Once upon a time in medieval England, Saint Erkenwald was building his new church upon the foundations of an ancient pagan temple so that the edifice might be “torn down and turned to new ends.” All of a sudden, he and his men discovered a great tomb that housed the perfectly preserved corpse of some unknown royal ancestor. Upon opening the crypt, Erkenwald “turns to the tomb and talks to the corpse, / While he leans down to lift up the lids of its eyes: / ‘In this sepulcher stay in your silence no more! . . .' / Then the man through a miracle moved in his tomb! / And with sounds that were solemn, he spoke before all. . . .” When Erkenwald's pagan forebear “melted out of memory,” his reanimated body regained the power of speech and his listeners the power of knowledge—a stunning metaphor for the very project of theatre historiography.

With this general issue of Theatre Survey, I end my tenure as Editor and pass the reins on to Jody Enders, who, over the past two years, has been the kind of Associate Editor that one only dreams of having. Her commitment to this journal, particularly to its vitality as a forum for rigorous scholarly debate, has been invaluable to me, and I have no doubt that this commitment will make her term as Editor one in which the journal moves increasingly into the center of some of the most important debates in our profession. It is, moreover, my firm belief that in two years she will be writing similar comments about Martin Puchner, who now begins his term as Associate Editor and who will follow her as Editor. I congratulate them both on their appointments, I thank them for the work that they are already doing, and I look forward to their collaborations as the new Editors of Theatre Survey.

Palestine, as an Ottoman province, was distanced from the main Arab cultural activities of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries; no literature bearing distinctive marks of Palestinian national identity was to be found before the First World War. After the war there was some national cultural revival, but it was mainly poetry, not fiction or theatre, that was traditionally perceived as a possible national weapon against external threats. The national revival however also covered folklore and religious culture, both of which combined some semitheatrical dimensions—the shadow theatre (khayāl al-ẓill), the storytellers (ḥakawātī; shāעir), and the peep show, that is, "Box of Wonders" or "Magic Box" (ṣundūq al-dunyā or ṣundūq al-עajab); the religious festivals, such as the traditional Prophet's birthday (mawlid) or the birthdays of saints (mawālid), the nighttime shows presented during the fast of Ramadan; and the popular peasant culture, such as the dabka dances. Modern theatrical and dramatic activities—most of them marked by European influence, whether by way of translations or adaptations—were very limited; because many of the plays were intended for staging in schools, most of them were flavored with didactic aims. Visiting troupes from Egypt and Lebanon created some public demand for theatrical activities, and in both the 1930s and the 1940s there were active Palestinian devotees of theatre, such as the brothers al-Jawzī.

Theatre Survey invites letters that comment on articles in previous issues or on matters of interest to the American Society for Theatre Research. The Editor reserves the right to reject or edit contributions, and will offer TS authors whose work is discussed in published letters the opportunity to reply. Footnotes are strongly discouraged; and any letter that exceeds five hundred words will not be considered. Occasionally, the Editor's Forum will contain letters submitted at the Editor's request. Given the nature of our biennial publication schedule, a letter destined for the subsequent issue would ideally be submitted within a few weeks of receipt of the issue to which the writer is responding (in order to arrive at our offices in time).

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

During a 1966 Radio Telefis Éireann broadcast celebrating the first forty years of indigenous radio in the Republic of Ireland, Maxwell Sweeney characterized the evolution of radio drama in the nation as a slow process, one that grew out of readings of short stories and poetry. Like all other facets of the early national radio service, dramatic broadcasting suffered greatly from inadequate funding and resources. Equally detrimental to its progress was the widespread, if understandable, ignorance about the new medium's possibilities. Indeed, music dominated the airwaves in the first decade of national radio in Ireland because relaying music performances and gramophone records did not pose the same challenges as speech and dramatic broadcasting. 2RN, as the service was initially called, was but “a part-time affair,” broadcasting for a mere five and a half hours, and “eighty percent of transmission time was devoted to recitals by small groups of instrumentalists, solo traditional musicians, and amateur choirs.” Consequently, though understanding of dramatic broadcasting steadily developed, the Irish Independent could accurately claim in 1933 that radio drama in the Free State had not significantly improved since the establishment of the service seven years earlier.

In 1991, Martha Boesing, cofounder of At the Foot of the Mountain in Minneapolis, declared, “I'm not [just] a cultural feminist. I was a Marxist before these girls were even born!” The “girls” to whom she was referring were the critics whose negative response to the performance of the multicultural collaborative piece The Story of a Mother II at the Women and Theatre Program in Chicago in 1987 marked a decisive clash between competing notions of feminism in American theatre. Boesing later owned her own cultural feminism, as well as her Marxist evocation to action, but the conflict between cultural feminists (who sought performance as a means of building communities) and materialist feminists (who resisted being constructed as part of universalized womanhood) resulted in a divide that ultimately affected the reception and hence the historical impact of At the Foot of the Mountain. From their founding in 1974 to this performance in 1991, Boesing and At the Foot of the Mountain had been featured both in critical literature and at theatre conferences, hailed for their application of consciously articulated feminist politics in the creative process of their plays. After Chicago, they lost momentum as subjects of study in critical scholarship.

