Dhat al-Himma – Woman of Noble Purpose

 

[On a June afternoon in 2019, I paid a visit to MoMA PS1 across the East River in Long Island City, Queens, to which I’d never been.  Established in 2000 as the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition space devoted solely to contemporary art.  (My report on this visit is “MoMA PS1,” posted on Rick On Theater on 25 July 2019.  The report includes a little of the history of PS1 and some details about its LIC neighborhood.)

[One exhibit caught my attention for more than just its aesthetic attraction.  Works and Days (31 March–2 September 2019), a retrospective of the ceramic sculptures, paintings, watercolors, and collages of Syrian-born Lebanese-American artist Simone Fattal (b. 1942) included elements of an unfinished project of telling the stories of ancient history with figures taken from tales such as The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Odyssey, Dhat al-Himma, and others. 

[Of course, I knew about Gilgamesh, the Mesopotamian epic poem, ca. 2100-1200 BCE, and The Odyssey, Homer’s (8th century BCE) Greek saga of the voyage of Ulysses from Troy back to Ithaca after the Trojan War (12th or 13th century BCE).  Dhat al-Himma, however, was unknown to me; so, I looked it up.  The Arabic phrase means “Woman of Noble Purpose”—the same meaning as Delhemma, the name given to the story’s heroine.

[Fattal’s tiny ceramic sculptures in this section, including The Guard (2006) and The Wounded Warrior (2008) from the little-known Arabic epic of the 7th through the 13th centuries, tell a story when viewed together.  

[In the legend, Delhemma (also a short version of the tale’s Arabic title) is a warrior, and a female djinn (a magical spirit, often called a genie in English) falls in love with her.  Guarded by the djinn and assisted by her son, Abd al-Wahhab, Delhemma fights the enemies of her people and her prince.

[If you’re looking for a feminist action hero with exotic trappings as a successor to TV’s Xena: Warrior Princess or the movie Wonder Woman, here’s a great prospect.

[(The Arabic title of the saga varies, leading to even more variations in the translations—not to mention the romanizations—and there are differences in the narrative depending on the version and the translation.  The names of the characters, some of which are historical, some quasi-historical, and some of unknown origin, can also vary widely.  I’ll at least try to be consistent.)]

Delhemma or Sirat Delhemma (“Tale of Lady Delhemma”) is a popular epic of Arabic literature set during the Arab-Byzantine wars, a series of conflicts across the Middle Wast, North Africa, and Southern Europe, also known as the Muslim-Byzantine wars (629-1180 CE), between several Arab dynasties and the Byzantine Empire of the Umayyad (661-750 CE) and early Abbasid (750-861 CE) periods.

(The Byzantine Empire, also known as the Eastern Roman Empire, was the extension of the Roman Empire ruled from Constantinople [previously Byzantium, now Istanbul] from the late 3rd century CE to the Middle Ages.  [The name ‘Byzantine Empire’ was used only after the realm’s demise in the 15th century; in its time, it was called the 'Roman Empire’ and its citizens called themselves ‘Romans.’]

(Constantine I [272-337 CE; Roman emperor: 306-337], also known as Constantine the Great, was the first Roman emperor to convert to Christianity [officially baptized into Christianity on his deathbed; began receiving instruction in the Christian religion with a view to baptism around 312].  He ruled from Rome until 330, when he moved the imperial capital to Byzantium, changing the city’s name to Constantinople and inaugurating the Byzantine Empire.

(The last non-Christian Roman Emperor was Julian [331-363 CE; Roman emperor: 361-363; known as Julian the Apostate].  Theodosius I [347-395; Roman emperor:  379-395], the last emperor to rule both the western and eastern halves of the empire, established Christianity as the Roman state religion in 381.  

(Having survived the events that caused the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 CE, the Byzantine Empire endured until the fall of Constantinople to the Islamic Ottoman Empire [ca. 1299-1922; also called the Turkish Empire] in 1453.  It had reached its greatest extent after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, during the reign of Justinian I [482-565; Roman emperor: 527-565; also known as Justinian the Great].  It encompassed much of the territory surrounding the Mediterranean Sea, including modern-day Italy [including Rome], Iberia, Greece, Turkey, parts of North Africa [including Egypt], the Middle East [including Syria, Lebanon, and Israel], and the Balkans.)

(The beginning of Islam is traditionally dated from 610 CE.  By 632, the year Muhammad [b. ca. 570 CE] died, most of the Arabian Peninsula had converted to Islam.  By 750, the Umayyad dynasty had conquered what is now North Africa west of Egypt, the Iberian Peninsula, southern France, and southeastern Pakistan.  In 750, the Abbasid dynasty succeeded the Umayyads and by 1258, Muslims had conquered Anatolia [Asia Minor] and the northern Indian subcontinent.

(Throughout the 11th and 12th centuries, various Muslim caliphates and sultanates conquered much of the Byzantine Empire, but at the same time, into the 13th through the 15th centuries, much of Islamic Europe was re-Christianized.  From then into the modern era, though the politics of the regions stretching from western North Africa to eastern South Asia shifted drastically and often, the status quo of the religious dominances remained static.

The full title of Dhat al-Himma (from the 1909 edition) is Sirat al-amira Dhat al-Himma wa-waladiha ’Abd al-Wahhab wa ’l-amir Abu Muhammad al-Battal wa-’Uqba shaykh al-dalal wa-Shumadris al-muhtal, or “The Life of amira Dhat al-Himma, mother of ’Abd al-Wahhab, and of amir Abu Muḥammad al-Baṭṭal, the master of error ’Uqba, and astute Shumadris.”  It’s also known by other titles after the principal characters, including Sirat Dhat al-Himma wa-l-Battal (“Tale of Dhat al-Himma and al-Battal”) and simply Sirat Delhemma.

(Amira or emira is the female version of amir or emir and is the equivalent of ‘princess.’  Sirat or sira is Arabic for ‘journey’ or ‘travel,’ but in this context, it’s translated as ‘biography,’ ‘life,’ ‘epic,’ or ‘tale.’  Be aware, also, that transliterations of the Arabic words will vary, sometimes vastly, with the renderer.)

According to some scholars, the saga was first published in Egypt around 900 CE, but the earliest reliable references to the characters appear in the middle of the 12th century, also in Egypt, and some of the events narrated occurred long after the 10th century.  It’s evident that most of Dhat al-Himma was written as a response to the impact of the Crusades (1095-1291). 

The eminent Belgian scholar of the Byzantine Empire, Henri Grégoire (1881-1964), however, suggests that at least the basis of Delhemma’s story must have existed before about 1000 CE, as it is used in the romantic Byzantine epic, the 11th- or 12th-century poem, Digenis Acritas (“bi-racial border lord,” a reference to the hero’s Greek-Syrian parentage).

There is a dearth of translations of Dhat al-Himma into any European language, particularly, into English.  The closest I’ve found is Melanie Magidow’s translation, The Tale of Princess Fatima, Warrior Woman: The Arabic Epic of Dhat al-Himma (Penguin Books, 2021), designated a “partial edition and translation.”

The first modern edition of Dhat al-Himma was published in Cairo in 1909.  It recounts the adventures and misadventures of a few characters—some inspired by historical events and figures, but with a lot of fantasy, anachronism, and historical inaccuracies in the mix—during a period from the 8th to the 12th or 13th centuries, although the main characters, Delhemma (or Amira Dhat al-Himma); her son, Abd al-Wahhab; and the hero al-Battal, lived at the same time.

One of the epic’s heroes, Amir Abu Mohammed al-Battal, is identified with the mythical character of Turkish folklore and classic literature, Battal Gaz, a figure of the late 9th or early 10th century CE.  Despite the chronological discrepancy, the legendary figure of Battal Gazi seems to have been inspired by a historical Umayyad commander, known as Abdallah al-Battal (ca. 690-695 – 740 CE), although there is no certainty about his full name.

In the 1909 Cairo edition, the story includes 70 sections in seven volumes and 5,084 pages.  The theme of the epic derives from the long history of wars between Muslim Arabs and Christian Byzantines during the Umayyad Caliphate and early Abbasid Caliphate, up to the reign of Abu Ja’far Harun ibn Muḥammad al-Wathiq bi’Llah (known as al-Wathiq; 812-847; 9th Caliph of the Abbasid Caliphate: 841-847), with elements of later events focusing on the vicissitudes of the rivalry between two Arab tribes, the Kilabi (or Banu Kilab, the tribe that dominated Central Arabia [i.e., today’s central Saudi Arabia] in the time before Islam [ca, the 6th to 7th centuries CE]), to which the main characters belong, and the Sulami (Banu Sulaym, in western Saudi Arabia). 

(Banu is Arabic for ‘the children of’ or ‘descendants of.’  It’s often used to indicate the lineage or ancestry of a group or clan, typically appearing before the name of a tribal progenitor.  The tribal names such as Kilabi and Sulami are nisba, an adjectival form of the name of the clan’s founder [Kilab is Arabic for Caleb; Sulaym is a form of Sulayman, or Solomon].)

According to the French orientalist and historian Marius Canard (1888-1982), the story has its origins in two traditions.  The first part, focusing on the adventures of al-Sahsah and the early years of his granddaughter Delhemma, reflects the Syrian-Umayyad and Bedouin tradition, including typically Bedouin elements in the tradition of Antarah ibn Shaddad al-Absi (pre-Islamic Arabian poet and knight; 525-608 CE), but mixes them with the semi-mythical tradition that grew up around the deeds of the 8th-century Umayyad real-life Arab commander Abdallah al-Battal, whose role is played in Dhat al-Himma by al-Sahsah.

(I wasn’t able to identify al-Sahsah, the grandfather of Delhemma, beyond the fact that he’s called Amir al-Sahsah elsewhere; the rest of his name doesn’t seem to appear in the narrative.  He’s probably a fictional character, a composite of several historical figures, or both.  [Some of the exploits of al-Battal, a historical hero of the saga, have been ascribed to al-Sahsah in Dhat al-Himma.]  

