Comment

The five essays in this issue all refer to drama and theatre in the Americas over the course of the last century. They are exemplary, I believe, in showing some of the key directions our discipline is now pursuing in its multifaceted approach to thinking about plays. No longer does writing about plays mean an overemphasis on a printed text, but instead contemporary scholarship, as so ably demonstrated in these essays, contextualizes both playtext and performance in a variety of discourses drawn from a variety of scholarly fields. In his editor's comments to the October 2000 issue of Theatre Journal, David Román asked what we should make of an apparent renewed interest in close reading and suggested that this was provoked, at least in part, by "recent critical attention to the 'local.'" He concluded that the resurfacing of close reading "invokes . . . careful and rigorous attention to the localized effects of language, performance, and reception and their relation to history, ideology, and pleasure." ¹

Just such a project characterizes David Krasner's careful reading of Zora Neale Hurston's Color Struck. We cannot forget, in the first instance, Hurston's belated entry into the canon of drama and theatre (Krasner quotes Susan Willis's description of rural black women "denied a voice in history and letters" ² ). Krasner's essay is, then, important in encouraging yet more scholars to consider (or reconsider) the playwright's extraordinary contributions to African American theatre, to American theatre, and to twentieth-century drama and theatre. Our very conception of these fields has been reoriented by the reappraisal of writers such as Hurston. Krasner's account of Color Struck points to an increased interest in the intersections between theatrical performance and folk culture, as well as with related arts practices such as dance. His attention to the production history of Color Struck also sheds light on the history of the critical reception of the play and raises fundamental questions for how we understand Hurston's theatrical oeuvre. It's interesting, too, to understand the impact of Hurston's training as an anthropologist on a play like Color Struck and, conversely, the importance of the play in giving us a history of black women in the south at a particular historical moment--people, events, and places that have been underconsidered in conventional accounts of the period.

The same historical moment--the 1920s--frames Amy Koritz's essay on "drama and the rhythm of work." This time period, Koritz argues, was one of intense interest in the nature of work and its impact on American men and women. Through an examination of a range of plays by major authors (Eugene O'Neill, Elmer Rice, and Sophie Treadwell, among them), Koritz charts how ideas and ideologies about work were dramatized and how this was received and understood by the influential theatre critics of the period. Equally importantly, Koritz stages her discussion through reference to a breadth of critical texts from fields such as history, sociology, business studies, popular culture, and--most significantly--cultural studies. The burgeoning of cultural studies in recent years has surely contributed a great deal to how we understand the social formation of plays as well as the production processes and histories of theatres. In Koritz's essay, we see vividly how the presentation and experience of identity, as it was constructed by and in "work," is interrogated by plays of the period. In some instances, the dramas take up arguments made in entirely different disciplines; in others, they refute those widely disseminated arguments to make their own points about the effects of "work." This kind of interdisciplinary practice, both then and now, brings us new and deeply relevant points of entry into reading plays in their specific historical and cultural context.

It almost goes without saying that the impact of "critical theory" has been to change forever the methodologies and assumptions of theatre studies. Issues of Theatre Journal over the last twenty years or so provide a revealing history, I think, of just how emphatic that shift has been. Sometimes, however, we have...