Editorial Comment: The Edges of the Theatrical Event

I write these comments while recovering from the flu, reflecting upon my experience at last weekend's performance of Sarah Kane's 4:48 Psychosis, and wondering if my physical delirium or the national turmoil over the presidential election has caused me to welcome Kane's suicidal deliberations as refreshingly redemptive. The Royal Court Theatre's production, which I saw at St. Anne's Warehouse in Brooklyn, strikingly splits individual body and psyche through the use of a mirrored wall—positioned at an angle above the actors and causing them to appear suspended, stuck in midair, even as they sprawl on the floor in abjection, anger, or perhaps simple resignation at the impossibility of going on as is. The spectator must move back and forth between regarding the living body and its reflected, inverted image—life and still life. I could not let go of the after-effects of such double-sight, of feeling caught between spatiotemporal planes. And while I resist projecting Kane's later suicide onto her fluidly lyrical text, the presence of three actors' bodies onstage and the absence of the playwright's own kept bringing me back to the limits of the theatrical experience.

General issues typically do not dictate a particular focus to the articles contained therein, but the subject matter of all five essays included in this issue is positioned at the edges of the theatrical event as it is conventionally understood. For Willmar Sauter, "theatricality" is a way of describing the communicative nature of a theatrical event collectively (albeit perhaps dissociatively, as Tracy C. Davis suggests in her essay published here) constructed by performers and spectators, "defined within a certain time and a certain culture."¹ Sauter's concept might logically be extended to involve all participants in the theatrical event—actors, designers, directors, playwrights, producers, critics, and spectators. These five essays examine such theatrical contracts, too often relegated to the edges of theatre scholarship.

Critical neglect provides the impetus for Christopher B. Balme's essay, "Selling the Bird: Richard Walton Tully's The Bird of Paradise and the Dynamics of Theatrical Commodification." Balme wonders why theatre historiography has ignored such long-running hits as Tully's early-twentieth-century romantic drama. The Bird of Paradise—a variation on the Madame Butterfly story set in 1890s Hawaii—was not only enormously successful in North America and England but also the subject of an influential plagiarism trial as well as a key player in the Western popularization of Hawaiian music and dance. To correct what Balme sees as a disciplinary privileging of modern aesthetics that erased such successful productions from our theatrical memory, he offers a commodification paradigm in which theatre "functions as a nodal point" in a larger field. Balme's proposed critical perspective can thus focus "on the interrelations between producers and consumers and the way both are implicated in the cultural and material products and by-products of theatre" and "trace the passage of goods, cultural or material, through processes of economic and symbolic transformation." Such a paradigm allows for a study of The Bird of Paradise as a "cultural processing machine" that "played a crucial role in defining and cementing the Pacific imaginary in the US as a scene of erotic, racial, musical, and performative encounter."

Richard W. Schoch and Susan Cannon Harris have contributed two essays on theatre of the eighteenth-century British Isles, but each focuses on a different specific theatrical relationship. In "'A Supplement to Public Laws': Arthur Murphy, David Garrick, and Hamlet, with Alterations," Schoch examines the hostile bond between British theatre managers and playwrights, and argues that the notoriously underpaid British dramatists, while unable to find redress within the law, nevertheless managed to establish a certain "authorial identity" through their plays. One such example is Arthur Murphy's 1772 Hamlet, with Alterations, a parody of David Garrick's adaptation of the Shakespearean tragedy. Schoch writes: "[Murphy uses] the reverential language of Bardolatry to continue his uncompromising advocacy of dramatists and their intellectual property rights. His parody strategically embraces a familiar, conservative model of dramatic authorship—Shakespeare as the genius creator of...