Hollywood is ruled by conventional wisdom—or, as it's known when it takes off its coat and tie, magical thinking. Certain factors, they say, make for a surefire hit; certain others mean you'll never make a buck. Some of the rules sound silly, but, really, why tempt fate? Listen to director Bill Condon as he slips one of these showbiz credos into a recent interview: “You know, they say for a great performance you need a great telephone scene.” To the uninitiated, this may sound strange—surely an outlying tenet of the faith!—but Hollywood's belief in the “telephone scene” is curiously devout. And unlike other Tinseltown lore, with its murky past and fractured provenance, this tale of the telephone is easy to track to a single event nearly eighty years ago.

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.

Andy Warhol was being an asshole. At least Ron Whyte thought so when the two artists crossed paths at a Soho gallery opening in the early 1970s. It's unclear what offense Warhol committed, another incident whose details have been lost to the historical record. But if Warhol had not behaved badly that fateful evening, Whyte—a queer and disabled playwright—might never have removed the “cosmetic glove” covering his “withered” left arm and hurled it at the visual artist, enabling the glove to make its own “contribution to modern art.” The famed artist, Whyte claimed, would go on to copy this assault by prosthesis in Andy Warhol's Frankenstein (1973).

During his first mayoral campaign in January 1989, Richard M. Daley insisted that “Everybody talks about bringing manufacturing back. There aren't going to be any more soap factories on Clybourn Avenue[.] … The city is changing. You're not going to bring manufacturing back.” Although this was a controversial statement at the time and Mayor Daley later embraced promanufacturing policies, it reflected an awareness of a fundamental economic shift in Chicago. By the late 1980s, the city had lost over half of its post–World War II manufacturing jobs, and companies were continuing to leave the city for more space, lower taxes, and a less expensive labor force. In fact, only months after Daley's comments, Procter & Gamble announced that it would close its fifty-nine-year-old soap plant at 1232 West North Avenue on the North Branch of the Chicago River, eliminating 275 manufacturing jobs in the process. Deindustrialization was under way, causing anxiety for politicians and pain for factory workers, but a new economy that was focused on real estate, finance, and culture was emerging in Chicago.

Identified by Time Out New York as “one of the best experimental playwrights in America” and hailed by the New York Times as “the most adventurous downtown playwright of her generation,” Young Jean Lee (Fig. 1) is actively shaping the future of the American theatre. In 2003, she founded Young Jean Lee's Theater Company, through which she has written and directed ten productions. Her full-length plays, including The Shipment and Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven, have been published in four collections and performed worldwide. In 2013, she released her first short film, Here Come the Girls, and her debut album, We're Gonna Die. In the following interview, Young Jean Lee reflects on the role of humor in her plays, discusses her collaborative process, and reveals the two rules that she would never break in the theatre.

In performances in Atlanta; Philadelphia; Washington, DC; Los Angeles; Rio de Janeiro; Chicago; and Denver in 2012, Ms. Lauryn Hill carved out space to voice black rage. In videos uploaded to YouTube, Hill sings, raps, talks, and riffs varied renditions of the song “Black Rage (Sketch),” a remix of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II's “My Favorite Things.” During her November performance at the Electric Factory in Philadelphia, drumbeats punctuated Hill's rapping and singing. Her performance took the audience on a journey meant to leave no one behind; it moved from the highly choreographed rendition of the song with musical accompaniment and Hill acting as lead vocalist and band conductor to her slowly speaking the lyrics of the song and occasionally offering analysis of her words over the shouts and applause of audience members. She explains the line “when I'm feeling sad,” saying “that's a depressive mood.” As the title of her song suggests, in each reiteration Hill issues a different draft of the song, sketching her sound, mood, tempo, and emphasis with each new audience. Although renditions of the song shift, the lyrics consistently recount the physical, psychic, economic, and environmental vulnerability of black people in the United States. The lyrics transform the original song's references to beloved objects—“blue satin sashes” and “snowflakes”—into ironic things such as “Black human packages tied up in strings,” which Hill described in her Philadelphia performance as a reference to bureaucracy but which also resonates with familiar images of lynching. Shifting from the original song's depiction of the curative capacity of things to offset feeling bad, Hill explains that her set of things prevents fear: “I simply remember all these kinds of things and then I don't fear so bad!”

