Thanks to the generous labors of the guest editors and authors of two special-topics issues (May and November 2002), we are able to feature four articles in this “open” issue of the journal that remind us (as did those) not only of the wealth of scholarship in the field of theatre research but of the seemingly chance confluence of ideas that often marks research. The archive I discussed in my first editorial (November 2001) has been well represented in these three issues, but also the imagination that lifts archival work to the living stage where history is enacted. The present issuewith its substantial references to theatre in the Americas, to theatre and national identity, to theatre in times of disaster and censorship, of prejudice and resistanceunderscores the relationship between research and its construction in scholarship, and between scholarship and civic life.

On 22 September 1776, the British army executed Captain Nathan Hale, Yale College class of 1773, officer of the Continental Army of the United States, and prisoner of war.James Staunton Babcock, Memoir of Captain Nathan Hale (New Haven: S. Babcock, 1844), 12. Babcock's biography of Nathan Hale is the first, and possibly the best, of its kind. Also indispensable is George Dudley Seymour's Documentary Life of Nathan Hale (New Haven: private printing, 1941), which reprints the known primary documents related to Hale's life, providing invaluable means for verifying Babcock's account, as well as a corrective for the enthusiasms of Hale's other biographers. Hale biographies are generally published in New Haven and, as a genre, tend toward fulsome sentimentality and paeans to the undying glory of Yale University, traditions established in Babcock's text. For typical examples of such Hale hagiography, see Henry Phelps Johnson, Nathan Hale, 1776 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1914), and Artemus Jean Haynes, The Story of Nathan Hale (New Haven: n.p., 1907). Hale's espionage stemmed from the Continental Army's disastrous loss at the Battle of Brooklyn in August 1776 and subsequent retreat to Manhattan. With his troops demoralized and vulnerable to further attacks, George Washington required intelligence about British troop maneuvers. When Washington asked for a volunteer from his officer corps, Hale's former schoolmate and fellow officer Captain William Hull records that Hale accepted the mission, in spite of his friend Hull's objections that “[h]is nature was too frank and open for deceit and disguise” and that “he was incapable of acting a part equally foreign to his feelings and habits.”William Hull, Revolutionary Services And Civil Life of General William Hull; Prepared From his Manuscripts, by his Daughter, Mrs. Maria Campbell: Together with the History of the Campaign of 1812, And Surrender of the Post of Detroit, By His Grandson, James Freeman Clarke (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1848), 35. Hull's narrative is the principal historical evidence for analysis of Hale's execution. Part, though not all, of his account is also reprinted in Seymour, 307–10. Hale traveled from Washington's encampment on Harlem Heights to Norwalk, Connecticut, before sailing to Huntington, Long Island. There, posing as a loyalist, he was captured while gathering intelligence and hanged.

It is a chilling irony that the lines of the prologue, which appear above, spoken on the opening night of a prosperous season for the American Company in Annapolis, unwittingly served as the epitaph on the last night of the Leeward Islands Company, whose playhouse on St. Croix was destroyed in the early hours of that very day, and they, themselves, heard no more. The two events remind us that, though David Douglass ultimately established his supremacy on the colonial American circuit, his American Company was by no means the only professional company that toured the Anglophone colonies. Indeed, throughout the eighteenth century, smaller, competing troupes performed a large provincial circuit that extended from Halifax, Nova Scotia, in the north, to the Leeward Islands in the Caribbean. What follows is the story of one rival company and their untimely demise, a history presently unknown and as yet untold by scholars of colonial American and Caribbean theatre.

