Any discussion of ancient Greek and Roman drama on the contemporary stage must begin with a brief acknowledgment of both the radically increased worldwide interest in translating, (often radically) revising, and performing these plays in the past thirty-five years and the growing scholarly response to that development. Electronic resources are developing to record not only recent but many more past performances, from the Renaissance to the present.1 A group of scholars at the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama at Oxford—Edith Hall, Fiona Macintosh, Oliver Taplin, and their associates Pantelis Michelakis and Amanda Wrigley—are at the forefront, along with Lorna Hardwick and her associates at the U.K.'s Open University, in organizing conferences and lecture series; these have already resulted in several volumes that aim to understand the recent explosion of performances as well as to develop a more extensive picture of earlier reception of Greek and Roman drama (above all, Greek tragedy, to which this essay will be largely confined).2 These scholars, along with others, have also tried to confront conceptual issues involved in the theatrical reception of classical texts.3 Most earlier work has confined itself to studies of individual performances and adaptations or to significant directors and playwrights; an important and exemplary exception is Hall and Macintosh's recent Greek Tragedy and British Theatre 1660–1914.4 This massive study profits from an unusually advantageous set of archival materials preserved in part due to official efforts to censor works presented on the British stage. Oedipus Rex, for example, was not licensed for a professional production until 1910 due to its scandalous incest theme. This study makes a particular effort to locate performances in their social and historical contexts, a goal shared by other recent studies of postcolonial reception discussed below.5 For example, British Medeas, which repeatedly responded to controversies over the legal and political status of women, always represented the heroine's choice to kill her children as forced on her from the outside rather than as an autonomous choice. Such connections between the performance of Greek tragedy and historical feminism have proved significant in many later contexts worldwide. Work on the aesthetic side of performances of Greek drama, including translation, is at an earlier stage, but has begun to take advantage of important recent work on ancient staging, acting, and performance space.6

In the fall of 2000, to honor Arthur Miller's eighty-fifth birthday, the University of Michigan sponsored an international symposium on the playwright's work, and Enoch Brater has now edited a volume based on selected presentations from that event. In plain terms, the book includes Brater's chronicle of Miller's days at the university, playwright Frank Gagliano's thoughts on adapting Timebends for the stage, Toby Zinman's interview with actor Patrick Stewart on playing Lyman Felt in The Ride Down Mt. Morgan, Brater's interviews with composer William C. Bolcom on his opera version of A View from the Bridge and with Miller himself via satellite hookup, an afterword by critic Mel Gussow, and fourteen scholarly essays that form the body of the volume.

Sam Staggs's When Blanche Met Brando may not be the most scholarly commentary on Tennessee Williams, but it is certainly informative. Aiming “to synthesize, as no previous writer has, the first-hand accounts of those who were there” (xii) for both the 1947 Broadway premiere of A Streetcar Named Desire and its 1951 film, as well as subsequent revivals, Staggs succeeds at revealing the gulf between myth and fact, between play and production. By illuminating its twisted path of accidents from genesis to premiere to “classic,” Staggs reminds us that Streetcar by no means was destined to take on the form in which we now know it.

In Book 3 of Plato's Republic, Socrates refers to the beginning of the Iliad in order to take Homer to task for switching from a purely narrative voice to actually “speaking” in the voice of a character—the Trojan priest Chryses—who is attempting to get Agamemnon to return his daughter. Socrates then demonstrates in his own third-person narrative of that same story how it could have been told without the imitation provided by the priest's speech. Socrates also makes the point that it is in tragic drama where the opposite condition obtains: tragic drama is comprised entirely of direct, imitative speech instead of a distanced, third-person narration. The distinction being made between diegesis (narrative) and mimesis (imitation) marks the beginning of the concept of theatricality, a concept still hotly debated today. Interestingly enough, as is often the case with concepts, it is born in a negative fashion, from antitheatrical criticism.

I am happy to take up this request to speak to the state of the field of performance studies, though I will be arguing here against the felicity of such a project. Performance studies, to my mind, is less “a thing done” than a set of questions asked, and the more performance studies keeps on the slip, remains diffuse, and resists congealing within delimited boundaries, the greater service it provides to our collective inquiries in the academy. This may be, oddly and even disturbingly, to argue for performance studies’ hollowness, its (in)capacity, its necessary infelicity—even, dare I suggest, its theatricality.

Here's a familiar story: a white director produces a play with black and Middle Eastern characters. Director decides to cast white actors in those roles, controversy ensues. To American readers of Ethnic Drag, this controversy will seem so routine as to be nearly unremarkable. What makes this rendition of the story interesting is that it takes place not in the United States, but in Germany.

