If a model haunts my inauguration of “Critical Stages,” then it is the “Forum on Theatre and Tragedy in the Wake of September 11, 2001” that David Román commissioned for the March 2002 issue of Theatre Journal. Yet there would be little room in that important historical document for what I have to say here. Though I greatly admire Román for commissioning that forum and am still profoundly moved by the thoughts of its twenty-seven contributors, I must ask how much more significant that forum would have been had the original commission focused on “Theatre and Politics” rather than “Theatre and Tragedy.” Would Diana Taylor's suggestion that the events of 9/11 have given us “a different kind of tragedy” have been a suggestion that 9/11 has given us a different kind of political theatre? What is that theatre? Is it even progressive? At the very least, a more direct focus on theatre and politics in the forum might have constituted a reply to the debate among theatre practitioners (particularly those in the United States) about the role of theatre in the politics of a post-9/11 world. As Marvin Carlson has pointed out, those debates initially centered on whether, in one fell swoop, historical forces had cowed political theatre into voluntary silence if not obsolescence. Five years later, what he describes as a retreat “from any consideration of an engaged theatre”—a retreat that ran the gamut from the “commercial theatre of Broadway” to “New York's most experimental and uncommercial ventures”—casts a shadow out of which we have yet to emerge.

This history of the American Society for Theatre Research is written on the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary and focuses chiefly on the years from 1981 to 2006, but with an overview of ASTR's first twenty-five years as a necessary prologue. A scholarly organization changing in response to complex cultural dynamics, ASTR is very different today from the society of 1956 and the society of 1981.

Usual stuff, more or less, only inside out. That is the condition under which Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern labor, a condition in which all the world's a backstage. Taking Shakespeare's Hamlet as the “supposed to happen,” as a kind of imaginary promptbook, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead reverses theatrical perspectives to show the lives of its not-so-lead characters “off.” In one sense Stoppard's play blunts the purpose of its dramatic forebear by not keeping to the usual stuff, but then it also highlights the various regions, conversations, and actions of an offstage world that Hamlet, like most other drama, must always take for granted.

In The Semiotics of Performance, Marco de Marinis notes that the field of performance studies has greatly expanded the traditional categories of drama and theatre. “It is obvious,” he writes, “that we are dealing with a field that is far broader and more varied than the category consisting exclusively of traditional stagings of dramatic texts, to which some scholars still restrict the class of theatrical performances.” A few scholars of early theatre history have embraced expanded categories of performance. Jody Enders's “medieval theater of cruelty,” for example, rests on a concept of “a theory of virtual performance” that translates “into actual medieval dramatic practice.” Carol Symes's study of the “dramatic activity” suggested by medieval French manuscripts identifies “a vital performative element within the surrounding culture.” Both writers have shown how new ideas of performance enlarge the category beyond the “traditional stagings” described by de Marinis.

In the late medieval morality play Everyman, the character Death makes a grand entrance on stage only to be met with utter misrecognition and incomprehension. When Death explains that he is here to take Everyman on a “longe iourney” to make his “rekenynge … before God,” Everyman's incomprehension is humorous even as it reveals him to be deeply unready for Death's summons: he asks Death, “Sholde I not come agayne shortly?” Everyman's inability to recognize the permanence of Death's “journey” raises the question for the audience of what might constitute such a recognition. Depicting death as a presence initially inscrutable to its central character, Everyman asks what it means to make our own mortality present to us, to recognize our finitude, and to remember that we must die. The play presents a surprisingly circuitous answer to that question, first providing a sustained investigation into how one learns the meaning of a word, and then concluding that individual understandings of words, concepts, and mortality emerge through the interpersonal relations and communal rituals that reveal and guarantee their meanings. Through its focus on the interrelational dimensions of penance, the play emphasizes the impact of community on the formation of Everyman's self-understanding. By showing penance in performance, Everyman reveals penance itself to be performative, dynamic, and capable of changing Everyman's understanding of both himself and his relation to others. Attending to the play's investigation of language and penitential practice allows us to understand more fully the role of theatricality in medieval notions of subjectivity, wherein even the most individual of experiences are shown to rely on communal processes of generating meaning. By investigating Everyman's presentation of the communal dimensions of penance, we can develop a new understanding of a morality play itself as a deeply social drama.

A few months ago I was accosted in a pub near King's Cross, in central London, by a drunk spoiling for a fight. Instead of trying to reason with someone unreasonable, I alerted one of the bartenders that trouble was ahead. My warning came too late. As soon as the drunk saw me talking to the bartender, he lunged at me, shouting “You! You!,” as if somehow I had betrayed the trust of this perfect stranger. He threw me against the wall, my pint glass shattering on the floor as I fell backward. And then he started to choke me. (For a drunk, his grip was surprisingly strong.) I couldn't tell you how much time elapsed—it felt like a long time, but was probably only a minute or so—before some of the other customers finally overpowered him.