With this general issue of Theatre Survey, I end my tenure as Editor and pass the reins on to Jody Enders, who, over the past two years, has been the kind of Associate Editor that one only dreams of having. Her commitment to this journal, particularly to its vitality as a forum for rigorous scholarly debate, has been invaluable to me, and I have no doubt that this commitment will make her term as Editor one in which the journal moves increasingly into the center of some of the most important debates in our profession. It is, moreover, my firm belief that in two years she will be writing similar comments about Martin Puchner, who now begins his term as Associate Editor and who will follow her as Editor. I congratulate them both on their appointments, I thank them for the work that they are already doing, and I look forward to their collaborations as the new Editors of Theatre Survey.

Palestine, as an Ottoman province, was distanced from the main Arab cultural activities of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries; no literature bearing distinctive marks of Palestinian national identity was to be found before the First World War. After the war there was some national cultural revival, but it was mainly poetry, not fiction or theatre, that was traditionally perceived as a possible national weapon against external threats. The national revival however also covered folklore and religious culture, both of which combined some semitheatrical dimensions—the shadow theatre (khayāl al-ẓill), the storytellers (ḥakawātī; shāעir), and the peep show, that is, "Box of Wonders" or "Magic Box" (ṣundūq al-dunyā or ṣundūq al-עajab); the religious festivals, such as the traditional Prophet's birthday (mawlid) or the birthdays of saints (mawālid), the nighttime shows presented during the fast of Ramadan; and the popular peasant culture, such as the dabka dances. Modern theatrical and dramatic activities—most of them marked by European influence, whether by way of translations or adaptations—were very limited; because many of the plays were intended for staging in schools, most of them were flavored with didactic aims. Visiting troupes from Egypt and Lebanon created some public demand for theatrical activities, and in both the 1930s and the 1940s there were active Palestinian devotees of theatre, such as the brothers al-Jawzī.

During a 1966 Radio Telefis Éireann broadcast celebrating the first forty years of indigenous radio in the Republic of Ireland, Maxwell Sweeney characterized the evolution of radio drama in the nation as a slow process, one that grew out of readings of short stories and poetry. Like all other facets of the early national radio service, dramatic broadcasting suffered greatly from inadequate funding and resources. Equally detrimental to its progress was the widespread, if understandable, ignorance about the new medium's possibilities. Indeed, music dominated the airwaves in the first decade of national radio in Ireland because relaying music performances and gramophone records did not pose the same challenges as speech and dramatic broadcasting. 2RN, as the service was initially called, was but “a part-time affair,” broadcasting for a mere five and a half hours, and “eighty percent of transmission time was devoted to recitals by small groups of instrumentalists, solo traditional musicians, and amateur choirs.” Consequently, though understanding of dramatic broadcasting steadily developed, the Irish Independent could accurately claim in 1933 that radio drama in the Free State had not significantly improved since the establishment of the service seven years earlier.

In 1991, Martha Boesing, cofounder of At the Foot of the Mountain in Minneapolis, declared, “I'm not [just] a cultural feminist. I was a Marxist before these girls were even born!” The “girls” to whom she was referring were the critics whose negative response to the performance of the multicultural collaborative piece The Story of a Mother II at the Women and Theatre Program in Chicago in 1987 marked a decisive clash between competing notions of feminism in American theatre. Boesing later owned her own cultural feminism, as well as her Marxist evocation to action, but the conflict between cultural feminists (who sought performance as a means of building communities) and materialist feminists (who resisted being constructed as part of universalized womanhood) resulted in a divide that ultimately affected the reception and hence the historical impact of At the Foot of the Mountain. From their founding in 1974 to this performance in 1991, Boesing and At the Foot of the Mountain had been featured both in critical literature and at theatre conferences, hailed for their application of consciously articulated feminist politics in the creative process of their plays. After Chicago, they lost momentum as subjects of study in critical scholarship.

One evening in 1973, or so the story goes, Tim Rice caught the last part of a BBC program about Eva Perón on his car radio. Intrigued enough to make a point of tuning into a later rebroadcast, he became fascinated with this woman, whose single saving grace—he later stated—was that “she had style, in spades.” In late 1976, after more than two years spent researching, writing, composing, and recording (and one or two trips to Buenos Aires), Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber released the studio album of Evita, their rock-opera follow-up to the hugely successful Jesus Christ Superstar. They would not work together again until they reunited to create the song “You Must Love Me” for the 1997 film version of Evita. The original staging of Evita, under Harold Prince's direction, premiered on 21 June 1978 in London's Prince Edward Theatre. The U.S. premiere came barely eleven months later, on 8 May 1979 in Los Angeles's Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. In December 1980, the Spanish-language version (translated and adapted by Jaime Azpilicueta and Ignacio Artime) opened at Madrid's Monumental Theatre. Although director Azpilicueta did not stray far from the original staging, except for a few “Argentinizing” modifications, on 26 June 1981 Prince premiered his own staging of the Azpilicueta—Artime translation in Mexico City.

