Nic Barilar is a third year PhD Student at Pitt and is this year’s Teaching Mentor in the department of Theatre Arts. He has also been named the 2018 President of the Duse Society (the theatre arts graduate student organization). His research interests include twentieth-century Irish theatre and drama in Ireland and the diaspora; theatre censorship; and the politics of aesthetics. This past summer Barilar had the opportunity to perform with the Pittsburgh Opera Festival and has recently received his Actor’s Equity Association membership!
In November, he and his colleague Vicki Hoskins facilitated a working group at The American Society for Theatre Research titled “Violent Bodies, Violent Acts.” Barilar is currently working on an article about Irish playwright Sean O’Casey and a world premiere of one of his plays at an amateur theatre in Lafayette, Indiana. One of his passions as a theatre practitioner and scholar is the work of Samuel Beckett. After recently directing Beckett’s short plays “Footfalls” and “Catastrophe” with the University of Pittsburgh’s Pitt Stages, he is writing a conference paper that “reads Samuel Beckett's Happy Days by paying particular attention to the presence of historically banned items that appear in the play as props.” He has also just completed a directed study course with Dr. Neil Doshi in the French department where he had the opportunity to read Beckett in French and in conversation with French post-war philosophy.
A Few Words From Nic:
Question: What has led you to your interest in censorship in theatre and performance studies?
Barilar Response: It's a pretty simple story, really. I was a master's student in literature at the University of Alabama and in my first semester I took a course in Irish modernism. For a term paper I had decided to write on some of Beckett's novels and was especially interested in this idea of silence, failure, and "the void." My professor, James McNaughton, really wanted us to historicize the texts we examined - and so I was researching Beckett's historical contexts when it occurred to me that his form and style might have to do with his own run-ins with censorship (which were plenty). Since then, the more I've read about how censorship has been discussed in scholarly circles, the more its hit me that there's something still to be said about censorship might be theorized in light of performance studies. It's one thing to think about text or discourse - where some scholars have argued that censorship is everywhere, a pervasive part of how knowledge and power circulate - it's another, perhaps, to think of it not strictly in textualist terms. For example, how does censorship move or cause bodies, ideas, or art to physically travel? What are the meanings of that movement? What are the politics that underpin those movements and the censorship itself? How does censorship manifest itself in the performance of banned texts or by playwrights whose work has been banned? Ultimately, I'm interested in how power and politics find their way into performance and censorship has been one of the main ways I've been thinking about those dynamics - because censorship, it seems to me, must always be about power and politics, right? Censorship is also one of those topics of inquiry that I think is always important to understand fuller and better because it's always a threat in all kinds of spheres - social, political, artistic.
Question: In what ways do your scholarship and your artistic practice inform one another?
Barilar Response: So, when I get the chance to actually decide what work I work on - especially in terms of directing - I typically pick work that interests me politically and socially. That doesn't necessarily mean I'm interested in overtly political theatre (although all art is political one way or another). I look for pieces that have something to say in the here-and-now. I'm also particularly interested in work that acts on its audience in different or unusual ways. So, for instance, when I directed Beckett's "Catastrophe" here at Pitt last spring, I wanted to play with the fact that the play depicts a rehearsal. We did most of the play with the fluorescent work lights on because that's how we rehearse in that space and because it would mean the audience, in thrust configuration, would end up looking at each other and also see each other watching the play. It was uncomfortable and politically compelling to me - it said something about complicity to the rather brutal dynamics inherent in watching theatre, performance, or really anything at all. Staging Beckett's plays also really helped me to begin to think about questions of space and temporality - and what are the relationships between space, time, history, and politics and how can we see those (or not) in and through performance? So, again, it's really all about exploring power, performance, and history and how those are felt and/or thought about in theatre.
Question: Would you share a bit about what you are currently working on?
Barilar Response: I'm working on an article about a play by Sean O'Casey called The Drums of Father Ned. To make a very long story short, this play was supposed to play at the 1958 Dublin Theatre Festival but the festival was cancelled after the Archbishop of Dublin protested and the major writers were either pushed out or pulled out as a result. That O'Casey play would end up having its world premiere and only performances at an amateur theatre in Lafayette, Indiana the following year, 1959. So, I'm thinking, surprise surprise, about censorship and thinking about it through memory and performance. How did the memory of its banning in Ireland interact with local cultural memory in Indiana through the performance? The answers I've found are surprising and it is a project that has been just so fun because there have been so many historical twists and turns - like a mystery novel. Plus, I've been very lucky enough to interview the only surviving cast member who still lives in Lafayette, and it was really fun to work with him to try to bring this performance back to the surface.
Question: What emergent project or topic is most compelling to you right now?
Barilar Response: I'm really interested in what it means to put banned objects on stage in the places where those items are banned. So, I just started a researching a project centered around a production of The Rose Tattoo by Tennessee Williams that took place in Dublin in 1957. The director was arrested for producing an obscene performance. In the play, a character holds a condom, drops it, and then kicks it under some furniture. All forms of birth control were officially banned in the Republic of Ireland at this time, it was very controversial - all literature about birth control was also banned - no ads, no pamphlets, nothing. But, all the evidence suggests that the sequence was mimed: that there was no condom and that there wasn't even a fake prop to stand in for the condom. So, the prop itself was censored from the stage by the director, who seems to have been very cautious about the whole ordeal. Still, he was arrested. What the heck does all of this mean? What can it tell us about censorship and power and the historical attitudes of the time? I find it endlessly fascinating and really provocative.