For theatre historians, teaching the gradual emergence of the political aesthetics that shaped the performances and theatres of the 1960s can be a particularly daunting task, but it is also a task whose importance to our work as scholars and teachers is fundamental because the political aesthetics that took seed in the sixties continue to shape our critical practices at the beginning of the twenty-first century. When we teach the sixties, we are in effect teaching the impact of that period on the discourses and institutions of theatre scholarship. So, at one level, a consideration of the theatre of the sixties almost inevitably entangles us in difficult (but valuable) self-reflexive practices. These moments of scholarly self-reflection in relation to our not-so-distant past need to be encouraged. Above all, they need to be made the product of conscious and deliberate aim; otherwise, we risk committing the same errors that were warned against four decades ago. Such self-reflexivity can, potentially, teach scholars and students about the sociohistorical underpinnings of pedagogy, historical periodization, canon formation, and the multiple technical necessities of the theatre form.

Three auspicious premieres attested to an international “sixties” presence in the Argentinean capital. The Sala Planeta produced Jean-Claude Van Itallie's America Hurrah! under the direction of Carlos Gandolfo, an influential leader of the 1950s Buenos Aires independent theatre movement. Premiering as well at the Planeta was Joe Orton's Entertaining Mr. Sloan, directed by Alberto Ure, soon to travel to the United States to study the work of the Open Theatre, the Performance Group, and the Theatre of the Ridiculous. Shortly after his return to Buenos Aires, Ure would become known for his own psychodramatic performance techniques. The cast of Entertaining Mr. Sloan included Eduardo Pavlovsky, an actor who was rapidly establishing himself as one of Buenos Aires's important “absurdist” playwrights. A third production launched the Equipo Teatro Payró; their staging of Megan Terry's Viet Rock would run for three years and 409 performances. The production's director and Payró cofounder, Jaime Kogan, soon became one of Buenos Aires's most respected independent theatre directors, and its principal actors went on to successful independent and commercial theatre, television, and film careers. The legendary Argentine rock band Manal performed the production's music.

The term “Chicano” is as politically charged today as it was in the 1960s, when contemporary Chicano Theatre was born. No one can trace the etymology of the term, which is neither Spanish nor English, but it was adopted as a self-identifier by mostly urban, politicized Americans of Mexican descent during the period. To call oneself “Chicano” meant that you were neither Mexican nor “American” but, rather, someone who recognized the various forms of oppression your communities were suffering. Then, as now, Chicanos scorned people who identified themselves as “Mexican Americans,” dismissing them as middle-class conservatives who were more comfortable “blending in.” On the other hand, Mexican Americans shunned “those Chicanos” as rabble-rousers and troublemakers with undue grievances. There was a class distinction at play in which working-class Chicanos criticized middle-class Mexican Americans as “sell-outs.”

This essay addresses theatre scholars who self-identify as baby boomers or, more precisely, those who link the years of their youth to the decades of the 1960s and 1970s, those who, in the vernacular of that time, were participants in or influenced by “the Movement.” Of course, the singular “Movement” was really a number of different movements or forms of activism, public performance, and revolutionary effort. The unselfconscious use of singular terms like “Movement” was one of the defining conundrums of the period itself, but I do not want to begin with a never-ending series of qualifications indicating I have passed beyond the thinking of those years. I prefer, rather, to start with a basic affirmation of participation in the rhetoric as well as the struggles of that time. Although my discussion addresses a limited age cohort within the field of theatre and performance studies, I am ultimately suggesting that scholarly, pedagogical, or even performative projects based upon a period that one has lived through need, at some level, to incorporate openly and consciously a critical self-reflection based on that experience.

In “A Voyage on the North Sea”: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition, Rosalind Krauss writes about Marcel Broodthaers, James Coleman, and William Kentridge because, as she notes, these artists have decided not to follow the international fashion of installation and intermedia work in which “art essentially finds itself complicit with a globalization of the image in the service of capital.”Rosalind Krauss, “A Voyage on the North Sea”: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (London: Thames & Hudson, 1999), 56. Neither have they retreated into the etiolated forms of traditional mediums, such as painting and sculpture. Rather, their recent works have embraced the idea of differential specificity, in which a medium itself is reinvented and rearticulated.

The Hurley Music Library is on the campus of Centenary College of Louisiana, a small Methodist-affiliated college located in the northwest corner of the state. The school has nationally recognized programs in music, theatre, dance, and art, and serves as regional center for the arts in the Ark-La-Tex tristate area (all of the major arts organizations in the area either rehearse, meet, or center their activities at the Centenary College campus). The Hurley Music Library is the only branch library on the campus, and it has been housed in its own building, adjacent to the Hurley School of Music, since 1990. The Hurley Library owns special collections in musical theatre and opera, and it has musical instruments from West Africa on permanent display. Because of these collections, the library has been called the region's “hidden musical treasure” (Shreveport-Bossier Forum News, 30 July 1997).