In the 1920s, the Royal Court Theatre still enjoyed the reputation earned earlier in the century by Harley Granville Barker and John Vedrenne, yet its daily fare was not remarkably distinctive from other West End theatres. In that context, an aspiring playwright was contracted to write a play for the Court's 1923 season. The playwright happened to be Marie Stopes, (in)famous author of the best-selling sex-education and birth-control manual Married Love. “Contracted” is the word Stopes uses. It could also be speculated that, in a year when the Court's five main undertakings had as many as five different producers and three different managers, the theatre was made available to Stopes, a celebrity on the London scene who had her own backing.

The documentary reminders of Edward Gordon Craig's influence on the world of theatre are in museums and libraries all over the world, partly because he was such a prolific writer, but also because his genius and the personality that went with it were impossible to ignore. Almost every piece of paper that contains his work, whether in published form or manuscript, feels like a vital clue to the mystery of the man whose opinions about the role of theatre and art in society helped shape those worlds. Craig felt obliged by his own sense of importance to record his thoughts on paper, and his friends, family, correspondents, readers, critics, and reviewers have helped preserve his written legacy by saving those records, more of which become available to researchers every year.

The previous special issue on “Theatre History in the New Millennium” issued a call for more dialogue in our written, intellectual exchanges. After various discussions with many generous and engaging members of ASTR (of whom the Editors thank, in particular, Laurence Senelick), the present issue initiates a regular feature of Theatre Survey called the Editor's Forum. A new venue designed to provide our readers with an opportunity to raise scholarly and professional concerns, issues, and questions in a collegial way, this forum will continue conversations begun in previous issues and, we hope, on occasion, initiate new ones.

The concepts of theatricality and performativity have been enormously productive sources of recent scholarship in the fields of theatre and performance studies. While the former term has a long history of use and abuse, the latter has gained contemporary currency in connection with the emergence of performance studies, on the one hand, and new interpretations and applications of J. L. Austin's 1950s philosophy, on the other. As scholars have reexamined theatricality and probed performativity, a number of new uses of these terms have developed, and depending on the scholar's viewpoint, a binary or sometimes hierarchical relationship between these terms has prevailed.

Over the more than twenty years since the publication of two profoundly influential collections—Errol Hill's two-volume anthology of critical essays The Theatre of Black Americans (1980) and James V. Hatch's first edition of the play anthology Black Theatre USA (1974)—there has been considerable activity in African American theatre scholarship. Yet even as scholars have produced new collections of historical and critical essays that cover a wide range of African American theatre history, book-length studies that document particular moments in the historical continuum such as the Harlem Renaissance, and Samuel Hay's broader study African American Theatre: An Historical and Critical Analysis (1994), no one until now has written a comprehensive study of African American theatre history. Into this void have stepped two of the aforementioned distinguished scholars of African American theatre, Errol G. Hill and James V. Hatch. To be certain, writing a comprehensive history of African American theatre poses a daunting challenge for anyone hearty enough to undertake it. Where to begin? What to include and exclude? With their study, A History of African American Theatre, Hill and Hatch show themselves indeed worthy of the challenge. They explore the evolution of African American theatre across time and space, documenting the particular efforts of artists, writers, scholars, and practitioners, from inside as well as outside the United States, that have had an impact on our understanding of African American theatre. The authors make clear that the definition of African American theatre from the beginning has been in constant flux and that it has been affected by the changing social times in American as much as it has influenced those times.

An unruly audience, comprising mostly working-class whites, attended a performance of William Shakespeare's Othello by the African Theatre on 10 August 1822. Instead of enjoying a thoughtful interpretation of Shakespeare, the crowd attacked the performers, stripping them of their clothing and dignity. The causes of riots included a growing presence of free blacks in public spaces, political debates surrounding franchise rights of propertied blacks, and the increasing social interactions between black and poor European Americans. The production of Othello was evidence of the African American contribution to evolving notions of national identities, while the Anglo-American's collective mob thinking reflected a consciousness that would become institutionalized by century's end. The riot marked another incident in the slow, painful demise of a theatre company, but the birth of theatre by African Americans.

Vaudeville makes a sprawling subject. Under the social and commercial shocks that swirled around it, vaudeville could scarcely afford to be more innocent than it needed to be. In Blue Vaudeville, Andrew Erdman follows a single, generally naughty-but-nice strand within the huge volume of vaudeville performance.

The Federal Theatre Project . . . was a unique and influential experiment in American theatre; not just for its outspoken politics, but because it reimagined the very way that theatre was produced in the United States. For the first time in the history of the country theatre was subsidized by the federal government, a practice with widespread precedents in Europe and Asia, but one that was totally out of step with free enterprise business practice and a culture which had banned plays in its Second Continental Congress. (1)

So opens Barry Witham's case study of the Seattle Federal Theatre Project from 1935 to 1939.

