Contemporary Authors

• Composing Ourselves: The Little Theatre Movement and the American Audience Southern Illinois University Press (Carbondale, IL), 2004
• Kitchen Sink Realisms: Domestic Labor, Dining, and Drama in American Theatre University of Iowa Press (Iowa City, IA), 2015

1. Kitchen sink realisms : domestic labor, dining, and drama in American theatre https://lccn.loc.gov/2015005039 Chansky, Dorothy. Kitchen sink realisms : domestic labor, dining, and drama in American theatre / Dorothy Chansky. Iowa City : University of Iowa Press, [2015] x, 291 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm. PN2277.N5 C46 2015 ISBN: 9781609383756 (pbk. : acid-free paper) 2. Composing ourselves : the Little Theatre movement and the American audience https://lccn.loc.gov/2003020682 Chansky, Dorothy. Composing ourselves : the Little Theatre movement and the American audience / Dorothy Chansky. Carbondale : Southern Illinois University Press, c2004. xv, 293 p. : ill. ; 24 cm. PN2267 .C45 2004 ISBN: 0809325748 (alk. paper)

• Texas Tech Univeristy - https://www.depts.ttu.edu/theatreanddance/about/faculty/Chansky-Dorothy.php

  Dr. Dorothy Chansky
  Dorothy Chansky
  Associate Professor - History, Theory, Criticism
  Dorothy Chansky is Director of the Humanities Center and teaches on the History/Theory/Criticism track in the School of Theatre and Dance at TTU. She is Vice President of the American Theatre and Drama Society. Dr. Chansky holds a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from New York University. She is the author of two books, Composing Ourselves: The Little Theatre Movement and the American Audience (Southern Illinois UP, 2004); and the Kitchen Sink Realisms: Domestic Labor, Dining, and Drama on the American State (U of Iowa P, 2015) and co-editor, with Ann Folino White, of Food and Theatre on the World Stage (Routledge, 2015).
  Other publications include “American Higher Education and Dramatic Literature in(to) English” in the September, 2013, Theatre Survey; “From Graphic Narrative to Multi-Media Stage: Transmogrifying Diary of a Teenage Girl” in The Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance, December, 2011; “Burns Mantle and the American Theatregoing Public” in Theatre History Studies, 2011; “Usable Performance Feminism for Our Time: Reconsidering Betty Friedan” in Theatre Journal, October, 2008; and “American Passion Plays: Theatre Versions of the ‘Greatest Story Ever Told’ in the New Millennium” in TDR,Winter, 2006. Dr. Chansky is the author of the Feminist Drama chapter (1945-present) for The Oxford Handbook of American Drama, edited by Jeffrey Richards and Heather Nathans (2014).
  Awards include the 2013 Betty Jean Jones Award, given by the American Theatre and Drama Society for Outstanding Teacher of American Theatre and Drama; and being inducted as a lifetime Fellow of the MidAmerica Theatre Conference in 2015. At Texas Tech she received a 2014 Faculty Recognition Award from Mortar Board and Omicron Delta Kappa and a TTU President’s Book Award in 2006 for Composing Ourselves. Dr. Chansky was one of the Provost’s Integrated Scholars for 2011-2012. In both 2009 and 2011 she was Outstanding Researcher for TTU’s College of Visual and Performing Arts and in both those years she received the university-wide award for advising the best master’s thesis in the arts or humanities. In 2009, she received a Research Enrichment Fund grant from Texas Tech and in 2007 she received an associateship at the Five College Women’s Studies Research Center at Mt. Holyoke College, where she was in residence for a semester. In 2012, she received, along with Professor Carol Flueckiger in the School of Art, a Creative Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences grant to create and produce an interdisciplinary piece called Three Eleanors: Arts as Historiography, which examined not only how art and performance help create and circulate celebrity, but also how venue affects reception. Three Eleanors played in New York City for three weeks in 2013.
  Dr. Chansky began her career as an actor in New York, where after seven years onstage, she wrote and produced off-Broadway an original musical about the building of the Brooklyn Bridge. She has performed as an actor at TTU in Curtains, 9/11 Voices, and in the spring, 2015, 24-hour play festival.
  Dr. Chansky edits Theatre Annual: A Journal of Theatre and Performance of the Americas. She is a former Book Review Editor of Theatre Journal and a member of the Editorial Board of Theatre Topics. She served for three years as a member of the Executive Committee of the American Society for Theatre Research and was also Director of Fellowships and Awards for ASTR for four years. She is a member of the Translation, Adaptation, and Dramaturgy Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research.

