the hat too, because that thing has come back so many times. And one of the one of the ways that it continues to reverberate, and that I'm fascinated with is the overlap between ways of identifying Jewish people, and ways of identifying people that are so called witches. So one of the many different possible historical reasons that we have a pointed hat as a symbol of a which is related to the juden hat from the Middle Ages, which was red, but it was, you know, a little bit, it looked a lot like, not exactly like, but it looked a lot like the hat that we today think about for the witch. But the other the other way of thinking about it, I like this one even better because I love beer, was that in the Middle Ages, if they had a woman who is who is brewing beer, right, and she was going to try to sell it in the middle of a town square in order to be seen, she would have a really tall hat so that you could see her across the crowd and be like, Oh, I'm going towards the hat. Right. But then she would also think about it. And she'd be making, you know, ale or beer in this huge vat. That, frankly, was like a cauldron. And she frequently had at least one cat that was following her around. Because rats are attracted to the grains that we use to make beer. But I love the practicality and I'm sure that's something that you're also drawn to as a designer, Michael, the practical reasons why we end up with things and iconic kinds of meanings that they may have come from this practical reason. But then they become iconic and worked into the idea, the "MindScape" if you will, and we end up unhooking them and sometimes forgetting entirely about the historical background, you know, and that's, of course, what dramaturgy can really help us remember, and potentially put some meaning behind, right?

Michael Schweikardt 

Yeah. Yeah, that's amazing. And also this whole idea that, you know, you said this much earlier in our talk together that these things are nouns and verbs at the same time, right? And when an idea goes into action, it requires things, it requires gear, in order to put it into action. I think that's a fascinating aspect of all this also.

Jane Barnette  

Yeah, I loved by the way, Sarah Bay-Cheng's essay in your first issue. I love the way that she used that word gear and gear head, right. And I especially love the way that gears made me think of, you know, just the sort of idea of a gear as a thing itself. Not working in isolation, but always with something else, depending on something else in order to make the larger thing work.

Jeanmarie Higgins 

Yeah, there's a lot to love about that essay. But we, you know, especially as, you know, Michael and I being interested in this idea of theater history and theater design and theater theory. You know, Sarah's always been so optimistic about technology. And what we found is she just, she just kind of, that image of the obvious staircase and, did that blow your mind? 

Jane Barnette

It blew my mind. And I loved it. 

Jeanmarie Higgins 

Yeah. Yeah. So for those of you who don't know, you should go to the first issue of Prompt and read Sarah Bay-Cheng's essay, because it will blow your mind. The idea that, you know there is in a virtual world we are always seeing a person. We're seeing a live event happening even if the thing being staged is in a virtual space. Yeah. Blew my mind.

Jane Barnette

Yeah. 

Michael Schweikardt 

So Jane, you are our first podcast guest. And so we thank you, we thank you for spending time with us. And I want to ask you one last question, which we intend to be a common question that we're going to ask of all our guests in the future. And it's this. We're curious if you could share with us and the listeners, what's the last real book you read from cover to cover? And buy real book, I mean, you know, printed on paper that you held in your hands and read?

Jane Barnette 

Gosh, that's a good question. I am one of those people who starts a lot of books. And I am okay with that, with without always finishing them. And this drives my spouse crazy. He's the other type of reader. And, and what's hard is that the last book that I really read, I did so through audible. And yet, I then was driven to want to see the book in print. So then I bought it and looked at it. So I'm going to if that's okay, I'm going to give you that example. Because it's, I think it's relevant, especially now for so many of us who in the quarantine lifestyle have really taken to hearing things. And it's called Oral History by Lee Smith. So it's about Appalachia. If you haven't read it, I highly recommend it. And it was something that I read, again, through Audible, because I was invited to write and create a story about a witch, and I wanted it to be set in Appalachia. And this story, arguably has a couple of witchy type of characters. And anyway, I was trying to get inspiration for that, but it's a really interesting tale. So Oral History by Lee Smith.

Jeanmarie Higgins 

Excellent, awesome. What's the last book you read, Michael, on paper? you've been reading a lot of books.

Michael Schweikardt 

I'm reading, I'm almost finished, I'm looking at it right now. I'm reading this book called Puppet by Kenneth Gross. I'm just a few pages from being finished and it's, it's astonishing. I mean, it's just the meditation on the the spookiness of the puppet.

Jeanmarie Higgins 

Cool.

Michael Schweikardt  

Why it both fascinates, and terrorizes us in sort of equal measure. And you know, I got onto this because I, I've been I've been thinking about and writing about the way scenic models give performances of their own and made all sorts of connections to puppetry in the last week, and in the reading that I was doing, this book title came up, so I got a hold of it. And it's, it's fascinating. I put it in the category with the entry sofers books, although it's scarier.

Jane Barnette

I love that. I always say once you go puppet, you'll never go back. And it's like once you've actually made theater with a puppet, you can't really always see theater the same way again, in your in your, yeah, yeah. What about you? Jeanmarie 

Jeanmarie Higgins 

Oh, uh, the last book I read on paper is a novel called Weather by Jenny Offill, O-F-F-I-L-L, and it was laugh-out-oud funny. I was actually talking to Michael about this, because, you know, after I read it, I said, Michael, guess what I did last weekend, I read a book from cover-to-cover. And it didn't have anything to do with theatre or writing or teaching. It was just a novel. And anyway, I highly recommend it. It is hilarious. It is about a librarian, who is also someone who answers like, self-help questions. So she does kind of like a psychology column. And she's also a librarian and she lives in Brooklyn. And it's, it'll take you just an afternoon to read. It's very short. And it's terrific weather by Jenny Offill. And the reason I got this title from my favorite bookstore, a little shout out to Phinney Books in Seattle. They have a a list of books, like recommended books, and it's the best, it's the best list of recommended books out there, in my opinion, so shout out to Phinney Books in Seattle. Yeah.

Jane Barnette  

That's great. We have a bookstore in Lawrence, The Raven, and it's similar. They have really good, you know, just people who work there who make these lists and keep them updated. And I've had very good luck with all of the books they recommended as well. So, yeah.

Jeanmarie Higgins  

Well, thank you so much for talking to us today. 

Jane Barnette  

Yeah, I feel like we just got started. But this is great. And I'm so glad that you guys are doing podcasts, as you will know, it's very, very near and dear to my heart. 

Jeanmarie Higgins

Theory Speaks is the podcast for Prompt: a journal of theatre theory, practice, and teaching. Prompt is a performance praxis laboratory that puts theatre artists, performance theorists, and theatre instructors in conversation with each other through teaching videos, critical essays, design documentation, original plays, and things we haven’t thought of yet. Prompt’s editors are Ryan Douglass, Michael Schweikardt, and me, Jeanmarie Higgins. Our founding editors include Alison Morooney, Alyssa Ridder, Bea Chung-Ortiz, Grisele Gonzales Ledezma, and Rozy Isquith. We could not possibly do this work without the labor and expertise of our interns, Serena Davanzo and Jacob Malizio, BA Theatre Studies majors at Penn State University.

You can find Prompt on the web at www.sites.psu.edu/prompt.