Although many artists have used food in performance, few are as famously or firmly associated with it as Karen Finley. At the start of Finley's career, almost all of her work was marked by unusual uses of food. Examples include sugared yams dumped over her backside while describing ageist rape in I'm an Ass Man (1985) and the concoction of crushed raw eggs and confetti sponged over her body to analogize social oppression in A Constant State of Desire (1986). Finley intended to channel spectators' excessive emotional and sensual reactions to her extreme, sometimes nauseating uses of food into an indictment of abusive attitudes toward people of marginalized identities. In this sense, the excess of the medium and the excess of the message were intended to correspond, creating a synergistic effect on the spectator.

In her recent book on celebrity pregnancy, legal scholar Renée Ann Cramer writes, “in the years from 1970 to 2000, popular culture became more open to performances of pregnancy; once kept secret and articulated as private, pregnancy became ‘public.’” This is not wholly true. In the English-speaking world, “celebrity pregnancy,” with its overt performances of femininity and maternity, bodily monitoring, and careful dance between the concealment and revelation of private information, had its first public moment in the long eighteenth century. That century's professional theatre was a site for the intersection of two forms of women's labor: the maternal labor of pregnancy and birth, which affected women of all classes throughout a century with rapidly rising birth rates, and the theatrical labor of professional actresses. Although the latter has been the subject of much-needed study in recent decades, the impact of maternal labor on the professional theatre of the time is only beginning to be explored. Between 1700 and 1800, birth rates for middle- and upper-class British woman rose significantly. Among the aristocracy, rates doubled from four to eight children, and middle-class women averaged seven births by the end of the century. At the same time, women in the professional theatre were inventing and modeling new forms of public womanhood, capitalizing on a burgeoning culture of female celebrity, and, in some cases, wielding exceptional economic and artistic power. Though not all actresses had children, many did, and at rates that were not unlike those of their nontheatrical counterparts. For these women, the successful balancing of maternal and theatrical labor could be vital to their careers and, in many cases, their family's survival. The need to balance personal and professional demands was all the more imperative within the hectic and extremely competitive repertory system. The day-to-day repertory of a London company was of necessity a malleable thing, accommodating short runs of popular pieces, audience requests, illnesses and absences of company members, and the perpetual state of competition between the patent houses of Covent Garden and Drury Lane. To compete profitably, managers needed competent and popular performers (bodies) and performance vehicles (texts) in which to feature them. As the available bodies changed, then, so too did the available plays for performance.

Eleonora Duse (1858–1924), international star, national treasure, and patriotic Italian died in Pittsburgh in April 1924. Those involved in the memorializing process contended for control of her body, attempting to interpolate her renown in competing narratives of national pride and the universality of art. Duse died at a turning point for Italy, the year Mussolini's Fascists became the majority party. For Mussolini and the Fascists, Duse's death became the occasion for a pageant of Italian pride through a series of carefully orchestrated ceremonies. At the same time, the theatre community tried to establish an artistic narrative more akin to the ideals Duse expressed in life. In the end, nationalist motifs dominated the memorial discourse. Duse's own assertions of the importance of spirit over corporeality became an ironic footnote to a story in which the actress's body stood in for the nation.

It is no secret, unhappily, that the study of theatre in the colleges and universities of this country is a discipline under siege, but the severity of the problems received strong confirmation in New York State this fall when two of the most distinguished and long-established (over a century in both cases) programs in the country were, with little warning, faced with draconian cuts or outright extinction. The fact that one, the state University of Albany, was the flagship school of the public system, and the other, Cornell University, was one of the state's most distinguished private institutions, suggests the scope and impact of these actions. At Albany, four other programs are being terminated along with theatre—Classics, Russian, Spanish, and French—while at Cornell the extent of the severe cuts imposed on the theatre program—almost a quarter of the total budget of the department (which also shelters dance and film)—are being suffered by no other program in the university. The prominence of these two schools in a state that has long claimed a central position in American theatre makes them particularly significant symbolically of a discipline in crisis, and this has impelled me to engage in serious and sometimes painful reflections on that discipline, the basis of the present essay.

