About

Adam N. Versényi is a Professor of Dramatic Art and Dramaturgy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He serves as the dramaturg for the PlayMakers Repertory Company and has chaired the Department of Dramatic Art from 2014 to 2022. As a theatre scholar, dramaturg, critic, translator, and director, he has authored several books including 'Theatre in Latin America: Religion, Politics, and Culture From Cortés to the 1980s,' 'The Theatre of Sabina Berman: The Agony of Ecstasy and Other Plays,' 'Ramón Griffero: Your Desires in Fragments and Other Plays,' and 'The Dramaturgy of Space.' His work focuses on Latin American theatre, U.S. Latino/a theatre, dramaturgy, theatre production, and theatrical translation. He is also the founder and editor of The Mercurian: A Theatrical Translation Review, an online journal. With a long-standing career as a dramaturg since 1988, he has worked at various regional and international theatres and universities, including Yale Repertory Theatre, Florida Studio Theatre, New York Shakespeare Festival, and La Mama E.T.C. He holds a B.A. in Literature in English and Spanish from Yale College, as well as M.F.A. and D.F.A. degrees in Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism from the Yale School of Drama.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Art history
• Art
• Aesthetics
• Psychology
• Literature
• Political Science
• History
• Philosophy
• Mathematics
• Developmental psychology
• Media studies
• Ancient history
• Epistemology
• Cognitive science
• Law
• Visual arts

Selected publications

• Translation and Adaptation

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2025-08-07

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
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• Arts Criticism Pedagogy for the Twenty-First Century

  Theatre topics · 2023

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Aesthetics
  • Sociology

  Arts Criticism Pedagogy for the Twenty-First Century Adam Versényi (bio) For a number of years now, I have periodically taught a course on arts criticism. Here, I offer my observations on the conception, practice, and aesthetic approach of that course and others as models for navigating arts criticism pedagogy in the twenty-first century. I attempt to write through the many challenges and changes to the practice of arts criticism since the early 2000s, and particularly in the past few years, in terms of the pedagogy of arts criticism. What does it mean to write arts criticism in the contemporary world? Why does it matter? What is its purpose? Who is it for? What form should it take? Is there a difference between a nationally oriented versus an internationally oriented arts criticism? How do we broaden the critical voices heard as we strive to broaden the stories seen and told—and are the two symbiotically linked? This essay focuses primarily on the purpose, form, and critical voices heard in arts criticism. From the beginning, answering these questions means establishing a distinction between writing a review of a performance and writing a piece of criticism. While students are most familiar with the form of a consumer-oriented review—a piece of writing meant to aid the ticket buyer in deciding how to spend their hard-earned pay on entertainment—I seek to instill in my students the notion that in the course we are only interested in criticism that "helps": helps the audience member approach and understand the work; helps the artist learn what is or is not successful in conveying their artistic intent; helps the critics themselves clarify their own response to a given performance and comprehend its complexity. The pandemic has forcefully focused our attention on the fact that access to arts training in higher education, let alone the ability to enter the field, has historically been limited to either those who have independent resources or those who are willing to subject themselves to penury for an extended period. Consequently, perhaps the most important function of teaching arts criticism at the undergraduate level, where I spend most of my time, is to create a knowledgeable audience for the arts, one that understands how work is created and the positionality of both themself and the artists whom they are responding to, and one that can create a lifelong practice of meaningful dialogue between the work and themselves. My conception of both the purpose and the practice of arts criticism derives from my perspective as a practicing dramaturg for the last thirty-seven years. As a dramaturg, I am interested primarily in how meaning is conveyed in performance; and as a member of a production's creative team, I seek to find the most effective artistic means to express the production's intentions while simultaneously looking for the most effective ways to explain those intentions to audiences and prepare them to receive the production in an accessible and informed manner. This inside/outside position—deeply knowledgeable of the creators' artistic intentions while at the same time viewing those intentions from the perspective of an audience member who lacks that information and needs thoughtful, accessible contextualization—also informs my approach to teaching arts criticism. The first portion of my arts criticism course introduces students to different approaches to writing criticism of visual art, theatre, film, dance, architecture, photography, and music. In the second half of the course, students participate in a criticism workshop where they write and rewrite their own criticism of performances, exhibitions, and architecture on campus and in the area. The final exam consists of revisions of two of the essays written during the criticism workshop, plus a revision of an essay on a performance that the entire class has seen. The syllabus for the most recent iteration of the course, taught in Summer 2022, can be found here. [End Page E-11] Since I began teaching this course in the early 2000s, both the performance and particularly the arts criticism landscape have greatly changed. Arts criticism has largely been eliminated from most major daily and weekly periodicals. There has been an explosion of blogs and online criticism...

