A construction site is a messy place, but a theatre under construction or, better yet, a theatre under reconstruction is an apt metaphor for the work that we as theatre historians do. Reconstructing a theatre, like reconstructing the events of theatre, is always a balancing act between excavation, speculation and innovation. In fact, in the sphere of theatre history, the border between reconstruction and construction is never entirely clear. Conceptually at least, theatre historians work in a construction zone, even if hard hats are not de rigueur. If for no other reason than to underscore the perpetual state of (re)construction that characterizes our work, I am thus delighted to open my first issue as Editor with a messy photo of the renovation of the Royal Court Theatre. Most immediately, the photo provides visual documentation for Stephen Berwind’s article “Reconstructing the Construction of the Royal Court,” and I am grateful to him for helping to procure the photo from Natalie Land at Haworth Topkins Limited in London. But the more I study the composition of this photo, the more its theatricality strikes me, especially the image of its suited elder central figure grappling with a cable loosely connected to the not yet anchored steel girder of support (an image that might double as a scene from Ibsen’s Master Builder). How rich that image is, and if it does indeed remind us of the constructive nature of our own work, so too does it remind us that our work repeatedly necessitates that we renegotiate the boundaries separating the practice of theatre from the practice of everyday life. In this respect, the photo of the Royal Court Theatre “under construction” rather brilliantly captures what I would argue are the foundations of theatre history: a fundamental acknowledgment of the provisional nature of the histories we construct combined with an ever-evolving definition of theatre itself.

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.

In seeking to explain the decline of Yiddish drama in America after its “first Golden Age” (1892–1902), contemporary critics and later historians have primarily blamed the rapid proliferation of vaudeville and moving pictures. Above all, the collapse of literary drama has been described as a direct consequence of the growing popularity of Yiddish variety shows among Jewish immigrant audiences.The Yiddish press, socialist papers in particular, frequently blamed the Yiddish music halls for the decline of literary drama. The tone was set by Abraham Cahan, the editor of the Jewish Daily Forward (Forverts) in a series of articles that appeared in the Tsaytgayst, the Forward’s weekly supplement, in October 1905. Bernard Gorin, the first historian of the Yiddish stage, also concluded that success of the music halls destroyed the movement for a better Yiddish drama. Di geshikhte fun yidshen teater, 2 vols. (New York: Literarisher ferlag, 1918), vol. 2, 178–80. Others followed his lead. For instance, Nahma Sandrow, Vagabond Stars: A World History of Yiddish Theater (1977; Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1996), 161. Recently, Nina Warnke presented a far more elaborated analysis of the rise and decline of Yiddish literary drama, but again she does not seriously challenge the predominant view that the Yiddish music halls were to blame for the crisis in the Yiddish theatre. Nina Warnke, “Reforming the New York Yiddish Theater: The Cultural Politics of Immigrant Intellectuals and the Yiddish Press, 1887–1910” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, May 2001), esp. 195. In film history, it is widely assumed that the movies killed ethnic theatre (both “legitimate” and vaudeville theatre). E.g., Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 103. The fact that the cultural and financial position of the “legitimate” Yiddish stage declined in a period in which Yiddish music halls flourished and moving pictures achieved large-scale commercial exploitation certainly suggests a correlation between these phenomena. Yet, as I will argue, there were also more structural economic forces at work in shaping the fate of the American Yiddish theatre, forces that were determined by the stringent conditions of the ethnic marketplace.

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.

To affect audiences, to inspire them to consider something new or to consider something old in a new way, to move them emotionally or, as Lee Breuer says, “from one place to another,” is a common, if not inherent goal of those who make theatre.Frederic Ohringer, A Portrait of the Theatre (Toronto: Merritt, 1979), 58. More deeply, some want the movement they affect to endure, to transform something in people. Belief in the possibility of such movement implies another, having political implications, for if an individual can be moved, then a mass of individuals can be shifted; and if a mass of individuals choose to act on such a shift, or if their acts are inflected by such a shift, then events are altered and history made. Here lies the catechism of someone with the faith of an Augusto Boal that “perhaps the theater is not revolutionary in itself, but it is surely a rehearsal for revolution.”Augusto Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed, trans. Charles A. McBride and Maria-Odelia Leal McBride (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1985), 122. And yet, in the United States and much of the West, how often are such professions of faith viewed as mere idealism or transformed, even by the converted, into faith’s safe sister, hope—which is to say, a lack of faith?

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.

In the autumn of 1995 the Royal Court Theatre received notice that it would be awarded funds from the National Lottery that would enable it to address the rapidly disintegrating state of its 107-year-old building. Almost forty years earlier the English Stage Company (ESC) had moved into the Royal Court, cognizant of the building’s inadequacies. During the intervening decades, management considered comprehensive plans to remedy the problems, as well as contemplated moving elsewhere, but never managed to raise the necessary funds to accomplish either objective. For forty years, makeshift solutions enabled the Royal Court to continue functioning without solving these problems. In 1994 the New York Times called the Royal Court (the company) the most important theatre in Europe the same week that, in London, The Times called the Royal Court (the building) “a dump.”Haworth Tompkins Architects and Theatre Projects Consultants, Royal Court Theatre Feasibility Study (London: n.p., 1995), 10.

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.

Among the most intriguing dramatic documents of the Elizabethan age are seven plots, drawn up at various times between the early 1590s and early 1600s. Even though they provide revealing insights into Elizabethan staging practices, they have often been neglected by Shakespearean scholars. This neglect is easily explained when we consider that a close scrutiny of the plots has major and inconvenient consequences for some widely accepted beliefs about the transmission and function of Elizabethan playscripts.

Special Collections & Archives contains several important named theatre collections. Notable collections include the Arena Stage Collection, the Robert Breen / American National Theater and Academy Collection, and the Theater of the Thirties Collection. Used by researchers all over the world, these collections contain production notebooks, playbills, playscripts, photographs, scrapbooks, correspondence, and news clippings.

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.

The tradition of Western drama has its ghosts, from the spectral characters of Darius in The Persians and Clytemnestra in The Eumenides to the attending ghost in The Spanish Tragedy and the ghostly voice in the “all grey” room of Beckett’s Ghost Trio. In turn, some non-Western traditions of theatre, such as Japanese noh, insist upon the primacy of ghosts, whose stories are recounted on stage. Perhaps, from the perspective of our modern world, such characters are anomalous devices of the theatre. Yet Marvin Carlson insists in The Haunted Stage that we understand them as emblematic signs of how all drama and theatre are organized and experienced.

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.

Anthony Kubiak’s Agitated States and Terry Eagleton’s Sweet Violence share several themes, in particular the analysis of dramas of violence as well as the ethics of tragedy in everyday life. Their points of view, however, differ. Whereas Kubiak takes a poststructural stance by examining the contrast between the actual event and its artistic representation (in both fiction and reality), Eagleton posits a recuperation of tragedy’s moral and aesthetic value. Taken together, the books provide an enlightening and varying perspective on violence, loss, and tragedy in theatre and drama.

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.

Mike Pearson studied archaeology and then spent twenty-five years in physical theatre and site-based performance, notably as founder-director of Brith Gof, while Michael Shanks is an archaeologist, specializing in the classical period and attempting to rethink the bases of his discipline. Together they have written a wonderfully evocative book, tracing the evolving dialogue between them as they explored what each discipline had to offer the other, leading eventually to the elaboration of the common project they call “theatre/archaeology.” They describe “theatre/archaeology” as “an interdisciplinary and hybrid focus on the textures of social and cultural experience; the means and materials of forging cultural ecologies or milieux that attend to that contemporary tension between the global and the local; how we model the event of this cultural production, the weaving of connections through such indeterminate times and places” (xvii). The book is a fascinating intermingling of different narratives (artistic, intellectual, autobiographical) and discourses (scholarly, polemical, visionary), and it begins at the end, which is of course a new beginning, with the outline of the academic programs that have emerged from their interdisciplinary collaboration: Mike Pearson’s course in performance studies in the Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, and Michael Shanks’s interdepartmental Archaeology Center at Stanford University in California.

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.

In the current scholarly discussion, many disciplines usurp the word “performance” to represent the postmodern idea of discursive creation through repetition (iteration). In an attempt to demarcate the boundaries of theatre studies, to reclaim performance as a “theatrical act,” many theatre scholars argue that a theatrical frame designates theatrical performance. This idea of frame may often be distilled into a spatial relationship between actor(s) and audience. To further this theory, many have written metaphorically about theatrical space; however, in her important new book, Gay McAuley addresses the idea of a theatrical space directly, discussing architecture, spatial structure, actor space, and audience space. She argues that theatre requires not only “liveness” and the presence of both performer and spectator but also the space where those presences meet. That “lived space” must be added to the first two aspects and examined as a basic element of the theatrical act. Thus McAuley seeks “to explore the multiple functions of this spatial reality in the construction and communication of theatrical meaning” (4).

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.