(Bedouins are nomadic Arab tribes who historically inhabited the desert regions in the Arabian Peninsula, the Levant, Mesopotamia [including present-day Iraq], and North Africa.)

Arabists posit that the epic must have begun as a collection of tales from the Banu Sulaym.  Over time, the rival Kilabi tribe appropriated these tales and added others, so that the work that has come down to us is basically an epic work of the Banu Kilab. 

The second, longer part of Dhat al-Himma, from the sixth chapter onwards, reflects the events of the Abbasid period, and probably originates from a cycle of tales based on the real-life Amir of Malatya (in the Eastern Anatolia region of modern-day Turkey), Amr ibn Ubaydallah al-Aqta (reigned 830s-863 CE) of the Sulami, who appears in the Byzantine sources under the name of Ambros.  Malatya became a major opponent of the Byzantine Empire and al-Aqta was one of the greatest threats on its eastern frontier.

Over time, the two traditions merged in favor of the Kilabi, who took the prominent role of the Sulami in the second tradition.  Orientallst Canard suggests that this was due to the shameful surrender of Malatya to the Byzantines in 934 by al-Aqta’s successor, his grandson.  The city’s Muslim inhabitants were expelled or forced to convert, and replaced by Byzantine settlers.

Thus, the Banu Sulaym were discredited while the Banu Kilab continued to play an important role in the wars against the Byzantine Empire throughout the 10th century.  The Kilabi Delhemma and her son, Abd al-Wahhab, became the main heroes of the conflict, and the Amir al-Aqta was relegated to a secondary role.  The Sulami were also associated with the perfidious Qadi Uqba, while the hero al-Battal, a Sulami, is transferred from the Umayyad period in which he actually lived, to the Abbasid period, as a Kilabi.

(Qadi Uqba seems to refer to Uqba ibn Nafi [622-683 CE] who was a prominent Muslim jurist [qadi] and general in the early Islamic period.  He was known for establishing Umayyad rule in North Africa [the Magreb].  In Dhat al-Himma, Uqba is a traitorous figure, also referred to as “the treacherous Uqba” or, as in the epic’s title, “the master of error.” 

(He’s portrayed as a spy for the Byzantines [Eastern Romans] who has secretly converted to Christianity and a major antagonist who fuels the rivalry between the Kilabi and Sulami clans.  His actions, including hounding the Kilabi and manipulating events, lead to their capture and imprisonment, often at the hands of the Byzantines or the Abbasid caliph.)

Dhat al-Himma is presented as “accurate history,” but, as Canard asserts, in reality it’s “the often very vague recollection of a certain number of facts and historical personages, garbed in romantic trappings and presented in an imaginary way, with constant disregard for chronology and probability” (“Dhu ’l-Himma,” Encyclopaedia of Islam [New Edition Online], Leiden, Netherlands, posted 24 Apr. 2012).  In general, Canard continues, the author or authors had a very superficial knowledge of history and geography, but they were evidently better versed in Christian practices and festivals, especially those of the Byzantines.

The epic begins with the history of the rivalry between the Banu Sulaym and the Banu Kilab during the early Umayyad period, when the Sulami dominated the Kilabi, and continues until the Banu Kilab took command and the participation of the Kilabi al-Sahsah in the military campaigns of the Umayyad prince Maslama ibn Abd al-Malik (flourished: 705-738) against the Byzantines, including the second Arab siege of Constantinople (717-718), his adventures in the desert (principally, his military campaigns and the establishment of fortified frontier settlements), and his death.  

Next, al-Sahsah’s sons, Zalim and Mazlum, argue over their father’s inheritance.  Mazlum’s daughter, Fatima, the eponymous heroine of the epic, is kidnapped by the Banu Tayy (from what is now parts of Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Jordan) and, during her captivity, becomes a valiant warrior, coming to be called al-Dalhama.  (The name is possibly the feminine form of dalham or ‘wolf,’ but it is more usual to be interpreted as a corruption of the honorific “Dhat al-Himma,” which also appears in history with other variations, the most common of which is “Delhemma.”)

During the Abbasid revolution (741-750), the Sulami, led by Abdallah ibn Marwan, regained leadership of the Arab tribes due to their support of the Abbasids.  Thanks to Delhemma’s intervention, the Kilabi accepted this change and together with the Sulami participated in the then revived border war with the Byzantines.  The Kilabi settled in the city of Malatya, while the Sulami took Hisn al-Kawkab, a nearby fortress.

(There’s a discrepancy with the identification of “Abdallah ibn Marwan,” the Arab leader in the Abbasid revolution.  He’s equated with Abdallah ibn Marwan ibn Muhammad, a son of Marwan ibn Muhammad ibn Marwan [ca. 691-750], Caliph Marwan II [reigned: 744-750], but Marwan II was the last ruler of the Umayyad Caliphate before the Abbasid revolution.  His sons fought for him, not the Sulami and the Abbasids, and fled to Nubia after their defeat.

(The actual military leader of the revolt was Abu Muslim [718/19 or 723/27-755], a Persian Muslim who followed Abu al-Abbas al-Saffah [722-754; reigned: 749-754], who became the first Abbasid caliph.  [Abu Muslim was put to death by the second caliph, Abu Ja’far al-Mansur [714-775; reigned: 754-775], brother of al-Saffah, purportedly for heresy, but in truth out of fear of Abu Muslim’s popularity as a great hero.)

Delhemma’s cousin, al-Harith, son of Zalim, was able to marry her thanks to a drug, and she bears him a son, Abd al-Wahhab, who has black skin.  When he grows up, he becomes leader of the Kilabi and his and his mother’s deeds in the war against the Byzantine Empire are the main theme of the epic.  

Abd al-Wahhab is supported by the cunning al-Battal, who, though a Sulami, joins the Kilabi, and faces opposition from the rest of the Banu Sulaym, including the treacherous Qadi Uqba, who had secretly converted to Christianity, and the Amir of Malatya, Amr ibn Ubaydallah al-Aqta, who distrusts the Kilabi despite owing his life to Delhemma.  

Meanwhile, Delhemma’s husband, al-Harith, joins the Byzantines with a band of Arabs and converts to Christianity.  On the other hand, the Muslims find allies among the Byzantines, such as the crypto-Muslim Maris, chamberlain of the emperor, or the lord of a frontier fortress, Yanis, a Christian convert to Islam.

The epic follows its protagonists on a series of military campaigns and adventures during the reigns of Harun al-Rashid (ca. 763 or 766-809; fifth Abbasid caliph: 786-809), al-Amin (787-813; sixth Abbasid caliph: 809-813), al-Ma’mun (786-833; seventh Abbasid caliph: 813-833), and al-Mu’tasim (796-842; eighth Abbasid caliph: 833-842).  

In the final part, the narrative is dominated by the rivalry between the Banu Sulaym and Banu Kilab, fueled by Uqba’s treacherous hounding of the Kilabi and his spying for the Byzantines.  The leaders of the Kilabi, including Delhemma and Abd al-Wahhab, were captured several times by the Byzantines and the Abbasid caliph due to Uqba’s intrigues, but were always released after several escapades.  

Al-Battal plays a crucial role as a counterpoint to the traitor, Uqba, with each of them seeking to capture and eliminate the other.  Abd al-Wahhab resolves the situation several times with his achievements, which take him to Western Europe and the Maghreb (North Africa).  

Various Byzantine rulers successively attacked and sacked Malatya, but were repulsed or defeated by the actions of Delhemma or Abd al-Wahhab.  On the other hand, the Kilabi often helped the Byzantine emperors to recover their capital Constantinople from usurpers or Frankish invaders from the West.

Finally, Uqba’s treachery is unmasked, and in the last and longest part of the epic he’s pursued by the caliph al-Mu’tasim and the Kilabi heroes across several countries “from Spain to Yemen,” eventually being crucified in front of Constantinople.  

On its return, the Muslim army falls into a Byzantine ambush and only 400 men, including the caliph (not named, but probably al-Mu’tasim), al-Battal, Delhemma, and Abd al-Wahhab, manage to escape, but Amir Amr ibn Ubaydallah is killed.  

In retaliation, al-Mu’tasim’s successor, al-Wathiq, launches a campaign against Constantinople, where he installs a Muslim governor and rebuilds the mosque that had been built by Maslama ibn Abd al-Malik and al-Sahsah.  

The narrative continues with the description of the death of Delhemma and Abd al-Wahhab, as well as the last days of al-Battal, who lives long enough to witness the resumption of Byzantine attacks later in the same century (740s-750s).  

Al-Battal dies in Ancyra (present-day Ankara), where his tomb remains hidden until the Turks arrive and discover him (in other versions the discovery is made by the Mamluks [slave soldiers of diverse ethnic origins who served the rulers in the Muslim world in the 9th through the early 19th centuries]).

(The legendary al-Battal apparently lived into the late 8th or even early 9th century, but the real-life general on whom he was based died, not in Ankara, but in Akroinοn (now known as Afyonkarahisar), in 740, 162 miles southwest of the modern Turkish capital.  He was killed in a huge battle with Emperor Leo III (ca. 685-741; Roman emperor: 717-741) that prevented al-Battal from reaching Constantinople, 262 miles to the north-northwest, for yet another assault.) 

[This is a pretty sketchy précis of Dhat al-Himma; its length prohibits anything short from being comprehensive (or, conversely, anything comprehensive from being short).  With all the Arab character and place names, I found it even more daunting to compile, and I assume it’s the same for reading—especially cold.

[I do hope, nevertheless, that my attempt here has resulted in something interesting—or at least curious for those readers who’re from the West and aren’t familiar with Arabic legends beyond One Thousand and One Nights, versions of which I suppose most of us read as children.  (Maybe it’s no longer part of every child’s experience as it was in my day—though I guess every kid knows some version of Alladin.)

[As I said at the top, my first encounter with Dhat al-Himma was just a few years ago, and I’d never even heard of it before then.  So, discovering the saga even only to the extent that I have (there are virtually no complete translations), was challenging and fascinating.  I hope ROTters have found it engaging.]

