Although the long-awaited murder of Arden in the anonymous Arden of Faversham (ca. 1592) takes place during a game of tables, or what we call backgammon,1 critics have been quick to overlook the choice of game in this climactic scene, underestimating its importance to the play's central concerns and even mistakenly calling it a game of dice or cards.2 These games do share some common features—backgammon, for instance, involves the use of dice—but the distinctions among them are significant, especially for the play's often-observed interests in geography and place. In attending to the intersection between games and theatre, I participate in a long tradition of performance studies scholarship. But in contrast to much of this scholarship, I emphasize the formal qualities of particular games—which vary widely from one game to another—arguing that different games call for unique competencies in players and in spectators of games.3Arden of Faversham reflects on spatial relations in the early modern theatre by staging and enacting the ludic competencies peculiar to backgammon.

Whether through its association with 1789 or 1830, with the German labor movement of the nineteenth century, or the fight against fascism in the twentieth, the stirring sound of the national anthem of France is familiar to us all.1 (And film buffs everywhere have a powerful image of this last association thanks to the unforgettable depiction of the song in Casablanca.) Less well known is that this famous song, though feared during the 1790s as the terrorist “chant” of the guillotine,2 also provided René-Charles Guilbert de Pixérécourt with the ingredients, and a ready-made dramaturgical recipe, for inventing a new theatrical genre.3 With its simple division of the world into vulnerable, imperiled enfants on the one hand, and powerful, plotting tyrans on the other, and its demand that the latter be killed, “La Marseillaise” may well have helped to stoke the fire of the Terror and certainly helped legitimize its violence. But in terms of its plot, characters, and politicomoral thought, even in terms of its diction and spectacle,4 “La Marseillaise” also laid down the dramaturgical rules for playwriting in revolutionary Paris, showing the father of melodrama how to make for the happiness of the enfants de la patrie—those in the audience and those on the stage.

Returning fresh from her summer vacation, the suntanned managing director of Gothenburg City Theatre, Karin Kavli (1906–90), proudly announced at a press conference in early August 1955 that she had secured the rights to produce the European premiere of Tennessee Williams's acclaimed play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.1 Well aware of the importance of creating a balanced repertoire that would satisfy the more artistically and literally minded audience and those who wanted some lighter forms of entertainment, Kavli understood that hosting the premiere of Williams's latest drama was quite a coup, especially in an age when television had begun to pose a great threat to theatre.

In the climactic scene of James Baldwin's 1968 novel Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone, the narrator and protagonist, Leo Proudhammer, appears with his friend and lover Barbara in the living room of a Jewish acting teacher named Saul San-Marquand, the artistic director of the Actors’ Means Workshop. Leo and Barbara have been hanging around the small town in New Jersey where the Workshop has decamped for the summer season. At last, they have been given their promised chance to perform a scene for Saul, who will decide on the basis of that scene whether or not they will be accepted as members of the Workshop. They have prepared a scene from Clifford Odets's Waiting for Lefty in which Flor and Sid, a young couple, break off their relationship under pressure from Flor's brother. Leo, who is black, and Barbara, who is white, have just admitted their love for each other; their impossible interracial relationship underlies the novel. When they arrive in Saul's apartment, they have just walked through town together to the obscene and threatening jeers of the white townspeople, validating their decision, made in bed hours earlier, that their relationship can never be public.

Editor's Note: In this previously unpublished conversation from 2007, Tina Takemoto and Angela Ellsworth discuss their collaboration during a period when Ellsworth was diagnosed with and underwent treatment for Hodgkin's lymphoma. For those compelling collaborations, the artists confronted the effects of diagnosis and prognosis on the experience of embodiment, the gendered and racialized practices of medical care, and the limits of empathy in communicating across illness/health. In this conversation, Takemoto and Ellsworth reconvene after a crisis in their collaborations to work through the complications that arose for each in their attempts to stage and manage performances that would make a difference in the treatment of cancer. This interview was conducted in New York City on 16 September 2007.

Patience Worth, a British Puritan girl who lived and died sometime in the seventeenth century, produced a prolific four million words in the form of novels, plays, poems, prayers, and short stories. “Produced” is the best word for what she did; we certainly can't say she “wrote” them. We can't, in fact, say that Patience Worth existed at all. But neither can we comfortably say that Pearl Pollard Curran (1883–1937) wrote the material in question, though she is usually credited as its author. Between 1913 and 1937, Curran (Fig. 1), a St. Louis, Missouri, housewife, spoke these four million words aloud (often in an idiosyncratic, pseudo-Shakespearean dialect) with the aid of a Ouija board and a planchette. A series of secretaries transcribed what she said: Curran claimed that Worth was a thwarted authoress who had long been searching from beyond the grave for a suitable host and that she had selected Curran as her channel. Some of the material she (they?) generated was ultimately published with the assistance of Casper S. Yost (1863–1941), editor of the St. Louis Globe-Democrat and founder of the American Society of Newspaper Editors. Intrepid librarians have cataloged this perplexing material in ways that attempt to account for its convoluted provenance: “Hope Trueblood, by Patience Worth, communicated through Mrs. John H. Curran, edited by Casper S. Yost, published by Henry Holt and Company, 1918.” Questions of authorship, ownership, and voice are central to this perplexing body of work.

The three books that have recently been traveling between my desk and an airplane seat are placed by their respective publishers into the following categories: “business/marketing,” “economics & finance,” and “popular culture/American anthropology.” Yet each of these recent publications has something to say to and about our field as well; the authors engage with theatre, theatricality, and performance as crucial to their interrogations of the contemporary world.