Near the end of his solo piece The Myopia, an epic burlesque of tragic proportion, prominent playwright and performer David Greenspan presents a pair of scenes in which he investigates, from a queer perspective, the question of time in the theatre. In the spirit of The Myopia's own temporally disruptive mechanics, I will describe the second scene first: an Orator and his Doppelganger, who “bears a striking resemblance to the actress Carol Channing,” have a conversation in which they explain to the audience that the overlong fourth act, in whose stead they appear, has been cut from the play. The Doppelganger, who is particularly concerned with keeping good time (and whose “striking resemblance” to Channing is camped in performance as an uncostumed Greenspan does an uncanny vocal impersonation of the actress), looks impatiently at her wrist—as if at a watch—and says that audiences will put up with “telling” in the theatre, as distinct from “showing,” only if the telling is “not too long. People—who of course apprehend words by either reading or listening—might be willing to sit a long time apprehending words by reading but might not be willing to sit a long time apprehending words by listening. Even if they're simultaneously seeing.” Here the Doppelganger, like the Orator, speaks in rhythms explicitly modeled on those of Gertrude Stein, whose essay “Plays” is invoked earlier in the scene. Likewise concerned with the pacing of showing and telling and the phenomenology of audience responses to that pacing, Stein complains famously in “Plays” of theatre's “syncopated time,” its inability to produce an identity between “the emotional time of the play” and spectators' “emotional time as audience.” Stein's own plays do not exactly solve the problem of syncopated time but rather attempt to circumvent the problem altogether by rejecting the theatrical apparatus that, in her view, produces syncopation—that is, “by blurring beyond recognition the distinctions among dialogue, didascalia, and other diegetic language that seems to belong to the province of neither dialogue nor didascalia.”

The East German poet-clowns Hans-Eckardt Wenzel and Steffen Mensching rose to prominence during the GDR's (German Democratic Republic; Deutsche Demokratische Republik, DDR) Peaceful Revolution of autumn 1989 with their cabaret production Letztes aus der Da Da eR. A film adaptation of the production was made by Jörg Foth in 1990, which was finally released on DVD with English subtitles in the United Kingdom and North America in 2009 (Latest from the Da-Da-R). In light of this long-overdue interest in Wenzel & Mensching, this article will attempt to put the work of the duo in historical and aesthetic context. Their use of character, masks, music, and philosophy combined to create the distinctly grotesque world that constituted their Liedertheater performances.

Judging from the number of its theatrical adaptations and the countries in which it was adapted, Anna Bonacci's L'ora della fantasia (The Fantasy Hour) was indeed “the most successful Italian comedy of the postwar era.” After its 1944 premiere in Rome, the play was performed again in Geneva in 1949 and in Paris in 1953 under the title L'Heure éblouissante (The Dazzling Hour). The enormous success the play received in Switzerland and France opened the way in the 1950s to numerous stagings worldwide, from Lisbon and Stockholm to Amsterdam and Mexico City. L'ora della fantasia has also been adapted for other media, including a musical, a film, and a television film. In fact, one of its film adaptations, Billy Wilder's 1964 Kiss Me, Stupid, has proved to be so well known that Bonacci's comedy is now often presented on the Italian stage as Baciami stupido!, and is sometimes even set in Climax, Nevada, the location Wilder used in his film.

Soon after he was consecrated bishop in 963, Æthelwold of Winchester (909–84) began to promulgate a series of new rules for worship and religious life in the monasteries of England. In one passage that is well known to theatre historians, Æthelwold insisted on the following performance of the Easter morning liturgy.

When Samuel Pepys heard Nell Gwyn and Elizabeth Knipp deliver the prologue to Robert Howard's The Duke of Lerma, he recorded the experience in his diary: “Knepp and Nell spoke the prologue most excellently, especially Knepp, who spoke beyond any creature I ever heard.” By 20 February 1668, when Pepys noted his thoughts, he had known Knipp personally for two years, much to the chagrin of his wife. He had met Knipp backstage and in the audience of the two playhouses. He knew her family and they shared a social circle; he had sung with her in domestic and social settings. Pepys had had much experience of Elizabeth Knipp's quotidian language and conversational mode of speech. The prologue, which offered the not-yet-in-role Nell Gwyn and the costumed Mrs. Knipp preparing for the play, begins in prose before breaking into bouncing rhyme to end more conventionally. Mrs. Knipp might seem to appear here as herself, yet Pepys eulogizes Knipp's speaking of the prologue as a theatrical experience. He does not compare her onstage performance of apparently natural speech to quotidian conversation nor does he talk of her acting. Rather, he judges it as an oratorical performance against other stage performances: she “spoke beyond any creature I ever heard.” This article explores what the performance of the prologues and epilogues in the newly established duopoly of Restoration London theatres can reveal about how performers were known and represented, and what they tell us about the increasing individuation of those performers and the implications of this for acting and acting style.