Merle Oberon

 

“NEW BOOK ‘LOVE, QUEENIE’ CHRONICLES LIFE
OF TRAILBLAZING SOUTH ASIAN ACTRESS MERLE OBERON”
by Amna Nawaz and Shrai Popat 

[Merle Oberon (1911-79), star leading lady of filmdom in the 1930s. ’40s, and ’50s, was born in Bombay (now Mumbai), India, of mixed Welsh and Ceylonese (now Sri Lankan) parentage, as Estelle Merle O’Brien Thompson, and was nicknamed “Queenie.”  According to Michael Korda (English-born writer. novelist, and editor; b. 1933; son of production designer Vincent Korda), she “became a feature of Bombay nightlife while still in her early teens and eventually made her way to England [in 1928] as the girlfriend of a wealthy young Englishman” (Another Life).  In early-1930s London, Oberon became a star at the famous Café de Paris and also the girlfriend of the Grenada-born jazz musician, Leslie “Hutch” Hutchinson (1900-69).

[(At the time of Oberon’s birth, India was a crown colony of the British Empire, often called British India of the British Raj.  It was directly ruled by the British Crown from 1858 to 1947.  Her father, Arthur Terrence O'Brien Thompson, was a Welsh mechanical engineer who worked in Indian Railways.  Oberon’s mother was Constance Charlotte Thompson, née Selby, a Burgher from British Ceylon, a separate crown colony, now the nation of Sri Lanka.  Burghers are a Eurasian ethnic group on the island descended from Europeans who settled there in the 16th and 17th centuries.  Oberon’s parents’ birth years are unrecorded, but her father died in 1914 and her mother in 1937—at which time, she was listed as 55 years old, making her birth year 1882.)

[The three Korda brothers, Alexander (British film director, producer, and screenwriter; 1893-1956), Zoltan (British motion picture screenwriter, director, and producer; 1895-1961), and Vincent (British artist and film art director; 1897-1979), were Hungarian-Jewish emigrants who made careers in the movie business, first in London and later in Hollywood.  Alexander Korda discovered the young beauty (then still known as Queenie Thompson) in the tea line at the movie studio.  He changed her name and cast her as the doomed Anne Boleyn in The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933), her first significant role and the first British picture to be nominated for an Academy Award as Best Picture.  (It lost to Cavalcade.)  Oberon and Alexander Korda married in 1939 and she became the first Lady Korda when he was knighted.

[After 1934’s The Scarlet Pimpernel, she left Britain for Hollywood.  With her nomination for an Academy Award for Best Actress as Kitty Vane in The Dark Angel (1935), Oberon became a star in both the U.K. and the U.S.  The ’30s and ’40s were busy and successful decades for Oberon, including the late films opposite Laurence Olivier (1907-89), the popular comedy The Divorce of Lady X (1938) and her most acclaimed performance in Wuthering Heights (1939).  These were followed by 15 films on the next decade.

[Then, however, the actress wasn’t seen on the screen for four years.  In 1940, Oberon’s skin had been severely damaged in an attempt to lighten her complexion with chemical treatments.  Her darker skin was fine in black-and-white photography, but under color, she didn’t “test” well. 

[After a few dismissible movies in the early ’50s, she returned in 1954 as Empress Josephine opposite Marlon Brando’s (1924-2004) Napoleon in Désirée.  There were few films after that: none in 1955 and one in ’56.  She did some television in the early and mid-60s, then a few movies at the end of the decade.  Oberon’s last film was Interval in 1973.  Her career ended after that and she retired quietly in Malibu, California, until she died of a stroke in November 1979.

[In 1985, Michael Korda published a fictionalized biography of his aunt, Queenie, which was made into a 1987 ABC television miniseries starring Mia Sara, Claire Bloom, Sarah Miles, Joss Ackland, and Gary Cady.  Korda later wrote an autobiographical account of the world of publishing—Another Life: A Memoir of Other People (Random House, 1999)—which created intimate portraits of the authors, editors, and celebrities he had worked with over the decades, including his aunt.

[Oberon is regarded by some as the first Asian nominated for a Best Actress Oscar, and the first Asian in any category to receive an Oscar nomination, even though she had hidden her mixed heritage throughout her career.  In 2023, when Malaysian actress Michelle Yeoh (b. 1962) was nominated for and won the Best Actress award for her performance in Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022), news outlets like the Hollywood Reporter described Yeoh as “the first self-identified Asian actress ever nominated in the category,” while pointing out that Oberon had passed as white.

[This interview was aired on PBS News Hour on 22 April 2025.] 

Amna Nawaz: As the first Asian and only South Asian actress to be nominated for a best actress Oscar, Merle Oberon’s place in the pantheon of cinema is historic, but it came with enormous sacrifice. For decades, Oberon had to hide her race to stay working in film.

I recently spoke with writer Mayukh Sen [b. 1992] whose new book, “Love, Queenie: Merle Oberon, Hollywood’s First South Asian Star” [Norton & Company, 2025], chronicles Oberon’s rise to fame, her groundbreaking career, and eventual fade from the spotlight.

It’s part of our arts and culture series, Canvas.

Mayukh, welcome to the “News Hour.” Thanks for being here.

Mayukh Sen, Author, “Love, Queenie: Merle Oberon, Hollywood’s First South Asian Star”: Thank you for having me, Amna.

Amna Nawaz: So before we dive into the details of Merle Oberon’s life, tell me how the book came to be. I mean, what was it about her and her story that made you want to dig in?

Mayukh Sen: So I have always been fascinated by Merle Oberon ever since I first encountered her, which was all the way back in the summer of 2009.

I was a rising senior in high school and I was obsessed with the Oscars. And I learned that she had been the first Asian actress who was nominated for an Academy Award for acting all the way back in 1936 [for The Dark Angel (1935)]. And then I learned that she had grown up in the city of Kolkata [formerly Calcutta], which is where my father was from.

And so, ever since then, I have really wanted to tell her story. And there hasn’t been a proper biography of her in over 40 years.

[Charles Higham and Roy Moseley, Princess Merle: The Romantic Life of Merle Oberon (Coward-McCann Inc., 1983). Higham and Moseley were known to write highly fictionalized accounts of celebrities. There is also Michael Korda, Queenie (Simon & Schuster, 1985). Oberon’s nephew’s roman à clef about his aunt.]

Amna Nawaz: Yes.

Mayukh Sen: So I told myself, you know what, I think it’s time for me to just take this project on and try to do her story justice.

Amna Nawaz: And the story that most people knew about her as she was making her way through Hollywood was that she was a British actress, that she was born in Tasmania [an island state of Australia located south of the Australian mainland], that she was raised in India, then brought to England. That’s the story she told people.

What was the truth about her life?

Mayukh Sen: So something that emerged in the years after her death in 1979 was that Merle Oberon, despite posturing before the public eye as this white Tasmanian-born woman, was in fact born into poverty in the city that was then known as Bombay, now Mumbai, India, to a South Asian mother and a white father.

And she spent the first 18 years of her life in India living through poverty. And it was only after she went to England in 1929 that this fictitious backstory was created for her by studios that she was actually a white woman born in Tasmania. And that is a lie that would stick with her throughout the entirety of her life, at least publicly.

Amna Nawaz: What did it mean to grow up mixed-race in India in the early 1900s?

Mayukh Sen: Yes.

So Merle Oberon, she was born as Queenie Thom[p]son in India, right? [As I note above, “Queenie” was a childhood nickname.] And many Anglo-Indians, Merle Oberon included, grew up having to deal with intense social discrimination because the fact that they were essentially neither here nor there. They didn’t easily assimilate into the wider South Asian population and they were also almost always rejected by white British folks.

Amna Nawaz: And the context for when she comes to the United States, as you point out in the book, is, again, one of real overt racism towards South Asians, right?

There was an immigration act that barred South Asians from entry. Hollywood had a code in place that barred any interracial romance on screen. You write in the book that her identity was a secret she guarded with her life.

[The Immigration Act of 1917, specifically the “Asiatic Barred Zone,” effectively barred South Asians from entering the U.S. This act created a geographically defined zone, excluding anyone from “any country not owned by the U.S. adjacent to the continent of Asia,” which included India and much of the rest of Asia. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 formally ended Asian exclusion as a feature of U.S. immigration policy.]

What would have happened if people had found out?

Mayukh Sen: So her career would have been completely destroyed had people known that she was in fact a mixed-race girl who was born into poverty in India.

The Hays Code, which was instituted in 1934 [1930-68 (enforcement started in 1934); see my post on 7 July 2013], which is coincidentally the same year that Merle Oberon first arrives in America, for example, one of its edicts barred the depiction of interracial romance, which was defined in the text as being between black and white races, but produced such a chilling effect that it also affected the opportunities for non-Black people of color, including Merle Oberon.

So had people known that she was actually mixed race and South Asian, she would not have been able to play any leading roles.

Amna Nawaz: And she does land some roles, right? She stars opposite of Laurence Olivier as Cathy in “Wuthering Heights,” as Anne Boleyn in “The Private Life of Henry VIII” [opposite Charles Laughton as King Henry VIII].

How does she hide her identity? What does she have to do?

Mayukh Sen: I mean, it requires enormous sacrifice. First, she’s armed with this backstory that was created for her all the way back in 1932 by a company called London Films. They’re the ones that [says], you know what, we’re going to give you this fictitious backstory that will essentially deflect any sort of curiosity or speculation about your heritage, right?

[London Films Productions is a British film and television production company founded in 1932 by Alexander Korda. The company made The Private Life of Henry VIII in 1933.  All together, London Films made eight movies with Oberon.]

And alongside that, she has to endure so many terrible and torturous, frankly, beauty regimens. When she was making the 1935 film “The Dark Angel,” which is the film for which she received her historic best actress nomination, she had to undergo an entire day of skin bleaching because studio crew essentially thought that she was too dark.

And this is something that she had to go through routinely as she was making films in Hollywood.

