Emma Pauly, University of California, Los Angeles
By necessity, much of the scholarship surrounding theatrical adaptations of classical text centers finished products with abundant budgets or published for broad consumption. This holds true in the case of theater produced by marginalized authors or which engages with marginalization; in order to reach the academy, there must be a certain degree of industry momentum present. Plays such as Cherríe Moraga’s The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea, and Luis Alfaro’s Greek trilogy (Electricidad, Oedipus El Rey, and Mojada) have been beneficiaries of this momentum, receiving Off-Broadway and major local productions.
A companion task is to highlight productions on the margins of the theater industry, unpublished plays with less momentum (and capital) behind them. This paper details the life of a script on multiple margins: SHINING, a “contemporary verse…Afro-futurist innovation on the myth of Phaethon explor[ing] the origin of state-sanctioned violence in western culture” by African-American and American Pakistani playwright and performer Aidaa Peerzada. Produced by San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Company (SFBATCO), SHINING bases its plot predominantly in the Ovidian iteration of Phaethon in Metamorphoses, as well as the fragmentary Euripidean Phaethon. Specifying the casting of people of color in nearly every role, Peerzada sets the stage for marginalized performers to enact scenes of resistance to systems of oppression, defiance of gender hierarchies, and cosmic paradigm shifts, all resolutely within the landscape of myth.
SHINING, this paper will argue, uses antiquity as a means of replenishment and liberation for marginalized creators and audiences. Peerzada performs a dramatic and mythic “jailbreak” upon and through the myth of Phaethon, radically reinterpreting the myth as a story not of hubris and punishment, but of radiant transcendence, refusing to confine her characters to the fates that await them within antiquity.
This paper will chart SHINING’s development through the dramaturgical process over 13 drafts, 5 readings, and a 2022 in-person production for which the presenter served as dramaturg. Peerzada’s own perspective on her work will be centered and amplified through selections from interviews with her and archived footage of both performances, as well as revisiting of the dramaturgical process between Peerzada and the presenter. The presenter also hopes to earnestly examine and critique their own participation in SHINING’s development, avoid some extractive tendencies in reception scholarship (dubbed “the classicizing creep” by Jermaine Bryant), and to center what Peerzada enacts on her own terms rather than her reflection back upon her source material.