The collection is edited by Michael M. Chemers and Analola Santana, and the chapter was developed through the monstrosity-in-performance working group that Chemers and Santana regularly offer at the American Society for Theatre Research conference. The collection aims to redefine “monstrosity” to describe the cultural processes by which certain identities or bodies are configured to be threateningly deviant, whether by race, gender, sexuality, nationality, immigration status, or physical or psychological extraordinariness.

Baker’s play involves a young couple staying at a bed-and-breakfast in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Their relationship is crumbling, and this crisis is made worse by the fact that one of them believes an American Girl doll she once owned has “returned from the dead” to menace her, appearing ominously in the knick-knack filled parlor of the B&B. Proudfit’s chapter looks at the surprising relationship between objects and gods as radical others, and how encounters with both can produce what Rudolf Otto calls “numinous dread.”

The argument engages two intertexts especially: briefly, H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu” (1926) and then, more closely, E. T. A. Hoffman’s “The Sandman” (1816). In doing so, it shows how Baker’s play parallels romantic relationships and spiritual awakening as encounters with radical otherness that are thrilling but also frightening, whether this otherness takes the form of objects, gods, or both at once.

Proudfit also happens to be �þ��� an English course this semester which examines the plays of Anton Chekhov and Annie Baker through the lens of cultural materialist theory, and last year he directed Baker’s play “The Antipodes” at Elon.

Scott Proudfit, coordinator of the Drama & Theatre Studies program and associate professor of English, published an article titled, “From Wilder’s Our Town (1938) to Churchill’s Escaped Alone (2016): Mediatization and the Collapse of the Large Into the Local” in the most recent volume of Comparative Drama.

This essay compares “Our Town” to “Escaped Alone” in order to reveal the shift in culture that has occurred in the last 20 years in the postindustrial West. This shift is a result of electronic mediatization, and can be generally characterized as the collapse of the large into the local.

Starting with structuralist theorists Ludwig Wittgenstein and Ferdinand de Saussure, the essay proposes that a primary goal of modern theory and modern drama was to find meaning and situatedness through putting local experiences into productive conversation with larger social and political contexts. By contrast, in the 21st century lifeworld it has become increasingly difficult to distinguish the large and the local because the large (our media-saturated encounter with the global) has collapsed into the local (our daily, personal interactions).

This essay culminates in a reading of Churchill’s play through the lens of contemporary mediatization theory, arguing that the conflation of the local and the global has created a state of almost constant fear and anger for all of those wired into this new age of electronic media saturation.

The essay offers. a reading of Jacobs-Jenkins’ 2014 play through the lens of white fragility. It draws on critical theory in Saidiya Hartman’s “Scenes of Subjection” (1997) and Susan Sontag’s “Regarding the Pain of Others” (2003) to consider the limits of empathy in theatrical depictions and reception of histories of racial violence.

“Appropriate” tells the story of the grown white children of a recently-deceased white D.C. politician who return to their crumbling homestead in Arkansas, a former plantation, to organize and sell off his effects. During their preparation for a public auction and in the midst of typical dysfunctional family squabbles, the Lafayette siblings discover among their patriarch’s possessions lynching photographs and souvenirs. For much of the remainder of the play, the siblings insist that their father could not have had any relationship to this history of racial violence or its memorializing.

The comics originally appeared in Spider-Man Magazine, a periodical for which  Proudfit served as assistant editor for two years.  This was his first job after graduating from Columbia University with a bachelor’s degree in English and a bachelor’s degree in drama.  Spider-Man Magazine was published by a division of Marvel Comics called Town Brook Press.  Indeed, the job ad that Proudfit answered had been placed under that business name.  As a result, he was not even aware he had applied to an editorial position at Marvel Comics until he showed up for his interview.  It was quite a surprise.

Proudfit served as assistant editor for Spider-Man Magazine and X-Men Magazine from 1994 to 1995.  He edited the copy in these comics and designed puzzles for them.  He also answered the many letters the division received from children hoping to reach Spider-Man.  After a year, Proudfit began writing comics for the magazines, including Spider-Man, X-Men and Iron Man stories.