Amna Nawaz: What kind of impact did that take on her, not just on her career, but her personally, psychologically?

Mayukh Sen: I mean, I think that it really incurred such a deep psychological cost on her.

And what I found as I was writing my book and really spending a lot of time with the archives and her personal papers is that she was essentially in this dance between having to deny who she was in public while in private still keeping in touch with her family members from India.

And that sort of tension, I think, really reached a boiling point later in her life.

Amna Nawaz: You write also in the book that the words forgotten and overlooked get thrown around rather indiscriminately these days, but they apply to Merle. Why do you say that? What do you think her legacy is today?

Mayukh Sen: When it comes to conversations about Asian identity in America, so often I find people fixate on East Asian or Southeast Asian identity, not necessarily South Asian identity, which is what Merle’s story represents.

Alongside that, I would say the fact that she’s mixed race has sometimes disqualified her from these conversations about representation. And then, of course, you add to the fact that she passed as white and she had to deny her heritage.

But I do find that, in terms of Merle’s legacy, what she was really fighting for, whether she was conscious of it or not, was an entertainment ecosystem in which people, especially performers of color, did not have the roles that were available to them dictated purely by their race.

This was a South Asian woman who grew up in poverty, who went on to play Cathy in “Wuthering Heights,” this canonically white role.

Merle Oberon, Actress [in a scene from Wuthering Heights]: Heathcliff, make the world stop right here.

Mayukh Sen: She was a leading lady and a box office draw and a total star in the ’30s and ’40s. And I do think that there’s so many South Asian performers working today who are indebted to her, whether they realize it or not.

Amna Nawaz: The book is “Love, Queenie.” The author is Mayukh Sen.

Thank you so much for being here. It’s such a pleasure to speak with you.

Mayukh Sen: Thank you, Amna.

[Amna Nawaz serves as co-anchor and co-managing editor of PBS News Hour.  Shrai Popat is White House Producer for News Hour.

[Mayukh Sen is a New Jersey-born writer and author of the nonfiction books Taste Makers: Seven Immigrant Women Who Revolutionized Food in America (W. W. Norton & Company, 2021) and Love, Queenie: Merle Oberon, Hollywood's First South Asian Star (Norton & Company, 2025).  

[Sen was nominated for a James Beard Award in 2018 and 2019, winning the award in 2018 for his profile of Princess Pamela (“She Was a Soul Food Sensation. Then, 19 Years Ago, She Disappeared,” Food52, 2 February 2017).  He teaches food journalism at New York University and has also taught creative nonfiction classes with Kundiman, a nonprofit organization dedicated to writers and readers of Asian American literature.

[I selected this interview to post on Rick On Theater in part because, I’m embarrassed to admit, I had no idea that Merle Oberon was of South Asian descent.  As an actress, Oberon isn’t among my favorites—though I enjoy some of her films (I’m an old-movie buff)—so I’ve never dug into her background and biography. 

[(By the way, I’m also an old movie-buff—but that’s not relevant here.)

[When I watched this News Hour episode, I was quite flabbergasted to learn Oberon was born in India and was half Ceylonese!  (Of course, I also had never heard the Tasmania story, either.)  I probably don’t have to point out that Oberon wasn’t the first actor whose studio, manager, or agent cooked up a phony life story for their employee or client.  She’s also not the only one whose manufactured past was created to hide a truth that might destroy the artist’s career. 

[Still, the true story, at least as close Mayukh Sen managed to get to it, should be a lesson.  One, I fear, that won’t be valued much at this moment in human history: can’t we finally, at the end of the first quarter of the 21st century, value people for who they are and what they can do instead of prejudging them on what they are.

[Note that this works both ways.  People who are good at something should be valued for what they can accomplish.  People, on the other hand, who are lousy at something should not be put in a position in which they’re expected to accomplish that thing at which they’re no good, irrespective of what they look like, whom they know (or to whom they’re related), or what group they’re connected to.  That’s the rationale at the base of the Peter Principle.  (Anyone who doesn’t remember that one from the 1960s should go look it up.  It’s a good—and somewhat frightening—theory which we may be seeing in action right here in City!)]

"A Pointy Reckoning": Arthur Miller's Women

by Alisa Solomon

[John Proctor is the Villain opened on Broadway last Monday, the 14th, one of several new plays that provide a woman’s perspectives to the works of Arthur Miller like The Crucible, Death of a Salesman, and other iconic American dramas.  In American Theatre’s Spring 2025 issue (vol. 41, no. 3), theater journalist and professor Alisa Solomon presents “A Pointy Reckoning,” a look at these plays.  (Solomon’s article was also posted on the AT website as “The Revolt of Arthur Miller’s Women” on 8 April 2025.)]

A spate of new plays sticks up for the women in Arthur Miller’s iconic dramas.

They are among the most famous words spoken by a woman in a canonical American play: “Attention must be paid.” It’s Linda Loman, of course, in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, admonishing her oldest son, Biff, to show his late father some respect. “He’s not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog,” Linda insists. “Attention, attention must finally be paid to such a person.”

[Death of a Salesman premièred at the Morosco Theatre on Broadway on 10 February 1949 and closed on 18 November 1950 after 742 performances. The play was directed by Elia Kazan, and starred Lee J. Cobb as Willy Loman, Mildred Dunnock as Linda, Arthur Kennedy as Biff, Howard Smith as Charley, and Cameron Mitchell as Happy. It was nominated for and won the Tony Awards for Best Play, Best Supporting or Featured Actor (Kennedy), Best Scenic Design (Jo Mielziner), Producer (Dramatic) (Kermit Bloomgarden and Walter Fried), Author, and Director, as well as the 1949 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best American Play. Death of a Salesman has been revived on Broadway five times and has played around the world and in regional, community, and school theaters countless times. It’s also been adapted for films and television broadcasts.]

“Such a person” was understood in a number of ways when Salesman opened on Broadway in 1949. It could refer to an abstract “capitalized Human Being without being anyone, a suffering animal who commands helpless pity,” as Mary McCarthy [1912-89; novelist, critic, and political activist] put it, or a heroic striver playing by the rules yet beaten down by a punishing capitalist system, the hero of what Miller [1915-2005] called a tragedy of “the common man.”

One thing “such a person” absolutely didn’t mean then: a woman. On the contrary, for Miller, in order for a protagonist to confront a moral test within the social sphere, he had to be male. The main women in Salesman—and in Miller’s other most studied and produced play, The Crucible—are a dutiful, chore-laden wife (Linda Loman; Elizabeth Proctor) and a sexual temptress (the otherwise unnamed “Woman” with whom Willy has an affair; Abigail Williams). The issue isn’t that these characters are weak or unbelievable in their contexts. The problem is structural: The erotic lure of the Woman and of Abigail is what catalyzes the hero’s self-sacrificing downfall in both plays.

[After starting a try-out run at The Playhouse in Wilmington, Delaware, from 15 to 17 January 1953 (four performances), The Crucible débuted at Broadway’s Martin Beck Theatre (now the Al Hirschfeld) on 22 January, starring Arthur Kennedy as John Proctor, E. G. Marshall as Rev. Hale, Beatrice Straight as Elizabeth Proctor, and Madeleine Sherwood as Abigail Williams. The production was produced by Kermit Bloomgarden and directed by Jed Harris. Miller felt that this production was too stylized and cold, and the reviews for it were largely hostile (although the New York Times noted “a powerful play [in a] driving performance”).

[On 22 June 1953, the production, with Miller assuming the directorship, opened with a new cast (including Marshall replacing Kennedy as Proctor and Maureen Stapleton in for Straight as Elizabeth Proctor), a simplified set and substituted curtains, and an added scene; the new production succeeded. Crucible won the 1953 Tony Awards for Best Play and Best Featured Actress in a Play (Straight). The production closed on 11 July 1953 after 197 performances.]

Over the decades feminist critics and scholars too numerous to name have grappled productively with Miller’s reliance on the old madonna/whore dichotomy and with his narrow ideas of masculinity. More recently, though, it is playwrights who have been taking on the gender issues that Miller seemed oblivious to, as the Broadway marquee currently proclaiming John Proctor is the Villain makes plain. The play with that table-turning title, by Kimberly Belflower, is one of at least nine American works for the stage that fire feminist rejoinders to Miller. They too demand that attention must be paid, but reorient what—and to whom—it is due.

[John Proctor is the Villain was commissioned by The Farm Theater in Brooklyn, New York, for their College Collaboration Project and first workshopped in 2018 and 2019 in the theater departments of three colleges: Centre College in Danville, Kentucky, Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina, and Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida.

[The final version of the play was premièred by the Studio Theatre in Washington, D.C., from 27 April until 5 June 2022. A subsequent production was staged at the Huntington Theatre Company in Boston from 8 February until 10 March 2024. John Proctor is the Villain opened at the Booth Theatre in New York City on 14 April 2025 and is scheduled to end its limited run on 6 July. The Broadway production is directed by Danya Taymor and stars Sadie Sink as the blunt-speaking deus ex machina, Shelby Holcomb.]

Different as these plays are from each other in form, tone, focus, and perspective, they all signal urgently through the sexist smog that has risen off these American classics in the nearly three-quarters of a century since they were written. Five of these new plays riff on The Crucible (1953) and three on Salesman (1949), and one [A Woman Among Women by Julia May Jonas; see below] takes inspiration from All My Sons (1946). Some frame the Miller work under scrutiny as a play-not-quite-within-the-play (Belflower’s play; Katie Forgette’s Mrs. Loman is Leaving; Sheri Wilner’s Kingdom City). Others take a sophisticated fan-fic tack by setting Miller’s characters in plots that come before, or after (Liz Duffy Adams’s Witch Hunt; Eleanor Burgess’s Wife of a Salesman; Barbara Cassidy’s Mrs. Loman; Talene Monahon’s The Good John Proctor).

