A construction site is a messy place, but a theatre under construction or, better yet, a theatre under reconstruction is an apt metaphor for the work that we as theatre historians do. Reconstructing a theatre, like reconstructing the events of theatre, is always a balancing act between excavation, speculation and innovation. In fact, in the sphere of theatre history, the border between reconstruction and construction is never entirely clear. Conceptually at least, theatre historians work in a construction zone, even if hard hats are not de rigueur. If for no other reason than to underscore the perpetual state of (re)construction that characterizes our work, I am thus delighted to open my first issue as Editor with a messy photo of the renovation of the Royal Court Theatre. Most immediately, the photo provides visual documentation for Stephen Berwind’s article “Reconstructing the Construction of the Royal Court,” and I am grateful to him for helping to procure the photo from Natalie Land at Haworth Topkins Limited in London. But the more I study the composition of this photo, the more its theatricality strikes me, especially the image of its suited elder central figure grappling with a cable loosely connected to the not yet anchored steel girder of support (an image that might double as a scene from Ibsen’s Master Builder). How rich that image is, and if it does indeed remind us of the constructive nature of our own work, so too does it remind us that our work repeatedly necessitates that we renegotiate the boundaries separating the practice of theatre from the practice of everyday life. In this respect, the photo of the Royal Court Theatre “under construction” rather brilliantly captures what I would argue are the foundations of theatre history: a fundamental acknowledgment of the provisional nature of the histories we construct combined with an ever-evolving definition of theatre itself.

In seeking to explain the decline of Yiddish drama in America after its “first Golden Age” (1892–1902), contemporary critics and later historians have primarily blamed the rapid proliferation of vaudeville and moving pictures. Above all, the collapse of literary drama has been described as a direct consequence of the growing popularity of Yiddish variety shows among Jewish immigrant audiences.The Yiddish press, socialist papers in particular, frequently blamed the Yiddish music halls for the decline of literary drama. The tone was set by Abraham Cahan, the editor of the Jewish Daily Forward (Forverts) in a series of articles that appeared in the Tsaytgayst, the Forward’s weekly supplement, in October 1905. Bernard Gorin, the first historian of the Yiddish stage, also concluded that success of the music halls destroyed the movement for a better Yiddish drama. Di geshikhte fun yidshen teater, 2 vols. (New York: Literarisher ferlag, 1918), vol. 2, 178–80. Others followed his lead. For instance, Nahma Sandrow, Vagabond Stars: A World History of Yiddish Theater (1977; Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1996), 161. Recently, Nina Warnke presented a far more elaborated analysis of the rise and decline of Yiddish literary drama, but again she does not seriously challenge the predominant view that the Yiddish music halls were to blame for the crisis in the Yiddish theatre. Nina Warnke, “Reforming the New York Yiddish Theater: The Cultural Politics of Immigrant Intellectuals and the Yiddish Press, 1887–1910” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, May 2001), esp. 195. In film history, it is widely assumed that the movies killed ethnic theatre (both “legitimate” and vaudeville theatre). E.g., Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 103. The fact that the cultural and financial position of the “legitimate” Yiddish stage declined in a period in which Yiddish music halls flourished and moving pictures achieved large-scale commercial exploitation certainly suggests a correlation between these phenomena. Yet, as I will argue, there were also more structural economic forces at work in shaping the fate of the American Yiddish theatre, forces that were determined by the stringent conditions of the ethnic marketplace.

To affect audiences, to inspire them to consider something new or to consider something old in a new way, to move them emotionally or, as Lee Breuer says, “from one place to another,” is a common, if not inherent goal of those who make theatre.Frederic Ohringer, A Portrait of the Theatre (Toronto: Merritt, 1979), 58. More deeply, some want the movement they affect to endure, to transform something in people. Belief in the possibility of such movement implies another, having political implications, for if an individual can be moved, then a mass of individuals can be shifted; and if a mass of individuals choose to act on such a shift, or if their acts are inflected by such a shift, then events are altered and history made. Here lies the catechism of someone with the faith of an Augusto Boal that “perhaps the theater is not revolutionary in itself, but it is surely a rehearsal for revolution.”Augusto Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed, trans. Charles A. McBride and Maria-Odelia Leal McBride (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1985), 122. And yet, in the United States and much of the West, how often are such professions of faith viewed as mere idealism or transformed, even by the converted, into faith’s safe sister, hope—which is to say, a lack of faith?