Theatre critics and historians generally acknowledge a movement toward realism in nineteenth century American dramaturgy and cite Augustin Daly, Bronson Howard, William Gillette, and James A. Herne as innovators in the development of American realism. Steele Mackaye, however, is rarely included as a significant part of this movement; although his theatrical inventions are hailed as far-sighted and innovative, his plays are usually dismissed as unworthy of consideration, as conventional melodramas reflecting the fashion of the day. The close study of Mackaye's plays, however, reveals that he was in the vanguard of the movement toward realism.

Ecstatic religious trance and spirit possession occur across a broad cultural and socioeconomic range, from Pentecostal possession by the Holy Ghost to Ethiopian zar possession cults. Interestingly, this phenomenon is most frequently experienced by young women in their early teens. Folklorists such as Felicitas Goodman postulate that this generational and gendered proclivity for trance reception is a response to the powerlessness of girls within their communities. As such, spirit possession allows young women to claim a degree of cultural power through the performance of a spiritual manifestation. Although I want to make it clear that I am not questioning the very real physical (and perhaps metaphysical) effects of the trance state during religious ecstasy, I argue that the trance state is a consciously induced performance and the enactment of spiritual power.

Wolcott Gibbs once told the New Yorker's readers: Now, in 1938, only the invincibly naive imagine they go to a production of “Hamlet” for the purpose of watching a bunch of actors in a play. The others understand that they are about to be confronted with a ringing challenge to their culture. The man who has not seen Barrymore, Massey, Hampden, Lieber [sic], Gielgud, Howard, Evans, Tinker, and Chance (to round up enough for a little ball game) and is not prepared to discuss their respective performances might better go and live in Rockport, Indiana, though it is by no means certain that he would be safe even there. (22 Oct. 1938, p. 34)

Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree (1853–1917) is a perplexing figure in Shakespearean stage history. At the turn of the century and in the decade following, he was esteemed as Irving's successor, the pre-eminent Shakespearean actor and producer in Great Britain. That reputation rested largely on his great “revivals” of Shakespeare at Her (later His) Majesty's Theatre. Highly regarded in his own day, Tree is now commonly thought of as a somewhat ludicrous impressario: “He was at heart a comedian, a character actor, a make-up artist specializing in the eccentric,” writes Charles H. Shattuck in his authoritative history of Shakespeare in performance. And, Shattuck continues, Tree's staging is remembered chiefly for its “tricky business, tableaux and dumbshows,” the kind of elaborate, literal-minded stage “illustration” which put a barge onstage in Antony and Cleopatra and live rabbits in A Midsummer Night's Dream. It is easy to laugh at Tree's excesses, as many have, because so little is known about his achievements. For until 1974 the Tree promptbooks and theatre records (scrapbooks with complete newspaper reviews) were controlled by the Tree Estate, and were therefore all but inaccessible to scholars. Lacking the direct evidence of reviews and promptbooks, theatre historians have relied on the harsh judgments of Tree's enemies—chiefly George Bernard Shaw and A. B. Walkley of the London Times—who denounced Tree in favor of William Poel, Gordon Craig, and Harley Granville-Barker.

On 1 September 1797, both the John Street Theatre and the New Theatre, Greenwich-Street advertised Sheridan's The School for Scandal. Although the company at the John Street Theatre subsequently postponed its performance, this confrontation was typical of what G.C.D. Odell referred to as the “Battle Royal of 1797,” New York City's first competitive theatre season. While most scholars of the American theatre are familiar with the history of the John Street Theatre, very little has been written about New York City's first “regular opposition theatre,” the Greenwich Street Theatre. Lack of information combined with scholarly bias has left us with only impressionistic images of this theatre's place in history.

At 12:30 P.M. on Monday, 30 April 1764, the curtain parted on the stage of the Little Theatre in the Hay-Market in London and revealed George Alexander Stevens about to begin his celebrated Lecture on Heads. For the remainder of the century this presentation became a staple in the English speaking theatre. It amassed a fortune for its creator, was copied and adapted by dozens of performers, and went through 30 published editions, authentic and spurious.