[All My Sons is a three-act play written in 1946. After tryouts at the Shubert Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut (9-11 January 1947), and the Colonial Theatre in Boston (13-27[?] January), it opened on Broadway at the Coronet Theatre on 29 January and closed on 8 November 1947, running for 328 performances. The production was produced by Elia Kazan and Harold Clurman, directed by Kazan, and won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best Play. It starred Ed Begley as Joe Keller, Beth Merrill as Kate Keller, Arthur Kennedy as Chris Keller, and Karl Malden as George Deever, and won both the Tony Award for Best Author and the Tony Award for Best Direction of a Play. The play was adapted for films in 1948 and 1987, and has had many revivals on Broadway, across the United States, and around the world.

[Mrs. Loman is Leaving premièred at Seattle, Washington’s ACT Contemporary Theatre from 12 to 27 October 2024. Kingdom City was developed at Launch Pad at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 2010 and premièred at La Jolla Playhouse, on the campus of the University of California, San Diego, from 23 September to 5 October 2014. Witch Hunt was workshopped at PlayPenn New Plays Conference in 2012 (with a reading on 21 July) and premièred at the Contemporary American Theater Festival at Shepherd University in Shepherdstown, West Virginia (17-21 July 2013), under the title A Discourse on the Wonders of the Invisible World (for a report on an earlier CATF, see “Contemporary American Theater Festival (2004)” [8 July 2015]).

[Wife of a Salesman had its world première at the Writers Theatre in Chicago in a co-production with the Milwaukee Repertory Theatre from 3 March through 3 April 2022; the Milwaukee Rep presentation ran there from 27 September to 6 November 2022. Mrs. Loman was workshopped from 5 to 20 November 2022 at The Tank in Manhattan, New York, and débuted on Off-Broadway’s Theatre Row at Theatre Five on 5-15 February 2025. The Good John Proctor had its world première by Bedlam theater company, performing at the Connelly Theater in New York City’s East Village, from 11 March to 1 April 2023.]

Some whirl into more fanciful forms that abstractly incorporate aspects of both approaches (Julia May Jonas’s A Woman Among Women; Sarah Ruhl’s Becky Nurse of Salem). Miller has become especially ripe for such treatment in recent years for reasons that, like those that impel many of his protagonists, have to do with his reputation and with the ineluctable social forces that shape it. For one, his standing as a Classic American Playwright has been solidified for two generations. The critics who disparaged his plays as having “middlebrow” pretensions in the serious magazines of 1950s and ’60s—Eric Bentley [1916-2020], Robert Brustein [1927-2023], and Richard Gilman [1923-2006], among others—are no longer with us (neither, for that matter, are the theatre pages in the magazines that employed them). More significantly, the high/low culture distinctions they labored to uphold—with pretentious “midcult” art being the worst of all for trying to be at once hugely popular and artistically momentous—have evaporated into the postmodern ether. Nowadays, no one questions Miller’s place in America’s playwriting pantheon, even if we object to his disregard for women as potential tragic heroes. That Miller, more than Eugene O’Neill [1888-1953] or Tennessee Williams [1911-83], has also been widely regarded as a preeminent moral conscience among American dramatists, has been a further goad to the creative scrutiny of feminist playwrights.

[A Woman Among Women was developed through residencies at the North American Cultural Laboratory, The Jam at New Georges, and the Great Plains Theatre Conference. The play premièred from 15 October to 17 November 2024 at the Bushwick Starr in Brooklyn, New York, in a coproduction with The Georges of Manhattan. Becky Nurse of Salem made its début at Berkeley Repertory Theatre in California from 19 December 2019 to 29 January 2020; it later had its New York première at the Lincoln Center Theater’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater from 4-22 December 2022.]

Their countervailing plays emerged in the wake of political developments that not only spurred them on, but that surface overtly in their work. Take Ruhl’s mordant comedy, Becky Nurse of Salem, for instance. Set in 2016 in the infamous Massachusetts town, the play has as its title character the foul-mouthed, opioid-popping descendant of Rebecca Nurse, a midwife hanged for alleged witchcraft some 325 years earlier. Becky is struggling to make ends meet as she raises her teenage granddaughter. Frequently, she has to ask someone to turn down a TV blaring coverage of a Trump rally (“Lock her up! Lock her up!”). In a scene when Becky is arrested for trying, without a license, to correct the historical record by offering “The Real Tour of Salem,” the scene shifts (“bizarrely,” say the stage directions) to 1692, and Becky becomes Rebecca. A live crowd chants the same menacing words, denouncing her as a witch. Time periodically collapses and springs back in Ruhl’s play: Language, clothing, and customs change, but misogyny holds constant through the centuries.

These plays reflect, too, demands made by both the Black Lives Matter [launched in 2013] and #MeToo [launched in 2006; popularized as a hashtag in 2017] movements that Americans face up to shameful realities of our histories and to inequities that persist. Not that anyone is trying to topple Miller like a Confederate statue. Rather, the new plays resemble the contextualizing and additive materials that historians recommend placing around such monuments.

Like Becky, Adams’s, Monahon’s, and Belflower’s plays emend a factual inaccuracy in The Crucible, noting that Abigail was all of 11 years old at the time of the witch trials, and Proctor, 60—not, respectively, 17 and 30-something, as Miller deliberately rendered them to make Abigail the seductress of a male paragon of integrity. (Stacy Schiff’s [b. 1961] meticulous 2015 account of the Salem witch trials in her book, The Witches: Salem, 1692 [Little, Brown & Co., 2015], set the record straight.) In different ways, these writers call into question The Crucible’s inciting incident, Proctor’s “affair” with Abigail, and skewer the punishing patriarchal worldview of Puritan New England—and of Arthur Miller—that discredits, and often silences, women’s voices.

In her thriller Witch Hunt Or, A Discourse on the Wonders of the Invisible World, Adams picks up the story after the witch trials. Abigail, having fled Salem, returns to the region a decade later, seeking to understand why the town’s “high and powerful men” urged the girls on. “They had never listened to ones so low as us in their lives,” she says. “Now they killed people on our word.”

Setting The Good John Proctor in 1691, the year before Miller’s play is set, Monahon brings us into the dreams, drudgery, and degradations of Salem’s pubescent girls in a series of short, mystery-tinged, Caryl Churchill-like scenes. Abigail is 11 (and nonbinary), and her cousin, Betty, only 9. Using 21st-century language in a 17th-century world, Monahon connects the mistrust and exploitation of Salem’s girls to the suppression #MeToo sought to shake off.

The girls in John Proctor Is the Villain are high school students in a small town studying The Crucible in their English class and finding disturbing parallels between the old text and their own lives—rife, as they are, with creepy adult men and the adolescent upheaval of sexual feelings. Says one:

The thing this play is talking about is that pretty much all these girls had been like assaulted at some point. I mean like sexually. I read this book that says most of these girls probably had like PTSD which explains the like crazy physical fits that people thought were happening because of witchcraft but anyway so yeah like the assault stuff was everywhere. Their dads, older men in the town, stable boys, whoever . . . [.]

The reading-against-the-grain insights these students glean from The Crucible help bring local real-life abuses to light. The play culminates with the girls dancing in an ecstatic frenzy, reclaiming as feminist bonding and expression what had earlier been condemned as witchcraft.

Building dramatic action around studying or staging a Miller play provides several of the feminist playwrights opportunities for direct, even bald, commentary on the original. Forgette makes great use of this ploy in her hilarious backstage comedy, Mrs. Loman is Leaving, in which two aging actors are making their comebacks in Salesman. But there are offstage bumps: The man playing Willy is hallucinating as wildly as his character, while Joanne, the woman playing Linda, is falling apart after she learns, via text, shortly before curtain, that her husband is leaving her. Her grief and fury over her personal crisis commingle with Linda’s and color her challenge to the director’s encomiums about Willy.

I have to interrupt before you can spin out some half-baked explanation of why it’s okay for this bloviating mediocre man to treat a woman who has devoted her life to his every need. Why is she mending her stockings?! He gives stockings to his girlfriend! Where are Linda’s? WHERE ARE LINDA’S STOCKINGS!!!???

When the director retorts that Linda “represents the expectations and limitations of her gender for the time period. Women were helpmates. They supported their husbands,” Joanne replies, “That doesn’t mean that she didn’t have a personal dream of her own. What was Linda’s dream before she gave it up?”

In her sequel to Salesman, Cassidy takes up such questions, extending the psychological depth Miller grants his male characters to Linda. Mrs. Loman begins after Willy’s funeral, as Linda enrolls in college, develops a friendship with another woman who mysteriously knew Willy, and challenges her son, Happy, over his appalling misogyny. In a prequel, Wife of a Salesman, Burgess uses both strategies: She imagines Linda confronting the Woman, ahead of the moment in Miller’s plot when Biff learns of his father’s affair, potentially erasing its inciting incident. Later Burgess disrupts the action, revealing the whole thing as a play-within-the-play; the two actors performing “Wife” and “Mistress” comment on their roles and their own somewhat parallel lives.

Rather than parallel, Jonas’s characters in A Woman Among Women run aslant of Miller’s in All My Sons; of this new crop of Miller riffs, hers offers the most oblique response to the play that inspired it, as she explores his dramatic vision but swaps out his lenses for her own. All My Sons centers on a “man among men,” as Miller called Joe Keller, a respected businessman who secretly holds onto an incriminating lie to retain his stature. While reversing most of the characters’ genders and moving the action from a small Ohio town to famously multi-culti, queer-friendly Northampton, Massachusetts, Jonas borrows Miller’s backyard setting and other key elements: a central family with two grown children, one of whom is absent; a close-knit community of neighbors; high-stakes questions of moral responsibility; Aristotelian principles of tragedy.

In a note in the script, Jonas says she set out to discover what a “woman among women” might mean. Her answer not only emerges in the shape of an almost casual, fourth-wall-breaking style that features some quirky little songs. It also gives its hero, who runs a “wellness center for women,” a transgression less blatantly self-serving than Joe Keller’s—and, forsaking Miller’s certainty, a denouement that leaves everything in doubt.

