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.

As what follows is, in many ways, a history of absence, I begin with a poignant illustration of materializing something that wasn't there.

Editor's Note: For this issue of Critical Stages, Ari Osterweis and Barbara Browning consider the multiple publics at play in the work of artist-performer Narcissister.

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).

Italian prima donna Francesca Cuzzoni (ca. 1698–1770) was the first internationally recognized virtuosa to sing high soprano women's roles. Although her work served as a model to the female performers who followed, no in-depth critical study has been written about her groundbreaking career on the opera stage of the Royal Academy of Music in London, where she was the celebrated prima donna from 1723 to 1728. During her tenure, the Royal Academy became one of the most important opera companies in Europe, rivaling those of the Viennese court, the Paris Opera, and the Italian opera houses of Naples and Venice. Her arrival on the London stage signaled a shift in the ways composers set roles in relationship to vocal categories and gender. In particular, Cuzzoni's superior virtuosic vocal abilities influenced and inspired German George Friedrich Handel's (1685–1759) compositional style and his musical treatment of dramatic elements.

In an 1847 lecture before the Female Anti-Slavery Society of Salem, William Wells Brown stated: “Were I about to tell you the evils of Slavery, to represent to you the Slave in his lowest degradation, I should wish to take you, one at a time, and whisper it to you. Slavery has never been represented; Slavery never can be represented.” In these oft-cited lines, Wells Brown makes a strong claim for the absolute impossibility of representing slavery. But I wish to pause and stay with his earlier suggestion that it might just be possible to tell about slavery in a whisper. Breaking through the fastidiousness of the audience, a whisper can bring the condition of slavery close.

In 1806, Longman & Co. publishers commissioned the accomplished actress, playwright, and novelist Elizabeth Inchbald to compose a series of prefatory remarks for the plays to be included in their British Theatre series. One hundred and twenty-five in all, each of the plays for Longman's British Theatre was originally published and sold separately at a rate of about one per week. Once the series was complete, the plays were bound together and sold as a twenty-five-volume set. As the surviving diary entries from the two-year period during which she wrote her Remarks testify, the task proved both arduous and unrelenting for Inchbald, especially as she had no hand in selecting the plays to be included and no control over the order in which she was asked to compose her critical commentaries. Working almost constantly, no sooner had she read one play, drafted her remarks, and copyedited the proof, than she had to turn to the next play sent by Longman, collect her thoughts, and start the process all over again. For the most part, as Annibel Jenkins has noted, “[T]here seems to be no pattern of publishing by date or genre; a tragedy by Shakespeare came out one week and a contemporary comedy the next.” At one point, the strain of this process was so unbearable that Inchbald even tried to renege on her contractual obligations, writing to Longman, “begging to decline any further progress.” This request, as her first biographer, James Boaden, records, Longman “could not be expected to permit; and she was therefore compelled to remark through the whole year.” In the event, and however “dreadful” the task may have been for Inchbald, the widely advertised series proved a “great commercial success,” and Inchbald's Remarks have come down to us as one of the first great achievements in English dramatic criticism of the early nineteenth century.

In April 2020—only weeks after the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic—the New York Times published an article titled “Why Zoom Is Terrible.” Quoting a gustatory simile from Sheryl Brahnam of Missouri State University, the article declared, “In-person communication resembles video conferencing about as much as a real blueberry muffin resembles a packaged blueberry muffin that contains not a single blueberry but artificial flavors, textures and preservatives.”1 It has been a year marked by the absence of “in-person” connection, or in the language of our field, of spatial copresence. The COVID-19 pandemic has fundamentally disrupted our ability to share space. Spatial copresence, it turns out, is what the coronavirus requires to spread. The virus, in this sense, is a phenomenon of the live. While technologies like Zoom have maintained our capacity for temporal copresence, the now ubiquitous status of “Zoom fatigue” points to new ways to consider spatial copresence, and by extension “liveness.”

The work of Joint Stock Theatre Company is the stuff of alternative theatre mythology. A self-defined socialist company that premiered plays like David Hare's Fanshen and Caryl Churchill's Cloud Nine, the group is known as one of Britain's most enduringly innovative alternative-theatre groups, in part because of those playwrights' success, in part because of such famous actors and directors as Max Stafford-Clark and Bill Gaskill, whose visions forged the group. But the history of Joint Stock's final years is not well known, despite the existence of a company history, The Joint Stock Book. Although it might seem that the group lost touch with its artistic imperative after 1985 and that it closed amid the generally harsh climate for alternative theatre created by the arts-funding policies of the conservative government of Margaret Thatcher (in office during 1979–90), that is not entirely true. Reorganized in 1985–6 to maximize racial and gender parity in the company, Joint Stock produced significant work and traversed important cultural and political terrain until 1989, when it closed both because of lost funding and because of the decisions of individual artists.