Loren Kruger's Post-Imperial Brecht: Politics and Performance, East and South is an impressive transnational study of Brechtian theatre that is notable for its simultaneous breadth and depth. Kruger takes us far beyond nationalist frameworks, which have long dominated theatre studies. She also avoids the common pitfalls of “global” and comparative studies: sweeping generalizations that flatten historical specificity are not to be found in this book's 400 richly footnoted pages. Post-Imperial Brecht provides a precise and detailed study of the transnational flow of Brecht's ideas and plays between West and East Germany, and between Germany and South Africa, from the 1930s to the present.

As a performance scholar and music lover, I find it strange that the fields of theatre and performance studies historically have been reluctant to engage with musical performance. Even as theatrical a musical form as opera is generally excluded from the history of theatre, on the grounds that “the predominant force in opera was the music rather than the words,” as Vera Mowry Roberts, my theatre history professor, puts the case.1 Roberts points to the nonliterary character of music as the reason for the exclusion; I speculate that the perception of music not only as nonliterary but, more broadly, as nonmimetic may seem to place it outside the realm of theatrical representation. While performance-oriented scholars spurn music, music-oriented scholars generally spurn performance. Traditional musicologists remain focused on the textual dimensions of musical compositions, whereas scholars who look at music from the perspective of cultural studies are generally more concerned with audience and reception than with the actual performance behavior of musicians.

The anthology African Drama and Performance, edited by John Conteh-Morgan and Tejumola Olaniyan, brings together a body of critical essays on the corporeal and discursive aspects of African drama and theatre remarkable for its encyclopedic scope and intellectual rigor. The work, stewarded by two of the most erudite and industrious scholars in the field, is a book-length version of a highly successful special edition of Research in African Literature.

The recent rubs and resistances within the various flows of religious thought and practice in American culture and politics have become near clichés. The impact of right-wing religions on government and cultural policies has been well noted, as have the concomitant attempts to keep religion of all kinds out of politics entirely. Meanwhile, the problematic status of Islam both locally and globally has become a continuous topic of debate, as have the debates over creationism and so-called intelligent design in American schools. These high-profile debates have in turn eclipsed the suspicions of academic leftist thought regarding religious questions of any sort, and this has in turn resulted in an entrenchment of theory—especially political theory—into a kind of religiosity of its own, while various forms of revivalism have signaled the mutation of faith into dogma, most recently the dogma of moderation. Each of these issues, apart from its intrinsic importance and currency, speaks to the practice of religion as a fundamentally philosophical problem of appearances that continues to emerge as a first cause of politics and of culture. The status of religion as a uniquely performative issue will, I think, occupy theorists over the coming years. Indeed, I suggest here that the thinking through of religion and spirituality will necessarily take place along the ontologic fault lines not just of performance but of theatre itself, and will come to delineate the important differences between performance and theatre. Finally, the reappraisal of religion as an ontologically charged theatricality will move into areas far afield from normative spirituality: cyberreligions and technoshamanism, chaos magic and the new alchemies, rave culture and other varieties of hyperinduced trance states.1 Although the focus in these newer forms of performance is almost exclusively on music, sound, and movement, the ultimate goal is the created intensity of a shared performative experience framed by theatrical perception: Artaud is the genius cited by nearly all of the authors of these phenomena. One larger suggestion here, in fact, is the moribund state of current theory, which sees dance culture (techno, hip-hop, electronica, rave), when it sees it at all, almost exclusively in cultural and political terms, ignoring the ecstatic, trance, and transformative aspects of DJ culture at large.2

The subject of medieval performance has recently come under the scrutiny of scholars from several disciplines—history, art history, religious studies, anthropology, and literature, to name but a few. In the process, “performance” has come to be used rather loosely to signify a number of different concepts. Evelyn Birge Vitz, Nancy Freeman Regalado, and Marilyn Lawrence—the editors of Performing Medieval Narrative—attend to a particular aspect of performance that they define as the confluence of four essential characteristics: the presence of a performer; the action of telling or enacting; a story being told or enacted; and, finally, and most important for the book, the presence of an audience. The volume is broken into four parts, each addressing different aspects of the performance traditions that form an integral part of medieval narratives.

My understanding of the avant-garde—and the state of avant-garde studies—was cast in stark relief by the social, political, military, and legal events that coincided with the period during which I was revising the manuscript of my first book. What those events were is no surprise: 9/11 and its various aftermaths. Many of this journal's readers have experienced a similar shift in perspective on their work—be it ethical, epistemological, or archival—leading them to reassess both their scholarly subjects and their methods in the face of what may well be a profound reconfiguration of power and knowledge.