Actress Elizabeth Robins, encountering Ibsen's Doll's House for the first time in a Novelty Theatre performance in June 1889, was thrilled by both the boldness of the play's ideology and the emotional power of the characters and the acting. The one element with which she found fault in the production, however, was Nora's tarantella, which she described nearly forty years later as “a piece of theatricalism, Ibsen's one concession to the effect-hunting that he had come to deliver us from.” William Archer and Harley Granville-Barker concurred with Robins's assessment, criticizing Nora's dance as the play's “flawed streak,” as “a theatrical effect, of an obvious, unmistakable kind” and “Ibsen's last concession to … the theatrical orthodoxy of his earlier years.” The tarantella, they agreed, was an embarrassing irrelevance, a crowd-pleasing distraction from the play's serious brainwork, simply an opportunity for the lead actress to display her agility and her well-shaped legs.

Tom Stoppard's 2006 play Rock ‘n’ Roll revolves around the story of the Plastic People of the Universe (1968–88), an underground Czech rock band best known in the United States for their connections to Václav Havel and possibly for their ties to the Velvet Revolution of 1989 and the fall of communism in the Eastern bloc. Often tangentially referred to in progressive Western journalism, the Plastic People have come to signify a kind of subcultural capital for mainstream bourgeois writers, a way for moderate Western liberals to appear edgy and cultured. Stoppard's play draws on this popular consumption of the Plastic People, fetishizing them both for their grungy, underground lifestyle and for their status as underground rock legends. After all, the play seems to ask, how many rock bands can claim to have started an actual revolution? The play's twin narratives dramatize the clash between rock music and philosophical Marxism in Cambridge and Prague from 1968 to 1990. The stories are linked through the protagonist, Jan, a Czech intellectual who abandons his studies at Cambridge to return to Czechoslovakia in the wake of the Soviet invasion of 1968. He is determined to “save” rock music, socialism, and his mother. Jan soon discovers the Plastic People of the Universe, whose music he holds up as a positive ray of light in the dreary decades preceding the Velvet Revolution. Placing the Plastics’ music and story alongside the work of male rock megastars such as the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, the Beach Boys, and Bob Dylan, Stoppard celebrates the Plastic People as a band that preserves the revolutionary roots of rock music.

In 1893, Mrs. Patrick (Stella) Campbell appeared as the title character in Arthur Wing Pinero's The Second Mrs Tanqueray at the St James's Theatre in London. The play told of a respectable widower, Aubrey Tanqueray, and his doomed second marriage to Paula, a younger woman with a past. Good wives did not have “pasts,” and Paula's is particularly scandalous for she has, since adolescence, “kept house” with a series of men. Aware that their marriage is unlikely to be accepted by their peers, Paula and Aubrey retreat to the country, where they are joined by Aubrey's adult daughter, Ellean. Ellean subsequently becomes engaged to a young soldier, Hugh Ardale. The crisis of the play occurs when Paula and Ardale come face to face and the audience learns that the pair had once lived together in London. With this revelation, Paula becomes convinced that she cannot outrun her past, and the play closes with her suicide. Despite the conventionality of its ending, the play was considered modern and daring and is remembered as one of the first attempts to represent the “fallen woman” sympathetically and to question the sexual double standard that operated in Victorian society. Campbell's clarity of expression and relatively unmannered delivery enhanced Pinero's uncommonly sympathetic portrait of a former courtesan. However, it was the actress's physical presence that particularly captured the audience's imagination. Campbell was tall, pale, and thin to the point of angularity—a representative example of the fashionable “neurasthenic” woman of the 1890s. Pinero's characterization joined with Campbell's playing style and (most important) her physicality to create the entity I dub “Paula Tanqueray circa 1893.” This entity haunted Campbell's entire career, acting as a ghostly double to her living body both onstage and off. Campbell continued to play the role of Paula Tanqueray into the 1920s, yet as the actress's body matured and changed, that of the ghost retained its svelte 1893 proportions and youthful charm, creating a corporeal dissonance that disrupted audience reception.

The past sixty years of theatre studies recall the travels of Odysseus. It had a narrow escape from being devoured and digested by the Gallic Cyclops that dwelt in the Cave of Theory. It lingered in the Lotos-land of performance studies, gorging on a bottomless buffet of human activity. It hearkened to siren songs luring it to seductive but slippery shoals of anthropology, ethnography, sociology, and neuroscience. Some of its crew has suffered a Circean transformation into omnivorously rooting cultural critics. Its vocabulary has been inflated by Aeolus, king of winds. Meanwhile, back home there languishes its consort, History, knotting and unknotting a tapestry of documentary material and archival research while urged to bed by suitors from foreign realms.