Like other postmodern historians in the line of Foucault and de Certeau, Michal Kobialka treats surviving documents not as markers of historical facts but as traces of discursive fields. This Is My Body: Representational Practices in the Early Middle Ages takes four “epistemological fragments” of the period, some of which have been read by theatre historians as evidence of the origins of medieval drama and theatre, and analyzes the heterogeneous “representational practices” they embody. According to Kobialka, a representational practice determines “what is possible to be thinkable and expressed” within a given discursive field (282). As an antidote to the homogeneous notion of representation in the Middle Ages frequently construed by traditional theatre historiography, Kobialka lays bare the power relations and discursive instabilities that underlie a network of such practices in the early Middle Ages (970–1215).

The first significant wave of Western scholarship about Japanese theatre came after World War II in the combined efforts of Brandon, Ernst, Keene, Scott, Bowers, Maim and others, who provided an encyclopedic introduction to the histories, practices and aesthetics of traditional Japanese theatre. The scope of this collective undertaking (no less than the [re]construction of a cultural legacy pre-dating Shakespeare) was, and remains, a stunning achievement in terms of its sheer exuberance as well as in its revelatory contribution to Western knowledge. Yet, in spite of such an auspicious beginning (as well as the excellent contributions of subsequent scholars), extant studies of Japanese theatre in English remain scarce and new ones, scarcer still. Even now, more than a half-century after the war, the emphases of these examinations often privilege the study of traditional practices over contemporary ones. A near-absence of translated studies by Japanese scholars further compounds this imbalanced perspective.

This study is part of Oxford Shakespeare Topics; a series of short, accessible books addressing “important aspects of Shakespeare criticism and scholarship.” It aims to reconstruct the conditions of performance in Shakespeare's own time. The relatively meager supply of hard historical evidence is supplemented by interpretive speculation, with the latter occasionally overbalancing the former.

Tracy Davis's monumental study of the economics of British theatre (and allied entertainment) in the nineteenth century is breathtaking in its scope, incessantly informative, frequently eye-opening, repeatedly assumption-shattering, and astonishingly well-researched. It is arguably one of the most important contributions to scholarship in Victorian theatre for at least a decade. It is also, for the first 150 of its 362 pages of text, difficult to read and almost impossible to digest.

he names of Arthur and Barbara Gelb have been connected with Eugene O'Neill ever since their 1962 biography of the playwright became a surprise bestseller. Since that time, they have written numerous articles and reviews, and their biography has become an unavoidable landmark in O'Neill scholarship. In the introduction to their new book, the Gelbs write that, following the publication of the earlier biography, “countless studies of O'Neill's plays [were] published, along with chronicles of his life and times.” Many of these texts used the Gelb book as a guide, some of which “surpassed segments of our own research, elaborated on our early discoveries and caught us in errors” (xiv).

According to Thomas F. Connolly, George Jean Nathan (1882–1958) stands as “the first modern American drama critic” (13). Nathan's career spanned the early half of the twentieth century, beginning in 1905 as reviewer for the NewYork Herald, followed by a position as coeditor with H. L. Mencken of The Smart Set (1914–1924) and, later, as cofounder with Mencken of the American Mercury (1923–1932), and concluding as a contributor to The American Spectator, Newsweek, and Esquire. In addition to his magazine and newspaper work, Nathan authored thirty-four books of theatre criticism and dramatic theory, becoming the most widely read theatre critic in the nation.

In Reading Stephen Sondheim: A Collection of Critical Essays, editor Sandor Goodhart interrogates an incongruity between Stephen Sondheim's reputation as one of the most important artists of the musical stage and the simultaneous paucity of serious academic attention to his work. Two recent collections from Garland Publishing, Joanne Gordon's Stephen Sondheim: A Casebook and Goodhart's own Reading Stephen Sondheim, attempt to illuminate Sondheim's works by examining them through a wide array of critical lenses. Gordon, an acclaimed Los Angeles stage director and accomplished scholar, includes fourteen essays by directors, acting coaches, designers, and scholars in her book (an eclectic collection oriented toward theatrical practice). Goodhart's volume presents an assortment of literary studies representing current trends in critical theory.

This vivid, inspiring collection of essays explores the general outlines, the retrospective guidelines, the facts, the falsehoods, and the possible future of experimental performance from the fin de siècle onward. It asks less what the “avant-garde” is than how it has been considered, and in so doing, suggests a preliminary structure for a long-needed genealogy of ideas of the groundbreaking, anarchic, and simply the “new,” in performance history.

