Among the many devices of the pageant carpenter's art, including the Trees of Jesse, mountains “inuironed with red roses and white,” thrones of justice, dragons, and fonts, the castle had become, at least by the mid-fifteenth century, practically a cliché. Its origins as a pageant structure, however, have yet to be satisfactorily explained, and its iconography is still open to interpretation. Theatre historians have long been interested in the “castle” pageant that the Goldsmiths' guild organized for the coronation of Richard II because it is the first English civic pageant for which any detailed description survives. The nineteenth-century antiquary, William Herbert, believed there to be no record of the “castle” pageant in the Company's own books, however, and following this lead, Robert Withington, the great compiler of pageant history, so reports the matter.

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 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.

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.

As it affected the performing arts community, the Red Scare has been examined in great detail.1 Taken together, these studies make clear that external political forces influence the hiring decisions of performing-arts organizations. From the 1930s to the 1950s figures affiliated with left-wing causes and groups found their careers stifled either temporarily or permanently because of their political beliefs. Although attention has focused primarily on institutional pressures from outside the industry on leftist artists, we describe an instance of pressure from within the industry on an artist whose politics were isolationist rather than progressive. In this research note, we present the case of Lillian Gish, describing how interventionists pressured her to distance herself from the isolationism that she had publicly embraced in the period immediately prior to the entrance of the United States in World War II. The attack on those described as “Nazi sympathizers” and their isolationist brethren during 1940–4 has come to be described as the “Brown Scare,”2 playing off the more widely known “Red Scares” of 1919–20 and 1947–54.

Patience Worth, a British Puritan girl who lived and died sometime in the seventeenth century, produced a prolific four million words in the form of novels, plays, poems, prayers, and short stories. “Produced” is the best word for what she did; we certainly can't say she “wrote” them. We can't, in fact, say that Patience Worth existed at all. But neither can we comfortably say that Pearl Pollard Curran (1883–1937) wrote the material in question, though she is usually credited as its author. Between 1913 and 1937, Curran (Fig. 1), a St. Louis, Missouri, housewife, spoke these four million words aloud (often in an idiosyncratic, pseudo-Shakespearean dialect) with the aid of a Ouija board and a planchette. A series of secretaries transcribed what she said: Curran claimed that Worth was a thwarted authoress who had long been searching from beyond the grave for a suitable host and that she had selected Curran as her channel. Some of the material she (they?) generated was ultimately published with the assistance of Casper S. Yost (1863–1941), editor of the St. Louis Globe-Democrat and founder of the American Society of Newspaper Editors. Intrepid librarians have cataloged this perplexing material in ways that attempt to account for its convoluted provenance: “Hope Trueblood, by Patience Worth, communicated through Mrs. John H. Curran, edited by Casper S. Yost, published by Henry Holt and Company, 1918.” Questions of authorship, ownership, and voice are central to this perplexing body of work.

In 2011 and 2012, I undertook a two-part survey to answer some large questions about the use of plays in translation in the higher education drama classroom in Anglophone North America and to test my ideas regarding the simultaneous ubiquity and invisibility of translation there. My project here is to report on that survey and to make clear why translation studies is ready to take a prominent role in theatre studies. U.S. colleges and universities constitute one of the largest single markets in the world for drama translated into English. Most U.S. theatre history classes include plays from the world canon, and many specialized classes in theatre departments focus on plays from non-Anglophone cultures. In English departments, where other genres in translation (e.g., the novel) may be approached with caution, drama seems to be offered a “pass” because the notion of being dramaturgically literate depends on some knowledge of a sizable canon of non-Anglophone plays. Yet despite its ubiquity, translation is often so normalized as to be invisible to those who depend on it. As Laurence Senelick notes, “For most students, a work exists wholly in its translated form, spontaneously generated.” Translation, as the survey confirmed, is part of the DNA of theatre studies. As such, I argue, it needs to be brought to the foreground of the field. In saying this, I am not unaware of the rich work undertaken by scholars, editors, and practitioners who are enmeshed in the difficult issues involved with translating plays, which include pressing for greater attention to cultural sensitivity and literacy. My focus here is on the academy and the classroom, where, for better or worse, the vast majority of future dramaturgs and audience members will cut their teeth on a critical mass of plays and where no single language or production entity or publisher can claim pride of place.

