We open this issue of Theatre Survey with Marvin Carlson's essay on how the events of 9/11 and the subsequent wars with Afghanistan and Iraq have affected New York theatre. At the core of Carlson's essay is a very subtle depiction of theatre forced by world events to contemplate anew its understanding of history and its understanding of the role that theatre has to play in history. Carlson's essay offers us an image of theatre communities that, in their responses to the deeply troubling events of the past two and a half years, have struggled to understand whether theatre is outside or inside of history, that is, whether theatre is “somehow out of place in a situation of real crisis and suffering” or whether it can be an actual force of change. At one level, then, Carlson's essay is significant because it illuminates how acts of terrorism and acts of war force theatre to return to the most basic questions about its function in society at large. Those questions serve as our point of departure because their answers change with history.

Clearly the attacks of 11 September 2001 served as a defining moment in the contemporary American political, social, or cultural imagination, and led directly to the invasion of Afghanistan and the far more controversial invasion of Iraq. Both wars were brief, the modest forces of these countries quickly capitulating to the overwhelming military superiority of Western forces, headed by the United States. On 1 May 2003, President George Bush announced victory and the end of the war in Iraq. Although the much more difficult and complex problems of occupation and pacification clearly will continue for some time, 1 May may be taken to have marked an end of a major phase in the crisis that was initiated on 9/11.

In October 1926 a leading African-American newspaper, the Pittsburgh Courier, featured adjacent photographs of two young women with a provocative caption: “White Actresses Who Open with Robeson and Bledsoe on Broadway during Week.” The actresses featured were Lottice Howell, starring with Jules Bledsoe in the musical play Deep River, and Edith Warren, starring with Paul Robeson in the drama Black Boy. In reporting this latest bit of integrated casting, however, the Courier was wrong on two counts. First, they misidentified the photographs, identifying Howell as Warren and Warren as Howell; and second, they misidentified Warren, whose real name was Fredi Washington, as “white.” Washington (who dropped the stage name during previews) was, by self-identification, Negro, or, in the language of the Savannah official who recorded her birth in 1903, “colored.”

Eleonora Duse (1858–1924), international star, national treasure, and patriotic Italian died in Pittsburgh in April 1924. Those involved in the memorializing process contended for control of her body, attempting to interpolate her renown in competing narratives of national pride and the universality of art. Duse died at a turning point for Italy, the year Mussolini's Fascists became the majority party. For Mussolini and the Fascists, Duse's death became the occasion for a pageant of Italian pride through a series of carefully orchestrated ceremonies. At the same time, the theatre community tried to establish an artistic narrative more akin to the ideals Duse expressed in life. In the end, nationalist motifs dominated the memorial discourse. Duse's own assertions of the importance of spirit over corporeality became an ironic footnote to a story in which the actress's body stood in for the nation.

The narrative fabric of modern history, writes Roland Barthes, tends to be woven with a certain amount of “useless” details, which, though they are ultimately “filling” (“catalysis”), nonetheless have “indisputable symbolic value.” As a consequence, the past two centuries have seen the “development of techniques, of works and institutions based on the incessant need to authenticate the ‘real.’” These techniques include photography, reportage, exhibitions, and, I would like to emphasize, “the tourism of monuments and historical sites”—the subject of this essay. Indeed, for the tourist, the symbolic value accorded the minutiae on display at historic sites, preserved or re-created for public display, seem to be the very elements that guarantee real history, despite the fact that many of these details are often the most conjectural elements.

In 1934, Louis B. Wright wrote, “All the world knows since the publication of studies by Professors Graves, Rollins, and Hotson that . . . [the drama's] light never went out completely.” Yet in a 2001 reference book, a contributor writes, “After an eighteen year hiatus. . . .” No wonder that Dale Randall could legitimately write in 1995, “We are asked to believe that little or nothing happened in English drama for the next eighteen years” beginning in 1642. His Winter Fruit is an important survey of dramatic activity during the Interregnum, and scholars continue to document the varieties of theatrical activities in the period. My essay is a modest contribution to the accumulation of details about a lingering, integral puzzle: how two London companies with experienced actors and new stars came into existence so quickly in 1660. It also shows that the Old City of London was not as inhospitable to drama as it is often portrayed. The piece of this puzzle that I can supply is the picture of John Rhodes and the Drapers' Company. Of Rhodes, John Downes wrote that in the winter of 1659–60 he “fitted up a House then for Acting call'd the Cock-Pit in Drury-Lane, and in a short time Compleated his Company.” Downes supplies a list of plays acted there beginning in February and comments that one of these new actors, Thomas Betterton, then “but 22 Years Old, was highly Applauded for his Acting . . . ; his Voice being then as Audibly strong, full and Articulate, as in the Prime of his Acting.”