One of Stanislavsky's most frequently quoted directives to actors is to play the specifics of life and to avoid the enemy of generalities. If this guideline can be applied to the composition of texts, then authors Jane Milling and Graham Ley of the University of Exeter have succeeded in disarming that enemy in print. Their detailed analyses of the writings of an illustrious group of twentieth-century theatrical figures is solidly grounded in sociocultural and artistic specifics and illuminates the theoretical trails blazed by these practitioners.

Since theatre emerged as an academic discipline, scholars and artists have argued over how to define it. These debates have had various motivations: the desire to capture the full dimensions of their object of study, the search for appropriate methods of analysis, and the fight for intellectual ground in academic power struggles. The increasingly popular term “performance,” which arose out of dissatisfaction with the narrow aesthetic and cultural limits that the concept of “theatre” seems to impose, has been likewise much debated (as demonstrated in Marvin Carlson's 1996 survey).

Since its inception in 1967, the Prague Quadrennial, an international exhibition of stage design and theatre architecture, has been a focal event for the world's best theatre practitioners, historians, and critics. Held every four years, the Quadrennial features exhibits from around the world that exemplify the breadth, depth, and variety of approaches to theatrical practice. The 1999 Quadrennial provided a forum for discussing the topic “Theatrical Space in Postmodern Times: Contemporary Concepts and Methodologies,” and was hosted by the Theatre Institute in Prague and the Scenography Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research. In Space and the Postmodern Stage, select essays from this Quadrennial's presentations suggest, as coeditor Irene Eynat-Confino remarks, “the many facets of postmodernism on the stage and in theatre sites” (9).

Scholars attempting to define the myriad meanings and purposes of the theatre across the centuries have tended to avoid issues of sexuality, particularly those aspects of it that seem to veer from the generally accepted norm. In The Changing Room: Sex, Drag, and Theatre, Laurence Senelick makes a compelling and persuasive case for understanding the centrality of sexuality in all aspects of performance, in all its confusing complexity and glory. In this, the first major cross-cultural study of theatrical transvestism, the theatre is “the changing room,” in its acknowledgment of “the essential queerness of its nature” (509). In over five hundred pages of copiously researched, cogently argued analysis, Senelick charts the role of drag in theatre from its origins to the present, shifting effortlessly through a broad range of cultures and eras. Along with the opportunity of viewing theatre history through a unique lens, drag provides an opportunity for the exploding of familiar stereotypes of gender—and Senelick comes armed with dynamite.

Jarka Burian's Modern Czech Theatre: Reflector and Conscience of a Nation accomplishes something important: namely, it helps theatre scholars understand why Czech theatre in the twentieth century was interesting, important, and worthy of study, in spite of the fact that Czech theatre artists were only occasionally leaders in theatrical innovation, and Czech playwrights sometimes “did not measure up to their fellow theatre artists.” In his book, Burian focuses primarily on theatre productions, the history of selected theatre companies, and the accomplishments of important Czech directors. Throughout it, Burian points out the periods when Czech theatre belonged to “the first ranks of European theatre” as well as when it sank into stagnation. Burian presents these different periods within the context of Czech history and situates them within the history of Western theatrical practice as well. As his title suggests, Burian stresses the unusually close bond the Czech people had with their theatre, and the high degree of political and social relevance that theatre had within Czech society.

African theatre and theatre artists have a long history of playing interventionist roles in the sociopolitical climate of the continent. Al-Zalum (The Tyrant) brought about the expulsion of Yussuf Khayyat from Egypt in 1878. Wole Soyinka was incarcerated during the Nigerian Civil War of the 1960s and helped end military dictatorship in that country in the 1990s. Ngugi wa Thiong'o's Kamiriithu Theatre was razed in the 1970s and the playwright incarcerated by Kenya's political leadership for allegedly using the theatre to “teach” politics. South Africa, because of its long years of apartheid, produced an impressive list of interventionist theatre practitioners—Athol Fugard, Mbongeni Ngema, Barney Simon, John Kani, and many more. The latter half of the 1990s ushered in a new way of life in South Africa, and theatre that had vehemently protested the evils of apartheid sought new ways to be relevant. South African Theatre as/and Intervention continues the trend of interventionary theatre, gathering intellectuals and practitioners to discuss how theatre should engage itself in future interventions. Blumberg and Walder's is the first book entirely devoted to the subject of theatrical intervention in an African country, and, whereas past interventions have often been reactive, their approach is proactive. By looking at the present, they boldly predict the future and set the pace for a productive, meaningful intervention, not only in South African theatre, but in theatre through out Africa and the world. Though focused on South Africa, the ripples extend to African and world theatres.