What's in a name? Theatre Survey is not a survey of theatre. It is not a survey of theatre history. It is not even a survey of theatre historiography (although I confess that, at times, I wish it were). On the eve of the fiftieth-anniversary celebration of the American Society for Theatre Research and of forty-seven years of publication of its journal, we might pause to ponder just what it is that distinguishes Theatre Survey. Since a journal is what it does, one need not change its name, the better to reflect how a historiographical project has changed and matured: as long as we keep reflecting.

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).

It was my first ASTR conference, a gathering on “Popular Entertainment” held over two decades ago in New York City, and every time my tweed-clad, bearded husband and I neared the conference arena, he was mistaken for the ASTR member. Determined to prove myself a scholar through my performance if not my looks, I strode into the dimmed conference auditorium, sat near the front, and listened intently to the chair of the next panel as he announced that, “unfortunately,” the aging vaudeville star scheduled to perform the fan dance for us had fallen ill. While I tried to process that information, a leotard-covered American Ballet Theatre replacement glided onto the stage, fan in hand. I was transfixed. I knew I was inexperienced—I had only attended two other theatre conferences—but was this really happening? At my first theatre conference prior to ASTR's—an inexplicably weeklong sojourn dedicated to Sarah Bernhardt—I had watched the aging French diva stomp around in an early silent movie as an independent collector slavered over “Sar-aah's divine ah-rt” and Laurence Senelick offered me a simultaneous (and inimitable) sotto voce commentary. At my second conference, I had found myself engaged in a group sing-along of a nineteenth-century barroom ditty and had encountered my still-favorite opening line: “Canadian provincial theatre is an almost virgin field.”

There is a long-standing tradition in theatre criticism of disparaging medieval farce as an essentially vulgar, inconsequential, and even immoral genre. As many scholars both past and present would have it, these short, comic “crowd pleasers” not only thematize moral corruption but actually injure public morals by pandering to the baser instincts of the lower classes. In her bold revisionist study of the genre, Bernadette Rey-Flaud cites Arthur Pougin's 1885 definition of farce as an “exemplary” one: “Short little plays, of a low, trivial, burlesque comedy and for the most part very licentious; plays that sought above all to incite the coarse laughter of the rabble.” According to Rey-Flaud, this definition encapsulates the four centuries of criticism that precede it and anticipates the consensus of much contemporary scholarship as well: “Farce has not been rehabilitated in our time” (8, emphasis mine).

Until recently, postwar British theatre history was shaped and bounded by a very stable periodization that located its origin in the premiere of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger at the Royal Court Theatre on 8 May 1956. As the story goes, the new kind of theatre ushered in by the Revolution of 1956 at the Royal Court grew more politicized with a second revolution, the birth of the alternative, or Fringe, theatre in 1968. Ultimately that revolutionary fervor was crushed by the conservative cultural and economic policies of Margaret Thatcher, who was elected prime minister in 1979. Contained within this history are many elements not directly related to the 1956|1968|1979 period markers; however this revolution model and its tripartite division of the era affected the conceptualization and positioning of all events within postwar theatre history.

The work of Joint Stock Theatre Company is the stuff of alternative theatre mythology. A self-defined socialist company that premiered plays like David Hare's Fanshen and Caryl Churchill's Cloud Nine, the group is known as one of Britain's most enduringly innovative alternative-theatre groups, in part because of those playwrights' success, in part because of such famous actors and directors as Max Stafford-Clark and Bill Gaskill, whose visions forged the group. But the history of Joint Stock's final years is not well known, despite the existence of a company history, The Joint Stock Book. Although it might seem that the group lost touch with its artistic imperative after 1985 and that it closed amid the generally harsh climate for alternative theatre created by the arts-funding policies of the conservative government of Margaret Thatcher (in office during 1979–90), that is not entirely true. Reorganized in 1985–6 to maximize racial and gender parity in the company, Joint Stock produced significant work and traversed important cultural and political terrain until 1989, when it closed both because of lost funding and because of the decisions of individual artists.

