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.”

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.

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.”

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.

(Note: This statement started its life as part of the State of the Profession panel at the joint American Society for Theatre Research / Congress on Research in Dance conference in Seattle [November 2010]. I was asked to respond to the question of “how power has worked on/through/with bodies in the fields of dance and theatre studies, and in the academy at large.” I decided to speak about the serious crisis facing higher education in light of the economic recession, and its particular challenges to the academy and our field, using my present context in the United Kingdom, where I have lived since 2006, as a case study.)

Note from the Re: Sources Editor: This is my first contribution as editor of Re:Sources, and I'm proud to join the team of editors and authors who work diligently to put together each issue of this fine journal. I vow to try and maintain the standard of quality set by my immediate predecessor, Nena Couch—a daunting task, to be sure. I hope that you will find something of use within the pages of this column and that you will consider yourself an active participant in the shaping of its future. In the November 2006 issue (47.2) of Theatre Survey, which marked the fiftieth anniversary of the American Society for Theatre Research, editor Jody Enders invited readers to “ponder anew” what constitutes a resource and to submit “untraditional proposals” for the Re:Sources column. As she explained:

I have fallen victim to a bait-and-switch scheme, one that I think is familiar to many academics. When first contemplating a life of the mind, I was essentially in search of an industry to fund my eclectic reading habits. The Academy welcomed me with the confident smile of a Ricky Roma. I was particularly enticed by the opportunity to talk (at length) about the books I had found while wandering in subbasements and forgotten annexes of research libraries, perusing used bookstores, or perhaps stopping at kiosks along the Seine during my lengthy summer vacations. That's not quite how it turned out. Instead, the only time I read a new book that isn't about talking steam engines or delinquent bunnies (and even then I often fall asleep before the final page) is because I have assigned it in a course. This is not what I expected, but it is satisfying nonetheless. Last fall I finished a number of good books just before teaching my classes.