What can queer and (trans)feminist restagings of history teach us about navigating contemporary socio-political issues?
Leigh Fondakowski's Casa Cushman
Dramaturgy and History: Staging the Archive
Co-Edited with Erin Stoneking (Routledge 2024)
Dramaturgy and History provides a practical account of an aspect of dramaturgical practice that is often taken for granted: dramaturgs’ engagements with history and historiography.
Dramaturgs play a vital role in amplifying and activating theatre’s unique potential to contribute to the pressing public discourse around the uses and legacies of history.This collection challenges the notion of history as an unassailable or settled set of facts, offering readers a glimpse into the processes and methods of eighteen dramaturgs working in a variety of settings, including professional theatres, universities, museums, and archives. The dramaturgs featured use history to a variety of ends: they reframe classical texts for contemporary audiences; advocate for the production of lesser-known writers and the expansion of the canon; create new works that bring women’s, LGBTQIA+, and Global Majority histories to life; and establish new and necessary archives by/of/for minoritarian artists. Collectively, they examine and animate some of the most urgent questions, concerns, and challenges that dramaturgs encounter in working with history.
An essential resource for teachers and students of dramaturgy, the collection offers a concluding hands-on exercise for each chapter to facilitate the reader’s application of the methods discussed in their own practice.
Recent Publications
In spring 2026, I published two chapters in edited collections. The first “(Extra)ordinary Heroics in Samuel Achilles Edwards’ Staging of Trans Antiquity” is an introduction to Edwards' play Caeneus in The Methuen Drama Book of Trans Plays (Volume 3). In it, I read Edwards' restaging of the story of Caeneus' gender transformation from Greek and Roman mythology as a contestation of mainstream media's sensationalization of trans experience and a corrective to narratives that suggest that gender fluidity and transition are new phenomena. The second, "Coming (In and) Out (of Time) in Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori's Fun Home," was published in a new textbook, Learning from Queer and Trans Studies: An Introduction. This chapter uses the musical adaptation of Alison Bechdel's Fun Home to introduce the concept of queer temporalities to undergraduate students.