When Paper magazine attempted in 2014 to “break the Internet” (as its cover declared) by publishing French artist Jean-Paul Goude's photos of reality star Kim Kardashian brazenly displaying her infamous derriere, the public reprimands to Kardashian from fellow celebrities quickly zeroed in on an even more essentializing aspect of her identity. As actress Naya Rivera posted, “You're someone's mother.” Singer Lorde articulated Kardashian's transgression even more simply, retweeting the photos along with a single word that served as a hex: “mom.” The judgment of her female peers seemed to be that Kardashian, who gave birth to daughter North West in June 2013, should have known better than to flaunt her sexuality on the public stage now that she was a mother. Meanwhile, in a related realm, an American celebrity tabloid such as Us Weekly can generate annual advertising revenues of $403 million (that magazine's 2013 figure) with a profit model based on spectacularizing celebrity mothers and appraising their so-called “baby bumps.” Former US Weekly editor-in-chief Janice Min coined the term “Frankenmom” in a now-notorious 2012 New York Times article about the pressure she felt to regain her pre-pregnancy body after the birth of her third child. In that article, she paid penance for “our ideal of this near-emaciated, sexy and well-dressed Frankenmom” that she had helped create through celebrity journalism. (Kardashian's decision to pose nude in Paper was later explained by celebrity outlet TMZ as a gesture “to show the world how she bounced back after giving birth to North West.”) Despite the personal pressure she experienced as a mother, Min boasted that because of her magazine's focus on maternal bodies during her time as editor (2003–9), American novelist “Tom Wolfe once remarked, ‘the one thing that Us Weekly has done that's a great boost to the nation is, they've probably increased the birthrate.’”

Since winning wide acclaim and a Tony Award for his play M. Butterfly in 1988, David Henry Hwang (Fig. 1) has remained one of the brightest luminaries in American theatre. A playwright, screenwriter, and librettist, he regularly tells stories that center on complex characters and reveal their experiences with Western imperialism, American racism, and cross-generational family differences. His works include the plays FOB, Golden Child, Yellow Face, Chinglish, and Kung Fu; the revised book for the 2002 Broadway revival of the Rodgers and Hammerstein's musical Flower Drum Song; and, most recently, episodes of the television series The Affair. In this interview, Hwang reflects on the longevity of East West Players, comments on today's culture wars, and shares his perspective on the current state of Asian American theatre.

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 moment when the actors’ sweltering bodies shed their crumbled costumes in the dressing room, the breakdown of the inseparable begins—the actors’ bodies and the costumes that presented a seamless portrayal of a character onstage now enter two separate realms. Although the living bodies will most likely appear onstage again, what about the costumes? Pickled with sweat and smeared makeup, they might be sprayed with alcohol before the next performance, or go through some chemical treatment and enter the shop to collect dust, or they might be sold off to those who want to make a big impression at the next Halloween party. But more often than not, they end up as landfill—those cheap, colorful, shiny shreds of garbage that were not produced in Mother Nature's belly, but were made in sweatshops by underpaid textile workers and draped by some overworked costume shop employee.

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 this article, I trace the origins of the normalization of pornographic tropes as the new sexual ideal in contemporary visual culture to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century publicity photos of actresses and monarchs by examining one prominent transatlantic actress's collection of publicity photos, the Elizabeth Robins Papers at the Fales Library at New York University. As I show, around the turn of the twentieth century, a new standard of idealized feminine beauty was produced by the combination of two contradictory images of celebrity: the distant decorum of the monarch and the perceived erotic sexuality of the actress. The mass production of publicity photographs, which took the form of cartes-de-visite in the 1860s and cabinet photos in the 1870s, broadened the spectrum of sexuality by positioning these two quintessential celebrity types—the actress and the monarch—in relation to the tableau vivant and to existing and emerging tropes of portraiture. The image of the actress existed in relation to several mutually dependent discourses in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the rise of photography in relation to other art forms; the rise of theatrical spectacle in relation to advertising, consumerism, and fashion; the rise of women's public role in relation to sexuality, the body, and beauty culture; and the paradoxical democratization of celebrity culture as related to the monarchy. All of these factors center on a figure who lived so vividly in the public imaginary that she could be found in multiple spaces: on the stage, in stationers’ shops, on postcards, in newspapers, in photograph albums.

Staged by East West Players in 1977, Wakako Yamauchi's And the Soul Shall Dance became one of the company's most successful and critically acclaimed productions. The drama launched Yamauchi's career as a playwright and helped East West Players (EWP) develop a strong audience base in the Japanese American community in southern California. Set in the 1930s in California's Imperial Valley, the play opens with the Japanese American Murata family surveying the damage caused by the accidental burning of their bathhouse. When the father (referred to only as “Murata” in the play) suggests that they might simply use the tub standing in the midst of razed walls, his wife Hana protests, “Everyone in the country can see us!” Murata quickly dismisses her concerns: “Who? Who'll see us? You think everyone in the country waits to watch us take a bath?” (157). Hana's uneasiness nevertheless injects a fear of scrutiny into the first scene of the play and turns those in the audience into the voyeurs whom she fears.