In his commendatory poem from the First Folio, Ben Jonson asserted that Shakespeare “was not of an age, but for all time.” This has proved true, and Shakespeare has been able to speak to many succeeding generations of readers and theatregoers. This, however, is not because essential, unchangeable, and universal truths about human nature, the world, and experience lay hidden in his plays or his characters but (quite the opposite) because succeeding generations, over the centuries, have been able to appropriate, exploit, and reuse Shakespeare to make sense of their world and their lives. Shakespeare is for all time precisely because he has relentlessly changed over time. The author and his texts have been unceasingly reinvented, and a virtually infinite number of “alternative Shakespeares” has come to embody specific contemporary issues and conflicts. As Jean Marsden put it in 1991, Shakespeare is the object of “an ongoing process of literary and cultural appropriation in which each new generation attempts to redefine Shakespeare's genius in contemporary terms, projecting its desires and anxieties onto his work.” This is true for both the “dramatic” Shakespeare and the “theatrical” Shakespeare: Shakespeare's plays have been as tirelessly reinterpreted on the page by scholars (and others) as they have been reinvented on the stage by actors and directors. The fate of King Richard III, however, is peculiar from this point of view, insofar as an often-denigrated Restoration revision of Shakespeare's play totally replaced the “original” one in the theatre and held the stage for nearly 200 years. This peculiarity acquires interesting overtones when we look at the treatment the staged play received at the hands of the Romantics, who, in spite of the bardolatry prevailing at the time and their often-vented disesteem for the adapted version, apparently missed their opportunity to make Shakespeare's original play speak for their own time.

William Ewart Gladstone, four times prime minister (1868–74, 1880–5, 1886, and 1892–94), the “greatest colossus of the Victorian Age,” the most influential prime minister of the nineteenth century, and the Grand Old Man (G.O.M.) of British politics and statesmanship, seems an unlikely advocate for the theatre. Deeply religious, conservative, and serious, Gladstone is not easily imagined as an avid theatregoer. It is difficult to imagine him supporting the ephemeral, often subversive, and suggestive character of the theatre. And indeed, in his early years Gladstone despised the theatre and called it an “encouragement of sin.” As prime minister, he was almost obsessed by a religious zeal; Richard Foulkes has noted that “Few, if any, prime ministers have carried out their role in making senior Church appointments as assiduously as Gladstone did.” For members of Victorian Britain's Christian majority, the theatre was anathema and regarded as morally suspect. They were intensely suspicious and saw playgoing as a distraction from religion and as a promoter of frivolity, vanity, and female forwardness. They linked theatres to “prostitution, juvenile delinquency, idleness, drunkenness and frivolity.” In fact, theatres were the “antithesis of the Victorian world view which prized respectability, gentility, decency, education and uplift.” Until at least the later decades of the nineteenth century, theatre “was widely regarded as the lowliest of the arts, if one at all.”

Geography has been accorded surprisingly little attention in the study of world theatre history. Maps are by no means the sum total of geographic knowledge, but their existence (or the lack thereof) provides a handy indicator of an author's interest in the subject. Oscar G. Brockett and Franklin J. Hildy's History of Theatre has numerous pictures of actors and diagrams of theatres but only one map that directly pertains to theatre. All the rest of its maps (of which there are fewer than two dozen) are standard-issue political maps. Theatre Histories: An Introduction, by Phillip B. Zarrilli and others, is groundbreaking in many ways, but it includes only six maps, and none of these directly concerns theatre. Each of the six volumes of The World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre includes only one map, a basic political one. Other standard reference works on the history of theatre contain no maps; these include The Cambridge Guide to Theatre, The Oxford Companion to the Theatre, and The Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre and Performance. Numerous types of map might be relevant for a study of theatre, but aside from the occasional political map, the basic overviews of theatre history do not include such resources.