Almost as soon as Paris was liberated from Nazi Occupation on 25 August 1944, Yiddish actors took back the stages on which they had once performed. In fact, on 20 December 1944, while war and the Holocaust still raged, a small cohort of actors produced what they advertised in the Naye prese as the “first grand performance by the ‘Yiddish folks-bine.’” This performance was to take place at the four-hundred-seat Théâtre Lancry, a performance space located in Paris's 10th arrondissement, not far from the Place de la République and the Marais. “Lancry,” as it was known, had played host to Yiddish theatre as early as 1903 and, during the interwar years, it was the center of Parisian Yiddish cultural activity: dozens of theatre performances occurred there and it was where the Kultur-lige pariz was based, among other institutions. During the postwar years, it also went by the name Théâtre de la République after 1947 and Théâtre du Nouveau-Lancry after 1951, but many still referred to it simply as “Lancry.”

In the last fifteen years, a growing number of theatre historians have examined the relation between the British stage and British Imperialism, suggesting that the theatre has both reflected and helped constitute modern colonialism.Articles examining theatrical orientalism and British Imperialism in Victorian and Edwardian periods include Michael Booth, “Soldiers of the Queen: Drury Lane Imperialism,” Melodrama: The Cultural Emergence of a Genre, eds. Michael Hays and Anastasia Nikolopoulou (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996), 3–20; Heidi J. Holder, “Melodrama, realism and empire on the British stage,” Acts of Supremacy: the British Empire and the stage, 1790–1930, eds. J.S. Bratton et al. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991),129–149; J.S. Bratton, “Theatres of war: the Crimea on the London stage 1854–5,” Performance and Politics in Popular Drama: Aspects of Popular Entertainment in Theatre, Film and Television, 1800–1976, eds. David Bradby, Louis James, and Bernard Sharrat (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 119–138; and J. Ellen Gainor, “Bernard Shaw and the Drama of Imperialism,” The Performance of Power: Theatrical Discourse and Politics, eds. Sue-Ellen Case and Janelle Reinelt (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991), 56–74. John M. Mackenzie provides a thorough overview of nineteenth-century theatrical orientalism in Orientalism: History, theory and the arts (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 176–199, and Gary Jay Williams examines orientalist images of colonial expansion in Covent Garden's 1816 operatic adaptation of A Midsummer Night's Dream in Our Moonlight Revels: A Midsummer Night's Dream in the Theatre (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1997), 76–92. While scholars have examined colonialism and theatre in a range of periods, studies of Renaissance theatre are particularly rich in this area. Examples include Paul Brown, “'This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine': The Tempest and the Discourse of Colonialism, ” in Political Shakespeare: essays in cultural materialism, eds. Jonathon Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 48–71; Kim F. Hall, “Sexual Politics and Cultural Identity in The Masque of Blackness,” in The Performance of Power: Theatrical Discourse and Politics, eds. Sue-Ellen Case and Janelle Reinelt (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991), 3–18; Patricia Parker, “Fantasies of 'Race' and 'Gender': Africa, Othello and Bringing to Light, ” in Women, “Race,” and Writing in the Early Modern Period, eds. Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker (London: Routledge, 1994), 84–100; and Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the native Caribbean, 1492–1797 (London: Methuen, 1986). At the same time, there has been an equally prolific effort by historians of the human sciences, examining a host of disciplines whose emergence coincided with colonial expansion.See Felix Driver, “Geography's empire: histories of geographical knowledge,” Society and Space, 10 (1992), 23–40; Brian Hudson, “The New Geography and the New Imperialism: 1870–1918,” Antipode 9 (1977), 12–19; George W. Stocking, Jr., Victorian Anthropology (New York: Free Press-Macmillan, 1987); Billie Melman, Women's Orients: English Women and the Middle East, 1718–1918 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992); and Nicholas Thomas, Colonialism's Culture: Anthropology, Travel and Government (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). Of course all of these works, like this essay, are indebted to Edward Said's Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books-Random House, 1979). If, as Talal Asad has asserted, “the colonial power structure made the object of anthropological study accessible and safe” Talal Asad, Introduction, Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter, ed. Talal Asad (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1973), 17. for the European researcher, it would seem by extension that this same power structure made the object of anthropological study accessible and safe to the British theatre-goer. As theatre historians have pointed out, British theatre managers have cited orientalist authorities ranging from Vivant Denon, who accompanied the French expedition in Egypt, to the press artists that accompanied British colonial armies.The Edinburgh Review attested to the popularity of Denon's Voyages dans la Basse et la Haute Egypte, asserting “Few publications, we believe, have ever obtained so extensive a circulation in the same space of time as these travels.” Cited in Patrick Conner, ed., The Inspiration of Egypt: Its Influence on British Artists, Travelers and Designers, 1700–1900 (Brighton: Brighton Museum, 1983), 29. Pieter van der Merwe argues in The Spectacular Career of Clarkson Stanfield 1793–1867 that Voyages soon became “the theatre's major source for Egyptian subjects” (Tyne and Wear County Council Museums, 1979), 89. I argue elsewhere that Augustus Harris's exhibition of artifacts and illustrations lent by soldiers and press artists in the Sudan Campaign was intended to lend credibility to his depiction of the region in his concurrent production. See “From Geography to Landscape: Imperial Theatre and the Domestication of Exotic Space” in Land Scape Theatre: Views of the Twentieth Century, eds. Una Chaudhuri and Elinor Fuchs (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, forthcoming). It was not simply that a new body o f research generated in colonialism's shadow provided raw material for Eastern plays, this research also served to “license curiosity” about the Orient (to borrow Nicholas Thomas's languageNicholas Thomas, “Licensed Curiosity: Cook's Pacific Voyages,” The Cultures of Collecting, eds. John Elsner and Roger Cardinal (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 116–136.), transforming the theatre's detailed representations of the East into a scholarly and respectable undertaking that seemed, in some ways, allied with Europe's Imperial goals.

