A Note from the Editor

Community has emerged as the keyword for this issue. This is not something I expected. While not a special issue per se, as I watched the submissions for this issue coming together, I was pleasantly surprised to see numerous points of connection among the articles, all of which engage in one way or another with this broad category of inquiry.

Anthony Cohen provides a definition of community with value for theatre-makers and scholars alike: “Community is that entity to which one belongs, greater than kinship but more immediately than the abstraction we call ‘society.’ It is the arena in which people acquire their most fundamental and most substantial experience of social life outside the confines of the home” (Cohen, qtd. in Van Erven 256). All the articles in this issue address such an arena of belonging, employing the tools of theatre-making to respond to the challenges faced by individuals and groups seeking kinship, collaboration, and agency in social space.

At the outset of a study that has strongly influenced the discourses of the subject, Jan Cohen-Cruz describes community-based art as “a field in which artists, collaborating with people whose lives directly inform the subject matter, express collective meaning” (1). The practices and discourses of community-based performance are sustained, according to Susan Haedicke and Tobin Nellhaus, by a “desire for social transformation” through “efforts to involve, mobilize, and politicize” (22, 1). Although Jill Dolan cautions against a reliance upon “idealistic notions of community” (86), a plethora of nuanced conceptions of community forms the touchstone of her foundational, inspirational Geographies of Learning.

The artists and activists considered in this issue, and the authors writing about them, all evince transformational ambitions: all take social change as a necessary goal, yet all season their idealism with clear-eyed analysis of social context and a realistic assessment of post-performance impact. In this context, Karen Jean Martinson is most definitive, theorizing the values of different understandings of failure in the context of community-based theatre in her article “‘The Way Through’: Social Action and the Critical Embrace of Failure.” Fadi Fayad Skeiker also is conscious of the constraints that some community-based work faces from the outset; a series of limitations discovered, and his accommodations in response to them, become very much the subject of his “‘I Will Raise My Daughters to Be More Confident’: Women’s Empowerment and Applied Theatre in Jordan.” The most explicit political intent in this issue is seen in Jeff Casey and Sandy Peterson’s article “Voicing Our Dissent,” which focuses on the impact that theatre had on the formation of a community of like-minded activists during and after the so-called Wisconsin Uprising of 2011–12. Each of these articles explores, in Sonja Kuftinec’s words, “the social and aesthetic exchanges that take place” during community-based performance, as well as the capacity for such performances to “create and enable community, while also illuminating the ambivalent nature of community identity” (7).

The construction of community through theatrical performance is the broad subject addressed in pieces by Christina Gutierrez-Dennehy and D. Ohlandt. The former explores the ways in which the historical practice of doubling—casting a single actor in multiple roles—used strategically, can enhance audience appreciation and engagement in a contemporary production of a play by Shakespeare. Gutierrez-Dennehy moves fluidly between artistic and scholarly modes in this productive example of practice-based research. In “Engaging the Audience: Cultivating Partners, Collaborators, and Stakeholders,” Ohlandt takes a sustained look at the ways that a dramaturg can enhance audience engagement through a range of activities that begin with the selection of a play, proceed through the production process, and include communication, marketing, and other opportunities to inform and educate. In the cases that Ohlandt describes, active participation and the thoughtful framing of reception are essential to community construction.

This issue includes two Notes from the Field. The piece by Kevin Riordan describes his dramaturgical work on an imagistic adaptation of Strindberg’s A Dream Play and features a dynamic, idiosyncratic glossary put to good use in the production process. Cynthia Running-Johnson interviews...