The founding of experimental ensembles dominates the history of Western theatre in the first half of the twentieth century. Groups of theatre artists, desperate to revive and resuscitate an art grown stale and lifeless, banded together, seeking common ground in the period's vast swirl of artistic and ideological sensibilities. These groups, from the Moscow Art Theatre to the Berliner Ensemble, produced a broad range of performances, yet all shared a common commitment to change and theatrical growth. Two of these, the Group Theatre and Jacques Copeau's Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier participated in and elevated this world-wide phenomenon. Since they share some common roots, an exploration of the relationship between the Vieux-Colombier and the Group yields some insights into the formation and maintenance of an acting ensemble.

Nearly a century-and-a-half after urban professional entertainers first attained instant popularity for music, dance, and humor performed in blackface, amateur minstrels in the rural Midwest continued to pack school auditoriums and smalltown theaters with their homespun variety. Blackening their hands and faces with storebought makeup (the modern equivalent of the burnt cork of the nineteenth century), farmers and schoolteachers sang spirited renditions of “There's Nothin Like a Minstrel Show” mechanics and school board members donned tutus in an exotic ballet burlesque; and a realtor with a rich baritone sang his version of “Mammy,” a perennial favorite.

The notoriety of the two most popular antebellum stage versions of Uncle Tom's Cabin naturally has led theatre historians to examine both the adaptation choices and their political intentions, continuing a debate which began in earnest on 7 November 1853. On that day the Henry J. Conway adaptation opened at P. T. Bamum's American Museum in New York, entering into direct competition with the version by George Aiken, at that time in the fourth month of its run across town. Barnum aggressively promoted the Conway text as “the only just and sensible Dramatic version of Stowe's book,” despite such changes as a rewritten happy ending and the use of minstrel humor and music. Incensed abolitionist critics countered by dubbing the Conway adaptation “pro-South,” a label which still remains in use, especially in comparisons of the Conway and Aiken texts.

“She is full of strength and grace, and though cold in surface there is burning Etna beneath”—this was Helen Faucit in 1849, as described by Mrs. Mary Coleridge. Perhaps the graphic words were meant for Helen Faucit as a person, but, if so, they apply equally well to her acting style in its maturity, a style that was distinguished alike by power and charm, by passionate “nature” and classical “art.”

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.

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.”

In April 1885, a New York Herald journalist rushed to Madison Square Garden for a special reception highlighting Jo-Jo, the Dog-Faced Boy. A feature of P. T. Barnum's traveling show, Jo-Jo was confounding scientists who had requested a stand-alone inspection of the mysterious attraction. Accordingly, the reporter provided an anthropological description of the boy: “He stands about five feet high. . . . His whole body is covered by a very thick growth of long, tow colored hair . . . and the peculiar formation of his head [is] very suggestive of the Russian dachshund.” At first, Jo-Jo appeared docile, but as the scientists prodded him more and more, he started “snarling, showing his three canine teeth” and asked his guardian if he could bite the inspectors. Jo-Jo was decidedly not a dog-boy, or not exactly. He was, in fact, a Russian teenager suffering from hypertrichosis, a condition causing excessive hair growth all over the body, including nearly every surface area of the face. Barnum had signed him to perform a year earlier, and the boy made quite an auspicious debut. However, Jo-Jo was simply the latest in a long line of supposed hybrid species and exotic curiosities that Barnum had been displaying since midcentury. The famed showman built his name in part by presenting human creation itself as a continual spectrum. Barnum's attractions ranged from live tigers and giraffes to enigmatic simian performers to wax statues of America's degraded lower classes. As much of a draw as he became, even Jo-Jo had to share a bill with Tattooed Hindoo Dwarfs, Hungarian Gypsies, Buddhist Priests, as well as a menagerie of animals including baby elephants, kangaroos, lions, and twenty-foot-long “great sinewy serpents.” But Jo-Jo's specific appeal was tied to his inexplicability. Even given the closer inspection of the dog-faced boy, “none of the physicians present would hazard an opinion as to his ancestry.”

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.

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.”

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.

It was a hot, sweaty day in Newport News, Virginia, in 1986. Cornerstone Theater's designer, Lynn Jeffries, was building a set for the company's first community-based production, Our Town, cast in part with local participants. Three kids rode up on bikes and drawled, “What y'all doin’?” Jeffries responded that they were building a set for a play, noting that she felt like she was “speaking Chinese.” The boys sat for several more minutes. “Do you need help?” And that, according to Jeffries, was “where it all kicked in.”

This rather proud statement is by Gerhart Hauptmann; anyone I wishing to challenge the validity of the boast will be wise to consider first the number of professional Shakespeare performances in the German language as compared with those in English, to take account of the amount and quality of German Shakespeare scholarship, and to realize that Shakespeare had reached many peoples in Eastern and Northern Europe by way of German transmission. In addition, the citation well illustrates the spirit in which German intellectuals approach Shakespeare.

Eighteenth-century dramatists had little or no control over the production of their plays after the initial run. In spite of major strides made in copyright during the eighteenth century—developments that have long been studied and celebrated—dramatists were in an unenviable position when it came to owning their work. Literary property law initially extended only as far as print publication, not performance, and any theatrical company that was able to get hold of a playtext could produce that play without the permission of the author. As a result, dramatists received far less for their work than they otherwise might have.