When I first approached my colleague Jody Enders about the possibility of doing a special issue of Theatre Survey during her tenure as Associate Editor, I had no idea that she would translate my offer into a major event in the journal's history. We at Theatre Survey have long been blessed with a steady stream of excellent scholarship from theatre historians around the world, but seldom have we been able to amass, in a single issue, as prestigious a collection of scholars as those whose work grace the pages of our November issue. I am grateful to each and every one of them for their contributions. But I am especially grateful to Jody Enders for her (nothing short of) magical ability to recruit so many prominent voices in our profession and to place them in a dialogue about the future of theatre history in this new millennium. She well deserves our acknowledgment and admiration for the amazing work that she had done here, and I am delighted to have the occasion of this special issue of Theatre Survey to express my deep appreciation of the work that she has been doing for the journal since she became Associate Editor almost two years ago. Soon Jody's tenure as Editor will begin, and as you read the collection of essays she has compiled for this issue, I suspect your thoughts will concur with my own about what this transition in Editors means: while the future of theatre history in the new millennium may be subject to debate, the future of Theatre Survey looks very promising indeed.

Dialogue. It comes from the Greek, and covers a host of meanings from conversation, to philosophy, to speaking articulately, to lecturing, to dealing with others. It can be as contentious as it is conciliatory and as hostile as it is friendly. It can be consensus-building or polarizing, controversial or anodyne. But, at its worst and at its best, it is engagement; and, throughout its worldwide history, it has consistently done a glorious thing. It produces knowledge—or, at a minimum, it puts on display the fact that knowledge is out there.

“What is the single most important thing we can do to bring theatre history into the new millennium?”

Historical scholarship, despite the many changes in methodologies and models over the years, is one of the abiding missions of the discipline of theatre studies: yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Yesterday, as is well known, Theaterwissenschaft was the foundational methodology for scholarship and doctoral education. Today, of course, our approaches to theatre history encompass several dozen research methodologies and analytical models. And tomorrow? Will cultural, social, political, and intellectual histories still provide a reliable foundation? Or will we develop fields of investigation and modes of analysis that draw upon new ideas in psychology, neuroscience, and biology? One thing is clear: our methods and models will continue to change.

Coetzee's nameless speaker, known only as “Mother,” is accused by her son of an excess of righteousness, and so might I be if I were to agree with her, at least in part, about that gang of thugs. Nonetheless, my hope for the future of the discipline does include the possibility that Clio will escape from the particular thug responsible for jargon and gibberish. Actually, nothing arouses darker thoughts in those of us who believe in lucid and stylish prose than sentences like “what is at stake here is the possibility that the cultural presence of the actor in theatre and in theatre history is delimited by material representational practices generated within a particular discursive site, and subject to the constraints of what can be enunciated about the self's contingent existence.” This may be perfectly clear to others, but I read it as a signal to a choir within which I do not sing, and I stop reading—a pity, since the topic is especially interesting to me and the author has important things to say. But, as Terry Eagleton says in his new book After Theory (the one presently receiving an international drubbing), “you can be difficult without being obscure.”

Some years ago, during a discussion in the ASTR Executive Committee about the relevance of the Theatre Library Association's participation in ASTR, a scholar on the cutting edge of contemporary theory is reported to have asked a TLA representative exactly what it was that libraries were doing to support postpositivist research. No one remembers what the answer was (it was evidently satisfactory), but I recall thinking that if I had been asked the question, my own reply would have been that libraries weren't doing anything at all; that the business of the library was to preserve the evidence as well as it could and provide access to it, so that scholars could make use of it in whatever manner they chose.

In the minute investigation of old oil canvases, modern art restorers use a technique called rigatino to fill in where flecks of paint are damaged or missing. These fine hatch marks, made with thin paint, signal to later scholars and restorers what constitutes the restorer's work while fully maintaining the distinctiveness and integrity of the original artist's brush strokes. In other words, restorers have devised a straightforward method to indicate the exact positions of evidentiary lacunae and to mark the impositions of their own hand amidst the work of old masters. Unlike the superscripts of footnotes amidst a printed text, rigatino blends with the original picture, though upon close investigation it is always distinct.

The greatest challenge that theatre scholars face today—as we watch the seemingly inexorable march of U.S. imperialism and capitalist globalization— is to remember, to historicize rigorously and resourcefully, to render events (in Brecht's words) “remarkable,” to “expose the world's mechanism on a grand scale and to copy it in such a way that it would be more easily serviced.” When we practice a mimeticism that keeps “impermanence always before our eyes, . . . our own period can be seen to be impermanent too.” We must remember in order to be able to demystify the pieties disseminated by our politicians, pundits, and journalists who so blithely disregard the brutalities and deceptions that structure the histories they glibly rewrite that one would think they sprinkled water from the River Lethe on their Cheerios every morning. For remembering, as Pierre Bourdieu points out, represents a reconstruction not only of the past but also of the dynamics of disavowal and forgetting. To historicize means to “reconstruct the history of the historical labour of dehistoricization [italics in original quote].” This reconstructive labor seems all the more urgent during a period when theatre scholars (who have long been considered more or less irrelevant within the humanities) must face the increasing corporatization of the universities for which we work, the continuing intellectual paralysis of the Left, the relentless commercialization and retrenchment of American theatre (for better or worse), and the rise of a discipline, performance studies, that is challenging, reinvigorating, and partially displacing theatre studies.

These three quotes will serve as a starting point as I enter into this discussion of the import and role of theatre history. While I make a case for theatre history generally, my examples and thesis are drawn from African American theatre history most specifically. My argument is for a critical historicism, a process that recognizes the need to historicize and situate dramatic criticism as well as the need to theorize history or, as Walter Benjamin suggests, to “rub history against the grain.” Rubbing history against the grain means that we must interrogate the past in order to inform the present, remaining cognizant of the material conditions that not only shape theatrical production but the historical interpretations of production. It implies a need to work against conventional historical narratives and the ways in which history has been told in the past.

Given performance history's disciplinary complexity, not to mention the complications of a “we” comprised by so many different scholars, Theatre Survey's question is, in one sense, unanswerable. In another sense, if I translate the question to what I can do (staying fully aware that others will propose answers different from mine), however, I can offer an answer from my position as a feminist performance historian and historiographer. My response to it is twofold. The argument I make here is for performance that foregrounds historiographical operations, making physical, gestural, emotional, and agonistic the processes that construct history out of the past. Concomitantly, I am arguing for history that overtly acknowledges the ways in which it is a performance of the past, but not the past itself. This dual approach is especially important in feminist accounts of the past because performance has historically been a crucial constituent of feminist theories and practices.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.”