It’s impossible to know what Miller himself might have made of these dramaturgical clapbacks. Forty years ago, when the Wooster Group incorporated a large chunk of The Crucible into L.S.D. (…Just the High Points), the troupe’s mash-up of a high-speed recitation of Miller’s text with passages from Timothy Leary’s [1920-96] treatise on the hallucinogen, he objected, and the show was eventually shut down. “Maybe at some point in the future,’’ Miller told The New York Times then, “the play will become a kind of public classic. But I’m still around and I should have a say about how the play is done as long as I am.”

[The New York-based experimental theater company Wooster Group morphed out The Performance Group (founded by Richard Schechner [b. 1934], Professor Emeritus at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and editor of TDR: The Drama Review, in 1967) from 1975 to 1980. Under artistic director Elizabeth LeCompte (b. 1944), it took its current name, derived from its address at 33 Wooster Street in SoHo, in 1980 but remained housed in the Performing Garage, a former metal-working factory.

[The troupe’s style is highly experimental, bending, mixing, and deconstructing genres and media, applying a lot of high-tech effects. Their performances often use familiar texts from the likes of Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956), William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), and Eugene O'Neill (1888-1953), which they usually reinterpret and subvert as raw ingredients.

[L.S.D. emerged over a period of collective development and workshopping in the mid-1980s. It was presented in October 1984 as a work-in-progress at The Performing Garage, then, from 22 March to 13 April 1984, Parts 1, 2, and 3 were performed, under the amended title L.S.D. (. . . Just the High Points . . .), at the Garage. On 15 April, Part 4 was added, and all four parts of L.S.D. were first performed in Boston, Massachusetts, through 13 May 1984. The play ran about 110 minutes in its complete form.

[From 27 September to 25 November 1984, L.S.D. was staged at The Performing Garage, during which run the Wooster Group received a cease-and-desist threat from Arthur Miller’s lawyers. The Group ceased performances of L.S.D. while actor-writer Michael Kirby (1931-97) wrote a new Part 2 (The Crucible section) and from 5 to 12 January 1985, L.S.D. reopened with the new version of Part 2.

[Over the next five years, the Wooster Group’s L.S.D. (. . . Just the High Points . . .) toured across the U.S. and around the world, returning to the Performing Garage in January and February 1987. It became Wooster Group’s most notorious performance piece.]

The plays are public classics now (some intellectual property restrictions notwithstanding), available to a robust playwriting tradition of theatrically talking back to canonical plays in a feminist register: Elaine Feinstein’s Lear’s Daughters, Zinnie Harris’s Macbeth (An Undoing), and Paula Vogel’s Desdemona: A Play about a Handkerchief all transpose Shakespeare in this way. Such works shrewdly craft fresh stories from revered old ones to critically engage the past, the present, and the ways we construct the past in—and for—the present.

[Tracing the origins and production history of Lear’s Daughters, a “prequel” of Shakespeare’s play from the perspective of Cordelia, Goneril, and Regan, was confusing and uncertain as the record is elusive. It was commissioned in 1987 by the Women’s Theatre Group (renamed the Sphinx Theatre Company in 1999), one of the oldest women’s theater organizations in the United Kingdom, founded in 1973. Elaine Feinstein was brought in to write the dialogue with members of the collective, but the writing credits vary from listing (programs, posters, advertisements, publication) to listing.

[The script was first staged, it seems, on 12 September 1987, but whether that was in a London theater or on tour is unclear; in any case, the production went out on tour of the U.K. immediately and performed until 5 December.  There seems also to have been a staging at the Battersea Arts Center on 24 September 1987, but if it was a single showing or one of multiple performances is unknown.  Other tours followed in 1988 shortly after the first one. Revivals have been staged in recent years to mixed reviews.

[Macbeth (An Undoing), a retelling of the Shakespeare tale with Lady Macbeth at the center, premièred at the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, Scotland, on 4-25 February 2023. It transferred to the Rose Theatre, Kingston in London in 8-23 March 2024, and then Theatre for a New Audience, an Off-Broadway company in Brooklyn, New York, with the U.K. cast on 5-28 April 2024.

[Desdemona: A Play about a Handkerchief, a reconfiguring of the Othello story from the women's point of view, premièred from 21 July to 9 August 1993 at the Bay Street Theatre, in Sag Harbor, New York, on Long Island. It moved Off-Broadway to the Circle Repertory Company in Greenwich Village from 27 October to 5 December 1993.]

One thing is certain. All nine of the feminist playwrights wrestling with their towering predecessor share one of Miller’s steadfast principles: that theatre matters, that it is the ideal sphere for examining social pressures, their fractures, and the impact they have on ordinary lives.

The word “feminist” does not appear on any of the 600 pages of Miller’s autobiography, Timebends [Grove Press, 1987]. Still, when he writes, “I could not imagine a theatre worth my time that did not want to change the world,” he offers these new plays a full endorsement.

[Alisa Solomon (she/her), a dramaturg in New York City and a professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, is a long-time theater critic and general reporter for the Village Voice, Jewish Currents, The Nation, and the New York Times, among other publications.  Solomon has written two award-winning books: Re-Dressing the Canon: Essays on Theater and Gender (Routledge, 1997) and Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof (Metropolitan Books, 2013).]

Clowning

 

[I confess that I’m not a huge fan of clowning (though I’ve actually performed as a clown in at least one children’s show), but I’ve covered clown performances on Rick On Theater, such as Old Hats (22 March 2013) with Bill Irwin and David Shiner, Theater of Panic (in “Short Takes: Some Unique Performances” [28 July 2018]), The Second New York International Festival of Clown Theatre (in “Some Vintage Reviews from the Archive” [15 March 2021]), and “Chicago’s Physical Theater Festival: Moving in Many Senses” by Gabriela Furtado Coutinho (in “Physical Theater” [24 November 2024]), and one piece on clown school/clown training, “It’s A Clown’s Life: Lessons From Clown School” by Lara Bevan-Shiraz (in “Theater Education & Training, Part 1” [3 October 2024]).

[(There are also several articles on ROT that touch on clowns in various contexts, including mentions in a couple of posts on Native American performance events.  Clowns are important figures in the cultures of several American Indian peoples, including the Taos Pueblos and the Zunis.)

[In the spirit of full disclosure, let me quote something I inserted into my report on the above referenced report on Old Hats, a clowning duet by Bill Irwin (b. 1950) and David Shiner (b. 1953): 

Before I get too far into this report, let me cop to something moderately significant.  I’m not a fan of clowns.  I have nothing against them—I’m not coulrophobic or anything—and I don’t object to the people who play the clowns.  I’ve just never found clowning very funny, not in circuses or on stage and film.  I can admire the skill of Chaplin or Keaton, but I was never drawn to their movies; I wasn’t a fan of [Jackie] Gleason (I don’t like The Honeymooners even today), [Red] Skelton, Lucille Ball, or the Three Stooges, and I don’t much like Jim Carrey or Will Ferrell.  I also ought to admit that there have always been exceptions: the Marx Brothers and W. C. Fields, Carol Burnett, Robin Williams—and Bill Irwin and David Shiner.

[Nonetheless, a recent article in the New York Times caught my attention, and then I came across some other recent writing on clowns and clowning.  I collected some of them to post below.  This posting is part of my effort on my blog to cover aspects of theater and performance that aren’t as well known as mainstream theater, film, and television.] 

“FUNNY GIRLS”
by Michael Snyder 

[This article was published in the New York Times of 30 March 2025 in T: The New York Times Style Magazine.  A version of this article appears online with the headline “There’s Always Room in the Clown Car,” posted on 24 March.]

For centuries, clowns have mostly been men. A new group of talent is changing that.

As a young woman in Mexico City, Gaby Muñoz, a 43-year-old performer known onstage as Chula the Clown [mentioned in “Chicago’s Physical Theater Festival,” referenced above], recalls, putting on makeup with her friends was always a fraught experience. “There was this whole idea of how to be a woman. They had this beautiful hair and these divine bodies, and I would look in the mirror and think, ‘Well, I guess not in this life.’ That made me laugh,” she says. As Chula — her round face washed white, her lips a tiny red heart, her eyebrows painted into inquisitive asymmetry — Muñoz, who this spring will begin touring through Europe and Central and South America, has played a jilted bride and a doddering old lady. She’s used her open, expressive face and antic physicality to joke wordlessly about loss, aging in a woman’s body and other concepts that have long been overlooked in the male-dominated world of clowns. For Muñoz, laughter isn’t an end in itself but rather, she says, “a way to connect.”

Clowns, jesters, harlequins and fools have, of course, played a similar role throughout history. In ancient Greece, they served as ribald choristers in epic dramas, while emperors in Han dynasty China delighted in the buffoonish exertions of the court paiyou [comic actor, similar to a jester]. Shakespeare’s world-weary wags spoke truth to King Lear and other royals, while the heyoka, the holy fool of many Sioux tribes, inverted day-to-day logic to provoke healing laughter. The emblematic sad clown that we know today evolved from the melancholic, talc-dusted Pedrolino of 16th-century Italian commedia dell’arte [one of the stock character types known as a Zanni], while the contemporary circus clown, with his exaggerated face paint and physical wit, debuted on a London stage around 1800. (The one dressed in an ill-fitting suit and oversize shoes emerged as his clumsy foil seven decades later.) Though ritually and physically distinct, clowns have always been, as the heyoka John Fire Lame Deer [1903-76; Lakota holy man] writes with Richard Erdoes [1912-2008; artist, photographer, illustrator, and author] in their 1972 book, “Lame Deer Seeker of Visions,” “sacred, funny, powerful, ridiculous, holy, shameful, visionary.” They were also almost always men.

During her childhood in Estonia, the 29-year-old London-based clown Julia Masli dreamed of acting in tragedies for exactly that reason: comedy, she assumed, was a man’s game. When, in 2017, she watched the legendary English clown Lucy Hopkins [b. ca. 1979] perform in Brighton for the first time, “seeing a woman do something so absurd and free felt like a revolution,” she says. In Masli’s show “Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha,” which debuted at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2023 and has since toured internationally [see below, “We All Have An Inner Clown” for a link to and comments on this show], she appears onstage as a doe-eyed Victorian vagabond who asks audience members to share their problems. As she offers solutions both genuine and absurd — enlisting a bored office worker to record the show’s minutes; duct-taping a lonely young woman to a group of strangers onstage — she transforms the emotional labor so often foisted on women into a source of laughter and catharsis.