In 1913, the play characterized in the popular press as “unquestionably the most widely discussed play of a decade” was not a brilliant interpretation of a classic, one of Shaw's problem plays, or one of David Belasco's realist inventions. The production that took the country by storm, Eugène Brieux's Damaged Goods (Les Avariés), was the first play on the American stage to deal openly with syphilis as a central theme.The staging of Ibsen's Ghosts in New York in 1894 was the first reference to venereal disease on the American stage. Unlike Ghosts, which never explicitly mentions syphilis, Damaged Goods focused on venereal disease as a central theme and discussed the condition in vivid medical terms. Though celebrated at the time as “The Greatest Contribution Ever Made by the Stage to the Cause of Humanity,”“Excerpts, Opinions, Etc. of Damaged Goods,” unidentified pamphlet in the Damaged Goods clipping file in the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Billy Rose Theatre Collection [hereafter, the NYPLPA]. this forgotten play merits the modern scholar's attention not only because its immense popularity has been overlooked or because it broke what turn-of-the-century narratives called the “conspiracy of silence.” Rather, this essay will argue that the performance history of Damaged Goods, far from marking a threshold-crossing freedom in sexual discourse in Progressive Era America, reveals how Progressives utilized the stage to normalize and reinforce the social centrality of bourgeois marriage, reproductivity, and traditional gender norms, much as they had wielded other discourses to study, contain, and discipline sexuality during previous decades.Scholars bracket the Progressive Era differently, depending on their scope of study. I agree with social historian Ruth Rosen's definition that the Progressive Era marks the time of intense American reform movements from the turn of the century until 1918. This is not meant to erase extensive reform efforts as early as the 1830s. Perhaps it is more accurate to describe this period (1900–1918) as the latter half of the Progressive Era. See Lewis L. Gould's America in the Progressive Era, 1890–1914, Seminar Studies in History (Essex, U.K.: Pearson Education Limited, 2001). For Progressive reformation, see Mark Connelly's The Response to Prostitution in the Progressive Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), and David J. Pivar's Purity Crusade: Sexual Morality and Social Control, 1868–1900 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1973). While this regulation of sexuality rested upon a conservative agenda that the ostensible liberalism of the play obfuscated in its (and even our) own day, the play's portrayal of prostitution demonstrates a rather clear, though vexed, relationship between contagion and the dangers of unsanctioned sex.

All theatrical protests are political. This is manifest in such cases as the premieres of Chénier's Charles IX or Hauptmann's The Weavers, but even when protests seem to be about the cost of admission (the O.P. Riots at Covent Garden) or xenophobia (the burning of the Astor Place Theatre), literary fashion (Hernani) or artistic innovation (Le Sacre de printemps), baiting bigots (Tartuffe) or épater-ing the bourgeoisie (Ubu Roi), the root cause can always be construed as political. Unrest, demonstrated within the playhouse or without, marks the evolution of a social consciousness reactive to whatever regime or authority controls the situation. Resistance (the attempt to impose a new order), no matter in which direction it moves across the footlights, engages with an established order.For a brief survey of English examples, see Sir St. Vincent Troubridge, “Theatre Riots in London,” in M. St. Clare Byrne, ed., Studies in English Theatre History in Memory of Gabrielle Enthoven, O.B.E. (London: Society for Theatre Research, 1952), 84–97.

Can there be a performance without live performers? Can the plastic arts be animated to create stage movement? The 11 May–17 August 2002 installation at Exit Art in SoHo, “Show People: Downtown Directors and the Play of Time,” posed these conundrums and managed to achieve the impossible: the excitement and spontaneity of live performance in a gallery setting. For this aspect alone, the show was an appropriate tribute to directors who changed our performance landscape.

An avalanche of single-author studies has appeared as a result of the expansion of the American university system since the 1960s, the growth of the “theory” industry, the triumph of the specialist and decline of the generalist, the proliferation of small academic presses, and the increasing pressure on professors (even in many small colleges) to publish. These monographs function, as a rule, as part teaching aid, part research tool, and part undergraduate crib sheet. The best-known series of these monographs is probably the Twayne (U.S., English, World) Authors Series, which started in the late 1950s and now includes over 150 authors deemed securely canonical. Routledge's Studies in Modern Drama is a more modest effort (the front matter of James Fisher's The Theater of Tony Kushner lists only ten other titles, mostly monographs). Fisher's comprehensive volume is very much in the Twayne tradition, providing a brief biography of the author, a dash of historical background, a study of the author's works, a production history, and an extensive bibliography, all rendered in a style accessible to specialist and nonspecialist alike.

