Staging Whiteness: Possibilities for Resistance and Revelation in a High School Production ofSimply Maria, or, The American Dream

Abstract

In the fall of 2000, a U.S. high school drama club produced the politically-charged, one-act comedy, Simply Maria, or, the American Dream (1992) by Latina playwright Josefina López. To the extent that the director of the play combined Mexican-American and white actors onstage in the context of a conservative community, producing this play was a radical act. The tensions that developed through this experience illustrate how—despite genuine intentions to off-set dominant expectations of white culture embedded both in the cast and audience—the power-center of the project remained white and largely unquestioned. A description of the five-week rehearsal process examines speech codes and illuminates tensions and insights that evolve from the efforts of a generally white high school drama club to tackle a play that speaks to a marginalized component of its school's student body.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 9 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.