As it affected the performing arts community, the Red Scare has been examined in great detail.1 Taken together, these studies make clear that external political forces influence the hiring decisions of performing-arts organizations. From the 1930s to the 1950s figures affiliated with left-wing causes and groups found their careers stifled either temporarily or permanently because of their political beliefs. Although attention has focused primarily on institutional pressures from outside the industry on leftist artists, we describe an instance of pressure from within the industry on an artist whose politics were isolationist rather than progressive. In this research note, we present the case of Lillian Gish, describing how interventionists pressured her to distance herself from the isolationism that she had publicly embraced in the period immediately prior to the entrance of the United States in World War II. The attack on those described as “Nazi sympathizers” and their isolationist brethren during 1940–4 has come to be described as the “Brown Scare,”2 playing off the more widely known “Red Scares” of 1919–20 and 1947–54.

This is an unusual but good and sensible book. I write that it is unusual because The Idea of the Theater in Latin Christian Thought does not follow the predictable pattern of looking at the “materiality of medieval theater practices and historiography” (2). It instead looks at theatre as it appears in medieval thought and as “moments in European intellectual history” (4). Dox leads the reader through a thorough and erudite survey of the writings of some of the Latin Christian authors. She begins with Saint Augustine of Hippo and ends with Bartholomew of Bruges. The text has three major goals. First, the author examines what different postclassical, Christian authors knew about or thought of Greco-Roman theatre as a function of written discourse. The second goal is to keep the discussion of the late-antique and medieval understanding of ancient classical theatre in the intellectual contexts in which the texts were used. Lastly, Latin Christian views on classical theatre are examined in detail. The conclusion of this analysis demonstrates that the idea of “truth” as different from “falsehood” in the writings by the Latin Christian authors was the focus of their texts, rather than any actual interest in classical tragedy and comedy as genres in their own right.

The previously available edition of this important source of evidence that documents scenic practice in the public theatres of seventeenth-century France was prepared by Henry Carrington Lancaster in 1920 as Le Mémoire de Mahelot, Laurent et d'autres décorateurs de l'Hôtel de Bourgogne et de la Comédie Française au XVIIesiècle. If only for supplanting Lancaster's with one that will be more widely available for purchase and consultation, Pierre Pasquier's new critical edition would be an excellent resource for theatre scholarship, continuing the transmission of documentary evidence and disciplinary knowledge to future generations. However, in the eighty-six years since Lancaster's edition, the discoveries, methods, and aims of theatre scholarship have changed dramatically, and Pasquier's significant introduction, which encompasses more pages than the presentation of the Mémoire itself, is also an excellent contextual synthesis of historical work that relies on this vital manuscript (BNF, ms. 24330).

Documentation is usually lacking for the process of conception of performances, whether text-based or not. Because of the nature of English pantomime as a genre, the origins of its productions tend to be particularly obscure. The form is known chiefly through elaborate advertisements in eighteenth-century newspapers, but comparatively few scenarios were ever published. Fragmentary music and some illustrations survive, but they are usually not easy to connect with a particular story. We seldom know much about what actually happened onstage and even less about how decisions concerning content were made. Almost all evidence derives from sketchy reports of performance, not from textual evidence at the draft stage. Ironic as the use of texts in regard to a non-text-based performance may be, a manuscript in the British Library offers us the opportunity of following along as a major exponent of the form created an outline proposal for a pantomime.

The combination of Shakespeare and American Studies has recently proven to be fertile ground for scholarly inquiry. In Shakespeare and the American Nation, Kim C. Sturgess shows that the subject has not yet been exhausted. Following the work of Lawrence Levine's Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988) and Michael D. Bristol's Shakespeare's America, America's Shakespeare (New York: Routledge, 1990), Sturgess's intriguing book examines how nationalistic appropriations of Shakespeare accorded him the status of a hero in American culture in a climate of strong anti-British sentiment.

Most of the books I'm reading don't have covers yet. Bearing that in mind as the membership anticipates the 2006 ASTR conference and a lively discussion of its eponymous keywords—America, society, theatre, and research—I thought that it might be useful to profile a few of the manuscripts (among those currently on, around, or under my desk) that speak to the trends suggested by some new approaches to these familiar terms. By offering one reader's preview of how the field will look when these forthcoming books are duly bound and distributed (and some of them may be out in time for the conference), I'm hoping to insinuate the underappreciated art of the blurb into the more exalted practice of augury.

John McCormick's delightful book The Victorian Marionette Theatre is at once a labor of love, a comprehensive history of a popular art form, an insider's description of the craft by a longtime practitioner, and a nostalgic reminiscence of a nearly forgotten aspect of the Victorian theatre. For all that, the book has an authoritative point of view and a cohesive unity establishing it as one of the most important sources of its kind, complementing George Speaight's more wide-ranging, classic treatment of the subject, The History of the English Puppet Theatre (London: G. G. Harrap, 1955; 2d ed., Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990) and McCormick's own companion study, coauthored with Bennie Pratasik, Popular Puppet Theatre in Europe, 1800–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Those three works anchor a shelf of studies of a major cultural phenomenon.