  PublisherDOI

• Kinesthetic Spectatorship in the Theatre: Phenomenology, Cognition, Movement (review)

  Theatre Survey · 2021-05-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Unfinished Art of Theater: Avant-Garde Intellectuals in Mexico and Brazil

  Modern Language Quarterly · 2020 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • History
  • Art history

  What is the “avant-garde”? As a term, it was initially used to describe elite, front-line shock troops on the battlefield, became a late nineteenth-century metaphor for those on the front line of revolutionary political activism, and, sometime in the middle to late nineteenth century, began its trajectory as a metaphor for politically oriented experimental art, a usage that became widespread in the twentieth century and still persists. Numerous theorists such as Renato Poggioli, Matei Calinescu, Peter Bürger, and Paul Mann have defined the avant-garde as a practice of experimentation and contestation that blurs art and life and agitates, often irreverently, against the reigning social order.Sarah J. Townsend’s Unfinished Art of Theater partakes of two laudable trends of recent decades by moving away from a purely literary focus to incorporate performance into its discussions and by breaking the once-dominant Eurocentric focus. She also avoids the historical linearity that has frequently ignored the avant-garde’s desire to break with the past and dismissed the importance of whose story is being told. In focusing on early twentieth-century Mexico and Brazil, two countries from the industrializing “semi-periphery,” Townsend asserts that the “‘backwardness’” of these locations illustrates “how these ‘unfinished’ works can illuminate the ways in which the very category of avant-garde art is bound up in the experience of dependency, delay, and the uneven development of capitalism” (3–4).The separate sections on Mexico and Brazil have three chapters each, with the first chapter dealing with origins and definitions, the second “explor[ing] the intersections of ethnography and art while also tracing the shared circuits of emotions and economics” (22), and the third focusing on audio technologies and the rhetoric of total theater.Along the way Townsend describes in detail a number of incomplete or unrealized projects. In Mexico they include José Vasconcelos’s never-performed play Prometeo vencedor (Prometheus the Winner) and his unfinished “theater-stadium”; the estridentismo (stridentism) movement’s attempts to turn the Mexican city of Xalapa into a futuristic socialist utopia and the movement’s connection to the Teatro de Murciélago and its idea of a “theater of synthesis”; and the curious figure of Troka the Powerful, who was both a radio personality and a puppet directed at Mexican children. In Brazil these unfinished projects include Mário de Andrade’s oratorio for 550,000 actors and his libretto for an opera using the folk hero Pedro Malazarte, as well as Oswald de Andrade’s never-performed O homem e o cavalo (The Man and the Horse).Townsend’s research is prodigious, and her descriptions of individual projects are always fascinating. These include the performative use of the essay form by Vasconcelos and by the Colombian author Germán Arciniegas; the short-lived estridentist Teatro de Murciélago’s “toy store for the soul” (22), which sought to present colorful scenes of indigenous culture to urban and international audiences (linked by Townsend to Marx’s notion of the “primitive accumulation” of capital); and the ability of radio to conjure up a “primeval age” before language. Turning to Brazil, Townsend uses Roberto Schwarz’s critique of liberalism as an “idea out of place” (9) that amounted to a false description of late nineteenth-century Brazil. Townsend extends Schwarz’s notion of an inauthentic, anachronistic view of Brazil into the twentieth century as she analyzes how Mário de Andrade’s mixed-race queerness affected his interventions in Brazilian modernism, as well as how political censorship and persecution in the dictatorship of Getúlio Vargas following the “Revolution” of 1930 prevented Oswald de Andrade from performing O homem e o cavalo, which repurposed aesthetic forms from the period of European colonization and Christianization in the New World to create a piece of total theater that is an avant-garde model of art “premised on the work’s incompletion and its incompatibility with a ‘revolution within capitalism itself’” (211–12).While there is much to admire in her book, Townsend also makes the troubling assertion that since something has not been staged, like Vasconcelos’s Prometeo vencedor, Mário de Andrade’s oratorio, or Oswald de Andrade’s O homem e o cavalo, it is impossible to stage it. This is particularly problematic when she cites parallels in what she, via Martin Puchner, terms the “closet-dramas” of Stéphane Mallarmé and Gertrude Stein. Stein’s works, for instance, have been successfully produced by both the Living Theatre and Robert Wilson, among others, and, while Mário de Andrade’s oratorio is certainly over the top, there are numerous instances of teatro de masas performances in Mexican history, from the Franciscan mendicant theater’s Conquest of Rhodes and Conquest of Jerusalem to Efrén Orozco Rosales’s plays Liberación (Liberation), El mensajero del sol (The Messenger of the Sun), and La bandera nacional (The National Flag), which were performed by up to four thousand actors in gigantic open-air productions in both the sixteenth and the twentieth centuries. It is also peculiar that a book treating the avant-garde comments on radio’s ability to produce sound as “heir to a tradition that locates the voice at the origin of ideality, prior to writing or even the advent of language” (105) but overlooks the connection to Antonin Artaud’s (1958) essay “Metaphysics and the Mise en Scène.”Townsend concludes by mentioning present-day echoes of political and social events from the 1920s and 1930s in Mexico and Brazil while stressing the necessity of pulling back “on the sense of futurity so often associated with the avant-garde and insist[ing] that it is equally tied to the experience of backwardness, dependency, and uneven development” (249). In this sense Townsend’s book continues the avant-garde tradition of resistance and contestation while recognizing Bertolt Brecht’s fundamental formulation of a theater that illuminates contradictions yet refuses to supply resolution. In its irresolution The Art of Unfinished Theater demonstrates the nature of the avant-garde.