In the autumn of 1995 the Royal Court Theatre received notice that it would be awarded funds from the National Lottery that would enable it to address the rapidly disintegrating state of its 107-year-old building. Almost forty years earlier the English Stage Company (ESC) had moved into the Royal Court, cognizant of the building’s inadequacies. During the intervening decades, management considered comprehensive plans to remedy the problems, as well as contemplated moving elsewhere, but never managed to raise the necessary funds to accomplish either objective. For forty years, makeshift solutions enabled the Royal Court to continue functioning without solving these problems. In 1994 the New York Times called the Royal Court (the company) the most important theatre in Europe the same week that, in London, The Times called the Royal Court (the building) “a dump.”Haworth Tompkins Architects and Theatre Projects Consultants, Royal Court Theatre Feasibility Study (London: n.p., 1995), 10.

Among the most intriguing dramatic documents of the Elizabethan age are seven plots, drawn up at various times between the early 1590s and early 1600s. Even though they provide revealing insights into Elizabethan staging practices, they have often been neglected by Shakespearean scholars. This neglect is easily explained when we consider that a close scrutiny of the plots has major and inconvenient consequences for some widely accepted beliefs about the transmission and function of Elizabethan playscripts.

Special Collections & Archives contains several important named theatre collections. Notable collections include the Arena Stage Collection, the Robert Breen / American National Theater and Academy Collection, and the Theater of the Thirties Collection. Used by researchers all over the world, these collections contain production notebooks, playbills, playscripts, photographs, scrapbooks, correspondence, and news clippings.

The tradition of Western drama has its ghosts, from the spectral characters of Darius in The Persians and Clytemnestra in The Eumenides to the attending ghost in The Spanish Tragedy and the ghostly voice in the “all grey” room of Beckett’s Ghost Trio. In turn, some non-Western traditions of theatre, such as Japanese noh, insist upon the primacy of ghosts, whose stories are recounted on stage. Perhaps, from the perspective of our modern world, such characters are anomalous devices of the theatre. Yet Marvin Carlson insists in The Haunted Stage that we understand them as emblematic signs of how all drama and theatre are organized and experienced.

Anthony Kubiak’s Agitated States and Terry Eagleton’s Sweet Violence share several themes, in particular the analysis of dramas of violence as well as the ethics of tragedy in everyday life. Their points of view, however, differ. Whereas Kubiak takes a poststructural stance by examining the contrast between the actual event and its artistic representation (in both fiction and reality), Eagleton posits a recuperation of tragedy’s moral and aesthetic value. Taken together, the books provide an enlightening and varying perspective on violence, loss, and tragedy in theatre and drama.

Mike Pearson studied archaeology and then spent twenty-five years in physical theatre and site-based performance, notably as founder-director of Brith Gof, while Michael Shanks is an archaeologist, specializing in the classical period and attempting to rethink the bases of his discipline. Together they have written a wonderfully evocative book, tracing the evolving dialogue between them as they explored what each discipline had to offer the other, leading eventually to the elaboration of the common project they call “theatre/archaeology.” They describe “theatre/archaeology” as “an interdisciplinary and hybrid focus on the textures of social and cultural experience; the means and materials of forging cultural ecologies or milieux that attend to that contemporary tension between the global and the local; how we model the event of this cultural production, the weaving of connections through such indeterminate times and places” (xvii). The book is a fascinating intermingling of different narratives (artistic, intellectual, autobiographical) and discourses (scholarly, polemical, visionary), and it begins at the end, which is of course a new beginning, with the outline of the academic programs that have emerged from their interdisciplinary collaboration: Mike Pearson’s course in performance studies in the Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, and Michael Shanks’s interdepartmental Archaeology Center at Stanford University in California.

In the current scholarly discussion, many disciplines usurp the word “performance” to represent the postmodern idea of discursive creation through repetition (iteration). In an attempt to demarcate the boundaries of theatre studies, to reclaim performance as a “theatrical act,” many theatre scholars argue that a theatrical frame designates theatrical performance. This idea of frame may often be distilled into a spatial relationship between actor(s) and audience. To further this theory, many have written metaphorically about theatrical space; however, in her important new book, Gay McAuley addresses the idea of a theatrical space directly, discussing architecture, spatial structure, actor space, and audience space. She argues that theatre requires not only “liveness” and the presence of both performer and spectator but also the space where those presences meet. That “lived space” must be added to the first two aspects and examined as a basic element of the theatrical act. Thus McAuley seeks “to explore the multiple functions of this spatial reality in the construction and communication of theatrical meaning” (4).