David Krasner: In surveying contemporary London theatre, New York Times critic Ben Brantley reported that the Tricycle Theatre had

inaugurated a season of African-American plays with the commandingly titled but obscure Walk Hard, Talk Loud, a play by Abram Hill from the early1940's. Abram who? The name meant nothing to me, but Abram Hill (1910–1986) was a founder and director of the American Negro Theater in New York (1940–1951) and a playwright, it seems, of considerable verve.3

That Abram Hill and the American Negro Theatre—the most important black theatre company during the mid-twentieth century—has flown below the radar is indicative of how much work still needs to be accomplished.

African artists cannot and do not choose their subject matter, says critic Tejumola Olaniyan. “They are, on the contrary, chosen by their subjects.” While that liberates artists from the “heavy burden of a head-scratching search for what on earth to create their art about,” Olaniyan observes, it also imposes “the much heavier burden of how on earth to fashion from that surfeit of ‘what’ an imaginative sublimation worthy of the label ‘art.’ This has been the contemporary African artist's greatest challenge, more so than artists in other climes.”1

Fin-de-siècle Russia was a culture replete with interest in the occult, spiritualism, and the religions of the Far East. Curiosity about the mystical infused all tiers of society. Among those influenced by the spiritual was none other than Konstantin Stanislavsky himself, who experienced a personal crisis in which he began to doubt his own ability as an actor. In 1906, he took his now-famous trip to Finland, where he sequestered himself for the summer, examined his artistic life, and began to reconsider seriously his process as an actor. While reflecting on his past artistic work, he began to organize years of notes on acting; and several notions drawn from Eastern mysticism in general and Yoga in particular found their way into his “system.” Although a handful of articles that examine Stanislavsky's use of Yoga have been published in the West, over the past century scholars and teachers have paid little attention to the spiritual facets of Stanislavsky's thinking, focusing instead on the psychological aspects of his work. Given, however, the presence of important Yogic elements in the system at its very inception, a full understanding of Stanislavsky's technique is impossible without knowledge of the intersections between his system and Yoga. Borrowing from Yoga, Stanislavsky offers actors much more than theories about how to be more believable or psychologically realistic in their roles. He adapts specific Yogic exercises in order to help actors transcend the limitations of the physical senses and tap into higher levels of creative consciousness.

In July 2005, the Art Institute of Chicago announced plans for the demolition of the Kenneth Sawyer Goodman Memorial Theatre in order to make room for additional gallery and administrative spaces for the museum. The Goodman Theatre had been a museum department from its founding in 1925 to 2000, when the company became an independent producing organization and moved to a new facility in Chicago's theatre district. Since then, the building had been an unproductive appendage to the Art Institute, but numerous attempts to tear it down had been met with resistance by architectural preservationists who felt that the structure, by noted Chicago architect Howard Van Doren Shaw, was historically significant and warranted landmark status.

In October 2004, I edited Theatre Journal's special issue on Latin American theatre. In addition to five essays on subjects ranging from sixteenth-century Amerindian performance to a twenty-first-century Mexican adaptation of an Irish play, that issue included a forum on the state of Latin American theatre and performance studies in the United States today. Even though the thirteen respondents resided, independently or as affiliates, in different disciplinary homes (theatre, performance, languages, and literature) and took multiple points of departure, a common thread ran throughout their comments: the need for the U.S. academy to study and teach the diversity that is known as Latin America.1 Tamara Underiner succinctly notes that “Latin America has never answered easily as an object of inquiry for theatre studies.”2 Indeed, studying Latin American theatre and performance poses very specific challenges: the region encompasses some twenty countries whose national borders obscure larger geographical, cultural, religious, political, and socioeconomic networks; a multiplicity of languages—European, dialectal, and indigenous to the hemisphere—are still spoken, written, and performed; and numerous intersecting histories extend back far beyond the five hundred years since the Europeans arrived and precipitated what today we euphemistically refer to as “contact.” Latin America does not terminate at the U.S.–Mexican border; thus although I'm cognizant of the attendant complications when including the U.S. latino/a communities in a discussion of Latin American theatre, the cultural network is such that I consider any arbitrary separation counter to the purposes of this reflection. Otherwise, how can we take into account the larger networks navigated by such U.S.-based playwrights as Guillermo Reyes (born in Chile but raised in the United States and the author of plays about Chilean history as well as specifically U.S. identities) or Ariel Dorfman (born in Argentina, raised in New York City and Santiago, Chile, now a professor at Duke, and author of English-language plays whose subject matter is frequently authoritarian Latin America)?

