I don't remember the very first time I watched The Wiz (1978). Growing up in a black household during the 1980s, the film was as much a part of my upbringing as the countless hours I spent removing my Jheri curl activator from the sofa, practicing the moonwalk, or listening to my mother and sister's annual Thanksgiving argument about how much salt should go into the collard greens. What I do remember is how much I enjoyed watching The Wiz. Each Thanksgiving Day my six sisters and I would gather around the television set and watch our heroine Dorothy (Diana Ross) travel from her aunt's Harlem apartment to the magical land of Oz. We celebrated the fact that Dorothy ultimately vanquishes her seemingly more powerful foe Evillene, the Wicked Witch of the West (Mabel King). As young black girls, we identified with Dorothy's plight. While we were not battling powerful witches, we were constantly resisting our mother's attempts to socialize us into “respectable” young women. As such, we were fascinated by Evillene, the most oppressive force within Dorothy's life. The gargantuan size of Evillene's body, the hideousness of her face, and the force of her supernatural powers both excited and repulsed us. We eagerly anticipated her first appearance in the film, bursting through the doors of her sweatshop belting, “Don't Nobody Bring Me No Bad News.” We reveled in drawing comparisons between Evillene and our mother, hoping that one day we too could defeat her.

How should we understand the role robes play within noh dance-drama's enactments of femininity? In the above poem Genji's jilted lover, Rokujō, bemoans her inability to keep her vengeful spirit from besieging the Lady Aoi, for whom Genji has spurned her. Within the worldview of Murasaki Shikibu's early eleventh-century narrative, to bind the hem was to tether the restless spirit to its host's body, like a tourniquet stanching spectral energies from seeping to infect victims. The famous noh play Aoi no Ue (Lady Aoi), in which Aoi is played not by an actor but by a short-sleeved robe (kosode), activates the poem's metaphor onstage. Moreover, the Japanese poem's final term, tsuma, signifies both as “robe hem” and “wife,” foregrounding a gendered dimension sutured to problematic notions of feminine deportment and mobility whose dramatic manifestations merit exploration.

Outside Switzerland, the Schauspielhaus Zürich (Zürich Playhouse) is best known among theatre historians for the role it played in supporting and advancing the career of German playwright Bertolt Brecht during and just after World War II. We learn, from our studies of Brecht, that while he was living in exile in Finland and the United States his plays Mother Courage and Her Children, The Good Person of Szechwan, and Galileo all received their first productions in Zürich, and that when he returned to Europe from exile the city was also his initial destination. Brecht was not the only exiled playwright to find a producing home at the Schauspielhaus; the theatre has additionally long been recognized, particularly among German and Swiss theatre historians, for the important role it played in producing the work of many other exiled German and Austrian playwrights during World War II. Some American theatre historians have also made note of the quality of the work produced at the Schauspielhaus: for example, Oscar Brockett mentions the Zürich theatre in passing as “one of the best in Europe during the Nazi regime because so many refugees settled in Switzerland.” But what remains underrecognized among historians outside Switzerland is the pivotal role that both the Schauspielhaus and its dramaturg (and later artistic director) Kurt Hirschfeld played in keeping an international repertoire on life support in Europe when most of the Continent was under Nazi occupation (Fig. 1). A look at the list of wartime and postwar productions at the Schauspielhaus reveals a veritable who's who of the modern Western dramatic canon: productions of works by playwrights like Karel Čapek, Thornton Wilder, Jean Giraudoux, Jean-Paul Sartre, Paul Claudel, Federico García Lorca, T. S. Eliot, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Luigi Pirandello, and many, many—in fact, many dozens—of others.

Since the first British production of Anton Chekhov's play The Seagull in 1909, audiences have found the Russian's plays both beguiling and frustrating in seemingly equal measure. After living in Britain some years, Russian translator Elisaveta Fen began to recognize the problem:

On 1 May 1950, a communist army invaded the small town of Mosinee in central Wisconsin. Occupying communist soldiers dragged Mayor Ralph E. Kronenwetter from his home at six that morning, interrogated and executed Police Chief Carl Gewess, and exiled other religious, civic, and political leaders to the stockade. They ransacked citizens’ homes and raided the public library in search of capitalist propaganda. Cars parked across the local train tracks isolated the town. Roadblocks disrupted travel, and armed soldiers demanded identification cards from anyone hoping to enter or leave Mosinee. Within hours, the paper mill, the newspaper, and other local businesses had fallen to the invading communist army. Food prices tripled and ration cards were required to purchase potato soup, borscht, and black bread. Nearly half the town—more than a thousand of the twenty-two hundred total Mosinee residents—marched in a parade that led to the town square, renamed “Red Square” by the invaders. The townspeople carried red flags and banners espousing famous communist ideology (Fig. 1). The Red Star, a special edition of the Mosinee Times, issued the official “United Soviet States of America” manifesto and abolished the US Constitution and Bill of Rights.