That may sound like an evasion. If the question under discussion is asking for a single direction and a plan of action, a stand and a silver bullet, it partly is. To “resist singularity” has the ring of poststructuralist relativism, the now clichéd way by means of which many seem to have evaded action and avoided taking any kind of a stand.

The following essays were inspired by talks delivered at the 2015 Association for Asian American Studies annual conference, where we commemorated the fifty years since the 1965 founding of East West Players (EWP) in Los Angeles. Currently led by artistic director Tim Dang, EWP is known as the first and longest-running Asian American theatre company. It has played a crucial part in the training of Asian American actors and the formation of other Asian American theatres across the nation and in the development of new plays and productions that articulate and challenge how “Asian America” is understood and represented. Through reflecting upon the past, present, and future of EWP, our essays contemplate the most significant questions about Asian American theatre practice: how theatre engages the multiple and even contradictory aspects of what is “Asian American,” the panethnic racial category that is consistently challenged by the diverse cultural practices, communities, and identities it purports to describe. EWP's history illustrates the multiple dimensions of how Asian American theatre can challenge the limited prescriptions, labels, and packaging so often used in talking about race both inside and outside the theatre.

In 1997 Claire Sponsler argued that, contrary to conventional interpretations, the anarchic, disruptive bodies of sin in medieval morality plays do not “unproblematically and unilaterally lead to the ratification of virtue over vice.” Instead, “the memory of the pleasures of misbehavior, of the satisfactions that come from unruly bodies allowed free rein” lingered with spectators to the extent that any “attempts made by these plays to bring misbehavior to a halt look highly unsatisfactory and incomplete.” For Sponsler, the powerful allure of vice performed was such that morality plays would have been unable fully “to negate the charms of misgovernance” they enacted. In this article, however, I want to argue against Sponsler's assumption and investigate how one English morality play, The Castle of Perseverance, understood very well the allure of performed sin and actively cultivated it as part of its dramaturgical and didactic strategies. All morality plays, as Sponsler observes, use representations of “disorderly behavior grounded in the misuse of bodies and commodities,” investing these figures of sin “with remarkable energy, interest, and vitality, so much so that the vices are … very seductive.” The Castle is no exception, and the vast majority of its roughly three thousand lines are spoken by the Three Enemies of Man and their affiliated Sins. In addition, the playtext also provides unusually rich, detailed descriptions of how these spiritual enemies and sins should move around the performance space. Drawing on the theory of kinesthetic empathy, I examine the kinesic dimension of these “unruly bodies” and argue, contrary to Sponsler, that it is their presence, and the audience's own embodied responses to them, that deepens and enhances, rather than detracts from, the play's moral message.

Women have been largely invisible in crime discourse in South Africa; they have never been conceived of as either the primary authors or objects of the law. Yet according to the Republic of South Africa Department of Correctional Services (DCS), they are one of the fastest-growing segments of the prison population today. In the eight years following democratic elections in 1994, DCS reports that the number of women behind bars grew by over 31 percent. From 2008 to 2012 alone, the women's prison population rose by 10 percent while the number of men behind bars declined. These increases are not fully attributable to an escalation in women's illicit behavior. Instead, shifts in policing and sentencing policies now mandate longer sentences for crimes for which women are most likely to be convicted—both aggressive and non-violent, often poverty-related, offenses such as theft (shoplifting, robbery, burglary, carjacking, fraud, embezzlement), narcotics (trafficking, sale, distribution), and sex work.

