In “Writing the Absent Potential: Drama, Performance, and the Canon of African-American Literature,” Sandra Richards argues that scholars largely ignore the African-American contribution to theatre and performance. She suspects that most critics regard “drama as a disreputable member of the family of literature” (65). Even African Americanists neglect dramatic literature; indeed, the Norton Anthology of African American Literature includes only a scant number of plays. Both David Krasner and Shane White effectively redress this oversight and shift the focus from African-American literature to blacks on stage in their recent monographs about early nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century drama.

The future of theatre history is interdisciplinary. The inevitable question is, of course, What does one mean by interdisciplinary? There is indeed a whole field of interdisciplinary, or integrative, studies, with its own academic departments, conferences and journals. (Which in turn raises the troublesome question, Is interdisciplinarity still interdisciplinary, or is it now a discipline? But I won't go there—yet.) The common view is that interdisciplinarity employs more than one discipline to address a complex problem. Interdisciplinary studies tend to privilege unity, convergence, synthesis, complex questions, and broad issues.

The Undiscovered Country is a collection of essays mostly by and for the Tennessee Williams specialist—who else could write with such confidence that Williams's “instinct for finding the humor in his most intimate pain may have sprung from the natural inclinations for self-protection and self-deprecation, long known as personality traits of the playwright” (212) ? Williams's “later plays” (of the sixties and seventies) have been “undiscovered” precisely because the Williams specialist has tended to treat them with well-meaning sympathy, even defensiveness, rather than critical rigor. Each of the fifteen essays here opens with a gloomy recitation of one later play's production history and its miserable reviews, before moving on to describe the work as unfairly denigrated, and to defend Williams as the victim of his early success. Because Williams continues to experiment technically throughout his career, the writers in The Undiscovered Country are in an awkward position. If they want to say that the later plays are new, better, or even different, they have to look to the past—the very history that “traps” him. The need to view the Author as the “past” or source of the works is, as Roland Barthes saw, a modern invention that really seeks to glorify the critic. Barthes celebrated the “Death of the Author” not as an escape from critical responsibility but as a way to ensure it. What would it take to clear away the history of neglect and well-meaning phrases and to read Williams's plays differently?

That may sound like an evasion. If the question under discussion is asking for a single direction and a plan of action, a stand and a silver bullet, it partly is. To “resist singularity” has the ring of poststructuralist relativism, the now clichéd way by means of which many seem to have evaded action and avoided taking any kind of a stand.

Over the past generation, literary critics and theatre scholars in the United States have not been overly interested in Ibsen, widely considered a fuddy-duddy old realist who never truly became modern. The fact that his plays are still performed all over the world has had little effect on scholarly opinion. This is a deplorable state of affairs, for Ibsen is a major writer of modernity on a par with Baudelaire, and Flaubert. He is also unique among nineteenth-century writers for his clear-eyed and profound analysis of the relationships between women and men in modernity.

Since the publication in 1981 of Bonnie Marranca's American Dreams: the Imagination of Sam Shepard, critical editions devoted to Shepard's works have appeared roughly every five to eight years. There are now at least four essay collections devoted to Shepard's works, and one might ask whether there is anything new, interesting, or valuable to say about him, especially since, in recent years, his output has decreased. Shepard is a key figure in American drama, some would argue the preeminent playwright of the postwar era. Yet is he as relevant or as cutting-edge as he once was? Are his protagonists' struggles to “act themselves out” in the framework of a beleaguered and moribund patriarchy still compelling when other writers have arguably “moved on” to other issues?

Is there a real world out there? I'll soon be moving the question to other perceptual sites, but at bedrock, Ground Zero (now hallowed by 9/11), or when push comes to shove, making their peace with deconstruction, few historians deny it—and come, let's face it, none really can (no Bishop Berkeleys among them), it's real enough for them. With all the signifiers shifting, and some of them under erasure, there may be uncertainties in the referential structure, as out the window, through the rain, across the lake from me now in Seattle, what should be the Cascades is, with a hint of snowcaps above, mainly a minimalist gray vaporous wall of clouds, nothing to be seen on the landscape of what I am sure was there, but then for a moment the trees (from Berkeley's forest, perhaps?), but not as metahistory. And so it may be with the recuperated vagaries of any historical context that, however obscured by the years, somehow inhabited time, or survived the attritions of time, to more than suggest, if not certify, that there was a there there. The important thing, of course—no different in this millennium, but after the collapsing towers suddenly a crazier world, with there all over, dispersed or even secreted—is to determine how to get there, with the swift accrual of history affecting theatre history.

“Those who created this book, and many of its readers, think of the musical as art,” write Everett and Laird in their preface to The Cambridge Companion to the Musical (xv). Indeed, many of us who study or teach musical theatre feel the need to defend it as a viable artistic form worthy of scholarly examination. Both of these books demonstrate the musical's importance in cultural history and amply illustrate the artistry of its production.

