It was my first ASTR conference, a gathering on “Popular Entertainment” held over two decades ago in New York City, and every time my tweed-clad, bearded husband and I neared the conference arena, he was mistaken for the ASTR member. Determined to prove myself a scholar through my performance if not my looks, I strode into the dimmed conference auditorium, sat near the front, and listened intently to the chair of the next panel as he announced that, “unfortunately,” the aging vaudeville star scheduled to perform the fan dance for us had fallen ill. While I tried to process that information, a leotard-covered American Ballet Theatre replacement glided onto the stage, fan in hand. I was transfixed. I knew I was inexperienced—I had only attended two other theatre conferences—but was this really happening? At my first theatre conference prior to ASTR's—an inexplicably weeklong sojourn dedicated to Sarah Bernhardt—I had watched the aging French diva stomp around in an early silent movie as an independent collector slavered over “Sar-aah's divine ah-rt” and Laurence Senelick offered me a simultaneous (and inimitable) sotto voce commentary. At my second conference, I had found myself engaged in a group sing-along of a nineteenth-century barroom ditty and had encountered my still-favorite opening line: “Canadian provincial theatre is an almost virgin field.”

David Krasner: In surveying contemporary London theatre, New York Times critic Ben Brantley reported that the Tricycle Theatre had

inaugurated a season of African-American plays with the commandingly titled but obscure Walk Hard, Talk Loud, a play by Abram Hill from the early1940's. Abram who? The name meant nothing to me, but Abram Hill (1910–1986) was a founder and director of the American Negro Theater in New York (1940–1951) and a playwright, it seems, of considerable verve.3

That Abram Hill and the American Negro Theatre—the most important black theatre company during the mid-twentieth century—has flown below the radar is indicative of how much work still needs to be accomplished.

African artists cannot and do not choose their subject matter, says critic Tejumola Olaniyan. “They are, on the contrary, chosen by their subjects.” While that liberates artists from the “heavy burden of a head-scratching search for what on earth to create their art about,” Olaniyan observes, it also imposes “the much heavier burden of how on earth to fashion from that surfeit of ‘what’ an imaginative sublimation worthy of the label ‘art.’ This has been the contemporary African artist's greatest challenge, more so than artists in other climes.”1

In October 2004, I edited Theatre Journal's special issue on Latin American theatre. In addition to five essays on subjects ranging from sixteenth-century Amerindian performance to a twenty-first-century Mexican adaptation of an Irish play, that issue included a forum on the state of Latin American theatre and performance studies in the United States today. Even though the thirteen respondents resided, independently or as affiliates, in different disciplinary homes (theatre, performance, languages, and literature) and took multiple points of departure, a common thread ran throughout their comments: the need for the U.S. academy to study and teach the diversity that is known as Latin America.1 Tamara Underiner succinctly notes that “Latin America has never answered easily as an object of inquiry for theatre studies.”2 Indeed, studying Latin American theatre and performance poses very specific challenges: the region encompasses some twenty countries whose national borders obscure larger geographical, cultural, religious, political, and socioeconomic networks; a multiplicity of languages—European, dialectal, and indigenous to the hemisphere—are still spoken, written, and performed; and numerous intersecting histories extend back far beyond the five hundred years since the Europeans arrived and precipitated what today we euphemistically refer to as “contact.” Latin America does not terminate at the U.S.–Mexican border; thus although I'm cognizant of the attendant complications when including the U.S. latino/a communities in a discussion of Latin American theatre, the cultural network is such that I consider any arbitrary separation counter to the purposes of this reflection. Otherwise, how can we take into account the larger networks navigated by such U.S.-based playwrights as Guillermo Reyes (born in Chile but raised in the United States and the author of plays about Chilean history as well as specifically U.S. identities) or Ariel Dorfman (born in Argentina, raised in New York City and Santiago, Chile, now a professor at Duke, and author of English-language plays whose subject matter is frequently authoritarian Latin America)?

Being asked to write about the state of Asian theatre in the American academy makes me feel a little like Jean Genet explaining the origin of his play The Blacks: “One evening, an actor asked me to write a play for an all-black cast. But what exactly is a black? First of all, what's his color?”

In retrospect, that Roland Barthes's insistence on “the death of the author” should have provoked an emergent interest in theatre audiences is hardly surprising. As, in literary studies, this brought about a new privilege for and investment in the reader, so too, in theatre and performance studies, there was an explicit recognition that what went on in the theatre was qualitatively and quantitatively more complicated and more exciting than the study of the playtext in the classroom. At the same time, the move to challenge a universalized (and thus male) viewing subject created new readings of the audience and new understandings of both individual and collective spectatorship across a range of subjectivities. So, Jill Dolan could argue that the “feminist spectator viewing such a representation is necessarily in the outsider's critical position.” Dolan continued:

She cannot find a comfortable way into the representation, since she finds herself, as a woman (and even more so, as a member of the working class, a lesbian, or a woman of color), excluded from its address. She sees in the performance frame representatives of her gender class with whom she might identify—if women are represented at all—acting passively before the specter of male authority.1

In the February 2005 issue of American Theatre, Ben Cameron considered impending season selection at theatres across the country and noted, “There are no magic bullets. God knows, I wish there were—especially in these times. … Even in the face of critical raves, standing ovations and a true sense of artistic pride, many have still fallen short of attendance goals.”2 Cameron explored a range of possible solutions to dwindling audiences: a season with no classics, or perhaps only classics; maybe opera, or A Christmas Carol, or the ever-popular Waiting for Godot. Indeed, the need to build audiences haunts most contemporary practitioners as we struggle to reestablish the place of theatre in the midst of its media sisters. It is a global issue, as noted in a column by Bhaskar Ghose in Frontline, a national Indian magazine: “Theatre needs to recapture its participative quality and density of human experience in order to woo the audience back from television and films. …”3 How then, do we build the base?

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 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.

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 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

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.

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.

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.