The young queen Marie Antoinette delights and inspires her French subjects with her three-foot tall wigs and extravagant haute couture. But times change and even the most fashionable queens go out of style. In David Adjmi’s humorous and haunting Marie Antoinette, idle gossip turns more insidious as the country revolts, demanding liberté, égalité,fraternité!

David Adjmi’s recent Off-Broadway plays, Elective Affinities and Stunning,were hailed by The New Yorker for their “gorgeous blend of narrative, girl talk, and politics.” The world premiere of Marie Antoinette reunites the playwright with director Rebecca Taichman, who staged Adjmi’s play, The Evildoers, at Yale Rep in 2008.

In their short time of existence the Diggers of San Francisco had a profound impact upon the their immediate surroundings in San Francisco and on the American Counterculture as a whole.  In the nineteen-sixties radicalism and resistance to cold war hegemony took many forms, from the lunch counter sit-ins to demonstrations that attempted to levitate the Pentagon.  The Diggers arose as a part of, and in response to, the radical zeitgeist sweeping the nation. Popular perception and scholars of the American youth movement of the 1960s have divided it into the expressly political and earnest New Left and the apolitical and superfluous Counterculture.  Drawing on the written records of the Diggers (their broadsheets, pamphlets, and manifestos), the memoirs of former members (in particular Emmett Grogan and Peter Coyote), as well as interviews and contemporary mediarecords, I will demonstrate the ways in which the Diggers problematize this distinction. Understood within the context of the growing community of Haight-Ashbury, the growing radicalization of young Americans, and a growing political theater movement the Diggers disrupt this categorization and reveal it to be a false dichotomy.  As an expressly political street theater group the Diggers strove to make what some have described as the micropolitics of resistance, those everyday acts by which ordinary people resist the dominant culture, expressly political.  They sought to use the methodology and tools of experimental street theater to promote a revolutionary praxis.  They attempted to transform daily life through the power of everyday acts.  By acknowledging the power of average people they strove to harness individual acts, to teach people that they could act as if the world they imagined already existed, and through this enacting, they would create the condition they described.  They sought to transform individuals into life actors– self conscious agents of social change.

In 1998, anthropologist Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett noted that, “Increasingly, [tourists] travel to actual destinations to experience virtual places.” Over a decade has passed since Kirshenblatt-Gimblett demonstrated this phenomenon in Destination Culture: Tourisms, Museums, and Heritage, but the observation remains pertinent today: physically real locations—such as Las Vegas, Macau, and Disneyland—serve increasingly as the material grounds upon which virtual tourist experiences are carefully constructed. In such places, visitors from afar travel physically to one location in order to be immersed in sights and sounds that simulate other places and times. In the case of Las Vegas, the visual dimensions of such simulations (architectural replicas, etc.) have been theorized in a number of studies, but the role that sound plays in these virtual touristic experiences is only beginning to be addressed. This paper contributes to this discussion by investigating the multi-layered ways in which sound contributes to the creation of virtual touristic worlds on the Las Vegas Strip. I move from the sounds of the Strip itself (the hawkers’ cries, the casinos’ themed music) to the elaborate and frequently exotic sound worlds of the Strip’s most prominent entertainment today: its seven Cirque du Soleil shows. I argue that these shows self-reflexively mirror Las Vegas’s strategies of virtual tourism, using music in particular to evoke a sense of experiential travel by asking the audience to be virtually absorbed in a spatially or temporally distant world, and ultimately creating a sense of expansive touristic experience within the otherwise emphatically site-specific shows.