  Degrees Held:
  Ph.D., New York University, Performance Studies
  M.A., The Catholic University of America, Theatre
  A.B., Smith College, English

  Contact:

  Email Dr. Dorothy Chansky
  Office: Drane Hall 315
  Office Phone: 834-7426

• University of Iowa Press - https://www.uipress.uiowa.edu/people/dorothy-chansky

  Associate professor of theatre and director of the Humanities Center at Texas Tech University, Dorothy Chansky writes about American theatre, audiences, feminist theatre, and translation. She is the author of Composing Ourselves: The Little Theatre Movement and the American Audience and many articles, and coeditor of Food and Theatre on the World Stage. She writes criticism for New York Theatre Wire. She lives in Lubbock, Texas, and New York City.

QUOTED: "Chansky ... delivers an illuminating study of the gendered nature of food preparation, entertaining, and household cleaning."
"essential."

Chansky, Dorothy: Kitchen sink realisms: domestic labor,
dining, and drama in American theatre
S.R. Irelan
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries.
53.10 (June 2016): p1484.
COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Full Text: 
Chansky, Dorothy. Kitchen sink realisms: domestic labor, dining, and drama in American theatre. Iowa, 2015. 291 p index afp ISBN
9781609383756 pbk, $55.00; ISBN 9781609383763 ebook, $55.00
(cc) 53-4319
PN2277
2015-5039 CIP
Chansky (theater, Texas Tech Univ.) delivers an illuminating study of the gendered nature of food preparation, entertaining, and household
cleaning up as presented in US dramatic literature and live performance from 1918 to 2005. What distinguishes her book from other works on the
topic of theatrical realism is the way she pluralizes the genre descriptor "realism" so that her analysis can freely encompass varied patterns of the
social world as related to class-based "home life" on stage. To do so, Chansky subdivides the book into seven engaging chronological chapters,
complete with an introduction that methodically frames the coming narrative. Of particular note are the "Domestic Labor in Black and White"
("and Brown" in the last chapter) sections within each chapter. In these, Chansky examines visible race in context. For example, in chapter 5,
"Death of a Dream 1949-1962," she uses Carson McCullers's The Member of the Wedding and Loraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun to
consider a shift in the staging of black domestics and black domesticity during the 1950s. A decade has passed since the publication of Chansky's
Composing Ourselves: The Little Theatre Movement and the American Audience (CH, Jan'05, 42-2719). Kitchen Sink Realisms is worth the
wait. Summing Up: **** Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals; general readers.--S. R. Irelan, Western
Michigan University
5/14/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1494785683107 2/2
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
Irelan, S.R. "Chansky, Dorothy: Kitchen sink realisms: domestic labor, dining, and drama in American theatre." CHOICE: Current Reviews for
Academic Libraries, June 2016, p. 1484. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA454942730&it=r&asid=96974b70d7ac7212fd3683ce16633da0. Accessed 14 May
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A454942730

Irelan, S.R. "Chansky, Dorothy: Kitchen sink realisms: domestic labor, dining, and drama in American theatre." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, June 2016, p. 1484. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA454942730&it=r. Accessed 14 May 2017

• Journal of American Drama and Theatre
  http://jadtjournal.org/2016/12/23/kitchen-sink-realisms/
  Word count: 1554

  QUOTED: "Chansky’s impeccably researched and engagingly written study examines theatrical representations of domestic work in twentieth century American drama, contributing an invaluable perspective to sociological questions surrounding feminized labor and theatrical debates regarding realism."
  "Chansky’s nuanced, rigorously contextualized readings of both canonical and non-canonical plays provide a rich resource not only for theatre scholars, but also for Americanists interested in adding to their understanding of the social texture of the twentieth century. This immensely satisfying study will be of great value to those working in theatre history, feminist theory and theatre, and American studies, and is equally suitable for upper class undergraduates, graduate students, and scholars. Impressive in both its historical scope and interpretive depth, Kitchen Sink Realisms is an important contribution to scholarship in American drama."