By all indications, the public persona of the late Restoration actress Anne Bracegirdle was built on the speculative foundation of maidenhead. A leading ingénue of multiple talents, Bracegirdle played significant roles in comedy, tragedy, and music-drama from her debut in 1688 to her retirement in 1707. In comedy, Bracegirdle specialized in marriageable young women of rank, wit, and fortune. In serious drama, Bracegirdle often played the pathetic heroine, a virtuous woman stalked by a predatory man. Though primarily an actress, Bracegirdle also called upon her impressive soprano voice in many entr'actes and the occasional musical part. A first-rank player and hardworking company member from very early in her career, Bracegirdle played some eighty roles over a nineteen-year span that kept her consistently before the public eye. Despite Bracegirdle's constant appearances on the stages of Drury Lane, Dorset Garden, Lincoln's Inn Fields, and the Queen's Theatre in the Haymarket, few extant sources identify the qualities that typified her playing; commentators rarely discuss her acting as a discrete set of practices, aptitudes, or characterizations. Rather, prodigious evidence attests to the public's obsession with Bracegirdle's reputation for virginity. Called the “Romantick Virgin,” the actress was thought to be chaste, and many writers focused attention on her sexual virtue. Indeed, Bracegirdle's chastity seems to have been the cornerstone of her fame. As Colley Cibber wrote, her star status rose in conjunction with her reputation for purity:

Herb Blau, reportedly, is writing a memoir. Surely, however, all his books are memoirs—memoirs of “blooded thought,” to use the phrase he has coined for the embodied, materialized process of thinking/experiencing he most prizes in the theatre. Or perhaps I should say “of” the theatre, since he has shown us for fifty years how both making theatre and theorizing theatre can be combined: how they mutually imply each other, neither one much good without the insights provided by the other—which is not to malign either alone, except when one ignores or denigrates the value of the other, as some theorists and practitioners have often been inclined to do. In The Dubious Spectacle, Blau has collected essays and lectures spanning over twenty-five years. They chart the intellectual and artistic preoccupations that he followed, but they also offer a variant of cultural history of a period in American theatre that reaches back into the 1950s and forward toward an “impossible” future (another of his signature terms).

The past three decades have produced a wealth of criticism devoted to the issue of space and performance as well as a glut of terms attempting to capture how theatre artists exploit the spatial dimension. A brief inventory yields spectacle, site, image, heterotopia, simulacra, surface, environment, geography, scenography, visual field, place, and space—to name only a few. Drawing on insights from anthropology, phenomenology, cultural studies, new historicism, and urban studies, critics are working to investigate the cultural meaning of space, to capture its dramaturgical potential, and to rethink performance as a system of communication based on visual vocabulary.

Anyone who has encountered the Provincetown Players, the art theatre that launched Susan Glaspell and Eugene O'Neill, knows what an amazingly vibrant and creative community it was, a progressive smart set teaming with ideas for a new American drama. In The Women of Provincetown, Cheryl Black gives us the most richly detailed work on the Provincetown to date, drawing on an impressive range of primary sources. For this reason alone, the book is essential reading for theatre historians and other scholars working on the emergence of American drama. A playwright, actor, director, and dramaturge herself, Black has enough experience to explore the range of roles needed to make theatre, providing a context for the predominantly literary studies of Provincetown plays.

In “Writing the Absent Potential: Drama, Performance, and the Canon of African-American Literature,” Sandra Richards argues that scholars largely ignore the African-American contribution to theatre and performance. She suspects that most critics regard “drama as a disreputable member of the family of literature” (65). Even African Americanists neglect dramatic literature; indeed, the Norton Anthology of African American Literature includes only a scant number of plays. Both David Krasner and Shane White effectively redress this oversight and shift the focus from African-American literature to blacks on stage in their recent monographs about early nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century drama.

The Undiscovered Country is a collection of essays mostly by and for the Tennessee Williams specialist—who else could write with such confidence that Williams's “instinct for finding the humor in his most intimate pain may have sprung from the natural inclinations for self-protection and self-deprecation, long known as personality traits of the playwright” (212) ? Williams's “later plays” (of the sixties and seventies) have been “undiscovered” precisely because the Williams specialist has tended to treat them with well-meaning sympathy, even defensiveness, rather than critical rigor. Each of the fifteen essays here opens with a gloomy recitation of one later play's production history and its miserable reviews, before moving on to describe the work as unfairly denigrated, and to defend Williams as the victim of his early success. Because Williams continues to experiment technically throughout his career, the writers in The Undiscovered Country are in an awkward position. If they want to say that the later plays are new, better, or even different, they have to look to the past—the very history that “traps” him. The need to view the Author as the “past” or source of the works is, as Roland Barthes saw, a modern invention that really seeks to glorify the critic. Barthes celebrated the “Death of the Author” not as an escape from critical responsibility but as a way to ensure it. What would it take to clear away the history of neglect and well-meaning phrases and to read Williams's plays differently?

