... to contract as characters fling apple cores from an outdoor balcony down onto the white couch of the living room below. The dramatization of Antebellum Sexual Performance Therapy, the first part of Harris s Slave Play, forces the audience to recognize the diametrically opposed attitudes of the enslaver...

... the theoretical problem endemic to studies of drama: what to do about the role of staging and performance in the dramatic text. That tension in drama scholarship between the text on the page and the staging and production elements of performance has tended to marginalize American drama from the rest...

... the playtext to the same value as souvenirs sold at performances. This year’s works instead see drama as a means of contextualizing the historical image, photo, or event, supplying the meaning that might have been taken for granted and left to stand alone. In Spectacles of Reform: Theater...

... and context are so patently mutually constitu- tive. Accordingly, I am arranging this chapter to reflect the centrality of cultural studies in considering drama. Sections titled “Plays” and “Playwrights” come first, but the latter part of the essay is a broad cat- egory I’m calling Performance...

... of entertainment increased in quantity and frequency. Butsch is interested in the public manifestation of the changes in audiences’ participation in their own entertainment and the consequent division between producers/performers and consumers/audiences, from active to passive. Particularly interesting...

... Theatre in Context, from the Beginnings to 1870 (pp. 111 81) includes an overview of sporting events, religious rituals, and other public performances beyond the theater, focusing on historical audiences and the major genres they enjoyed. His essay demonstrates how the dominance of the new bourgeoisie...

... performance. The following year Harte cowrote with Mark Twain a play called simply Ah Sin in which the eponymous character was lifted from Harte’s earlier poem. Despite Harte and Twain’s attempt to portray a Cantonese American dialect with some accuracy, critics heard comic pidgin. Romeo argues...

..., and the gorilla variously “perform a critique of humanism” and drawing on dramatic criticism, performance theory, and animal studies, Rundle explores “how popular conceptions of evolutionary theory, and their intersection with secular and religious cosmologies as well as various movements in theatrical...

.... The theater’s schizophrenia in- cluded a blatantly fake street preacher named Bill Talen (aka the Rever- end Billy of the Church of Stop Shopping) performing a new kind of political theater outside the Disney Store on West 42nd Street; a Broad- way pit stop by Dame Edna (aka Barry Humphries...

... to more radical revisionings, such as one production that reset A View from the Bridge in a community of Dominican immigrants. With a focus on performance over text and exploration of such issues as translation and adaptation; political, cultural and religious contexts; and imperi- alism...

..., in their historical, cultural, and/or performance contexts. Laura L. Mielke sees a decade of political change limned in the history of an unproduced antebellum play. “Sectional Patriotism and Heroic Eloquence in William Gilmore Simms’s Norman Maurice” (21, ii: 9–28) traces how Simms, “a prolific...

... to finish an opera based on Moby-Dick. As always, Weales brings his yearly piece to a close with comments on individual and group-performance artists. Perhaps the question for this year is, have the events of 11 September 2001 ‘‘changed everything For the recording of drama history...

... to provide a key term for future study and to offer up a genealogical analysis of its ongoing relevance. This is best performed, in my opinion, by Joanna Brooks, who unpacks the key word colonialism and in so doing raises some of the same concerns identified above. Brooks notes that in its...

.... While this approach is obviously relevant to contemporary drama, in The Nineteenth Century; or, Marking Time in American Performance Culture ( J19 6: 395 402), part of the journal s forum on 19th-century performance, Heather Nathans demonstrates that even approaches to earlier plays now require...

...David K. Sauer © 2013 Duke University Press 2013 18 Drama David K. Sauer Last year’s survey concentrated on performance’s effect on dramatic criticism. Meaning enlarges as new productions reveal added dimen- sions to a script, so that the meaning, in a sense, is ever expanding...

... legitimate theater performance in Chicago the year it was incorporated as a city, and moves more or less chronologically to the present. Christiansen began as an arts journalist in 1956, joined the Chicago Tribune in 1978, and was its chief critic until his retirement in 2002...

....’s Jump Jim Crow: Lost Plays, Lyrics, and Street Prose of the First Atlantic Popular Culture (Harvard) brings together for the first time the plays and songs performed in this guise and reveals how these texts code the complex use and abuse of blackness that has often characterized American...

.... Thus Sarah Jane Cervenak’sWandering: Philosophical Performances of Racial and Sexual Freedom (Duke) takes a very theoretical approach to racial issues, focusing in particular on minoritized people who in response to attempts to constrain and control them “refuse their scripts or endeavor...

..., and then in the contemporary 1921 subsequent acts. What makes Withers’s approach unusual is the linking of the idea of ephemeral performance to the idea of history, which must be reenacted and reper- formed or it will ossify into anti-immigration bigotry: “The impossibility of preserving something dynamic is ultimately...

..., anarchic, narrative form as a playful space in which all sorts of performativity are possible . . . assuming and dismissing varied gendered and non-gendered identities, in works meant to indulge their fantasies of stardom and glamor. In a sense, marginalized by the straight world, Ludlam s Ridiculous...