Credits

The following ensemble:

Travis Brisini, Melissa Cameron, Sarah K. Jackson, John LeBret, Courtney Lecombe, Kate Mullinax, Amanda Stephenson, Jackie Sutherlin, and Rebecca Walker

Plays the following roles:

King Kong, Carl Denham, Ann Darrow, Self, stop-motion animators,
La Belle Helene, Fumiko Sakurai, Lt. Susan Watson, Madame X, Dwan, Hank “Mitch” Mitchell, Naomi Watt’s Ann Darrow, Jack Driscoll/Jack Prescott, 1930’s director, leading man and leading lady, Dracula, Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, colonizers/colonized, slaves/auctioneer, “the Japanese,” amorphous Pacific Islanders, wo(men), Christ figures/the faithful, Yank “The Hairy Ape,” gorilla, native dancers, native chief, warriors, witchdoctor, the “inanimate” sacrificial structure, actors, illustrator, Godzilla/T-Rex, gang members, Fay Wray, giant bats, foley artists, puppeteers, bi-plane pilots, and people on the street.

Director/Choreographer Tracy Stephenson Shaffer
Director of Photography/Editor Pierre Cazaubon
Lights Danielle Vignes
Sound Andrew McDaniel and Ben Powell
Set Design Tracy Stephenson Shaffer
and the design students of ID 2750
Lighting Design John LeBret and Tracy Stephenson Shaffer
Original Score Work Craig Gingrich-Philbrook
Poster/Publicity Trish Suchy
House Managers Courtney Haynes and Amy Wiggins

Special Thanks: Doug and Sara Shaffer, Melissa and Melvin Stephenson, Ben Powell, Brianne Waychoff, Cora Leighton, Danielle McGeough, Ryan McGeough, Sam Sloan, Holley Vaughn, Danielle Vignes, Phillip Tebbutt, William Riehm, Jessica Ketcham Weber, Renee Major, Paul Harmon, Camilla Dinkel, Chriss Florkiewicz, James Peck, Jessica O’Neill, Lisa Flanagan, my colleagues in the Department of Communication Studies, Lisa Landry and Ginger Conrad, the design students of ID 2750, and the Spring 2007 FMA 4001: “King Kong” class.

Works Cited

Auslander, Philip. Liveness. London and New York: Routledge, 1999.

Chvasta, Marcyrose. “Remembering Praxis: Performance in the Digital Age.” Text and
Performance Quarterly 25 (2005): 156-170.

Minh-ha, Trinh T. When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender, and Cultural
Politics. London and New York: Routledge, 1991.

Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. London and New York:
Routledge, 1993.

Wolf, Stacy. “In Defense of Pleasure: Musical Theatre History in the Liberal Arts
[A Manifesto].” Theatre Topics 17 (2007): 51-60.

The following additional texts* have inspired aspects of OR are paraphrased in OR are quoted in
this performance:

Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack’s King Kong (1933) and Son of Kong (1933); Ishiro Honda’s King Kong Versus Godzilla (1963) and King Kong Escapes (1967); John Guillermin’s King Kong (1976) and King Kong Lives (1986); Peter Jackson’s King Kong (2005); Ernest B. Schoedsack’s Mighty Joe Young (1949); Ron Underwood’s Mighty Joe Young (1998); Frank Agrama’s Queen Kong (1976); Christina Aguilera’s Ain’t No Other Man (2006); Ray Morton’s King Kong: The History of A Movie Icon From Fay Wray to Peter Jackson (2005); Anne Bogart and Tina Landau’s The Viewpoints Book (2005); Maria Lugones’s Playfulness, “World”-Traveling, and Loving Perception (1994); A Flock of Seagulls’s I Ran (So Far Away) (1982); Carol Clover’s Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (1992); Kool and The Gang’s Jungle Boogie (1973); Ivan Reitman’s Ghostbusters (1984); Live Action Cartoonists’s Live Action 2002-2005: The Remix! (2006); Trish Suchy’s 13 Ways to Kill a Mockingbird (2004); Michael Jackson’s Beat It (1982); Fay Wray’s On the Other Hand: A Life Story (1989); Wes Craven’s Scream (1996); Ruth Bowman’s Moby Dick (2002); Laura Mulvey’s Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975); Paul Well’s The Horror Genre: From Beelzebub to Blair Witch (2000); Robert Hopper’s Conversational Dramatism: A Symposium (1993); The Police’s King of Pain (1984); Michael Bowman’s . . . she looked like Mary Queen of Scots (2006); Robert Greenwald’s Xanadu (1980); Craig Gingrich-Philbrook’s DiscoKong (2007); David Skal’s The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror (1993); Beverly Whitaker Long and Mary Frances HopKins’s Performing Literature: An Introduction to Oral Interpretation (1982); Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960); Dwight Conquergood’s Performing as a Moral Act: Ethical Dimensions of the Ethnography of Performance (1985); Will Wright’s Six-guns and Society: A Structural Study of the Western (1975); John Storey’s Cultural Theory and Popular Culture, 2nd Edition (1998); Mary MacGregor’s Torn Between Two Lovers (1976); The Brady Bunch’s The Subject Was Noses (1973); Donna Haraway’s Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (1989); Ron Pelias’s Performance Studies: The Interpretation of Aesthetic Texts (1992); Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape (1922); Mike the Tiger’s Roar (2007).

* This list of films, videos, books, articles, and live performances is far from exhaustive. In addition, while directors/authors are listed before each text for clarity, a director (or author) is but one voice/vision of many in a project the size of King Kong. For full citation of any of the above, please contact Tracy Stephenson Shaffer at tsteph3@lsu.edu