You Can Never Go Home Again: Nostalgia, the Uncanny, and Staging Home on the Front Lines
Victoria Scrimer
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VICTORIA SCRIMER is an animal-lover, retired rollergirl, and doctoral candidate at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her research is in modern and contemporary drama, theatre history, and activist performance. In addition to Etudes, her work has appeared in Text & Presentation. She is currently working on her dissertation, "Beyond Resistance: Performing Protest in a Postdramatic Age."
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Abstract
A strange thing happened in the first half of the twentieth century: while many avant-garde artists obsessively resisted dramatic realism and its increasingly popular staging of the domestic mis en scène, allied military forces, for-profit companies and charitable service organizations were busy staging their own scenes of domestic comfort on the front lines. Starting in World War I, groups like the Salvation Army and the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) constructed a simulacrum of home away from home for soldiers fighting in Europe, providing home-cooked meals, familiar brands of cigarettes and candy, and friendly faces at “huts” furnished with radios, games, rocking chairs, pianos, and even kindly matrons and “lassies” carefully cast to play the roles of mom and sis. In this essay, I suggest the fervent rejection of the domestic in the arts, characteristic of the theatrical avant-garde, and the calculated
re-staging of the domestic on the battlefront constitute an overlooked frame through which to view modern drama’s fraught relationship with ideas of home and nostalgic longing.
A strange thing happened in the first half of the twentieth century: while many avant-garde artists obsessively resisted dramatic realism and its increasingly popular staging of the domestic mis en scène, allied military forces, for-profit companies and charitable service organizations were busy staging their own scenes of domestic comfort on the front lines. Starting in World War I, groups like the Salvation Army and the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) constructed a simulacrum of home away from home for soldiers fighting in Europe, providing home-cooked meals, familiar brands of cigarettes and candy, and friendly faces at “huts” furnished with radios, games, rocking chairs, pianos, and even kindly matrons and “lassies” carefully cast to play the roles of mom and sis. In this essay, I suggest the fervent rejection of the domestic in the arts, characteristic of the theatrical avant-garde, and the calculated
re-staging of the domestic on the battlefront constitute an overlooked frame through which to view modern drama’s fraught relationship with ideas of home and nostalgic longing.
| etudesdec2019scrimer.pdf |