  Joanna Mansbridge

  In 1996, John Guare summed up the aesthetic battle in American theatre as “the war against the kitchen sink.” Although the phrase “kitchen sink drama,” in a British theatrical context, signifies a postwar turn toward gritty social realism, in American theatre, this same phrase carries with it vaguely derogatory connotations. The dominance of realism and the thematic emphasis on family in American drama has been pointed out often and emphatically. And while feminist scholars have ably deconstructed realism for its associations with a masculinist representational system, what has been consistently overlooked is the very labor signified by the kitchen sink. As Dorothy Chansky brilliantly demonstrates in Kitchen Sink Realisms, that infamous sink and the domestic labor for which it acts as a metonym have been used as theatrical material throughout the twentieth century, and its continued relevance – as both dramatic theme and stage action – suggests its enduring importance as a topic of social debate. Moreover, realism, Chansky reminds us, is itself a variable and varied form (hence the realisms in her title), shaped by (and shaping) specific socio-economic pressures. Chansky’s impeccably researched and engagingly written study examines theatrical representations of domestic work in twentieth century American drama, contributing an invaluable perspective to sociological questions surrounding feminized labor and theatrical debates regarding realism.

  Chansky is broadly concerned with reevaluating how the modern American theatre has negotiated the enduring question: Who is responsible for cleaning, cooking, and running the home? This question was posed differently in the 1920 than it was in the 1980s. However, Chansky underlines the structural issue that makes this a particularly persistent debate: “While the representations changed […] the central issue has not: American society offers no practical and affordable way for most adults to combine gainful employment with child rearing and housekeeping” (60). Indeed. Chansky states her goal thusly: “My project here is to examine the multiple ways in which a too-often belittled but perennially popular realm of American theatre can be fruitfully and seriously reassessed” (77).

  Organized chronologically into seven chapters and an Introduction, the book covers the timespan between 1918 and 2005, the end of World War I and the dawn of the digital era. While the study overall has a chronological structure, Chansky productively complements that linearity by linking the plays thematically as well. Each chapter provides incisive close readings, as well as thick descriptions of the surrounding conditions of production and reception, incorporating relevant and often fascinating historical materials that give the plays a vivid context. Bringing some plays out of obscurity, Chansky points to their popularity in the original context, and their significance as forums for public debates around “woman’s work.” These debates were especially lively, not surprisingly, during periods when women were either gaining employment in greater numbers or marrying in fewer (such as the 1920s and 30s and the 1980s). As Chansky points out, “Domestic labor had not always been portrayed in American drama as a potential trap. Nor had it been something to avoid onstage and hand off to invisible help” (80). Domestic labor, in fact, was staged as pure spectacle in James A. Herne’s hit of 1893, Shore Acres, in which a full act was “devoted to the preparation and consuming of an anniversary dinner” (80).

  Chansky’s focus on food, cleaning, and domestic labor sheds new light on changing gender roles over the past century, as well as on issues relating to social class, immigration, ethnic identity, and assimilation in the US. In Susan Glaspell and George Cram Cooke’s Tickless Time (1918), for example, Annie, a first generation Irish servant (played in the original production by Edna St. Vincent Millay), accommodates the WASP couple she works for by adapting “ethnic” meals, like spaghetti, for a “modern” middle-class American palette (94). Incorporating data about the number and national origin of immigrant servants in this period adds a rich sociological understanding of this and other plays. Chansky astutely situates references to food and the people who prepare it, instructing contemporary readers about the meaning of these references to early twentieth century audiences. The author also sharpens how we might think about these audiences in the early years of legitimate American theatre. She writes, “theatregoers who read criticism by critics understanding themselves as specialists became, in turn, a cohort who saw theatregoing and drama as salutary and important, even when scripts or genres might suggest otherwise” (84-85).

