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).

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.

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 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.

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.

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 fall of 2000, to honor Arthur Miller's eighty-fifth birthday, the University of Michigan sponsored an international symposium on the playwright's work, and Enoch Brater has now edited a volume based on selected presentations from that event. In plain terms, the book includes Brater's chronicle of Miller's days at the university, playwright Frank Gagliano's thoughts on adapting Timebends for the stage, Toby Zinman's interview with actor Patrick Stewart on playing Lyman Felt in The Ride Down Mt. Morgan, Brater's interviews with composer William C. Bolcom on his opera version of A View from the Bridge and with Miller himself via satellite hookup, an afterword by critic Mel Gussow, and fourteen scholarly essays that form the body of the volume.

Sam Staggs's When Blanche Met Brando may not be the most scholarly commentary on Tennessee Williams, but it is certainly informative. Aiming “to synthesize, as no previous writer has, the first-hand accounts of those who were there” (xii) for both the 1947 Broadway premiere of A Streetcar Named Desire and its 1951 film, as well as subsequent revivals, Staggs succeeds at revealing the gulf between myth and fact, between play and production. By illuminating its twisted path of accidents from genesis to premiere to “classic,” Staggs reminds us that Streetcar by no means was destined to take on the form in which we now know it.

Here's a familiar story: a white director produces a play with black and Middle Eastern characters. Director decides to cast white actors in those roles, controversy ensues. To American readers of Ethnic Drag, this controversy will seem so routine as to be nearly unremarkable. What makes this rendition of the story interesting is that it takes place not in the United States, but in Germany.

Loren Kruger's Post-Imperial Brecht: Politics and Performance, East and South is an impressive transnational study of Brechtian theatre that is notable for its simultaneous breadth and depth. Kruger takes us far beyond nationalist frameworks, which have long dominated theatre studies. She also avoids the common pitfalls of “global” and comparative studies: sweeping generalizations that flatten historical specificity are not to be found in this book's 400 richly footnoted pages. Post-Imperial Brecht provides a precise and detailed study of the transnational flow of Brecht's ideas and plays between West and East Germany, and between Germany and South Africa, from the 1930s to the present.

The anthology African Drama and Performance, edited by John Conteh-Morgan and Tejumola Olaniyan, brings together a body of critical essays on the corporeal and discursive aspects of African drama and theatre remarkable for its encyclopedic scope and intellectual rigor. The work, stewarded by two of the most erudite and industrious scholars in the field, is a book-length version of a highly successful special edition of Research in African Literature.

The subject of medieval performance has recently come under the scrutiny of scholars from several disciplines—history, art history, religious studies, anthropology, and literature, to name but a few. In the process, “performance” has come to be used rather loosely to signify a number of different concepts. Evelyn Birge Vitz, Nancy Freeman Regalado, and Marilyn Lawrence—the editors of Performing Medieval Narrative—attend to a particular aspect of performance that they define as the confluence of four essential characteristics: the presence of a performer; the action of telling or enacting; a story being told or enacted; and, finally, and most important for the book, the presence of an audience. The volume is broken into four parts, each addressing different aspects of the performance traditions that form an integral part of medieval narratives.

This is an unusual but good and sensible book. I write that it is unusual because The Idea of the Theater in Latin Christian Thought does not follow the predictable pattern of looking at the “materiality of medieval theater practices and historiography” (2). It instead looks at theatre as it appears in medieval thought and as “moments in European intellectual history” (4). Dox leads the reader through a thorough and erudite survey of the writings of some of the Latin Christian authors. She begins with Saint Augustine of Hippo and ends with Bartholomew of Bruges. The text has three major goals. First, the author examines what different postclassical, Christian authors knew about or thought of Greco-Roman theatre as a function of written discourse. The second goal is to keep the discussion of the late-antique and medieval understanding of ancient classical theatre in the intellectual contexts in which the texts were used. Lastly, Latin Christian views on classical theatre are examined in detail. The conclusion of this analysis demonstrates that the idea of “truth” as different from “falsehood” in the writings by the Latin Christian authors was the focus of their texts, rather than any actual interest in classical tragedy and comedy as genres in their own right.

The previously available edition of this important source of evidence that documents scenic practice in the public theatres of seventeenth-century France was prepared by Henry Carrington Lancaster in 1920 as Le Mémoire de Mahelot, Laurent et d'autres décorateurs de l'Hôtel de Bourgogne et de la Comédie Française au XVIIesiècle. If only for supplanting Lancaster's with one that will be more widely available for purchase and consultation, Pierre Pasquier's new critical edition would be an excellent resource for theatre scholarship, continuing the transmission of documentary evidence and disciplinary knowledge to future generations. However, in the eighty-six years since Lancaster's edition, the discoveries, methods, and aims of theatre scholarship have changed dramatically, and Pasquier's significant introduction, which encompasses more pages than the presentation of the Mémoire itself, is also an excellent contextual synthesis of historical work that relies on this vital manuscript (BNF, ms. 24330).

The combination of Shakespeare and American Studies has recently proven to be fertile ground for scholarly inquiry. In Shakespeare and the American Nation, Kim C. Sturgess shows that the subject has not yet been exhausted. Following the work of Lawrence Levine's Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988) and Michael D. Bristol's Shakespeare's America, America's Shakespeare (New York: Routledge, 1990), Sturgess's intriguing book examines how nationalistic appropriations of Shakespeare accorded him the status of a hero in American culture in a climate of strong anti-British sentiment.

John McCormick's delightful book The Victorian Marionette Theatre is at once a labor of love, a comprehensive history of a popular art form, an insider's description of the craft by a longtime practitioner, and a nostalgic reminiscence of a nearly forgotten aspect of the Victorian theatre. For all that, the book has an authoritative point of view and a cohesive unity establishing it as one of the most important sources of its kind, complementing George Speaight's more wide-ranging, classic treatment of the subject, The History of the English Puppet Theatre (London: G. G. Harrap, 1955; 2d ed., Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990) and McCormick's own companion study, coauthored with Bennie Pratasik, Popular Puppet Theatre in Europe, 1800–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Those three works anchor a shelf of studies of a major cultural phenomenon.