In Book 3 of Plato's Republic, Socrates refers to the beginning of the Iliad in order to take Homer to task for switching from a purely narrative voice to actually “speaking” in the voice of a character—the Trojan priest Chryses—who is attempting to get Agamemnon to return his daughter. Socrates then demonstrates in his own third-person narrative of that same story how it could have been told without the imitation provided by the priest's speech. Socrates also makes the point that it is in tragic drama where the opposite condition obtains: tragic drama is comprised entirely of direct, imitative speech instead of a distanced, third-person narration. The distinction being made between diegesis (narrative) and mimesis (imitation) marks the beginning of the concept of theatricality, a concept still hotly debated today. Interestingly enough, as is often the case with concepts, it is born in a negative fashion, from antitheatrical criticism.

In looking forward to the important issues of this coming decade, we need only turn to the events of the past year for a sense of what is at stake for theatre, performance, and performance pedagogy. Last year, student activists protested racism on college and university campuses across the United States. At Yale, students protested the hostile racial climate on campus following several incidents, including a professor's dismissal of concerns about racist Halloween costumes, numerous swastika graffiti, and the explicit exclusion of black women from fraternity events. At the University of Missouri, the student group Concerned Student 1950—named for the year the first black students were admitted to the university—called for the resignation of university president, Tim Wolfe, citing the administration's inaction in the face of numerous racist incidents on campus. At Ithaca College, Claremont McKenna University, the University of Kansas, and many other colleges and universities across the United States, students held rallies, performed die-ins, and signed petitions in support of students at the University of Missouri and Yale and to call attention to inequality on their own campuses. Set against the backdrop of Ferguson and an increased awareness of institutionalized violence against black and brown bodies, these events remind us that colleges and universities have always been sites where racial discrimination and inequality have been both perpetuated and protested.

Theatre is predominantly a social form. Social history, which invites perspectives from “below,” stories of resistance, and awareness of how social organization stratifies, has had a profound effect on theatre studies since the 1970s. A wide scholarly purview on performative forms dates from the later nineteenth century, but social history changed awareness about historical contiguities of categories of community, amateur, and folk performance; tensions and exchanges among court, community, and professional performance constituencies; as well as greater respect for nonliterary traditions and unwritten forms of preservation and lineage. Social history, in short, prompted questions about who made theatre and how it mattered to the people who partook of it, including those who made it as well as others who consumed it, rather than more narrowly determining what constituted theatre (or drama) worthy of posterity. This approach—society as a group with common territory and interactions, enveloping each individual—could not be investigated as theatre history without a commensurate interest in culture. That is to say, not culture as the pinnacle of elites' achievements, but rather any social group's interpretation and use of common beliefs and values patterned by behavior and practices into religion, behavioral protocols, cuisine, and so on, including the arts. Wariness of a narrow elite construal of culture may be what keeps theatre historians from calling our field “cultural history,” for, though we embrace the ambit of social history, cultural history often comes in through the side door of sociological or anthropological theory. Cultural expressions are evident via how a society socializes, interacts, and adapts in ways that make the contours of the society legible to those within it, as well as differentiated from those who are outside it.

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.

Because sensory theatre productions are designed with neurodiverse audiences in mind, practitioners are first and foremost concerned with accessibility at all levels for their audience members, incorporating multiple senses throughout a performance to allow a variety of entry points for audiences that may have wildly divergent—and often competing—access needs. One-to-one interaction between performers and audience members results in highly flexible performances that respond to physical and auditory input from individual audience members, through which performers curate customized multisensory experiences that communicate the production's theatrical world to its audience. Given this reliance on close-up interaction, the circumstances surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic have posed a particular challenge for sensory theatre makers. In in-person sensory theatre, performers focus on neurodivergent audience members, with parents and paid carers often taking a (literal) back seat, but remotely delivered sensory theatre during COVID-19 hinges on the carer's facilitation of sensory engagement curated by sensory theatre practitioners. Oily Cart, a pioneering London-based sensory theatre company, responded to COVID-19 restrictions with a season of work presented in various formats in audiences’ homes, and their production Space to Be marked a shift in the company's audience engagement to include an emphasis on the carer's experience.1 Using this production as a case study, I argue that the pivotal role adopted by carers during the pandemic has the potential to shape future in-person productions, moving practitioners toward a more holistic, neurodiverse audience experience that challenges a disabled–nondisabled binary by embracing carers’ experiences alongside those of neurodivergent audience members.2