Music theatre scholarship, and indeed theatre history research in general, can be accurately described as a subset of media studies. As much as we might claim the contrary to our theatre students, theatre scholarship is not, by and large, the study of live performance but is instead an analysis of our own reconstructions built from the traces theatrical events leave behind. We study not moments but materials, not what was live but rather what was left. Increasingly, these leavings are likely to be digital. Much has been written of late about the current and imminent challenges these “born digital” materials pose for librarians and archivists, and many are now developing processes and procedures for preserving and providing access to them. Relatively little published scholarship has been done using these archives, however, so the emerging practices have yet to be thoroughly tested by researchers.1 In this article I narrate my experiences using the born-digital artifacts in the Jonathan Larson collection at the Library of Congress in an effort to provide an example of one form this sort of scholarship might take.

I want to preface this brief piece by declaring from the outset that the title is not ironic and does not intend to sport with our or another's misfortune. In spite of its brutality, it has proved, in the end, a pleasant recession. By the time this article goes to press, we will be advertising two new faculty lines in the Ph.D. program at the University of Washington. When this edition of Theatre Survey comes out, we will be interviewing candidates. Two years after the budget crisis first hit and we lost half of our doctoral faculty in one month, we will have emerged stronger than ever, with a wider, deeper, more rigorous program with far more partners and opportunities than we ever could have imagined. By the time this issue arrives, the hard times will not likely have ended, but they most certainly will have improved us.

It is no secret, unhappily, that the study of theatre in the colleges and universities of this country is a discipline under siege, but the severity of the problems received strong confirmation in New York State this fall when two of the most distinguished and long-established (over a century in both cases) programs in the country were, with little warning, faced with draconian cuts or outright extinction. The fact that one, the state University of Albany, was the flagship school of the public system, and the other, Cornell University, was one of the state's most distinguished private institutions, suggests the scope and impact of these actions. At Albany, four other programs are being terminated along with theatre—Classics, Russian, Spanish, and French—while at Cornell the extent of the severe cuts imposed on the theatre program—almost a quarter of the total budget of the department (which also shelters dance and film)—are being suffered by no other program in the university. The prominence of these two schools in a state that has long claimed a central position in American theatre makes them particularly significant symbolically of a discipline in crisis, and this has impelled me to engage in serious and sometimes painful reflections on that discipline, the basis of the present essay.

A lovely stream flows through the campus at UC Davis. While it is widely believed to be filled with dangerous agrochemical runoff, this stream offers an idyllic place for students, staff, and faculty to stroll or sunbathe. One day toward the end of the spring quarter of 2010, a young man stood in that beautiful but toxic water, protected by hip-high waders. He wore a cowboy hat and overalls and looked like a character from the 1849 Gold Rush. With a pan in his hands, he called out to passersby to watch as he demonstrated his solution to student financial problems. A sign planted in the ground near him said: gold: the tuition solution. He cried out to passersby, “It's an old California tradition, and it's the only way I can pay for school!” He had several gold-painted rocks to prove that one could still strike it rich, and he offered them to passersby. As a small crowd gathered around to observe this Swiftian “modest proposal,” he made his point about the desperate situation students have found themselves in at the University of California.

Rather than negotiate first with protesting and then striking students, the administration of the University of Puerto Rico (UPR) shut down its flagship Río Piedras Campus from 21 April to 6 July 2010. Regular academic activity on the campus came to a standstill, and as a consequence the semester programmed to end in mid-May could not be finished until mid-August. Yet in those seventy-plus days of closure (cierre) a poignantly expressive culture of resistance took shape out of the continuous tension among the striking students who occupied the campus, the remote administration that refused to respond to their issues, the heavily armed state police officers who were stationed just outside the campus's gates, and the crowds of professors, nonteaching personnel, parents, and student supporters who gathered daily to urge the administration to open a dialogue with the students. Along with independent radio broadcasts, the skillful use of cyberspace, celebrity concerts, and other strategies to capture public and media attention, the protest movement also fostered the spectacle of mass rallies and marches that featured acts of performance and theatre. If the university's theatres were dark, the streets that surround the campus became the stages for seminude, placard-carrying bodies moving serpentine through crowds; stilt-walking masked portrayals of local politicians and university administrators; large, painted-cardboard dragons and wolf heads to stare down police officers; a twenty-foot-tall puppet whose shirt front read “the university is not for sale” (“La UPR no se vende”); processions of black coffins accompanied by black-clad lloronas (mourners); and red-nosed, broom-carrying clowns decked out in tactical police gear to parade comically in front of the heavily armed and real tactical forces.