  PublisherDOI

• Kinesthetic Spectatorship in the Theatre: Phenomenology, Cognition, Movement By Stanton B. Garner Jr. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018; pp. xii+ 277. $99.99 cloth, $29.99 paper, $19.99 e-book.

  Theatre Survey · 2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Cognitive science
  • Art history

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• Sovereign Acts: Performing Race, Space, and Belonging in Panama and the Canal Zone, by Katherine A. Zien

  New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids · 2019-06-07

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Social Critique and Theatrical Power in the Plays of Isidora Aguirre

  Indiana University Press eBooks · 2018-01-30

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Theatrical translation/theatrical production

  2017-07-06

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  The theatrical translator must be sensitive to and convey the dramatic structure of the play as well as allow for subsequent approaches to the mise en scene in production. The theatrical translation issue at the forefront of Downstream is Ramon Griffero’s extensive use of music throughout the play and how it connects to issues of memory and sphericality in the play. In The Dramaturgy of Space, Griffero posits that human society conceives of space primarily in terms of squares and rectangles, but that those forms do not occur naturally in the non-human environment. The politics of The Dramaturgy of Space turns to the creative power of the theatre as a site for an ontological rebirth that moves beyond spoken discourse to enable people to discover ourselves. The process of theatrical translation enables them to experience that creative power of the theatre through pre-texts for performance.

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• Kinesis as Mimesis: On the Application of Martial Arts to Dramaturgical Practice

  Theatre topics · 2014-09-01 · 2 citations

  articleSenior author
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• The dissemination of theatrical translation

  2014-07-30

  article1st authorCorresponding
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Frequent coauthors

• Sabina Berman

  1 shared

• Carlos Martín

  Hospital Universitari de Girona Doctor Josep Trueta

  1 shared

• Michael M. Chemers

  1 shared

• Ryan Long

  1 shared

• George Woodyard

  1 shared

• Yolanda Broyles‐González

  1 shared

• Donald L. Shaw

  1 shared

• Camilla Stevens

  1 shared