There is so much to say about the persistent critiques of and mobilizations against Chris Dercon's vision (or lack thereof) of the newly named Volksbühne Berlin. My task here, however, is a different one: to begin to understand why there has also been such persistent mobilization on behalf of the Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz. In what follows, I provide some critical context for reflection upon the unique role the Volksbühne played in post-Wall Berlin. I suggest that in his twenty-five-year tenure at the Volksbühne, Frank Castorf worked to refunction the theatre apparatus itself, to transform the theatre as state institution, as interrelated set of supporting structures that extend beyond and behind the proscenium arch. Further, Castorf's work as both director and artistic director helps us to understand the complex relations between a theatre aesthetic, which exposes and critiques the structures of its (state) support, and a theatrical institution with similarly ambitious goals. As an aesthetic and as an infrastructural project, Castorf's Volksbühne enacted a new kind of public theatre in Berlin—and it is this project of institutional dis/avowal that we must remember (and dare to reenact) as so much more than reactionary or provincial nostalgia.

Some years ago, during a discussion in the ASTR Executive Committee about the relevance of the Theatre Library Association's participation in ASTR, a scholar on the cutting edge of contemporary theory is reported to have asked a TLA representative exactly what it was that libraries were doing to support postpositivist research. No one remembers what the answer was (it was evidently satisfactory), but I recall thinking that if I had been asked the question, my own reply would have been that libraries weren't doing anything at all; that the business of the library was to preserve the evidence as well as it could and provide access to it, so that scholars could make use of it in whatever manner they chose.

Martha Morton was a remarkable woman — a talented and energetic person whose career in the New York theatre extended from 1890 to 1915, a time when women were expected to concern themselves with traditional roles and when public life and outside work were adventures for only a few daring women. In spite of efforts to sweep her aside, Morton opened the doors for American women, who followed after her, to participate in the theatre as playwrights, directors, producers, and professional members of theatre organizations.

On the night of 7 June 1861, at a playhouse in Albany, New York, actress Adah Isaacs Menken, on horseback, wearing nothing but a fleshcolored bodystocking, galloped up a stage mountain into theatrical history. The combination of danger and nudity shocked and excited her Victorian audience. In an age when women swathed themselves in yards of crinoline, her performance proved scandalous; critics agreed that, though she wore “pink fleshings,” she so explicitly revealed the female form that she might as well have been naked. One reviewer warned that “no pure youth could witness her performance and come away untainted. Naturally, such cautions increased curiosity; soon Menken became the most notorious, highest paid actress of her day. She toured with her show Mazeppa through the northeast, the American west, and the capitals of Europe before succumbing to cancer a short seven years later in Paris.

During the course of her summer's progress in 1575, Elizabeth I spent nineteen days at Kenilworth, the Earl of Leicester's Castle in Warwickshire, where she was presented with various entertainments—including plays, fireworks, bear-baitings, water-pageants, acrobatic performances, and dancing—at a cost of over a thousand pounds a day, as part of what has been called “unquestionably sixteenth-century England's grandest and most extravagant party.” Robert Langham, a minor court functionary who wrote an eyewitness account of the party, describes a “lyvely morisdauns” that was featured in this festive show of fealty to the queen. According to Langham, the morris performed for Elizabeth was danced “acording too the auncient manner” and featured “six daunserz, Mawdmarion, and the fool.” The dance was part of a bride-ale procession made up of “lusty lads and bolld bachelarz of the parish” arranged two by two in “marciall order,” who preceded sixteen horsemen and the bridegroom; after the horsemen came the morris dance, followed by three “prety puzels” carrying spicecakes and leading the bride (“ill smellyng” and “ugly fooul ill favord”), who was accompanied by “too auncient parishionerz, honest toounsmen” and a dozen bridesmaids. The procession marched to the castle in the great court in which a quintain had been set up for feats of arms; when these games were concluded, a performance of the traditional Hock Tuesday play from nearby Coventry was enacted. Though these festivities were staged outside her window, apparently the queen did not see much of them because, Langham tells us, “her highnes behollding in the chamber delectabl dauncing indeed: and heerwith the great throng and unruliness of the peopl, waz cauz that this solemnitee of Brydeale and dauncing had not the full muster waz hoped for” (11. 722–26). Elizabeth asked that the Hocktide play be performed again for her on the following Tuesday; Langham does not mention whether or not the morris dance was also repeated for the queen's pleasure.

Robert Barker of Edinburgh patented the panorama process on 19 June 1787 and opened the first panorama in London in 1792. Robert Fulton, the American inventor, obtained the patent to import the panorama to Paris at the end of 1799. Fulton opened the Paris panorama in 1800, but shortly thereafter ceded the patent to James Thayer. By the summer of 1800 there were two panorama rotundas in operation in a passage off the Boulevard Montmartre. At the end of 1802 a third rotunda was constructed in the Jardin des Capucines, Boulevard de la Chausée d'Antin.