Performing Democracy sets out to explain the energetic growth of diverse community-based theatre, to explore its various approaches and challenges, and to promote its sustainability. The impressive range and sheer number of projects discussed in these twenty-three essays make the book a valuable introduction to what editors Susan C. Haedicke and Tobin Nellhaus see as an international movement to “involve, mobilize, and politicize” audiences (1).

In this invigorating analysis, Matthew H. Wikander weaves together themes of hypocrisy and sincerity in acting, plays, criticisms, and antitheatrical theories. At issue is how critiques of theatre, termed “antitheatricalism,” have used differing and even contradictory approaches to acting and performance. According to Wikander, there are fundamentally three kinds of antitheatrical critic. First are those who, following Plato, admonish theatre’ pretense and its association with play-acting, immorality, and deception. Next are those contemporary critics, particularly new historicists and feminists, who claim that all human action is merely a social performance, “with its attendant inability to distinguish hypocritical from sincere performance.” To such scholars, performing onstage is merely a facade, since acting is little more than an imitation of social constructs. Finally, there are the critics who, following Rousseau, “cherish sincerity and prize inner self” (xix). Such critics dismiss theatre and performance as shameful exhibitionism. From this perspective, those who believe in human volition and the presence of an essential, inner sincerity believe also that presenting the private self onstage is reprehensible. Wikander stakes out a “middle ground” between the theatrical and the antitheatrical, asking: “must we throw out the baby of sincerity with the bathwater of antitheatricalism?” (xix–xx). Wikander’s analysis traverses several selected moments of theatre history in consideration of the “problem of identifying acting as hypocrisy and stigmatizing actors as hypocrites,” as well as examining “the idea of slanders against actors, slanders that particularly privilege the value of sincerity and set it in opposition to performance of all kinds” (xxi).

The art of acting is hard enough to describe when it is in our midst. In view of the difficulties, we in theatre studies usually make our lives easier by assuming that opera and ballet are the property of other disciplines. Consider the problems, then, of dealing with this broad topic across a thousand years of history and the whole Mediterranean world, when we have but a handful of references in treatises devoted to rhetoric or poetry, some paintings of scenes (reinterpretations of originals) and other equally problematic forms of iconography, models of masks but not the actual objects worn, playtexts often in the form of fragments (lacking stage directions but sometimes accompanied by bookish commentaries), some puzzling scraps of musical notation, a set of inscriptions, and precious little more, with nothing faintly resembling a treatise on acting. Without attempting an overview, Easterling and Hall have gathered together twenty essays under three headings: the art of the actor, the professional world, the idea of the actor. Each essay is a rigorous attempt to salvage something of substance from the wreckage.

For those of us who write about modern Greek theatre the major problem is not to prove its value but to find ways to let others know about it, which primarily requires overcoming the language barrier. Since most of the plays written in Greek are never translated into English or any other “major” language that would attract widespread critical attention, most often we are forced to write for two audiences: the local specialist and the non-Greek generalist. For the first, we tend to narrow down the focus to the point where the generalist who lacks the background necessary to engage with unknown texts is lost. When we write for the generalist, we open up the lens too much to appeal to the local specialist. This dilemma characterizes Stratos Constantinidis’s Modern Greek Theatre: A Quest for Hellenism, a study that tries to balance the author’s scholarly ambitions on the one hand (to write a new account of modern Greek theatre) and the demands of his readers on the other for something more general that does not cram in names, dates, and titles.

When surveying books on Czech theatre on a library shelf, one is likely to be surprised to see how many there are. After all, the Czechs form a small nation—ten million all in all—whose independence, before the vast tides of twentieth-century history swept over it in 1939, lasted no more than two decades. Perhaps this is one of the reasons that for this nation the strong bond between theatre and politics has lasted since the dawn of its literature in the eighteenth century. It seems something of a miracle that by 1920, two years after the creation of an independent Czechoslovakia, its theatre found itself in the mainstream of modern European drama and that it moved, within the next twenty years, into the avant-garde of its contemporaries. Against this briefly sketched background in his introduction, Jarka M. Burian pitches his discussions of the creative artists whose work raised international awareness of their nation's theatre and, above all, that “other,” nonverbal language of the stage: scenography.