About midway through Margaret Atwood's dystopian novel Oryx and Crake, the protagonist Jimmy (later known as Snowman, survivor of a genetically engineered global epidemic induced by his childhood friend, Crake) leaves home for the university, or in this case for the Martha Graham Academy. In a culture driven by the collusion of technology and capital it's not surprising that the best students are sent to lavish technical universities (Crake attends the Watson–Crick Institute), while arts and humanities students listlessly rusticate at Martha Graham, learning the pointless yet “vital arts” of “acting, singing, dancing, and so forth” and how to deploy them in the service of commodity culture (Jimmy's skill with language leads him to major in Applied Rhetoric, eventually writing advertising copy for Crake's new life forms). Like much else in Oryx and Crake, Atwood's vision jibes chillingly enough with the rhetoric of today's corporate university: compared to jet propulsion, cancer research, or even the battle of Appomattox (on my campus, history is a social science), the arts and humanities can be made to seem “like studying Latin, or book binding: pleasant to contemplate in its way, but no longer central to anything” (187).

This anthology of essays and interviews brings together the eleven playwrights who won the Pulitzer Prize in the years 1989–2000. Generally, the playwrights were awarded the prize on the basis of a specific play from the prior year, although in some instances the prize appears to be a recognition for a career. Moreover, there is considerable variety in the playwrights selected by the Pulitzer Committee. Some are very successful commercially, others very experimental; some have been prolific, whereas others are known only for one or two major works. A common bond among them all is their dedication to the stage. Some may have written television or film scripts, and even narrative fiction and poetry, but they all see the stage as their preferred creative ground.

The annual publication of the Theatre Library Association is designed “to gather and disseminate scholarly articles dealing with the location of resource materials” relating to all media as well as popular entertainments, the evaluation of those resources, and to include as well “monographs of previously unpublished original material.” The volumes are slim ones, so we should not expect coverage of the many theatre collections available to scholars and practitioners, but rather a highly selective series of essays reflecting the priorities of the Association or of the individual volume editors. This certainly appears to be the case here: the 1998 volume concerns itself with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American pleasure gardens, whereas, after a publication hiatus of three years, the 2001 volume is focused around the acquisition, scope, and use of four major archives—those of the Joseph Papp/New York Shakespeare Festival and of Lucille Lortel in the New York Public Library of the Performing Arts, the Lawrence and Lee Theatre Research Institute at Ohio State University, and the holdings of the Weill—Lenya Research Center in New York. As a consequence, the tones of the two volumes are very different, as is their utility. The first volume appears to be directed toward a disinterested readership; the second addresses those who might actually use the particular collections.

Frankly, I'm not much of a historian. That is, the past interests me mostly as grist for my theoretical mill. I am not nostalgic. I don't often trek through ruins—whether of stone, paintings, videotape, paper, library stacks, or my own many notebooks. Of course, I've done the right thing when it comes to this kind of activity. I have climbed the pyramids at Teotihuacan and in Mayan country, sat on stone benches of the Theatre of Dionysus in Athens and in Epidaurus (where I was tormented by some really awful productions of ancient Greek dramas), and visited the theatre museums of four continents. On the art-history front, I've gazed at more paintings and sculptings than I can readily organize in memory. But my strongest meetings with “history” have been at the cusp of the past and present—living events always already changing as they are (re)performed. This has been the core of my “anthropology-meets-theatre” work whether among the Yaquis of Arizona, at the Ramlila of Ramnagar in India, in the highlands of Papua–New Guinea, at Off-Off Broadway in New York, in the interior of China, and at very many other events in a wide variety of places.

The future of our field is obsolete. It has been accumulating for decades, and now we are stuck with it. Surveying the panorama of North America with a view framed by a Manhattan street ending at the Hudson, as in the old New Yorker cover, we might ask: Where is theatre research located? Can we find it on the map? It is not invisible, as some might complain. On the contrary, theatre research appears prominently as an array of widely planted scene houses, boxy protuberances rising above college and university performing-arts complexes, often located at the physical center of their campuses but rarely, if ever, close to their hearts. Set in concrete, they constitute what Harold Clurman, speaking at Murphy Hall for the Performing Arts at Kansas University in 1965, called “the Edifice Complex.” Our future, like fate, lies before us, but it was settled at our birth, when the buildings went up and acquired legions of technical specialists to service them. That's where the money went, and that's where it must go. Greater in number than the theatre scholars, well-intentioned but mostly vapid practitioners, acting with more or less skill, with more or less tenure, fill “slots” in largely indistinguishable seasons, block-booking their houses like mall multiplexes, from coast to coast. The reason that they are so visible on the map is that they stand isolated from everything else, in and out of the academy.

