What You See Isn't Always What You Get: War of the Worlds
Carrie Winship
CARRIE WINSHIP is a director, dramaturg, teacher, and scholar who joined Bloomsburg University in 2018 where she teaches courses in theatre history, script analysis, stage management, and theatre appreciation. Carrie holds a Ph.D. in Theatre and Performance Studies from the University of Missouri; an M.A. in Theatre History, Theory, and Literature from Indiana University; and a B.A. in Theatre and Sociology from Emory & Henry College in Virginia.
Carrie’s research explores women’s voices in practice and theory, as well as new play development, theatre pedagogy, dramaturgical collaboration, and devised theatre. She regularly presents at the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, the Mid-America Theatre Conference, and the Women and Theatre Program annual meeting. Carrie is particularly invested in serving platforms that cultivate new works: she coordinated the prestigious Jane Chambers Student Playwriting Award from 2013-2016 and has served numerous other initiatives including the Playwriting Symposium of the Mid-America Theatre Conference, and the Missouri Playwright’s Workshop. Select professional directing credits include: Hamlet, Dark Creation: The Mary Shelley Project, Measure, Don Juan: After the War, Our Town, Three Sisters (all with GreenHouse Theatre Project); The Baltimore Waltz (Talking Horse Theatre); and The sHORT Women’s Play Festival 5 (Independent Actors Theatre). Select educational directing credits include: Much Ado About Murder, Be More Chill, and Good Kids (all at Bloomsburg University); Stop Kiss (Lycoming College); The Lost Slipper, Aria da Capo (University of Missouri); and The Marriage Proposal (Indiana University). |
Abstract
Anne Bogart describes Naomi Iizuka’s War of the Worlds as a play “essentially about the American confusion between news and entertainment, our appetite for sensation, and our ability quickly to discard and forget whatever it was we were so excited about.” Conceived and directed by Anne Bogart and created by the SITI Company, the play premiered at the Humana Festival in 2000. I have been recently drawn to this disturbing and delightful play as an artist, teacher, and scholar, as it offers a meditation on the fickleness of media narratives, and how they may intersect or diverge to create the image of a monster, or a hero. Donald Trump’s love of Citizen Kane was touted throughout his 2016 presidential campaign—reporters compared Trump’s political bid to that of character Charles Foster Kane—both eccentric tycoons fighting against establishment candidates. I was struck by Trump’s fascination with Welles himself; it seemed a cruel joke that this contemporary showman could idolize an artistic giant perhaps best remembered for his own brand of “truthiness.” But idolize Welles, he did. In this pastiche of connections, Iizuka’s playtext deserves renewed attention. In this essay, I explore the work’s potential as a piece challenging essentialist concepts of identity, as it interrogates the phenomenon of celebrity in the United States, as well as offers a critique of visual mediums of storytelling as unstable artifice.
Anne Bogart describes Naomi Iizuka’s War of the Worlds as a play “essentially about the American confusion between news and entertainment, our appetite for sensation, and our ability quickly to discard and forget whatever it was we were so excited about.” Conceived and directed by Anne Bogart and created by the SITI Company, the play premiered at the Humana Festival in 2000. I have been recently drawn to this disturbing and delightful play as an artist, teacher, and scholar, as it offers a meditation on the fickleness of media narratives, and how they may intersect or diverge to create the image of a monster, or a hero. Donald Trump’s love of Citizen Kane was touted throughout his 2016 presidential campaign—reporters compared Trump’s political bid to that of character Charles Foster Kane—both eccentric tycoons fighting against establishment candidates. I was struck by Trump’s fascination with Welles himself; it seemed a cruel joke that this contemporary showman could idolize an artistic giant perhaps best remembered for his own brand of “truthiness.” But idolize Welles, he did. In this pastiche of connections, Iizuka’s playtext deserves renewed attention. In this essay, I explore the work’s potential as a piece challenging essentialist concepts of identity, as it interrogates the phenomenon of celebrity in the United States, as well as offers a critique of visual mediums of storytelling as unstable artifice.

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