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� A Global <strong>Theatre</strong> — and Macaronic Drama <strong>Today</strong>’s theatre is not only open and diverse but also global. Of course the theatre has been an international medium during most of its history. In ancient Greece, nearly all of the Hellenic city-states participated in the Great Dionysia, Athens’s springtime theatre festival, which also attracted traders and visitors from throughout the Mediterranean world. In Shakespeare’s time, plays — including his own — were set in <strong>It</strong>aly, France, Egypt, Bohemia, Greece, Austria, Denmark, Scotland, and other countries, including an island now thought to be Bermuda. Audiences for these plays included many foreigners, some of whom provide much of what we know about theatergoing in Shakespeare’s day. In subsequent centuries, theatre retreated to a more parochial insularity; then in the twenty-fi rst century it reemerged into an art form with a global profi le and an international audience. Several factors shaped this reemergence: the globalization of the world economy, the worldwide proliferation of art and culture through fi lm, television, and theatrical touring, the expansion of world tourism occasioned by substantially lower air fares in the jet age, and the worldwide social and economic upheavals and migrations during and after the cold war. For all of these reasons, it is nearly impossible to spend an hour on the sidewalks of any major city — New York, London, Tokyo, Toronto, Sydney — without hearing a broad mix of languages. And the theatre of today often refl ects both the multiple tongues and the international intellectual appetites of today’s globalized world. Critic Marvin Carlson uses the term macaronic — originally equating the mixture of Latin and early <strong>It</strong>alian spoken in medieval <strong>It</strong>aly to a maccarone (macaroni) of thrown-together pasta — to describe dramas that include speeches in different languages.* The European theatre has long been macaronic: even Shakespeare’s plays include many lines (and in two cases entire scenes) in French, <strong>It</strong>alian, Latin, or Welsh. More recent plays take this multilingualism much further. <strong>Can</strong>adian playwright David Fennario’s Balconville, about the relationship of French-speaking and English-speaking <strong>Can</strong>adians, is presented in both languages of offi cially bilingual <strong>Can</strong>ada. The French * Marvin Carlson, “The Macaronic Stage,” in East of West: Cross-Cultural Performance and the Staging of Differences, ed. Claire Sponsler and Xiaomei Chen (New York: Palgrave, 2000), 15–31. 264 Chapter 11 | <strong>Theatre</strong> <strong>Today</strong> comic play Les Aviateurs is performed entirely in English — the language of aviation — though it is a thoroughly French play that has (so far) been performed only in France. Endstation Amerika, Frank Castorf’s adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire at the Berlin Volksbühne, was performed in German, French, and English. In the United States, Luis Valdez’s Zoot Suit and his subsequent I Don’t Have to Show <strong>You</strong> No Stinkin’ Badges, both about Chicano life in California, are written in Spanish and English. And nearly one-third of Lonnie Carter’s The Romance of Magno Rubio, as performed in California, is written in Tagalog (Filipino). Even more fl agrantly macaronic, however, is Homebody/Kabul (2004) by American playwright Tony Kushner, which is presented — usually with great vehemence — in French, Arabic, Pashto, Dari, English, and Esperanto. <strong>It</strong> is both realistic and poignant for the characters in these plays to speak in different languages. This linguistic variety conveys different states of emotion (Top right) Macaronic (multilingual) theatre reaches a high point in Ariane Mnouchkine’s production with her Théâtre de Soleil company production of Le Dernier Caravansérail (The Last Caravan), presented at the Lincoln Center Festival in New York in 2005. Mnouchkine and her company have been the greatest French theatre innovators over the past three decades, with Asian- or East Asian–inspired productions of plays by Shakespeare (Richard II, Twelfth Night), Aeschylus (the Oresteia), and Molière (Tartuffe), among others. Here she tackles an original subject — the global crisis of immigration — with a text developed from interviews she and her colleagues conducted all over the world. The six-hour production — portraying current immigrants from Afghanistan, Iraq, Kurdistan, and Iran crossing to Europe on the ancient Silk and Spice Roads — includes forty-two scenes, actors traveling by carts, boats, and other conveyances so that they never set foot on the ground, and a wide variety of languages totally unfamiliar to theatre audiences, even when they are heard above the screams and sounds coming from the stage. In this opening scene, “La Fleuve Cruel” (“The cruel river”), immigrants in a wicker basket are smuggled across violent and roaring “waves” created by a gigantic span of billowing fabric. The cacophony of multiple languages, together with the roar of the river and the screams of those thrown overboard, greatly intensifi es the realism of this global catastrophe. (Bottom right) Jean Verdun’s Tibi’s Law is a French play set in rural Africa; it premiered not in France but in the forty-four-seat “equity-waiver” Stages <strong>Theatre</strong> Center in Hollywood, California, in 2003, echoing the play’s theme of globalization and the third world by such a transnational opening. American slam poet Saul Williams plays the title role of an African “sayer” who offi ciates at the funerals of Africans killed by disease, poverty, and thoughtless police raids, while Erinn Anova plays his long-lost girlfriend, Mara. The audience is cast in the role of global tourists, sent to these funerals by travel agents so they may see, between safaris to the wild-game parks, the “real Africa.” The setting is by Grant Van Szevern, the lighting by Leigh Allen.