Other rising female clowns, like the 26-year-old English actress Frankie Thompson and the 32-year-old Swiss Mexican theater artist Paulina Lenoir, use womanhood itself as a source of humor. In the former’s “Body Show,” performed with her collaborator the 29-year-old trans masculine anarchist clown Liv Ello, Thompson forgoes exaggerated makeup and costume, combining lip-syncing and confrontational bouffon (an approach to clowning that emphasizes absurdity and shock) to discuss her history with anorexia. Small and blond — “people treat me like this tiny-angel special little bird to be protected,” she says — Thompson makes herself grotesque by, say, licking the stage or choking down Marmite, eliciting laughter that implicates the audience in the humiliations of body dysmorphia. Meanwhile, Lenoir’s persona Puella Eterna feminizes the physical exaggeration of the classic male clown by wearing a corset, a flamenco skirt and a giant Minnie Mouse bow in lieu of a bulging nose. As master of ceremonies at her Fool’s Moon cabaret, Puella displays the kind of unearned self-assurance that usually wins praise for men and scorn for women.

[Marmite, a British food spread, is a dark brown, salty, and yeasty paste. It’s often described as having a strong, savory flavor, similar to soy sauce, but saltier and with a deeper, more complex taste. Because of its strong and unique flavor profile, Marmite is often considered an “acquired taste.”]

While Thompson and Lenoir blur boundaries between cabaret and comedy, the 41-year-old British performer Ella Golt, better known as Ella the Great, has incorporated sly observations about gender into characters rooted in traditional clowning. Since 2015, Golt has mostly played Richard Melanin the Third, a bearded magician who believes deeply in his own abilities. Richard was born when another of Golt’s characters, Babushka — a prototypical female clown in a frilly skirt and tiny jacket — was invited to participate in a London drag king night. Slow, silent and charming, Richard started out as a clown-world Victor/Victoria: a gender-ambivalent actor playing a woman playing a man.

[The reference is to the 1982 musical comedy film Victor/Victoria, written and directed by Blake Edwards and starring Julie Andrews, James Garner, and Robert Preston, or the 1995 stage musical with a book by Edwards, music by Henry Mancini, and lyrics by Leslie Bricusse, again directed by Edwards and starring Andrews, Tony Roberts, and Michael Nouri.]

Golt’s choices pay homage to the clowns who inspired her to join a London youth circus at age 7. Today she’s found similar solace as a queer Black artist in a genre that has only recently become more diverse. “Seeing people perform who look like you allows you to see that laughter is for you,” she says. “The permission to laugh and be laughed at can be empowering.” For these artists, clowning ultimately has less to do with putting on makeup than with stripping it away. It’s about “uncovering your inner idiot, the thing you’re taught to hide,” Lenoir says, “and learning to let that come through.” Foolishness, after all, is its own kind of freedom.

[Michael Snyder is a freelance journalist based in Mexico City focused on architecture, design, and food and their intersections with history, politics, economics, and culture. In addition to T Magazine, his work has appeared in a range of publications, including The Believer, The Caravan, The Nation, Lucky Peach, and Scientific American.]

*  *  *  *
“THE SERIOUS BUSINESS OF SILLINESS:
HOW CLOWNING AROUND CAN BOOST
YOUR PERFORMANCE GAME”
by Zoe Dumas 

[This article was published online in Backstage, the entertainment industry trade publication, on 4 June 2024]

Steve-O [Stephen Gilchrist Glover, b. 1974; stunt performer and comedian] famously attended the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Clown College, a boot camp-like experience that didn’t get him a spot with the circus—but did prepare him for his “Jackass” hijinks [see “‘Dante update neither divine nor comedy’” by Kyle Smith (1 December 2010)]. While not everyone in the industry finds themselves called to the clown’s oversized shoes and squeaky red nose, clown training can be highly beneficial to entertainers of all types. Whether you want to be the next Bozo or are just looking to hone your craft, learning to clown is a great way to expand your repertoire, improve your improv skills, and explore the great absurdities of life through the lens of comedy.

What is clowning?

Clowning is a type of performance that portrays exaggerated characters through a mix of comedy, physical performance, and costuming. This character has a long history as entertainer, healer, and truth-teller, leading to a wide array of types that can still be seen today. The circus clown, with its crazy-colored hair, white face paint, a honking red nose, and oversized shoes, is likely the one that people associate most with the profession. Some performers create character clowns, such as the classic tramp, where they exaggerate archetypal character traits to create hilarious scenarios.  

The art of clowning goes back millennia, with the earliest recorded instance of clowns coming from ancient Egypt. During the fifth dynasty, around 2500 B.C.E., pharaohs were entertained and advised by African pygmy clowns. Centuries later and continents apart, clowns held a sacred role in several indigenous American tribes such as the Navajo and Hopi, participating in religious rituals to entertain and expand minds. 

These traditions echo our modern conception of clowning, but closer to that were Grecian and Roman clowns in overstuffed suits and garish makeup. Performers took this tradition on the road during the Middle Ages, carrying over the jester’s specific brand of mockery to a broader audience. It was this that led to Italy’s famed “commedia dell’arte,” which in turn inspired the first clown resembling the character we most often think of today: Joseph Grimaldi [1778-1837]. The father of modern clowning, Grimaldi wowed 19th-century English audiences with his harlequin character, which overtook the then-standard country bumpkin clown as the de facto style.

How is clowning an important part of an actor’s training?

Accessing vulnerability: Clowning helps performers access their usually hidden selves, L.A.’s the Idiot Workshop founder John Gilkey [b. 1966] told the Hollywood Reporter. “We’re looking for your voice. Not your verbal, auditory voice. But your full personality voice, which is based on your vulnerability,” he said. “What we teach is the boldness to be you at your wildest, most fun, crazy self and, once you open that up, you’re going to take that wherever you go as long as the medium you’re performing in allows for that expression.” 

Connecting with audiences: Regardless of style, clowning is about creating an authentic connection with viewers. Director of the Highland Park Clowns and the Clown Church workshop Jet Eveleth described clowning to the Los Angeles Times as “a celebration of the physical and vulnerable side of the human experience. When the performer embraces this ‘muchness’ of life, they serve as a mirror for the audience to see and laugh at themselves from a safe distance . . . . Clown is poking fun at the human condition.” In other words, clowning allows performers to let loose and open up while showing audiences the profound beauty of being human.

Refining comedic chops: Clowning requires an excellent sense of humor and the ability to make people laugh. David Bridel, the founder of the Clown School in L.A., emphasizes that learning the art allows performers to improve their skills in comedy and make fun of themselves. This “is obviously a huge part of the work of a clown and is also very therapeutic to some people,” he told the Hollywood Reporter. 

Broadening horizons: All this is to say that clowning is a feat of vulnerability that pushes performers to step far outside their comfort zone and explore aspects of themselves they may never have thought possible. Clowns have a long tradition as theater characters; Shakespeare, for example, used the clown quite heavily because they are a character that can speak truth to the absurdities of everyday life without fear of consequences. Far from the laughable doofus we often make the clown out to be, this is a character and type of acting that allows for endless creativity from a performer. They can put themselves in the vulnerable position of being laughable, certainly, but they can also explore the vast contrasts and eccentricities of being human.

Clowning ideas and exercises

Even if you don’t decide to don the big shoes and red nose, incorporating some aspects of clowning into your regimen can go a long way in taking your performance art to the next level. If you’re a performer looking to explore the art of clowning, there are several activities and exercises you might do to open up and stand out.

1. Immerse yourself in theory. Books such as Christopher Bayes’ “Discovering the Clown, or The Funny Book of Good Acting,” Henry Jestworth’s “How to Clown,” Paul Bouissac’s “The Semiotics of Clowns and Clowning,” Jon Davison’s “Clown Training: A Practical Guide,” and Eli Simon’s “The Art of Clowning” encourage performers to connect with their inner clowns. Simon, UC Irvine chancellor’s professor of drama and founding artistic director of the New Swan Shakespeare Festival, has been teaching his students clowning for years; he specializes in the development of original clown shows that he’s directed and produced around the world. In his book, he provides a complete regimen of exercises and techniques that “[yield] swift and deep access to the clown in you.”

2. Take a workshop. Clowns love sharing their art with eager audiences and performers, so there are a wide variety of workshops and classes available throughout the U.S. and the world. Research the clown classes available in your area to find a troupe that can brighten up your act. Alternatively, you can also attend online classes and workshops such as those offered by the Clown School, University of Southern California, the Online Clown Academy, and the Clown Institute. 

3. Practice with a group. If you already have a troupe of actors or even just friends you prefer working with, try performing some clowning exercises together. There are countless improv activities out there to release your inner clown. These include dolphin training, where audience members guide an actor to perform specific tasks only by clapping or laughing, and the exaggeration exercise, where one actor follows another, comically exaggerating the first’s movements and expressions. A third actor might even join this one and exaggerate what the second clown is doing.

4. Put a routine together. Another way to try clowning is to simply do it! Create a simple character and routine—it could be joke-heavy, something with more props, or perhaps slapstick calls to you—and explore the world through new eyes. Bring your routine to an acting or improv class, or another place where you’ll have an accepting audience, and see what it takes to make your fellow actors laugh and clown around with you.

[Zoe Dumas, a freelance writer based in Fresno, California, covers the entertainment industry, with a specific emphasis on expert commentary and reviews.  In addition to her work for Backstage, she’s been a content writer at Movieweb.com.]

*  *  *  *
“WE ALL HAVE AN INNER CLOWN;
ON RISKING HEARTBREAK FOR JOY”
by Priscilla Posada

[The Los Angeles Times ran this article on 15 March 2025; it was also posted online as “A fool’s journey: Notes from a clowning workshop” on 13 March.]