The Shock of the Real treats the relationship between literary Romanticism and the visual popular culture of the late-eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries. Gillen D'Arcy Wood argues that the new visual culture of this period is the first phase of what we call “modernism,” and he claims that he will “illuminate the largely unwritten pre-history of our millennial visual age” (15). Wood's title is somewhat deceptive, since all but one of the eleven essays in the book focus on English Romanticism. His primary concern is the aesthetic debate provoked by the popularity of the new “realistic” visual culture: panoramas, theatrical spectacle, exhibitions, prints, book illustrations, and, finally, photography. Realistic spectacle delighted the masses and horrified the cultural elite in England. Wood examines the various ways in which the poets Coleridge, Byron, Keats, Shelley, and Wordsworth, and the essayists Hazlitt and Lamb, participated in “the anti-visual culture prejudice” of the literary establishment in England.

For close to two decades, Susan Glaspell has served as the virtual poster child for feminist playwrights of the American Little Theatre movement. One can no longer call her an unknown, but J. Ellen Gainor's insightful and meticulously researched new book makes it clear that Glaspell as a subject remains, if I may coin a term, underknown.

John Fleming has used the Tom Stoppard archive, housed at the Harry J. Ransom Humanities Research Center in Austin, Texas, to bring before students and scholars of Stoppard's plays a rich array of contextualizing materials. Letters, manuscripts, notes, typescripts, and other documents provide a wider frame for viewing Stoppard's authorship than has been available before now. Fleming has used these materials to revisit the entire Stoppard dramatic canon to 2000, correcting some errors of fact passed down by critics, and by using more recent plays to comment on earlier ones, offering the first comprehensive critical monograph about Stoppard since 1992.

Singapore's extraordinary economic success, taken with a cultural ideology of “authoritarianism lite,” have inspired imitation throughout Asia and the developing world. Many in the West viewed the 1994 caning of American teenager Michael Fay (for spray painting cars and stealing road signs) as a model of effective crime prevention. In the midst of his campaign to run the United States more like a business, Ross Perot named Singapore his “favorite country.”

One might wonder if there is anything new to be written about the work of Harold Pinter. Other than Brecht and Beckett, there may be more volumes of criticism on Pinter than any other playwright of the twentieth century. The difference is that Pinter is still very much a living and evolving artistic force in today's theatre, not only as a playwright, but as a screenwriter, director, and actor. Despite some minor flaws, The Cambridge Companion to Harold Pinter, a collection of critical essays edited by Peter Raby, accomplishes the purpose stated in its brief foreword: to “provide an introduction to one of the world's leading and controversial writers, whose output in many genres and roles continue to grow.”

This volume is primarily a collection of eleven interviews with distinguished actors, directors, and producers who have brought Eugene O'Neill to the stage. In addition to interviews with James Earl Jones, Jane Alexander, Michael Kahn, Jason Robards, Theodore Mann, Arvin Brown, Len Cariou, Theresa Wright, Gloria Foster, Edward Petherbridge, and Fritz Weaver, Yvonne Shafer contributes a seventy-page introduction describing the work of earlier actors and directors that enables the book to span the entire production history of Eugene O'Neill's plays on the professional stage. This perspective makes a valuable contribution to O'Neill studies, which is heavily concentrated on the plays as literary texts.

Despite an increasing awareness that the history of English theatre must necessarily encompass the study of those actors who were not stars and who worked in the provinces and suburbs rather than in the West End, there is still a comparative dearth of information about such players. Philip and Susan Taylor write that “for every actor about whom much is written and recorded, there must be at least 100 over whom the waters of time have closed without trace, but without whose contribution the theatre would not exist” (xv). In what Peter Thomson, in his foreword to the volume, describes as “an act of recovery” (x), the authors have lovingly and painstakingly documented the life of Philip Taylor's great-great uncle, the provincial tragedian Jonathan Dewhurst.

