In 2011 and 2012, I undertook a two-part survey to answer some large questions about the use of plays in translation in the higher education drama classroom in Anglophone North America and to test my ideas regarding the simultaneous ubiquity and invisibility of translation there. My project here is to report on that survey and to make clear why translation studies is ready to take a prominent role in theatre studies. U.S. colleges and universities constitute one of the largest single markets in the world for drama translated into English. Most U.S. theatre history classes include plays from the world canon, and many specialized classes in theatre departments focus on plays from non-Anglophone cultures. In English departments, where other genres in translation (e.g., the novel) may be approached with caution, drama seems to be offered a “pass” because the notion of being dramaturgically literate depends on some knowledge of a sizable canon of non-Anglophone plays. Yet despite its ubiquity, translation is often so normalized as to be invisible to those who depend on it. As Laurence Senelick notes, “For most students, a work exists wholly in its translated form, spontaneously generated.” Translation, as the survey confirmed, is part of the DNA of theatre studies. As such, I argue, it needs to be brought to the foreground of the field. In saying this, I am not unaware of the rich work undertaken by scholars, editors, and practitioners who are enmeshed in the difficult issues involved with translating plays, which include pressing for greater attention to cultural sensitivity and literacy. My focus here is on the academy and the classroom, where, for better or worse, the vast majority of future dramaturgs and audience members will cut their teeth on a critical mass of plays and where no single language or production entity or publisher can claim pride of place.

Shannon Jackson's bracing, intelligent new book historicizes the study of performance in American colleges and universities from the advent of the theatre major about a century ago to the present. Using Foucault's notion of genealogy, Jackson is ever mindful that concepts such as theatre, theatre studies, performance, discipline, and so on, cannot be understood outside of their “enabling enunciative conditions” (30)—the contexts and institutions in which they are constituted. Is performance “a vehicle of community formation . . . [or] a site of social transgression”? Is it “an intentional realm of purposive action [or] an unintentional realm of spontaneous or habitual enactment” (14)? Saying “both” is probably correct, but to read Jackson's investigation of the “vagaries of the term ‘performance'” (11) is to appreciate how limited such a facile answer is, absent a nuanced grasp of the territorial battles that defined the terms at key points in our collective past.

In Theatre, Society and the Nation, S. E. Wilmer promises two enticing strands of investigation. First, he seeks “to illustrate the role of the theatre and live performance in reformulating concepts of national identity” (3) over some two hundred and fifty years of U.S. history. Second, his introduction asserts that besides examining “theatrical events and the printed texts of plays” the book “considers the audience and critical response” on the part of both “the dominant and oppressed groups in society” (3–4). Wilmer's work is rewarding on roughly half the topics proffered: it provides valuable information about many printed texts and performances of resistant discourse as well as some critical journalism and scholarship that responded to these pieces. On actual audience response, the book is virtually silent, sometimes substituting the comments of artist participants, publicity, or theory for the reactions of people who actually witnessed the events.

For close to two decades, Susan Glaspell has served as the virtual poster child for feminist playwrights of the American Little Theatre movement. One can no longer call her an unknown, but J. Ellen Gainor's insightful and meticulously researched new book makes it clear that Glaspell as a subject remains, if I may coin a term, underknown.