Simon During's book presents a broad overview of European and North American magic and argues that magic influenced the formation of modern culture. During clearly delineates three types of magic: Supernatural Magic, or “real” spiritual magic associated with superstition, religion, and the occult; Natural Magic, which popularized scientific discoveries such as electricity, magnetism, X-rays, and optics; and Secular Magic, based on spectacle, skillful technique, illusion, and special effects. He successfully charts the complex relations among the three types of magic, and explains how they reinforce one another (as is the case with natural and secular magic), or work against one another (as when natural and secular magic gradually delegitimized the influence of supernatural magic in an increasingly secularized, modern culture).

Western theatrical dance emerges in the late Renaissance as an increasingly autonomous art form. However, as theatrical dance strove toward the ideal of its own aesthetic self-sufficiency, toward an autonomy that would eventually confer it its place as a truly modern art form, dance developed a paradoxically intimate, intricate, and convoluted relationship with its other—writing. The historical persistence of a continuous dialoguing between dancing and writing indicates how dance's aspirations for aesthetic autonomy were precisely that: an impossible (modern) wishing. Historically, the role and function of writing in regards to dance has been one of partnering. This partnering has oscillated among three foundational modes of writings on dance: the archival (writing as the guarantor of dance's historical survival, as seen already in the late 1500s, in Arbeau's Orcheseography), the choreographic (writing as mode of composing dances directly on paper, as seen in the exams for the Académie Royale in late seventeenth-century France), and the writing of criticism. Of these three modes, criticism—understood as writing aimed at explaining or translating to an audience the opacity of dance's appearing—won't emerge in its incipient form until the late eighteenth century. This mode is today the most prominent role writing takes in relation to dance, in which the function of the critic is simultaneously to preserve and explain the dances she witnesses.

Since Edward Said's influential formulation, scholars in a variety of disciplines have unpacked orientalism in its various incarnations. Within American studies, theories of orientalism have been used to understand more fully both the relationship of the United States to Asia during the “Pacific century” and the history of racial formation and racism with regard to Asian Americans. One of the prevailing tendencies has been to posit the Oriental as that which is marginalized and excluded, as either the exotic Other or the yellow peril. Both Mari Yoshihara's Embracing the East and Christina Klein's Cold War Orientalism do much to refocus this discussion, using contexts that demonstrate how Asia and Asian Americans were not just treated as, to use Alexander Saxton's phrase, “the indispensable enemy,” but rather held, both politically and culturally, within a much more paradoxical “embrace.”

David Savran's recent contribution may seem at first to be simply a collection of articles in survey of his scholarship since 1990, pleasurably, as he writes in his preface, comprising “something of a buffet” (ix). But as this book's subtitle and preface helpfully indicate, there is a coherence to the buffet, in the very diversity of its topics and queer shifts in analytical perspective. Presiding over the eclectic array is Savran's first chapter, entitled “Middlebrow Anxiety,” an impressive introduction to the book's main ambition in “recontextualizing American theatre” via very concrete applications of queer, feminist, and historical materialist theorizing. Indeed, a major value in this collection is the lucid demonstration of Savran's critical success in juxtaposing different contextual frames to explore American theatre of the past fifty years.

Anyone old enough to remember the wailing sirens and portentous footsteps of Gangbusters or the clattering consequences of opening the closet door belonging to Fibber McGee and Molly probably has a soft spot for the radio dramas of the past. Those who never experienced the medium that George Bernard Shaw called “the invisible play” may lack a context. Admitting that you remember those nostalgic broadcasts dates you. In a world of HDTV, GPS, home THX, and digital imaging by cell phone, what good is radio?

Penny Gay's study moves between the influence of theatre and drama on Austen's novels and theatricality itself as a mode of representation. While theatrical performance is considered, Gay's analysis generally emphasizes the impact of dramatic literature rather than theatrical representation, genre rather than performance. Through reference to the work of eighteenth-century women playwrights, Gay also places Austen's work and contemporary theatre in pervasively “masculine” and “feminine” discourses.

Through this case study of the Cornerstone Theater, Staging America sets out to explore the complexities of theatrical practices that aim to transform their audiences and enact social change, especially within the context of national identity. Cornerstone was founded in 1986 by a group of Harvard graduates interested in “bringing theater to the culturally disadvantaged,” but the company soon found itself equally transformed by the communities it served (66). With unusual theoretical depth in its use of cultural studies and ethnography, Staging America chronicles Cornerstone's changes as it attempted to become America's national theatre, traveling across the country to foster grassroots productions of classical plays. It is a fascinating journey that never quite settles on any easy conclusions, for if Cornerstone has ever come close to being a national theatre, it is only with the same unease that any single “America” can ever be staged or even defined. Kuftinec argues that this unease is Cornerstone's strength, as it constantly refigures itself in an anxious dialogue over national identity. Ultimately, she says, Cornerstone reflects America as “a matrix of continuously refigured difference.”