The problem with much postcolonial theatre theory in the West, as Catherine M. Cole points out in her introduction, is that it is “dominated by literary analysis of European-language written texts,” while much of the performance in Africa occurs in the form of “non-textual expressions in so-called indigenous languages” (7). How, then, is the theatre theorist and historian to study the concert party of Ghana, a twentieth-century traveling popular theatre, a comic variety show “that combined an eclectic array of cultural influences,” including, but not limited to, Al Jolson, American movies, Anansesem (Ghanaian “spider stories”), “highlife” music, African-American spirituals, and others in which there is no literary text but there is most definitely a performance text?

At first glance, Freddie Rokem's violent yoking of two unrelated events, the French Revolution and the Shoah, seems a bit odd. Rokem has good reason for linking plays treating these disparate subjects, however: both phenomena encourage a view of history “as a series of tragic failures of basic human values” (1) and, as such, the two are viewed dialectically. (In postwar theatre, the Terror has often served as a metaphor for the horrors of World War II.) Issues of representation also seem to make the coupling of these events unusual. While the French Revolution's self-conscious spectacularization seems to lend itself to theatre, the subjective, occluded suffering characterizing the Shoah nearly defies representation. This contrast would seem to present opposing challenges to playwrights, yet, frequently, dramas about the French Revolution and the Shoah employ similar metatheatrical devicessuch as plays within playsto present their histories.

From the first glance, this is a beautiful book. Its cover is provocative, offering the image of Dario Fo's face stretched across the spine of the book, seemingly held in place by buckles and cables that extend across the front and back cover. The inside of the book contains one stunning presentation after another, including a wide variety of photographs of Dario Fo and Franca Rame in performance or at work, as well as drawings and paintings by Fo himself, paintings by the great masters Leonardo da Vinci and Jacapo Tintoretto as interpreted by Fo, and others by Piero della Francesca and Giotto as altered in Fo's adaptations. Moreover, the layout of the text is beautifully designed. The staff of Aperture, and particularly Yolanda Cuomo, the book's designer, have executed its presentation masterfully.

Leslie Hill and Helen Paris intend that Guerilla Performance and Multimedia “prove a valuable resource to fellow artists on both practical and creative levels,” and they hope to “help artists get their hands on more funding to make their work.”

William Tydeman's volume brings together a wide selection of materials constructing a “theatrical history” of the Middle Ages. The focus is on Western Europe; the temporal boundaries are more or less the fall of the Roman Empire and the emergence of “markedly Renaissance forms in Italy”thus, some one thousand years. The individual sections, each preceded by a brief introduction penned by an associate editor, provide the signposts for this documentary history: “The Inheritance” (Nick Davis), “Latin Liturgical Drama” (Peter Meredith), “Extra-Liturgical Latin and Early Vernacular Drama” (Lynette Muir), “England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales” (Tydeman), “France” (Muir), “The German-Speaking Area” (John E. Tailby), “Italy” (Michael J. Anderson), “The Low Countries” (Elsa Strietman and Muir), “The Iberian Peninsula (Including Majorca)” (Louise M. Haywood), and “Traditions of the People and Folk Drama” (Thomas Pettitt and Leif Søndergaard). These titles unequivocally indicate the scope and the limits of the volume: classical inheritance, the development of liturgical drama within the Roman Catholic Church, and popular religious drama in the vernacular in nine medieval regions. This general historical trajectory is complemented by the extant records about the costumes, audiences, staging, actors, directors, props, contracts, correspondence, and “eye-witness” accounts. Over seven hundred documents of varied length have been compiled from the manuscripts or copied from other reference books on the topic of medieval drama and theatre.

The aim of this superb volume is a deeper understanding of physical gesture in European drama and art. Rarely does a collection approach a topic with such commitment and clarity. At a time when theatre historiography construes bodies as cultural constructions or as signifiers of power relationships, these authors delve into the communicative potential of bodies in motion. The eight essays are uniformly incisive in their analyses, convincing in their arguments, and elegant in expression. Each contributor sets in motion a different set of problems and critical perspectives, use of sources, and analytical strategies. Within these variations, a common concern for the performative qualities of gesture (beyond linguistic or pictorial referentiality) gives the volume its organic unity.