Editorial comment

While preparing this issue for publication, I have been haunted by two quotations that functioned near-aphoristically during my academic training. In the first, Fredric Jameson poses the idea of a "perforated history": "history with holes, . . . gaps not immediately visible to us, so close is our gaze to its objects of perception."¹ Charles L. Mee, Jr.'s comments regarding history and US theatre also returned to me:

What we really mean by history is the historical condition—politics, economy, society and the interaction of those things, and how they shape individual and collective lives. But most of our theater excludes that understanding of history, so it actually makes us stupid and ignorant of the conditions under which we live because it focuses on psychological interactions. It sets a frame of discourse in which you cannot have historical perspective, and therefore makes it impossible to arrive at political understanding.²

Although the five essays contained in this general issue respond in very different ways to current theatre and performance scholarship, all place their objects of study within a clearly detailed and defined historical condition, and all have altered this reader's gaze of theatre and performance history and theory, making her aware of some hitherto undetected perforations.

The first two essays look at performances and events firmly rooted in the 1980s United States. In "Mo(u)rning in America: Hamlet, Reagan, and the Rights of Memory," Timothy Raphael examines a genre he terms "memory-as-performance" in order to trace how "the Reagan presidency constructed its political authority through the staging of lost, damaged, and / or absent bodies." Raphael argues that these catastrophic "bodies of memory" were seized upon and incorporated into rituals of mourning by the former actor's administration. Hamlet and Derridean hauntology serve Raphael as theatrical and philosophical touchstones for discussing political performance and the "shared role of players, kings, and ghosts in materializing the imagined community of the state." Even though Reagan-Fortinbras built his first term upon these dead bodies' "rights of memory," their ghosts haunted his second term, most glaringly in the so-called Bitburg fiasco, when, during a 1985 visit to Germany's Kolmeshöe Cemetery, the president encountered the graves of Waffen SS instead of US soldiers and controversially equated dead German soldiers with Holocaust victims. The momentary breakdown of Reagan's stagecraft-qua-statecraft reminds Raphael that "to observe the rights and perform the rites of memory requires acknowledging the specter . . . and listening to its tale."

The ghosts of a 1980s New York City haunt J. Chris Westgate's "Toward a Rhetoric of Sociospatial Theatre: José Rivera's Marisol." Departing from a general critical focus on the 1992 play's sociocultural conflicts (played out during the Puerto Rican New Yorker protagonist's dystopic journey through the boroughs set against a heavenly rebellion), Westgate looks at the "spatial discord" created in a contested social landscape that functions in the play as both setting and subject. By mapping "the interplay of space, geography, and landscape with sociality, ideology, and epistemology," Westgate argues that Marisol's "defamiliarization of space, geography, and landscape" not only provides a scathingly "magnified" critique of then-Mayor Ed Koch's draconian economic cuts and social-service policy changes but also rhetorically positions the play's audiences to reconsider their perceptions regarding the city's disenfranchised populations most affected during the 1980s. Westgate ends his consideration by examining the difficulties productions have encountered in realizing the dramatic text's "sociospatial ambitions." These constraints point to the limits of mimetic representation when a text seeks to stimulate "epistemological uncertainty" and encourage audiences to engage with a reality not their own and imagine otherwise.

While this issue's following two essays center their analyses on plays created during the Elizabethan period, what Mee might call their historical conditions differ radically. In "Daniel Mesguich's Shakespearean Play: Performing the Shakespeare Myth," Nicole Fayard provides an overview of the thirty-year career of one of France's most controversial—and most widely acclaimed—contemporary stage directors. Mesguich's sustained fascination with Shakespeare stands out among his many restagings of the classical repertoire, perhaps most tellingly in...