Since the publication in 1981 of Bonnie Marranca's American Dreams: the Imagination of Sam Shepard, critical editions devoted to Shepard's works have appeared roughly every five to eight years. There are now at least four essay collections devoted to Shepard's works, and one might ask whether there is anything new, interesting, or valuable to say about him, especially since, in recent years, his output has decreased. Shepard is a key figure in American drama, some would argue the preeminent playwright of the postwar era. Yet is he as relevant or as cutting-edge as he once was? Are his protagonists' struggles to “act themselves out” in the framework of a beleaguered and moribund patriarchy still compelling when other writers have arguably “moved on” to other issues?

“Those who created this book, and many of its readers, think of the musical as art,” write Everett and Laird in their preface to The Cambridge Companion to the Musical (xv). Indeed, many of us who study or teach musical theatre feel the need to defend it as a viable artistic form worthy of scholarly examination. Both of these books demonstrate the musical's importance in cultural history and amply illustrate the artistry of its production.

This anthology of essays and interviews brings together the eleven playwrights who won the Pulitzer Prize in the years 1989–2000. Generally, the playwrights were awarded the prize on the basis of a specific play from the prior year, although in some instances the prize appears to be a recognition for a career. Moreover, there is considerable variety in the playwrights selected by the Pulitzer Committee. Some are very successful commercially, others very experimental; some have been prolific, whereas others are known only for one or two major works. A common bond among them all is their dedication to the stage. Some may have written television or film scripts, and even narrative fiction and poetry, but they all see the stage as their preferred creative ground.

The annual publication of the Theatre Library Association is designed “to gather and disseminate scholarly articles dealing with the location of resource materials” relating to all media as well as popular entertainments, the evaluation of those resources, and to include as well “monographs of previously unpublished original material.” The volumes are slim ones, so we should not expect coverage of the many theatre collections available to scholars and practitioners, but rather a highly selective series of essays reflecting the priorities of the Association or of the individual volume editors. This certainly appears to be the case here: the 1998 volume concerns itself with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American pleasure gardens, whereas, after a publication hiatus of three years, the 2001 volume is focused around the acquisition, scope, and use of four major archives—those of the Joseph Papp/New York Shakespeare Festival and of Lucille Lortel in the New York Public Library of the Performing Arts, the Lawrence and Lee Theatre Research Institute at Ohio State University, and the holdings of the Weill—Lenya Research Center in New York. As a consequence, the tones of the two volumes are very different, as is their utility. The first volume appears to be directed toward a disinterested readership; the second addresses those who might actually use the particular collections.

Simon During's book presents a broad overview of European and North American magic and argues that magic influenced the formation of modern culture. During clearly delineates three types of magic: Supernatural Magic, or “real” spiritual magic associated with superstition, religion, and the occult; Natural Magic, which popularized scientific discoveries such as electricity, magnetism, X-rays, and optics; and Secular Magic, based on spectacle, skillful technique, illusion, and special effects. He successfully charts the complex relations among the three types of magic, and explains how they reinforce one another (as is the case with natural and secular magic), or work against one another (as when natural and secular magic gradually delegitimized the influence of supernatural magic in an increasingly secularized, modern culture).

Western theatrical dance emerges in the late Renaissance as an increasingly autonomous art form. However, as theatrical dance strove toward the ideal of its own aesthetic self-sufficiency, toward an autonomy that would eventually confer it its place as a truly modern art form, dance developed a paradoxically intimate, intricate, and convoluted relationship with its other—writing. The historical persistence of a continuous dialoguing between dancing and writing indicates how dance's aspirations for aesthetic autonomy were precisely that: an impossible (modern) wishing. Historically, the role and function of writing in regards to dance has been one of partnering. This partnering has oscillated among three foundational modes of writings on dance: the archival (writing as the guarantor of dance's historical survival, as seen already in the late 1500s, in Arbeau's Orcheseography), the choreographic (writing as mode of composing dances directly on paper, as seen in the exams for the Académie Royale in late seventeenth-century France), and the writing of criticism. Of these three modes, criticism—understood as writing aimed at explaining or translating to an audience the opacity of dance's appearing—won't emerge in its incipient form until the late eighteenth century. This mode is today the most prominent role writing takes in relation to dance, in which the function of the critic is simultaneously to preserve and explain the dances she witnesses.

Anyone old enough to remember the wailing sirens and portentous footsteps of Gangbusters or the clattering consequences of opening the closet door belonging to Fibber McGee and Molly probably has a soft spot for the radio dramas of the past. Those who never experienced the medium that George Bernard Shaw called “the invisible play” may lack a context. Admitting that you remember those nostalgic broadcasts dates you. In a world of HDTV, GPS, home THX, and digital imaging by cell phone, what good is radio?

Penny Gay's study moves between the influence of theatre and drama on Austen's novels and theatricality itself as a mode of representation. While theatrical performance is considered, Gay's analysis generally emphasizes the impact of dramatic literature rather than theatrical representation, genre rather than performance. Through reference to the work of eighteenth-century women playwrights, Gay also places Austen's work and contemporary theatre in pervasively “masculine” and “feminine” discourses.