One of the more original developments in contemporary theatre at the end of the twentieth century was the reactionary mode of playwriting to emerge from Britain’s younger generation. London and Edinburgh audiences, particularly, saw some of the most groundbreaking and influential movements in British theatre to be produced since John Osborne’s provocative debut of Look Back in Anger in 1956. In In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today, Aleks Sierz contemplates the theatrical debuts of many young writers and the artistic contributions by directors, designers, and actors involved in each of their often scandalous new works. The brazen portrayals of violence including rape, murder, and incest as well as drug abuse, homosexuality, and the ruthless use of language made for a controversial new mode of writing. The young playwrights who brought these appallingly poetic stories to the stage were simultaneously reacting to the post-Thatcher, postconsumer, cultural climate of the 1980s and locating the theatre as an uncensored medium for which to write. The plays form an aggressive, provocative, sometimes obscene, and usually highly entertaining corpus that Sierz situates as one of the most influential theatre movements of the late twentieth century.

Alan Ayckbourn is one of the more successful—and undervalued—British playwrights to have emerged in the postwar period. As a director, not only of his own work but of others’ (Arthur Miller described his production of A View from the Bridge as definitive), he has proved himself a sure-sighted man of the theatre. Paul Allen’s biography begins with his upbringing by his mother—his parents separated shortly after his birth—and takes us up to the triumphant performances of House and Garden, the two plays presented concurrently in real time with the same casts at the National Theatre in London in 2000.

At the beginning of his contribution to Druids, Dudes and Beauty Queens, Vic Merriman reminds us why Irish theatre has had a profile out of all proportion to the small, relatively sparsely populated island from which it hails. “Irish drama’s claim to social significance,” writes Merriman, “rests on the pledge that in acts of theatre something more than box office, or the reputation of an individual artist, is at stake. Theatre is part of a broader cultural conversation about who we are, how we are in the world, and who and how we would like to be” (54). Underlying most of the contributions to this collection—and they are diverse, coming from theatre artists, academics, and journalists—is a concern (sometimes fully articulated, sometimes implicit) that changes in Irish society over the past decade have eroded the conditions that once made Irish theatre “something more than box office.”

Inspired perhaps by the centennial of the founding of the Irish Literary Theatre in 1897, or by the critical excitement generated by the current wave of Irish playwriting, an unusual number of historical analyses of the Irish theatre have emerged in the last few years. The better of these texts reflect the trend in both theatre history and Irish studies to challenge the assumptions of earlier historical narratives by analyzing the work of previously marginalized individuals and groups, and by including feminist, materialist, or postcolonial perspectives in their analyses. Yet while a growing interest in pre-twentieth-century Irish performance is emerging into print, few Irish theatre history surveys look farther back than the 1870s, focusing instead on Irish drama’s dynamic influence on modern theatre—and modern Ireland—throughout the twentieth century. While it’s a long way from Smock Alley to the Abbey, and while modern Irish theatre was invigorated by global influences as well as local traditions, Ireland’s rich theatre heritage created important artistic and material precedents for its twentieth-century stage. Christopher Morash’s A History of Irish Theatre, 1601–2000 performs a great service for the field by linking the modern Irish theatre to the country’s earlier theatrical traditions, reminding us that Irish drama was enriching the lives (and sometimes enraging the tempers) of Irish audiences long before The Playboy of the Western World.

In 1998, Kim Marra and Robert A. Schanke published Passing Performances: Queer Readings of Leading Players in American Theater History. Informed by contemporary gay and lesbian studies, the dozen or so essays in this pioneering anthology cast new light on the lives, same-sex relationships, and desires of a number of historically important actors and actresses from Edwin Forrest to Mary Martin. Taken as a whole, Passing Performances argued persuasively for sexuality as an important factor in the on- and offstage lives of the actors the volume scrutinized. In passing, so to speak, it also offered a perceptive account of sexism and homophobia in American theatre and American culture in general from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries.