In the years leading up to the U.S. Civil War, free and fugitive persons of color were aware of the need to frame how they were seen in their everyday lives as part of an arsenal of rhetorical strategies to attract audiences to the abolitionist cause. In this article, I examine three spatial contexts that nineteenth-century mixed-race persons navigated for abolitionist ends in which their hybrid bodies were featured as an aspect of their public performances. These locations—Britain's imperially sponsored Crystal Palace, a Brooklyn church pulpit, and the dramatic reader's lectern—were not merely static places but were spaces animated and made meaningful by the interactions performed therein. Each framed a particular ocular and locational politics and strategically imbued some degree of social class privilege on the hybrid persons following its social scripts. But in so doing, each setting also reinforced colorism and contributed to notions of the supremacy of “whiteness” even while it furthered an antislavery agenda.

Eighteenth-century dramatists had little or no control over the production of their plays after the initial run. In spite of major strides made in copyright during the eighteenth century—developments that have long been studied and celebrated—dramatists were in an unenviable position when it came to owning their work. Literary property law initially extended only as far as print publication, not performance, and any theatrical company that was able to get hold of a playtext could produce that play without the permission of the author. As a result, dramatists received far less for their work than they otherwise might have.

More than a century after Edward Gordon Craig published “The Actor and the Über-Marionette” (1908), the core of his conception of acting still poses a hermeneutical challenge to the theatre scholar. Many intriguing interpretations have stemmed from his statements on acting: from Denis Bablet's or Christopher Innes's argument that the Über-marionette is a metaphor for the perfect performer, to Irène Eynat-Confino's thesis that it is a real, oversized puppet; from the idea (Lindsay Mary Newman's or Cesare Molinari's, for instance) that the concept evolved with time along with the details of Craig's acting theory, to Patrick Le Boeuf's recent hypothesis that the Über-marionette is a full-body puppet. Le Boeuf's interpretation is somehow a telling example of the puzzling quality of Craig's acting theory: his studies originally led him to believe that the Über-marionette was a technically perfect gymnast, in perfect control of his own body, but he was induced to reconsider his hypothesis only a couple of years later, in the light of newly recovered documents. The same ineffable quality Jane Goodall detects in “stage presence” seems to be an inherent feature of Craig's ideal performer, and as with presence, the Über-marionette appears to be best definable by approximation.

With the modesty then expected of a daughter of Britain's theatrical royalty, Fanny Kemble attributed the necessity of her 1829 stage debut to the hard circumstance of financial need. As she explained in her journal, hers was not an act of self-promotion; rather, she exposed herself to the scrutiny of London's critical establishment with the hope that interest in her performance might draw much-needed revenue into the cashbox of the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, a venue jointly managed by her father and uncle, Charles and John Philip Kemble. However rhetorically necessary the narrative was for preserving her respectability, Kemble's financial motivation was also very real. The theatre was fiscally impaired, never quite able to square itself in relation to the expensive footing upon which the new building was erected after the fire of 1808. With construction costs high and materials scarce in the midst of the Napoleonic Wars, Charles attempted to raise ticket prices in the new theatre to help cover his expenses, raising instead public ire, in the form of protracted demonstrations known as the Old Price Riots, which bullied him into restoring the original ticket prices.

The scene is New York City, 1958. That year, in two disparate arenas, American culture was attempting to come to grips with the difference between noise and art. A twenty-five-year retrospective concert of John Cage's work at New York's Town Hall helped create an intellectually coherent canon out of Cage's experiments, which critics had often treated as puerile provocations or exercises in whimsy to be regarded with bemused toleration. For some forward thinkers, noise was becoming intellectually exciting material for experimental music, whereas the audible audience outrage preserved by the recording of the Town Hall concert testifies to the continuing rearguard pique of more conservative sensibilities. Cage himself couldn't have imagined a more apt illustration of his theories than this aleatory auditory event, preserved for posterity by the recording apparatus.

Imagine a festival taking place before about five thousand people in a park in Adana, Turkey, in June 1992. In the middle of the park is a stage made of concrete. A touring Kurdish theatre company comprising four men, Hüseyin Kaytan, Kazım Öz, Nihat Öz, and Kemal Orgun, is performing a short play called Du Şivan (Two Shepherds). They enact a village raid and choose the villagers from among the audience. Kemal Orgun plays the commander of the task force raiding the village. The other three carry out the operation, rounding up the villagers. Orgun struts among the villagers, harassing them. All of a sudden, a woman jumps onstage and tries to grab the gun Orgun is carrying. He tries to wrest the gun from her, but she won't let go. A great commotion ensues, and more people clamber onstage to help the woman and attack the actors. When a man tries to strangle Orgun, he yells out in Kurdish, “Bira ma tu çi dikî, te ez kuştim?” (Hey my friend, what are you trying to do, kill me?). When the attacker finally understands Orgun is Kurdish, he releases and embraces him. Recounting this incident in his interview with me, Orgun remarks that they were almost lynched. The Kurdish woman who had jumped onstage and impulsively attacked Orgun had thought this was a real raid, just like those that had been taking place in Kurdish villages in Turkey for years. Her rage and instinctive self-protection is at one level slightly amusing, but this was also a bitter episode that demonstrated the consequences of the oppression of Kurdish people in the country. After the festival, Orgun and the other members named their theatre company Teatra Jiyana Nû (New Life Theatre). This became the foremost Kurdish theatre company and has trained many Kurdish actors, who in turn have further sustained and promoted Kurdish theatre by establishing their own companies.