In one way or another, most of my recent readings have focused on diasporic and ethnic-minority literatures, experiences, and performances. From the late spring through midsummer, the readings I did in the context of a migratory experience in Europe produced new perspectives on questions of displacement, marginalization, and cross-cultural connections. I was invited to teach a graduate course on a departmental exchange with the Comparative Literature program of the University of Lisbon, and I designed a course called “Crossing Continents: Multiethnic Literatures of Europe and North America.” The course, taught in spring 2005, focused on understanding ways in which the critical paradigms used by literary and cultural critics in the United States might be extended profitably to the examination of immigrant and racial-minority cultures in Western Europe, and how diasporic and postcolonial models of migration developed by European scholars could expand the dimensions of U.S. ethnic studies.

Being asked to write about the state of Asian theatre in the American academy makes me feel a little like Jean Genet explaining the origin of his play The Blacks: “One evening, an actor asked me to write a play for an all-black cast. But what exactly is a black? First of all, what's his color?”

Time, timing, and timelessness all converge in Harry J. Elam's The Past as Present in the Drama of August Wilson (2004), a major addition to Wilson studies at this profound juncture in the history of American theatre. First, Elam's study offers a sweeping retrospective of Wilson's blending of past and present time in his recently completed cycle of plays. Yet it is the timing of the book's release that affords it an added advantage. Though published in 2004, The Past as Present in the Drama of August Wilson can easily be regarded as a most fitting tribute to one of the great voices of the American stage. As the nation—indeed the world—mourns the sudden loss of August Wilson, current and future generations of scholars, students, educators, theatre practitioners, and lovers of theatre may find comfort in knowing that the foundation has already been laid for serious and sustained study of his phenomenal legacy and far-reaching influence. Elam's work adds a vital cornerstone to that foundation.

In retrospect, that Roland Barthes's insistence on “the death of the author” should have provoked an emergent interest in theatre audiences is hardly surprising. As, in literary studies, this brought about a new privilege for and investment in the reader, so too, in theatre and performance studies, there was an explicit recognition that what went on in the theatre was qualitatively and quantitatively more complicated and more exciting than the study of the playtext in the classroom. At the same time, the move to challenge a universalized (and thus male) viewing subject created new readings of the audience and new understandings of both individual and collective spectatorship across a range of subjectivities. So, Jill Dolan could argue that the “feminist spectator viewing such a representation is necessarily in the outsider's critical position.” Dolan continued:

She cannot find a comfortable way into the representation, since she finds herself, as a woman (and even more so, as a member of the working class, a lesbian, or a woman of color), excluded from its address. She sees in the performance frame representatives of her gender class with whom she might identify—if women are represented at all—acting passively before the specter of male authority.1

Series books do not always make for the most scintillating study of a given topic; but Philip C. Kolin's Understanding Adrienne Kennedy enlivens the format of the University of South Carolina Press's series with an elegantly written study on the interrelationships of life, work, and performance in the dramatic accomplishment of a unique African-American woman playwright. Kennedy's dark, evocative dramas emphasize the search for identity in a culture that is at once familiar and alien, real and imagined. The books in this worthy series are geared toward students and nonacademic readers, and Kolin has skillfully managed to offer a deep reading and, at the same time, an accessible survey of Kennedy's diverse plays that, under any circumstances, would provide a heady challenge to any reader or viewer.

In the February 2005 issue of American Theatre, Ben Cameron considered impending season selection at theatres across the country and noted, “There are no magic bullets. God knows, I wish there were—especially in these times. … Even in the face of critical raves, standing ovations and a true sense of artistic pride, many have still fallen short of attendance goals.”2 Cameron explored a range of possible solutions to dwindling audiences: a season with no classics, or perhaps only classics; maybe opera, or A Christmas Carol, or the ever-popular Waiting for Godot. Indeed, the need to build audiences haunts most contemporary practitioners as we struggle to reestablish the place of theatre in the midst of its media sisters. It is a global issue, as noted in a column by Bhaskar Ghose in Frontline, a national Indian magazine: “Theatre needs to recapture its participative quality and density of human experience in order to woo the audience back from television and films. …”3 How then, do we build the base?