For this special edition of “Critical Stages,” Chambers-Letson and Son meditate on the following questions: What are the exigencies that animate your entry into the field of theatre and performance studies? How does a shared project in Asian American performance offer a range of possibilities for thinking through pressing political questions and crises that seem otherwise insurmountable?

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.

In the years leading up to the U.S. Civil War, free and fugitive persons of color were aware of the need to frame how they were seen in their everyday lives as part of an arsenal of rhetorical strategies to attract audiences to the abolitionist cause. In this article, I examine three spatial contexts that nineteenth-century mixed-race persons navigated for abolitionist ends in which their hybrid bodies were featured as an aspect of their public performances. These locations—Britain's imperially sponsored Crystal Palace, a Brooklyn church pulpit, and the dramatic reader's lectern—were not merely static places but were spaces animated and made meaningful by the interactions performed therein. Each framed a particular ocular and locational politics and strategically imbued some degree of social class privilege on the hybrid persons following its social scripts. But in so doing, each setting also reinforced colorism and contributed to notions of the supremacy of “whiteness” even while it furthered an antislavery agenda.

Professor George F. Reynolds' The Staging of Elizabethan Plays at the Red Bull Theatre, 1606–1625 was the first major book, to cast doubt on the theory that there was a recessed room, an ‘inner stage,’ cut into the tiring house wall on the Shakespearian stage. Reynolds further restored the reputation of the much-maligned De Witt-van Buchell sketch of the Swan Theatre. Although a number of scholars recognized at once that Reynolds' book was something of a landmark, it was not until this decade that his methods and materials were made use of. C. Walter Hodges' The Globe Restored was the first book to take up where Reynolds had left off. Dependent on Hodges, but at the same time highly original, was A. M. Nagler's Shakespeare's Stage.

Almost all of the major characters in Chekhov's plays are ambiguous; their interpretation poses no small task for directors and actors. The figure of Nina Zarechnaya in The Seagull, in particular, has been construed in many ways. She has been seen as a soaring seagull; a tumbled, tousled bird; a talentless country girl; an emerging artist of promise; a high-reaching neurotic wreck; a future actress of Arkadina's vein; and so on. Because of this interpretive ambiguity, Chekhov was often asked to clarify his position on one or another of his characters. In written form he did so explicitly only once, in a letter to Suvorin in connection with his Ivanov performance in St. Petersburg. In this letter and others as well, it is clear that Chekhov's principle was “better to blur the portrait than overdo it.” The recollections of Stanislavsky, Nemirovich-Danchenko, and many actors of the Moscow Art Theatre indicate, moreover, that most of the time Chekhov confined himself mainly to seemingly insignificant remarks if asked about a role. Stanislavsky remembers, for example, that when, after a rehearsal, he asked Chekhov to critique his portrayal of Trigorin, Chekhov said, “Wonderful! Listen, it was wonderful! Only you need torn shoes and checked trousers.” After these sorts of typically oblique remarks directors and actors were puzzled and would long ponder the hidden meaning of the playwright's comments. The famous actor of many Chekhov plays, V.I. Kachalov, also wrote in his memoirs about Chekhov's unwillingness to influence the actor straightforwardly.

Although the modern reputation of Molière is based upon a group of major comedies, these were not the sole source of his popularity during his lifetime. He and his troupe performed many minor plays which are no longer prominent in the Molière repertory. Among these plays is a group which feature a comedian named Sganarelle, a role always performed by Molière himself.

Theatre history sometimes amuses us with the persistence of certain notions which, no matter how roundly discredited, simply refuse to die. One of these speculations concerns the method of pairing role and actor in the Elizabethan theatre. Actors were assigned to their roles, and roles were written for actors, in accordance with the actor's “lines of business” — weren't they? T. W. Baldwin's long and influential book, The Organization and Personnel of the Shakespearean Company, attempts to prove this method of role designation. However, his is one of those theories of remarkable stamina which, in spite of serious critical challenge, never stay down for the count, but stagger gamely back into lectures and appear unexpectedly in respectful citations. Given its shortcomings and inaccuracies under close scrutiny, Baldwin's hypothesis seems to demand a final and permanent interment. To that end, I will examine the question of acting lines — the theory, its champions and its challengers, and the evidence for and against it, taking Baldwin's work as a starting point.

The material upon which this paper is based is divided into two sections. The paper concerns the problems presented to historians of the theatre confronted by staging conventions. The first section is intended to consider in general terms our own experience of some of these problems—problems which, while forming given constants in the preoccupations of theatre scholars, have been brought sharply into focus by Robert K. Sarlós' recent article in Theatre Research International, “Creating Objects and Events.” The second seeks to examine the generalities which we put forward in an account of the practical reconstruction of Mahelot's staging of Pyrame et Thisbé in the early seventeenth-century Hôtel de Bourgogne.