Emily B Klein
Emily Klein is co-editor of Performing Dream Homes: Theater and the Spatial Politics of the Domestic Sphere (Palgrave Macmillan 2019). In her chapter, "Nostalgic Cartography: Performances of Hometown by Pittsburgh’s Squonk Opera and San Francisco’s Magic Bus," Klein investigates how the metaphors of tourism and travel inform place-based performance in two rapidly changing civic tech hubs.
"Seductive Movements in Lysistrata and Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq: Activism, Adaptation, and Immersive Theatre in Film" (Adaptation, 2019) follows up on her first book, Sex and War on the American Stage: Lysistrata in performance 1930-2012 (Routledge 2014), which was featured in The New York Times, Ms., and Vice.
Klein holds a PhD in Literary and Cultural Studies from Carnegie Mellon University and a BA from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her teaching and research areas include twentieth and twenty-first century American political theatre, women and gender studies, performance theory, media and film studies, and cultural and ethnic studies.
Her work has appeared in several scholarly journals including Adaptation, Frontiers, Women and Performance, American Quarterly, American Literature, and Theatre Journal.
Address: https://www.stmarys-ca.edu/node/143691
"Seductive Movements in Lysistrata and Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq: Activism, Adaptation, and Immersive Theatre in Film" (Adaptation, 2019) follows up on her first book, Sex and War on the American Stage: Lysistrata in performance 1930-2012 (Routledge 2014), which was featured in The New York Times, Ms., and Vice.
Klein holds a PhD in Literary and Cultural Studies from Carnegie Mellon University and a BA from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her teaching and research areas include twentieth and twenty-first century American political theatre, women and gender studies, performance theory, media and film studies, and cultural and ethnic studies.
Her work has appeared in several scholarly journals including Adaptation, Frontiers, Women and Performance, American Quarterly, American Literature, and Theatre Journal.
Address: https://www.stmarys-ca.edu/node/143691
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Articles by Emily B Klein
Chicago-based Teatro Luna. The Madres are a group of mothers whose children were the victims of state-sponsored violence during the Dirty War. Their weekly protest events have become increasingly performative in the decades since they began their public marches around the Plaza de Mayo. Teatro Luna, a pan-Latina performance collective, stages innovative theatrical workshops and productions that aim to represent and advocate for the rights of Latina and Hispana women. These all-female urban collectives have each used established Latino/a performance traditions like the escrache and the carpa, as well as cultural archetypes like the mater dolorosa, to invert and politicize stereotypical Latina modes of citizenship for the purpose of reframing loss and trauma to incite social change. I argue that by using urban spaces as their staging ground for politically resistant performances of pain, Teatro Luna and the Madres creatively adapt traditional Latino/a performance practices to attract and mobilize new audiences.
Books by Emily B Klein
Starting with the play’s first mainstream production in the U.S. in 1930, Emily B. Klein explores the varied iterations of Lysistrata that have graced the American stage, page, and screen since the Great Depression. These include the Federal Theatre’s 1936 Negro Repertory production, the 1955 movie musical The Second Greatest Sex and Spiderwoman Theater’s openly political Lysistrata Numbah!, as well as Douglas Carter Beane’s Broadway musical, Lysistrata Jones, and the international Lysistrata Project protests, which updated the classic in the contemporary context of the Iraq War.
Although Aristophanes’ oeuvre has been the subject of much classical scholarship, Lysistrata has received little attention from feminist theatre scholars or performance theorists. In response, this book maps current debates over Lysistrata’s dubious feminist underpinnings and uses performance theory, cultural studies, and gender studies to investigate how new adaptations reveal the socio-political climates of their origins.
Chicago-based Teatro Luna. The Madres are a group of mothers whose children were the victims of state-sponsored violence during the Dirty War. Their weekly protest events have become increasingly performative in the decades since they began their public marches around the Plaza de Mayo. Teatro Luna, a pan-Latina performance collective, stages innovative theatrical workshops and productions that aim to represent and advocate for the rights of Latina and Hispana women. These all-female urban collectives have each used established Latino/a performance traditions like the escrache and the carpa, as well as cultural archetypes like the mater dolorosa, to invert and politicize stereotypical Latina modes of citizenship for the purpose of reframing loss and trauma to incite social change. I argue that by using urban spaces as their staging ground for politically resistant performances of pain, Teatro Luna and the Madres creatively adapt traditional Latino/a performance practices to attract and mobilize new audiences.
Starting with the play’s first mainstream production in the U.S. in 1930, Emily B. Klein explores the varied iterations of Lysistrata that have graced the American stage, page, and screen since the Great Depression. These include the Federal Theatre’s 1936 Negro Repertory production, the 1955 movie musical The Second Greatest Sex and Spiderwoman Theater’s openly political Lysistrata Numbah!, as well as Douglas Carter Beane’s Broadway musical, Lysistrata Jones, and the international Lysistrata Project protests, which updated the classic in the contemporary context of the Iraq War.
Although Aristophanes’ oeuvre has been the subject of much classical scholarship, Lysistrata has received little attention from feminist theatre scholars or performance theorists. In response, this book maps current debates over Lysistrata’s dubious feminist underpinnings and uses performance theory, cultural studies, and gender studies to investigate how new adaptations reveal the socio-political climates of their origins.