Rhapsody for the Theatre: A Short Philosophical Treatise, first published in French in 1990, occupies a unique spot in Alain Badiou's oeuvre. Part theory and part theatre, or at least prototheatre, it certainly can be read alongside other books from the same period, especially Handbook of Inaesthetics and Metapolitics, devoted respectively to the truth procedures of art and politics that function as two of the four conditions of philosophy according to Badiou. Of the other two conditions, mathematics is treated in Number and Numbers and Briefings on Existence: A Short Treatise on Transitory Ontology, whereas love is the only truth procedure not to receive a book-length investigation. Even in the case of Badiou's treatment of love, a text such as “The Scene of the Two” resonates with the present text due to the importance given to the production of a “scene” for the amorous couple. In addition to opening up a fascinating dialogue with this theoretical treatment of the four conditions of philosophy, Rhapsody for the Theatre also and at the same time can serve as the ideal accompanying piece for Badiou's work as a playwright, most notably the Ahmed tetralogy that comprises Ahmed le subtil, Ahmed philosophe, Ahmed se fâche, and Les Citrouilles and that was staged in a quick creative sequence starting just four years after Rhapsody for the Theatre was published. In fact, one of the most intriguing aspects of this treatise is the way in which it moves between philosophy and theatre to the point of opening up a space of indiscernibility between the two.

When the first serious studies of the homosexual past began to appear in English, they bore titles like Hidden from History and Who Was That Man? Even now such studies may describe themselves as “disclosures,” “the secret life,” “the untold story.” The suggestion is that there has been, if not a deliberate suppression, then a less-than-benign neglect of those aspects of history that revealed the presence of same-sex desire and behavior. To unearth and disclose them was regarded as essential to the struggle for gay liberation. By establishing homosexual individuals as a presence from time immemorial, one could make the study of them respectable and thereby bestow respectability on their practices, sexual and cultural, as well. This endeavor was complicated by the increasingly heated debate between the “essentialists,” who regard a homosexual identity to be innate and ahistorical, and the “social constructionists,” followers of Foucault, who insist on the evolution of a modern homosexual identity as the result of changes in the concept of sexuality. Often the fruits of research have been obscured by contentions over whether they supported one camp or the other. Valuable data, which might have gone to challenge traditional attitudes or conventional postures, fell unheard on ears deafened by the grinding of axes.

I am grateful to the Francis W. Parker School, Chicago, for allowing me free access to Morning Exercises and to the archives housed at the school. I would also like to thank the many current and former teachers and students who took the time to answer my questions, especially Andy Kaplan and John Holabird. I also thank Eric Martin, Christine Harris, and the anonymous readers at Theatre Survey for their patient editorial work.

It is as good a division of the world as any other to observe that there are and have been societies with theatre and others without theatre. And that in societies that know this strange public place, where fiction is consumed as a repeatable event, this has always met with reticence, anathema, major or minor excommunications, as well as enthusiasm. More specifically, next to the spiritual suspicion that befalls theatre, there is always the vigilant concern of the State, to the point where all theatre has been one of the affairs of the State and remains so to this day!

In 1658, having been invited to perform at court for the first time in his career, Molière paired his farce Le Docteur amoureux with Nicomède, a 1651 play by France's reigning dramatist, Pierre Corneille. The choice of Nicomède is surprising for political reasons, since the play is shot through with suspicion of royal authority: Corneille's hero is a great military leader unjustly imprisoned by the weak king he selflessly serves. The choice becomes less surprising when one considers a different set of reasons. Corneille's play is a generic oddity that marries its tragic tropes to elements of historical drama and a surprisingly comic ending. Molière's provincial troupe may have felt more at ease in such a play than in a proper neoclassical tragedy, since they lacked training in rhetorically complex stage declamation and in the codified gestures and postures preferred to convey tragic stage emotion at the time. In particular, they lacked the facility of the king's (and Corneille's) favorites, the esteemed Hôtel de Bourgogne actors, who were in the audience as guests of the monarch. No doubt anxious in their presence and in the presence of the king, Molière might have sought to mitigate the unfavorable comparison he anticipated between the talents of his troupe and those of the reigning Paris tragedians.

This article reflects my current research, exploring the complex interactions between the discursive practices of theatre and performance on the one hand and philosophy on the other. Instead of beginning by trying to formulate the general principles for such an interaction, I examine actual encounters: direct face-to-face meetings and actual dialogues between philosophers and representatives of the Thespian professions. The earliest recorded encounter of this kind is in Plato's Symposium depicting the banquet in Agathon's house, celebrating his victory at the Lenaean theatre festival in 416 b.c., during which the celebrants spent the whole night eulogizing Eros. On this occasion Socrates and the two playwrights, Agathon and Aristophanes, interacted directly on several occasions.

In order to lay the groundwork for the link I mean to make between ashes and the theatre archive, let me start by recollecting a few disasters.

In The Power of Darkness (Vlast' t'my; 1886), Tolstoy examines the nature of human evil in the unlikely context of the Russian peasantry, a class with a privileged relation to the Good throughout most of his oeuvre. Tolstoy's first major play chronicles Nikita's rise as a philandering laborer who succeeds to the fortune of his peasant employer (Pyotr) through a murder that is conceived by his mother (Matryona) and carried out by his employer's wife (Anisya). After marrying Anisya, Nikita descends into drunkenness, seduces his sixteen-year-old stepdaughter, Akulina, and fathers her child. Many commentators—taking their cue from the play's subtitle, “If the claw is caught, the bird is lost” (kogotok uviaz, vsei ptichke propast’)—have followed the logic of Tolstoy's plot in search of an original sin, usually locating it somewhere in the confrontation between a backward peasantry and the forces of progress, especially money—a bane of civilization that corrupts the play's characters from without. This same logical sequence can be reversed so as to foreground not the causes of evil but its victims. Nikita's final and greatest crime is the killing of Akulina's newborn. Here Tolstoy's oft-disparaged moralism proves no less groundbreaking than his play's cutting-edge naturalism. Through an artistic strategy of moral provocation, The Power of Darkness contributes to a modern revaluation of evil through the figure of the murdered child, a tradition that runs from Swift to Dostoevsky to the photojournalism of twentieth-century warfare.