  While each chapter offers crucial insights and intelligent reinterpretations, it is the last two chapters, “Prisoners of Total Blame, 1963-1990” and “The Clean House, or Change” that make this study seem especially urgent. The penultimate chapter covers feminism’s second wave and its aftermath in the Reagan era, when debates around family values and women’s new role in the public sphere were hotly contested. Adding to ongoing discussions of canonical plays such as Sam Shepard’s True West (1980) and Marsha Norman’s ‘night Mother (1984), Chansky reframes them from the standpoint of the domestic spaces and laborers depicted in these plays. Pointing out that critics often ignore or are baffled by the Mom character in True West, who enters after the brothers’ climatic fight (and into the decimated kitchen that results), unaffected by the disaster she comes home to find, Chansky succinctly summarizes her appearance on the scene: “While the brothers remain deadlocked in a stranglehold as the lights go down, Mom has shown that she is able to leave, come back, and leave again, as if in some kind of existentially realist fort da maneuver” (455). Sharp (re)readings such as these abound in Kitchen Sink Realisms.

  The final chapter outlines five post-Nannygate cultural phenomena that shaped American cultural attitudes toward domestic life and plays that dealt with it: the economic prosperity of the Clinton years; the rise in immigrants from Asia and Latin America; a decline in the two-parent family; a “no-turning-back presence of women of all classes in the workforces”; and lastly, a consumerism retooled “as a form of self-improvement or activism” (486-87). From within this context, Chansky looks at three works produced in 2003: Joan Holden’s Nickel and Dimed, a Brechtian play inspired by journalist Barbara Ehrenreich’s exposé of working class poverty; Lisa Loomer’s Living Out, which looks at the relationship between a privileged yuppie mother and her Latina nanny; and Tony Kushner and Jeanine Tesori’s through-composed musical set in 1963, Caroline, or Change (2003), which Chansky pithily describes as a work that “portrays tension within a maid/mistress household, the difference between the households of the two, and how historic distance can deflect assessment of present-day problems” (504). Chansky concludes her study with Sarah Ruhl’s The Clean House (2005), a play focusing on the relationship between an upper-class white woman and her Brazilian maid, Ana, who is depressed and refuses to clean. This perceptive comedy brings kitchen sink realisms, as a genre, into an age of globalization. While the second-wave feminist struggle for the right to participate equally in the public sphere has largely been achieved, this seismic shift has resulted in a need for imported domestic care. What was once a local division of labor among the predominately white middle classes has now become global division of labor between a developed world in need of domestic laborers and developing world in need of better economic opportunities and living conditions.

  So just what does a kitchen sink signify onstage? How does it communicate gender, class, ethnicity, and Americanness? And how do these codes of social identity relate to broader public debates around the value of domestic work, the changing demands of the marketplace, and the erosion of “the good life”? The answers to these questions vary vastly, it turns out, depending on the historical context. Whereas in the early twentieth century, a clean kitchen with a live-in servant cooking the meals signified middle class-ness, in the late twentieth century, it might suggest a global division of feminized labor.

  Chansky’s nuanced, rigorously contextualized readings of both canonical and non-canonical plays provide a rich resource not only for theatre scholars, but also for Americanists interested in adding to their understanding of the social texture of the twentieth century. This immensely satisfying study will be of great value to those working in theatre history, feminist theory and theatre, and American studies, and is equally suitable for upper class undergraduates, graduate students, and scholars. Impressive in both its historical scope and interpretive depth, Kitchen Sink Realisms is an important contribution to scholarship in American drama.

  Joanna Mansbridge
  Bilkent University

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