In theatre and drama histories, the politics of the American stage has most often been judged by the litmus test of nationalism, primarily in the “rise” of American-authored drama set in America, the development of American character types, and the appearance of American-born actors on the stages of the early United States. To uncover in the old playbills the mention of a performance of Royall Tyler's The Contrast, to celebrate the development of the stage Yankee, or to focus on Edwin Forrest's muscular rant in The Gladiator is to score a palpable hit for national theatre. Given the scarcity of American texts before the War of 1812, this search for national needles in the (British) theatrical haystack is understandable. But the politics reflected in the theatre in early America is far more complex than traditional theatre histories have acknowledged. Fortunately, there are signs of a new historiography at work. Heather Nathans's recent history of the postrevolutionary playhouses (to 1800) in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, for instance, uncovers a web of economic and social relationships among the shareholders in the various theatres, which shows that simple party definition hardly accounts for a clear sense of who supports the stage and who does not. Examined more closely than as buildings in which to launch “Jonathan,” American theatres reveal their own traditions for handling topical material, a particularly thorny problem for cultural spaces dominated by British plays and actors. In other words, beyond identifying stage Yankees or following Forrest, finding the political in the theatrical may require other strategies of reading in order to determine the full range of interaction between the political and theatrical spheres.

In November 1910, New Theatre artistic director Winthrop Ames asked his former teacher, Harvard English professor George Pierce Baker, to speak at a reception honoring the theatre's financial backers. The occasion was the start of the New Theatre's second season, and Ames was hoping to raise morale after a disappointing first year. Endowed primarily by millionaires in New York City, the New Theatre was supposed to offer a venue for staging plays free of the usual commercial pressures of Broadway productions. The contradiction at the heart of such an enterprise was manifest, particularly in the New Theatre's architecture and opulent interior design, which continually marked the “noncommercial” house as a monument to the economic power of those wealthy enough to provide for its massive and gaudy construction. Audiences complained that the two-thousand-seat auditorium had lousy acoustics; critics deemed the productions undistinguished and condemned the twenty-three Founders Boxes that ringed the orchestra as vulgar and ostentatious. Maybe an English professor, Ames thought, would have something helpful to say on the matter.

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.

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.

It is ironic that the works of Antonin Artaud, who called for the rejuvenation of theatre as such, come to us today not on their own, but through an unusually dense filter: a peculiarly persistent critical/theoretical apparatus doubles his own writings and practice. Artaud's work has occupied a cultish space in both French and English criticism for several decades. Each major trend in Artaud scholarship has reinforced the image of Artaud as a brilliant/mad theoretician and inspirational writer but a failed theatre practitioner—worse, one doomed to failure. The French school of criticism has plumbed the depths of the paradoxes of Artaud's oeuvre, examining the impossibility of reconciling the inadequacy of expression with the need to express. Derrida has argued that Artaud's projects, by their nature, by his nature, cannot succeed: They betray him the moment they begin to be articulated; they cannot stand upright the minute they leave his body. Much French criticism takes Artaud's madness and uses it as a touchstone for discussion of his legacy. The French Artaud begins at the asylum in Rodez.

The first performance of Sarah Kane's Blasted in 1995 is already widely regarded as a landmark in the history of contemporary theatre in England, singled out for the same reason that Edward Bond's 1965 Saved and Howard Brenton's 1980 The Romans in Britain achieved notoriety. Blasted belongs in this genealogy of English plays in that all drew attention to themselves with instances of raw violence represented onstage and contextualized within situations of scathing social criticism. Saved contains an infamous scene in which the apathy of a group of dispossessed urban youths leads them to the casual stoning to death of a baby in its pram, and in The Romans in Britain a young Celtic seer is raped onstage by a Roman centurion. In both cases, these instances of visual shock became decontextualized and held up to the public eye, a disassembling of the part from the whole, which constituted an act of interpretive violence perpetuated against the dramas themselves. The violence in Blasted was similarly decontextualized and sensationalized in the British press. Yet in contrast to Bond and Brenton, Kane's brief body of work quickly received sober reevaluations on the part of previously hostile theatre critics, largely as a result of her suicide in February 1999 at the age of twenty-eight. While Kane had always had supporters among theatre workers, including Edward Bond, who had appreciated the strength of her work from the outset, Blasted is now also praised as a major work of theatre by critics who were previously happy to mock the play and vilify its author.

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.

