Exploring diverse strategies of process-focused research from historical reconstructions of period practices to staged intimacy coaching, seven new titles offer a representative but not exhaustive overview of the expanding field of rehearsal studies.

The current theory of “camera presence” derives from ancient and early modern sources in theology, natural philosophy, rhetoric, and eventually science. As music depends on silence, “presence” in these disciplines depends on absence, and authorities framed their understanding of the expressiveness of actors by analogizing their performances to “electrical fire” based on the reciprocal action of positive and negative charges as effected by “phlogiston,” or “the stuff that isn’t there.”

Having passed the tercentenary of the “Mississippi Bubble” of 1720, the financial fiasco that accompanied the founding of New Orleans, the city continues to risk everything by gambling on the collateral of its dreams. Like Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, “The City that Care Forgot” is playing out a mortgage melodrama under constant threat of dispossession, dreading the last stop on an itinerary that begins with Desire, changes at Cemeteries, and dead ends in Elysian Fields.

Charismatic celebrities have open wounds. Fans have probing fingers. Drawn together by doubt, as in Caravaggio's The Incredulity of Saint Thomas, they collaborate in hopes of reassurance. The baroque painter shows Christ guiding the hand of the doubting apostle, who finds the bloodless hole and inserts his index finger up to the second knuckle. The quizzical expression on Thomas's face highlights by contrast Christ's patient indulgence as they come together in an impromptu ritual of verification, initiating what a recent theorist of celebrity calls the Saint Thomas effect, which describes the need of fans for intimate authentication, insisting, as they tend to do, on all the gory details (Rojek 62). The deep contradictions at the heart of celebrity incite this relentless probing: a divine being, apparently not at all like them (having risen from the dead, for instance), may prove in crucially titillating ways to be just like them after all. But what the millions of fingers seek they never satisfactorily find. For the celebrity to remain celebrated, the contradiction that defines his or her mystery must remain in continual uncertainty, flickering between highlight and shadow, visibility and invisibility, teasing the eyes of the beholders and leaving them in doubt, like the searing effect of Caravaggio's chiaroscuro, which catches Saint Thomas at a moment of suspense, still undecided between skepticism and belief.

Performance is an idea that became a field. For ideas to matter to the field of performance studies, however, they must take the form of action—a play, a rite, a dance, a game, a parade, an utterance. The action of performance may be practical or symbolic, but it is “always a doing or a thing done” (Diamond, Performance 1). In this essay, I assess the idea of performance, the field of performance studies, and their common relation to action by reopening the question of mimesis, the venerable doctrine that art imitates life. I also provide a preliminary sketch of a practical poetics of performance, defining it as Orphic (of or pertaining to the mythic figure of Orpheus). The action that the Orphic plot imitates—moving forward while glancing back—recapitulates the risky act of performance itself, for the performer typically feels the urge to look back, despite the prohibitions and costs, because performance always seems to be authorized by something prior, even when it isn't. Not restricted to dead Europeans or any other limited constituency, popular Orphism embraces all the lively arts, but it is most intensely concentrated in poetry meant to be spoken aloud, from Homer to hip-hop, and in lyric drama. “The story of Orpheus underlies every poem,” Susan Stewart writes in Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, and she might have added, “every performance”: bereft of Eurydice from the moment of his fatally forbidden turn, when he dooms her to be his inspiration, “he must attempt to fill her absence with compensatory song” (256). So Eurydice stands in for Orpheus, punished for his transgression, and he for her, making art out of her fate. Across the gulf of time and the river Styx, she prompts him, as he keeps looking back to her.

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.

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.

We have reported high Chi(3) values observed for metallo meso-tetra (substituted phenyl) tetrabenzporphyrins (metallo TPTBP). In order to find the relationship between the molecular structures and the Chi(3) values, we have attempted to find relationships between these values and the electronic spectral properties of the compounds. For a series of Zn TPTBPs, we found that the B and Q band peak wavelengths and the peak height ratio between these two bands are related as one would expect from such a series of porphyrins. The Chi(3) values appear to be directly related to the Q/B peak height ratio. For a series of metallo meso-tetra(p-methoxyphenyl) tetrabenzporphyrins, such a correlation of Chi(3) with the spectral properties of various metal species was not apparent. Strategies to increase the Chi(3) values of metallo TPTBP on the basis of these observations are discussed.

A numerical simulation of the nonlinear optical and thermal response of a material is described. The code is divided into preprocessor, simulation and postprocessing functions. The simulation function is a transient, three dimensional, finite difference algorithm which describes the thermal response and the optical phase change that occurs due to 3rd order nonlinearity and thermal effects. Irradiance changes due to linear and nonlinear absorption mechanisms are included in the code. In the postprocessing function a Gaussian beam decomposition technique is used to calculate the irradiance and transmitted power at a far field location and the temperature time response of the material. Examples of using the code to simulate Z-scan experiments are presented and compared to those reported in the literature. Results are presented that demonstrate that the code can be used as a tool to investigate using thermal transport mechanisms to modify the nonlinear optical response of the material. Limitations of the code are discussed.

Optical limiting in a solution of tetrabenzporphyrin (TBP) dissolved in tetrahydrofuran (THF) was measured in an f/5 optical focusing arrangement using 532 nm wavelength laser light with a 9 ns pulse duration. The performance of this solution was compared to a variety of other materials. In order to better understand the nonlinear behavior of this material, apertured and unapertured Z-scans were performed. From these measurements it was determined that the excited-state cross section and its ratio to ground-state cross section were large. The nonlinear refraction of this material is made up of contributions from thermal density change and population redistribution. Limiter performance was modeled in an f/64 limiter. The limiter behavior of a slightly modified compound and an additional solvent were measured.

In recent critical theory, the word performance has undergone a significant expansion, some would say an inflation. As the Editor's Note to the May issue of PMLA (“Special Topic: Performance”) observes, “What once was an event has become a critical category, now applied to everything from a play to a war to a meal. The performative … is a cultural act, a critical perspective, a political intervention.” Theatre historians will perhaps greet such pronouncements with mixed emotions. On one hand, they may welcome the acknowledgment by the principal organ of the Modern Language Association that performance (as opposed to drama merely) can count for so much. On the other hand, they may wonder what exactly is intended by the conceptual leap that takes performance beyond the established theatrical genres to encompass armed conflict and comestibles.