“Now, I don't want to take anything away from the French resistance,” protests a character in a recent novel. “… Its brave raids and acts of sabotage undermined the Germans and helped bring about their downfall. But in many ways Marcel Carné's movie, his Children of Paradise, was more important than the armed resistance. The resisters might have saved the skin of Paris, Carné kept alive its soul.” It is a fatuous remark, the kind we expect from the determinedly fatuous hero, but its praise of Carné suggests with embarrassing accuracy the seductiveness of Les Enfants du Paradis. A Paris of romantically roiling passions, of pure Pierrots and gay Robert Macaires, of the Boulevard du Crime, whose little theatres stand as metaphors for the brash vitality of le peuple — it is a spectacle that few of us can resist. All our dreams of the City of Light (save those of shabby accordionists strolling beneath balloonbedecked Eiffel Towers) are contained in its opening shot, alive with the turbulent crowds of the old quartier du Temple.

Archeological evidence for the history of theatre art has always been less definitive and less extensive than either artists or historians have wished. We have the stone remains of late Greek theatres and we have the pictorial fragments from some ancient amphorae which, when co-ordinated with inscriptions, give us a modicum of knowledge concerning the performances in Greek theatres. From Renaissance architects and painters we have beautiful drawings and engravings of scenes and costumes which give us an indication of the grandeur which was possible in the court performances of Europe for two or three hundred years.

On 29 December 1845, Charlotte Cushman did an extraordinary thing at the Haymarket theatre: she convincingly transformed herself into a man. Audience members who witnessed this performance were captivated by “the transmuting power” of Cushman's “genius” as she became Romeo. This production (and Cushman's Romeo in general) continues to fascinate both contemporary theatre historians and feminist scholars, who are equally impressed with Cushman's seeming ability to create an unsettling paradox. In a recent article, Anne Russell discusses the positive reception that Cushman's Romeo received and questions how the cross-dressed actress could have been so successful “in a period when dominant gender ideologies assumed clearly delineated separate spheres for men and women, when stage reviewers as a manner of routine assessed the ‘womanliness’ or ‘manliness’ of characters and performers.” As Russell explains, the nineteenth-century audience member, critic, and/or commentator read the human figure on stage as either male or female; indeed, such antithetic thinking was pervasive throughout nineteenth-century culture. Cushman was unique, however, in that she repeatedly defied such categorization, both in her theatrical performances and in her “private” life.

In every theatre historian there lurks the shadow of the amateur. For the commitment always begins with a sharing of the theatre-goer's delight in seeing the curtain rise, and a strong sense of being in the presence of history in the making. To record this moment is the instinct of the enthusiast; to recapture it from the past is the function of the historian.

In 1956 a small group of scholars, all of them engaged in some way or other in the study of theatre, past and present, met and founded a certain remarkable organization. I hardly need to explain that that organization was the American Society for Theatre Research, then and still the only organization of American scholars devoted entirely to promoting the cause, the activity, and the results of research in theatre. Nor is it necessary here for me to recapitulate, even briefly, the course of events that now sees us celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Society. Fortunately, one of those founding members, Thomas Marshall, has generously accepted the charge offered him a year ago by the ASTR Executive Committee to write a concise history of the Society from the time of its founding. That review of the first twenty-five years has just come off the press, nicely timed for distribution to all members in attendance at this meeting. Subsequently it is to appear also in the twenty-fifth anniversary issue of the Society's journal, Theatre Survey.