Censorship is an intriguing lens through which to view theatre in the United States because it allows us to glimpse—at moments—how theatre participates in the life of a society in truly meaningful ways. These moments appeal to John Houchin, as I suspect they do to many of us who yearn to find significance in live performance and who toil in the backwater of vapid and violent film and television. Censorship, whether it be of Sapho or Angels in America, enrages and harms, but it also crystallizes the debate between those who believe the arts should support the normative culture and those who believe the theatre's obligation is to challenge authority.

Scholars and enthusiasts of the work of Edward Albee will be pleased to see this new volume of essays edited by Bruce J. Mann, the first critical collection of essays devoted to the playwright in more than fifteen years. Although it would be hard to judge from the past decade, in which Albee has undergone a renaissance of sorts with several new plays and several major revivals on Broadway (starting in 1994 with Three Tall Women, which earned him his third Pulitzer Prize, and ending most recently with The Goat; or, Who Is Sylvia, which won the Tony for best new play in 2002), Albee had previously lapsed in critical and scholarly favor. This volume aims to capitalize on the recent interest in Albee's work by providing a current survey that pays specific attention to his newer plays, as well as his more obscure ones, and also includes new essays on his three classics: The Zoo Story, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and A Delicate Balance. The volume concludes with an interview with the playwright, conducted by Mann in April 1999.

In two compelling new books, each analyzing a sensational female star whose career peaked in the late nineteenth century, the multifaceted celebrity image becomes the historical prism refracting the social, political, and cultural dynamics of various performance contexts. Neither study purports to chronicle the star's entire life and document truths about “who she really was.” Rather, each focuses on a relatively brief, temporally circumscribed period of the performer's career and examines her complex public personae and their meanings to her American audiences. Ultimately, more is revealed about the values of those who consumed and exploited the star than about the star herself. The two celebrities at issue here, Adah Isaacs Menken and Sarah Bernhardt, separated in time by a generation, compare in intriguing ways, both as historical agents and as subjects of historiographical analysis.

Helen Faucit: Fire and Ice on the Victorian Stage represents the distillation of decades of work by Carol Jones Carlisle on this eminent, but now largely forgotten, Victorian actress. The book is an impressive achievement, and one that will be of great service to the growing number of academics and students now working within the increasingly well-resourced field of Victorian theatre. As interest in the range of Victorian theatres develops, however, it is helpful to be reminded of the narratives that go to produce the spectacle of the legitimate and patent theatres. As Faucit's own family history demonstrates, that narrative was often far from legitimate itself, though it could, and in her case did, encompass a social elevation to the highest levels of English society.

I have no hesitation in saying how much I admire Jacky Bratton's New Readings in Theatre History. I consider it an essential guide to an understanding of modern theatre historiography, and it offers a cluster of apposite alternative approaches to historical research. That this book throws light into some areas of the early Victorian stage that are rarely investigated and even less frequently analyzed is a further gift. Bratton has a knack for identifying those marginalized, by gender or by theatrical task, from central discourses and in restoring to these now-distant sources a reclaimed significance. She hears the small voices and those whose contributions to the British stage were rarely, if ever, known to audiences in the capital or major centers. She has given us a superb study, vital to the practicing historian.

Paul Maloney's study of Victorian and Edwardian Glasgow's entertainment is part of the series Studies in Popular Culture, under the general editorship of Jeffrey Richards, and it benefits from the protocols of its social-history methodology. His approach to the halls has a welcome freedom from the constraints that dog theatre scholars whose disciplines have equipped them with subliminally insistent literary and musical criteria. Maloney is able to acknowledge the stereotypical, misogynistic, jingoist materials used by music-hall performers but still understand them as functional expressions of working-class attitudes that are counterhegemonic. In his argument, manner and style are read as signifiers before words, articulated positions, and character types. He asserts of Scottish music hall that “[a]s a popular entertainment format it did not articulate its social agenda but embodied it in its functioning and culture” (50). This is an important insight, one that not only circumvents the impasse presented to textual analysis by the bland and unrevealing songs and other materials that survive on the page, but also chimes with the latest research in the history of performance, which is beginning to emphasize the historicism of the embodied. We move toward the possibility of historical and theatrical methodologies jumping together, independently of literary judgments, and producing previously unavailable nuance and fresh insight.

Frank McGuinness and Marina Carr are two of Ireland's leading contemporary playwrights, and these books are the first full-length edited collections to be dedicated exclusively to their work. While both have been the subject of numerous journal articles and book chapters, and two monographs have previously been published on McGuinness, the volume edited by Cathy Leeney and Anna McMullan marks the first full-length book on Carr. Each book offers new essays as well as those previously published elsewhere. While both volumes treat a wide variety of the playwrights' oeuvres, and both approach the material from several theoretical perspectives, the book on Carr is more accurately named in that it focuses on theatrical productions and reception of Carr's work alongside analyses of her dramatic texts.