Quiara Alegría Hudes (Fig. 1) won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Water by the Spoonful, the second play in her “Elliot” trilogy. She is a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist for Elliot, A Soldier's Fugue, the first play in the trilogy, and the musical In the Heights. Her plays include The Happiest Song Plays Last (which ends the trilogy), 26 Miles, Yemaya's Belly, and Daphne's Dive. In 2012, the Los Angeles Times praised Hudes as “one of the most poetic, socially clued-in young voices in the American theater.” In this engaging interview with Editor Harvey Young, Quiara Alegría Hudes talks about the role of music in her plays, socioeconomic isolation in cities, the inspiration for some of her plays, and the importance of asking the deep question.

“Threescore years and two have now elapsed since our fathers ventured on the grand experiment of freedom.” So said the renowned actor Edwin Forrest in a Fourth of July address at New York City's Broadway Tabernacle in 1838. The similarity to the start of the Gettysburg Address in 1863 is striking: “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty.”

In 1894, Robert Neilson Stephens's play On the Bowery debuted at Haverly's Fourteenth Street Theatre in New York City, with Steve Brodie, who had won fame for purportedly jumping from the Brooklyn Bridge years earlier, playing himself. Although Brodie's entrance is delayed until the second act, he rather quickly commandeers the plot and leads the rest of the characters through the Bowery and across the Brooklyn Bridge (where he reenacts his jump to enthusiastic audiences) to an East River pier, where he leaps into a burning building to rescue one of those perpetually distressed damsels from the 1890s. Naturally, mainstream newspapers were rather critical of On the Bowery’s literary merits. The New York Herald claimed that the play made “no dramatic pretensions,” and the Philadelphia Inquirer emphasized that it left the critic not “overly impressed with the play as a play.” The New York Times took an especially harsh line. Lamenting the play's “threadbare plot” and “no originality,” and overreliance on Brodie's celebrity, its critic used the production as an opportunity to advance rigid delineations of highbrow and lowbrow, upper class and lower class, and literature and leisure. For what this reviewer described as the “Brodie audience,” the working-class spectators who crowded the gallery and boisterously cheered Brodie's every feat, On the Bowery gratified a yearning for escapism and entertainment. On the Bowery was not, according to the Times, geared to what the reviewer described as the “Booth audience,” the middle- and upper-class spectators who normally prized Edwin Booth's Shakespearean performances: “even the management does not take [Brodie] seriously.” If box office success is any measure, however, many from both the Booth and Brodie audiences did take On the Bowery seriously. Productions of the play toured for nearly three years, and a number of plays emulated On the Bowery during the next five years. If Bruce McConachie is right that what is relevant is not “whether . . . melodramas were any good” but what audiences were watching and what meanings they were constructing from these plays, then theatre history should take On the Bowery seriously too.

In 1761, Count Carlo Gozzi created a “reflective analysis” of an Italian fairy tale about three oranges, framing his commedia dell'arte–infused scenario with a series of polemical attacks on his theatrical rivals. In 1914, Vsevelod Meyerhold and two collaborators, Konstantin Vogak and Vladimir Soloviev, published a reflective analysis of Gozzi's reflective analysis. This new Love of Three Oranges (Liubov k trem apel'sinam, translated as Love for Three Oranges), served as the source material for Sergei Prokofiev's opera (1919; Chicago world premiere, 1921). It is also one of the most illuminating, yet strangely understudied sources of information on how Meyerhold redefined the theatrical event, the creative process of the director, and the role of the actor in the years preceding the October Revolution. In particular, this Russian Three Oranges explores how a conscious relationship between actor and character in concert with framing devices that delineate levels of fiction can emphasize an experience peculiar to the theatre: regardless of style, audiences inevitably maintain both belief and disbelief in what they see and perceive theatrical performance as simultaneously real and not real.

When Suzan-Lori Parks's play Venus, about the displays of Saartjie Baartman in early nineteenth-century Europe, opened in 1996, the outrage it provoked by suggesting that its central, black character may have been complicit in her plight raised yet again one of the most inspiring and frustrating questions in modern US theatre history: how to stage the racial Other. Even the most sympathetic responses to the play revealed the difficulty of assuming a critical stance toward the racially marked body (especially the black female body) that is affectively fixed as a symbol of martyrdom and victimization. In fact, Shannon Jackson has proposed that the racially marked body's resistance to being reduced to a critical sign, free from affect, may be definitive of race as a social phenomenon. As US theatre history demonstrates, onstage this resistance is highly productive of controversy, much of which has focused on the question of which representational contracts may most accurately convey the experiences of racially marked people. In this sense, art critic Abiola Sinclair's reading of Parks's experimental aesthetic as a traitorous concession to a white theatrical tradition was unexceptional; it was a reminder of the historical efforts of African American artists to create distinctly black art.