In his second year at the University of California, Berkeley, Arthur William Ryder (1877–1938), the Ohio-born Harvard scholar of Sanskrit language and literature, collaborated with the campus English Club and Garnet Holme, an English actor, to stage Ryder's translation of the Sanskrit classic Mrichchhakatikam, by Shudraka, as The Little Clay Cart. The 1907 production was described as “presented in true Hindu style. Under the direction of Garnet Holme, who … studied with Swamis of San Francisco … [and] the assistance of many Indian students of the university.” However, in the twenty-five-plus cast, there was not a single Indian actor with a speaking part. The intended objective was grandeur, and the production achieved that with elaborate sets and costumes, two live zebras, and elephants. Seven years later, the Ryder–Holme team returned with Ryder's translation of Kalidasa's Shakuntala, “bear cubs, a fawn, peacocks, and an onstage lotus pool with two real waterfalls.” While the archival materials do not indicate the involvement of any Indian actors (barring one Gobind B. Lal, who enacted the Prologue), its importance is evinced by the coverage it received in the Oakland Tribune, the Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine, and the Los Angeles Times.

Imagine an E♭+5 chord opening this meditation, played on a late-1940s Gibson hollow-body ES-125 electric guitar, the instrument held high on a woman's chest so she can play and narrate at the same time. Not just what I need to tell, not just what I need to sing, but how I need to tell, how the lyrics will make this collection of notes into an essay. Close your eyes. Wouldn't you rather listen to this discourse on the field? Walking with your earphones, washing the dishes with an ear cocked for the important bits, lying on the floor after hours at the computer—you could just listen.…

How did he do that? This question has been on the lips of audience members since magicians first began delighting and amazing viewers with skills of dexterity and legerdemain. The first-known recorded, secular magic performance dates back to 2500 b.c. when the conjuror Dedi presented a series of tricks for the Egyptian king Cheops at the royal palace. The event was recorded in the Westcar papyrus, a document that was composed around 1700 b.c. but is thought by Egyptologists to have been copied from earlier sources. Yes, magic and conjuring have long been an integral part of popular entertainment, and from these very early beginnings, secular magicians have continued to provide entertainment for audiences of all ages right up through the present day. Magic shows are still some of the hottest tickets of the Las Vegas strip, and touring artists such as David Copperfield can still fill theatres. Magic is also popular on television once again thanks to the work of David Blaine and Criss Angel. Organizations such as the International Brotherhood of Magicians (IBM) and the Society of American Magicians (SAM) also boast a strong membership.

The University of Houston (UH) Libraries' Special Collections possesses several groups of papers and other items related to theatre and the performing arts, one of which is the Nina Vance Alley Theatre Papers. These items were donated to Special Collections in 2000. What follows is a brief biography of Nina Vance and history of the Alley as well as some highlights of items contained within this collection. Nina Vance was the Alley's first artistic director, from 1947 until her death in 1980. Along with Margo Jones and Zelda Fichandler, she helped shape the American regional-theatre movement in the later twentieth century. During her tenure at the Alley she directed 102 plays, produced 245 shows, and was awarded major grants, including significant funding from the Ford Foundation. Despite Vance's achievements in these areas, as well as in establishing the Alley as a respected theatre in the United States and across the world, few works of scholarship exist on her career. This could be partially due to the fact that many primary sources on the Alley Theatre and its founder, such as those found at the UH Libraries' Special Collections, have not been well publicized.

For someone who reads most of the time—on the train, in the library, at the dentist's—this is not an easy question to answer. Reading occurs at various levels of concentration; for me, focus is determined by the environment as much as the book. And what I'm reading now or in the past few years is not psychologically defining, I suspect, any more than what happens to be on my iPod is: both are subject to randomness, convenience, and passing attraction. Roland Barthes said he divided his reading in two branches: for work he read at the desk; for pleasure, on the bed. That's a bit too dichotomized as it leaves out the armchair and the waiting room, and I usually fall asleep while reading on the bed, but the basic idea is fair enough. A different place for different reading.

“This overheated and distasteful little book—for me the wrong book in many ways—addresses matters about which there is, precisely, nothing left to say.” The Rutgers University library believed this antihype and never purchased Paul Mann's The Theory-Death of the Avant-Garde (1991), a book so amusingly dour, so relentlessly dialectical, as to be, for me, irresistible. A member of Mike Sell's Vectors of the Avant-Garde seminar at last month's ASTR, I decided really to read instead of skim my Alibris-purchased copy of Mann's distasteful little book. In it the main figures of futurism, dada, and surrealism become a failed or self-recuperating aggregate whose discourse of inflammatory “anti-” stances served only to undermine their revolutionary intentions: “[T]he avant-garde's assaults on tradition, cultural establishments, and the formal structure of the work of art tended to place it in the service of, not . . . the revolution, but of its deferral, its displacement. . . . The avant-garde's historical agony is grounded in the brutal paradox of an opposition that sustains what it opposes precisely by opposing it” (11).