The previous special issue on “Theatre History in the New Millennium” issued a call for more dialogue in our written, intellectual exchanges. After various discussions with many generous and engaging members of ASTR (of whom the Editors thank, in particular, Laurence Senelick), the present issue initiates a regular feature of Theatre Survey called the Editor's Forum. A new venue designed to provide our readers with an opportunity to raise scholarly and professional concerns, issues, and questions in a collegial way, this forum will continue conversations begun in previous issues and, we hope, on occasion, initiate new ones.

Brander Matthews (1852–1929), author, critic and a professor of English and Dramatic Literature at Columbia University, believed strongly that, to best study theatre, researchers and scholars needed to see and access the makings of the stagecraft itself. Based on personal experience, Matthews realized that the observation of sets, props, costumes, models, sketches, and other ephemera would enable a better understanding and visualization of actual productions. As a result, he set out collecting such objects, as well as puppets, masks, posters, and playbills. In 1911, the Brander Matthews Dramatic Museum collection was officially established at Columbia University.

The concepts of theatricality and performativity have been enormously productive sources of recent scholarship in the fields of theatre and performance studies. While the former term has a long history of use and abuse, the latter has gained contemporary currency in connection with the emergence of performance studies, on the one hand, and new interpretations and applications of J. L. Austin's 1950s philosophy, on the other. As scholars have reexamined theatricality and probed performativity, a number of new uses of these terms have developed, and depending on the scholar's viewpoint, a binary or sometimes hierarchical relationship between these terms has prevailed.

Well-written reviews counteract the inertia that can afflict any field, given the pressures on the professorate and the limited resources of academic publishing houses. Between the demands of teaching, publication, production, and university service many theatre professors struggle to keep up with the literature related to their own research interests, let alone read broadly in the field. In such a context, no book—not even an excellent book—is assured an audience. Books that are not easily categorized, that do not fit comfortably in a given discipline, or that address underresearched topics are even less likely to reach a broad audience (and “broad” in terms of academic publishing is clearly a relative term). Reviews create audiences for books that might otherwise sit unnoticed in the margins of a field. Every review implicitly charts important directions for the field; reviews identify central conversations in the academy and indicate how theatre studies can engage these conversations. Reviews help us to be eclectic readers, and we must be such readers if we hope to speak beyond the circle that shares our individual research interests. It is in the spirit of eclecticism that Theatre Survey has instituted the column “What Are You Reading?” asking innovative scholars to share and reflect on the texts that feed their thinking. It is in the same spirit that Theatre Survey reviews a broad spectrum of the books received and invites both junior and senior scholars to propose reviews of books that the journal has not received but that should come to the attention of scholars of theatre and performance studies. Reviews help shape the field. Theatre Survey looks for reviews that cultivate new performance-centered historiographic study, reflecting a diverse range of methodological and critical perspectives.

Over the more than twenty years since the publication of two profoundly influential collections—Errol Hill's two-volume anthology of critical essays The Theatre of Black Americans (1980) and James V. Hatch's first edition of the play anthology Black Theatre USA (1974)—there has been considerable activity in African American theatre scholarship. Yet even as scholars have produced new collections of historical and critical essays that cover a wide range of African American theatre history, book-length studies that document particular moments in the historical continuum such as the Harlem Renaissance, and Samuel Hay's broader study African American Theatre: An Historical and Critical Analysis (1994), no one until now has written a comprehensive study of African American theatre history. Into this void have stepped two of the aforementioned distinguished scholars of African American theatre, Errol G. Hill and James V. Hatch. To be certain, writing a comprehensive history of African American theatre poses a daunting challenge for anyone hearty enough to undertake it. Where to begin? What to include and exclude? With their study, A History of African American Theatre, Hill and Hatch show themselves indeed worthy of the challenge. They explore the evolution of African American theatre across time and space, documenting the particular efforts of artists, writers, scholars, and practitioners, from inside as well as outside the United States, that have had an impact on our understanding of African American theatre. The authors make clear that the definition of African American theatre from the beginning has been in constant flux and that it has been affected by the changing social times in American as much as it has influenced those times.

Recently Ruby Cohn, the expert on Samuel Beckett, was staying at my house. One morning she announced to me in a disapproving tone: “Your library has no focus.” Nor, I fear, would Ruby find a focus in my reading. I read several books at once from various disciplines and approaches. They lay about in different rooms of the house, where I read them at different times of the day. For example, the 4:00 p.m. read in the library is something less demanding, suggesting rather than theorizing or documenting; whereas the morning read in my study is a note-taking venture, in proximity to little yellow stickies or the computer so I can type in passages as they generate new ideas. Worse yet, I am on the Internet multiple times daily, The New Yorker is usually open to some article I read while waiting for my partner to get ready for a date, and various novels are next to the bed for reading before going to sleep. Reading is not what it used to be. It more closely resembles online surfing than the removed, “focused” (as Ruby would say) reading in, say, the British Library. In part, my selection of books reflects the variety of articles I will be completing within the coming months; in part, the nature of current postcanon scholarship, which is held to account for a complex and variegated critical perspective.