Peter Brook begins the second chapter of The Empty Space, “The Holy Theatre,” with a lament for the loss of sacred approaches to theatre; approaches that satisfy a community's need to make visible its identity, its hope, and its history. In describing the vacuum within the modern theatre once occupied by ceremony—what he defines as the importance of a noble aim for theatre—Brook critiques hollow and backward attempts to fill new and grand spaces with old and meaningless ritual. In postwar Europe, he saw a need for new spaces that “crie[d] out for a new ceremony, but of course it is the new ceremony that should have come first—it is the ceremony in all its meanings that should have dictated the shape of the place.” Brook's assessment of postwar European bourgeois theatre and its search for new and meaningful agendas is framed by conceptions of space as antecedent to action, requiring only performer and audience in order for theatre to occur, and for a space to be called a theatre. Indeed, theatrical space is always a product of well-established cultural performance conventions—a phenomenon common throughout history. Brook's critique focuses on the conventions of theatrical space that developed from the romantic dramas and spectacle-driven performances of the late nineteenth century and continued well into the twentieth century. Echoing Bertolt Brecht, Brook rejected theatres that predetermined the limits of drama and performance, arguing that it was necessary to strip them of conventional expectations in order to lay bare their potential. Essentially, he asks: When and how does a space become a theatre?

Edwin Forrest, then a not-yet-famous actor, spent the summer of 1825 living in the greater New Orleans area among the Choctaw. It has been alleged that he spent these months with his friend Choctaw chief Pushmataha. From this relationship, Forrest learned how to play “Indian,” acquiring knowledge that informed his later interpretation of the title character in John August Stone's 1829 play Metamora; or, The Last of the Wampanoags. Accounts of Forrest's time with Pushmataha appear in biographies of the actor and critical assessments of his acting. In none of these texts is the fact of their relationship disputed.

In the summer of 2013, Shakespeare's Globe, the company based at the Globe reconstruction in London, mounted productions of the three parts of Shakespeare's Henry VI at Wars of the Roses battlefield sites. The battlefield as performance space, with its rolling hills and buried corpses, mediated the temporal overlap of past and present, as contemporary bodies engaged with the construction of a historical narrative in the fictional play and the actual historical moments of the Wars of the Roses. The associations entrenched in the soil of these sites, the physical remains and histories of the past, encode a connective experience for the contemporary participants interacting with it. The battlefield site, then, is not just a site of historical significance—it is also a site of historical reenactment, where present bodies meet absent ones in the Globe's attempt to converge separated temporalities. The Globe framed the battlefield performances as a way of enlivening history by grounding well-worn Shakespearean texts in the places they represent. But the Globe, in collaboration with The Space, an online arts collective, also filmed the ten-hour marathon event at the Barnet battlefield, live-streamed, and then saved the performance to a digital archive. So the Globe displaced the site of their site-specific experience. Virtual spectatorship, a result of the Globe's efforts to increase access to their battlefield performances by making them available online, adds another layer of absence to the battlefield. The virtual spectator as absent spectator challenges the privileging of a physical viewing experience that the Globe's “open-air” project promotes. The displacement of site disrupts the relationships grounded in the material performance space and its geographical connections, and expands the understanding of site-specific by demonstrating how a specific relationship to place might be produced and maintained without physical access to a geographical location. Together with their placement at the historical sites and transmission into virtual spaces, the battlefield Henry VIs generate a multiplicity of shared viewing experiences. These shared experiences mediate the continuation of a (re)constructed historical and collective memory and highlight the role of spectatorship, both physical and virtual, in the formation of communal and national identity.

No discussion of antitheatrical polemics can escape mention of Stephen Gosson. His characterization of theatre as the “doctrine of the devil” is found in his last of a succession of pamphlets attacking the theatre. His polemics comprise one of the most theologically nuanced arguments against the Elizabethan stage—euphuistic though they may be. Indeed, others were far more concise. The preacher William Holbrooke, for instance, made his case with efficiency when he branded stage players “scumme of the world.”

Peru approached the twenty-first century a polarized country. In the year 2000, with increased authoritarian control over the legislative and judicial branches along with constitutional reforms paving the way for his re-reelection, President Alberto Fujimori campaigned for a third term in office. His main electoral opponent, Alejandro Toledo, along with opposition leaders, spearheaded massive demonstrations in Lima accusing the government of repression, corruption, drug trafficking, and electoral fraud. Opposition figures were joined by grassroots social movements, unions, students, and human rights activists who opposed the regime's repressive and corrupt practices, which included by now reports of torture and extrajudicial killings. When Fujimori first became president a decade earlier he had inherited a country ravaged by widespread poverty, hyperinflation, nearly depleted foreign reserves, a growing narcotics trade, and two armed terrorist groups: the MRTA (Tupac Amarú Revolutionary Movement) and the Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso). Both were on the offensive across the country, the Shining Path most prominently, planting car bombs in the capital, kidnapping and killing civilians, and besieging towns and villages across the country. Looking for a way out of economic and terrorist violence, Peruvians were faced with two options in 1990: Alberto Fujimori, an ex-university president and agricultural engineer of Japanese descent, and Mario Vargas Llosa, a white, upper-middle-class novelist and liberal intellectual. Though Fujimori was less well-known, many Peruvians saw Vargas Llosa's center-right coalition as a repackaged version of the same traditional political groups that had lead the country into crisis. Fujimori would appear much like Hugo Chávez later in Venezuela, a populist outsider ready to challenge the traditional party system. Many saw Fujimori's succinct rhetoric as refreshing when contrasted with Vargas Llosa's elaborate speeches, especially since the former president, Alan García, who fled the country in 1992 on corruption charges, was also well-known for his loquacious disposition.