Intertextual Inquiry and Interpretive Creation: Pope.L’s Experimental Staging of William Wells Brown’s The Escape

Ilka Saal

doi:10.1515/jcde-2023-0023

Article

Intertextual Inquiry and Interpretive Creation: Pope.L’s Experimental Staging of William Wells Brown’s The Escape

Ilka Saal
is Professor of American Literature at the University of Erfurt. She is the author of Collusions of Fact and Fiction: Performing Slavery in the Works of Suzan-Lori Parks and Kara Walker (2021) as well as of New Deal Theater: The Vernacular Tradition in American Political Theater (2007) and co-editor of three essay collections: Slavery and the Post-Black Imagination (2020), American Cultures as Transnational Performance (2021), and Passionate Politics: The Cultural Work of American Melodrama from the Early Republic to the Present (2008). Her essays on American theater and literature have appeared in peer-reviewed, international journals and essay collections. She is a former editor-in-chief of Theatre Annual: A Journal of Theatre and Performance of the Americas and the recipient of a Feodor Lynen Fellowship of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

Published/Copyright: November 23, 2023

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From the journal Journal of Contemporary Drama in English Volume 11 Issue 2

Abstract

This contribution discusses Pope.L’s 2018 provocative restaging of William Wells Brown’s anti-slavery play The Escape: Or, A Leap of Freedom (1858) at the Art Institute of Chicago. Drawing on Linda Hutcheon’s theory of adaptation, it argues against a source-oriented assessment of the production, which would prioritize the original over its interpretation and delimit aesthetic evaluation to questions of fidelity. It proposes to consider Pope.L: The Escape as an interpretive creation in its own right. Engaging in a complex intertextual and intercultural dialogue with its antetext, Pope.L’s staging brings into focus particular aspects of the contemporary moment. While Brown’s play presents race as first and foremost a performative category and stresses the possibility of autopoiesis qua performance, Pope.L reduces slavery to an ontological condition. Its title and manifold multimedia performances notwithstanding, there is no escape from enslavement in Pope.L: The Escape. Performance remains contained in and prescribed by an ongoing condition of physical and psychic enslavement. With this radical adaptation, Pope.L responds to what Paul Gilroy identifies as the “ontological turn” in recent Black thought. In light of the ongoing structural and quotidian violence against People of Color, this approach insists on the central significance of the bodily experience of racializing attributions for understanding social relations as well as Black collectivity. It also provocatively asks whether the performative does indeed suffice to unsettle the structural coordinates of anti-Blackness that continue to impact and overdetermine contemporary lives.

Keywords: Pope.L; William Wells Brown; The Escape ; Black radical performance/theater; adaptation

About the author

Ilka Saal

is Professor of American Literature at the University of Erfurt. She is the author of Collusions of Fact and Fiction: Performing Slavery in the Works of Suzan-Lori Parks and Kara Walker (2021) as well as of New Deal Theater: The Vernacular Tradition in American Political Theater (2007) and co-editor of three essay collections: Slavery and the Post-Black Imagination (2020), American Cultures as Transnational Performance (2021), and Passionate Politics: The Cultural Work of American Melodrama from the Early Republic to the Present (2008). Her essays on American theater and literature have appeared in peer-reviewed, international journals and essay collections. She is a former editor-in-chief of Theatre Annual: A Journal of Theatre and Performance of the Americas and the recipient of a Feodor Lynen Fellowship of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

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Published Online: 2023-11-23

Published in Print: 2023-11-08

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Articles in the same Issue

https://doi.org/10.1515/jcde-2023-0023

Keywords for this article

Pope.L; William Wells Brown; The Escape; Black radical performance/theater; adaptation