This story is part of Image’s March Devotion issue, exploring various forms of reverence, love and worship.

[Eight times a year, the L.A. Times publishes Image, a themed issue covering style and culture in L.A. and beyond.]

We all have an inner clown, a wild self whose yearning for delight is greater than the fear of failure. A little one who wants to play during nap time, convenience to others be damned. Underneath layers and layers of socialization, we each have a clown willing to risk heartbreak for joy. Or at least that’s the idea.

Clowning, an ancient art form that includes but is not limited to the red wigs and big shoes of the circus, is difficult to define. Filed under “physical comedy,” a clown communicates primarily through their body rather than words.

All I’m sure of is that without an audience — to play with, to laugh or not laugh, and hopefully cry and transform — there is no clown. I’ll admit: When I started, I wanted the benefits of clowning, namely feeling comfortable and even coming to enjoy reading my work in public, without any of the scary bits (and clowns in America have quite a scary reputation). I had asked my first clown teacher for private (read: audience-free) lessons. She chuckled over the phone: “It doesn’t work that way.” Thus began my fool’s journey, if you will, from scared and lost to scared and lost with a dash more openness to being vulnerable.

I was glad I was wearing sneakers because I ended up running from the subway station to the midtown Manhattan building. I arrived at Room 315 on time and out of breath. It was a Saturday, and I was there for a two-day workshop, from noon to 5 p.m., with an hour break for lunch, with Christopher Bayes. His credentials, in a field where it feels funny to have them, include studying under clown masters Philippe Gaulier [French; b. 1943; master clown, teacher, and professor of theater; founder of École Philippe Gaulier; see “It’s A Clown’s Life,” cited above] and Jacques Lecoq [French; 1921-99; stage actor and acting movement coach] and working as the head of physical acting at Yale’s David Geffen School of Drama. While this all sounds technique-heavy, Bayes is known for valuing a heart-forward approach over an intellectual one. This was an honor for which I somehow justified paying $300.

We began with introductions — names, pronouns, why we were there. “I’m a writer,” I said, picking one job, out of the three I had, most suited to the moment. “And I’m writing a piece on clowning.” I scanned the room and my eyes landed on A, whom I recognized from another workshop. Our faces lighted up. We smiled — and clowns must smile only when they’re actually happy since, as I learned in workshop, a smile is a mask — and waved to each other. When it was A’s turn, they explained that whatever they were seeking from psychoanalysis, they were finding in clowning.

In this group of about 25 people, there was also a theater director who flew all the way to New York from San Francisco to take this workshop. There were a lot of people who loved theater and hoped a more honest connection with audiences would bring them back.

Next were the warm-up exercises. We started shaking our bodies, and I made another mental note: Actors and musicians all did warm-up exercises. What was the equivalent for writers? My thought was interrupted when Bayes instructed us to laugh very hard. It had been a confusing week, a mix of macro tragedy and micro wins. I cracked up, and it felt like sobbing. The group entered a frenzied state. I acclimated to the cacophony of primal sounds. We sounded like the animals we tend to forget we are.

“Now cry!” Bayes shouted. I wailed and made my ugliest face. I was screaming so loud my voice cracked and I had to cough to clear it. I said, “Why, oh why?” I slapped my hands down on my quads. I headed toward the floor. I curled into a ball and cried with my face hovering an inch above the wooden floor. I heard a voice from above: “Don’t hide your sadness.” I stood up awkwardly having just been reprimanded for crying the polite way. I needed to cry the clown way, that is, take up space. I balled my hands into fists and stretched my arms out and up. I turned my face toward the ceiling and blamed it for all that was wrong with the world. Sobbing from the belly and feeling like some sort of tragic figure, I doubled over in laughter and now I couldn’t tell the difference between the two.

Afterward, we separated into groups of four. We were given 10 minutes to devise a song, along with a dance. My group chose the chorus “I love it.” We all had solos when we sang about something we genuinely loved. I sang about my apartment, how I loved it. I got the instructions mixed up and tried to rhyme but learned I wasn’t supposed to, so I sang, “Ohhhhhh, that’s easieeeeerrrr.” My solo came to a dark end: I loved my apartment, but I couldn’t afford it on my own, without roommates, and even if I could, it would be selfish to live there alone because of the city’s housing crisis. I sang about how the rental vacancy rate was 1.4% and that 5% was considered an emergency. There was nowhere else to go, so I sang to the audience to think about that. Some of the faces in the audience looked scared. My group sang, all together, “I love it, I love this love, I love love love love, yeah I like it!” We broke for lunch, and someone added me to the “Clown NYC” WhatsApp group. It has 712 members, and there are multiple threads, including “Shows & Mics,” “Meetup & Hangouts,” “Prop/Costume Exchange” — and “Housing.”

When I saw my first clown show, Julia Masli’s “Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha,” my first words might have been, “What the f—?” Masli emerged on a blueish dark stage amid the haze of fog. I recall a Medusa-like nest of wires around her head with a light illuminating her face. A gold mannequin’s leg with an attached microphone substituted as Masli’s left arm. She was bundled in a witchy outfit resembling a duvet cover. Masli looked extraterrestrial, complete with the wide, innocent stare of a being looking upon our society and its problems from a fresh perspective.

As a clown, it’s ideal if you wear something so stupid, people laugh just glancing at you. A performer’s costume signals to the audience that they’re in a space operating outside of societal norms, a place of amplification. While a clown’s “look” can be idiosyncratic and interesting, what starts off as funny and absurd gives way to the profound. In this way, clowning appears light and gets deep. With the support of aesthetics, a clown communicates, “Isn’t being human with all of its striving for status and repression in order to fit in kind of ridiculous?”

In “Nothing Doing,” a work-in-progress, clown Alex Tatarsky announced at the top that they didn’t believe in work or progress. They entered the stage in a top hat, white sequined leotard, rhinestone heels, sporting a long, thick braid attached to their hair. When they turned around for the first time, I was treated to a grotesque mask at the back of Tatarsky’s head and prosthetic cleavage that might have also been the plastic molding of butt cheeks. By the close of their show, after having mimed chasing after the performance’s nonexistent plot, Tatarsky sat at the head of a table, facing the audience, eating Life cereal with milk, with their hands, out of an empty skull, and at one point chewed and swallowed a cigarette. They said something like, “Darling, I just want you to love me, but it’s repulsive when I’m this desperate.” This desperation, rather than repelling me, became a source of connection. I found myself falling in love with this clown and, in turn, with the parts of myself I tend to reject.

In the environment of a clown workshop, practicing loss of control (a clown can’t plan for an audience’s response) and being present with what is (a clown works with whatever they’ve got) can feel good. One eases off expecting specific results and being disappointed when things don’t turn out according to a rigid vision of success and delights in surprises no one could have imagined. If clowning is on the rise, and it certainly feels that way, it might be because it provides relief from having to keep it together.

On the second day of the workshop, we tried a different exercise. Two conventionally attractive men were onstage, and I was prepared to hate them both. Why? Because conventionally attractive men send me hurtling back in time to when I was an awkward preteen, and I’ve since developed an aversion. Bayes instructed them to get to know each other. They looked uncomfortable. One extended a handshake to the other. The crowd booed at the predictably masculine, business-like gesture. Then, Bayes told them to turn away from each other and walk to opposite ends of the room. One faced stage left, the other stage right.

They had to jump around to face each other and land at the exact same time. They kept failing. “Oh, come on,” I jeered. Ten minutes passed. The audience was exasperated. An eternity passed. One would turn around while the other didn’t move. Was I cursing them somehow? One wore a crisp white T-shirt that looked expensive with black wide-leg trousers. He had shoulder-length hair parted down the middle, like a model. The other, a white T-shirt that looked worn-in, black joggers and a delicate hoop earring. Both were barefoot. They kept missing even though they could technically cheat and set a pattern for the other to follow. It was agony. Bayes, who was sitting next to me, drew my attention to the man on the right. He was twitching. His eyebrows, his legs. The impulses were all confused. I laughed. I thanked the heavens that my performance of the same exercise didn’t go this badly.

Bayes told them, “You’re not getting it because you haven’t tucked in your shirts and raised your pants all the way up.” The two clowns followed the instructions. Now, they looked more ridiculous and endearing. We waited. We breathed. Finally. They jumped. They landed at the exact same time. People erupted in applause. A great tension was released. I rose from my seat along with others for a standing ovation. No matter how hopeless it seems, a clown can always win back the audience.

Now, the two men were facing each other. There were more boos. They lost us because they were “trying” again. I joined in, feeling like I was at a wrestling match where I wanted neither party to win. Now they were holding hands and squatting up and down vigorously. “Say, ‘Oh, yeah,’” shouted Bayes. They complied in unison. “Now say, ‘Oh, daddy,’” Bayes shouted. Again, the two complied, but they missed a beat and now they were saying “Daddy, O” in a guttural way as they continued holding hands and squatting up and down. I was laughing hard and clapping my hands. I was full of glee. In less than 30 minutes, I’d seen myself mirrored and altered. I could be someone who was afraid of being in front of others. Cocooned in the safety of a crowd, I could be cruel. I could be extravagantly generous. The clown wanted my love regardless. The clown was there to hold it all. I learned things that words fail to capture.

You had to be there. And that’s what I love most about clowning — it brings you into the now. Everything else fades away. It’s no longer about the shape something takes but about the attempt. No one is ever done as a clown.

Later that week, I found myself singing a stupid-sweet song from the workshop called “Open Like a Little Flower.” The next line was “Open like a different type of flower.” I remembered Bayes saying that when you go looking for beauty, you find it. I remembered too my pounding heart. Breathing hard from physical exertion. Buzzing with the high of a collective response, with the feeling of wholeness.

[Priscilla Posada is a writer living in New York City.  Her work can be found in the Los Angeles Review of Books, BOMB, and the Brooklyn Rail, among other places.]