For many years these comics have been available only in their original publications, and therefore have been very hard to find.  The two reprinted comics appear in the new trade book titled The Adventures of Spider-Man: Radioactive.  In one comic Spidey battles the Shocker, in the other the relatively obscure villain the Tinkerer.

In writing the Spider-Man/Shocker comic, Proudfit was able to collaborate with Marvel legend Marie Severin, who was semi-retired at that point.  Severin was one of the first and only women to work at EC Comics in the 1950s.  She was inducted into the Will Eisner Comics Hall of Fame in 2001.

(ISBN: 978-1302920449) is available for purchase on amazon.com.

Scott Proudfit, assistant professor of English, had two publications released during January. 

The first was an essay for the journal Modern Drama titled "Reunion, Complication, Refraction, and Translation: How Postcolonialism and Post-Structuralism Mark 'Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo.'" This essay argues that what has perplexed critics and audiences about Rajiv Joseph's 2009 play — its seemingly apolitical and ruminative second act — in fact signals why the play is the rightful heir to an earlier generation of Broadway productions with postcolonial concerns, including David Henry Hwang's "M. Butterfly."  In his new interpretation, Proudfit puts Joseph's play in conversation with the theories of Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, and Arjun Appadurai, among others. 

The second publication is a chapter in Palgrave's collection "Contemporary Approaches to Adaptation in Theatre," edited by Kara Reilly, titled "Theatrical Mash-up: Assembled Text as Adaptation in 'Medea/'Macbeth/Cinderella.'"  This chapter argues that a number of recent "assembled-text" theatre productions, including Bill Rauch and Tracy Young's "Medea/Macbeth/Cinderella" (M/M/C), have more in common with pop-music tracks from, for example, Danger Mouse's "The Grey Album" than with these plays' theatrical antecedents, the postmodern collages of late 20th-century U.S. theatres, such as the Wooster Group's "Route 1&9."  "M/M/C", most recently presented in 2012 at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, simultaneously stages Euripides' "Medea," Shakespeare's "Macbeth," and the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical "Cinderella" in an overlapping mash-up.  Proudfit also wrote the Introduction to the first section of this collection, titled "Company and Directorial Approaches to Adaptation."

Prior to “A History of Collective Creation and Collective Creation in Contemporary Performance” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), collective creation was largely considered by theatre historians and drama critics to be a phenomenon which occurred almost exclusively in the U.S. during the 1960s in such theater companies as the Living Theatre and the Open Theater. However, Syssoyeva and Proudfit in these volumes showed that far from being limited to the 1960s, modern collective creation may be best understood as an ongoing, resistant tradition emerging in its European and North American contexts circa 1900, running throughout the 20th century and on into present-day devising practices.

Specifically, the editors argued that collective creation evolved in three overlapping waves, each with its own distinctive ideological and aesthetic characteristics: in the first third of the 20th century, in the mid-1950s to the mid-1980s, and in the mid-1980s to the present.  Jeffrey Scott’s review of “A History of Collective Creation” in the July 2015 edition of Theatre Research International called the book “an important piece of scholarship” and noted that it “addresses an important need in the study of collective creation, devised theatre, and improvisational theatre by illuminating the fact that these methods of theatre-making are not limited to the latter half of the last century.”

The current volume, “Women, Collective Creation, and Devised Performance,” continues the work of the previous books, arguing that collective creation is pivotal to the evolution of the modern theater, and that women must be fundamentally credited with the development of practices of collective creation since the turn of the 20th century. The 20 essays within the volume, written by an international team of established scholars, trace a sprawling lineage, revealing the unseen or forgotten web of transmission that connects, for example, the Women’s Suffrage Pageant of 1913 in Washington, D.C., to the improvisational theatre of Viola Spolin in 1930s Chicago, to the experimental devised work of Ariane Mnouchkine and the Theatre du Soleil in France in the 1960s, to the nomadic performances of the women of the Odin Teatret in 1980s’ Europe, to Pussy Riot’s recent protests in Russia.

In addition to conceiving and co-editing this volume, Proudfit co-wrote the book’s introduction and authored the chapter, “From Neva Boyd to Viola Spolin: How Social Group Work in 1920s’ Settlement Houses Defined Collective Creation in 1960s’ Theatres.”  The book is available at most major outlets, including amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com.