A Note from the Editor

I am pleased to introduce this general issue—the last of volume 27 and my final issue as editor of Theatre Topics. This issue presents a diversity of voices that all reflect the mission of the journal: to highlight how theatre can move between theory and practice, off the page and into specific communities and classrooms.

The issue opens with Erika Hughes's essay "'The Veterans Project': Historiography in/as Performance." She adds to the burgeoning literature on applied theatre for combat veterans by focusing on "The Veterans Project," developed and performed at Arizona State University. What differs in this essay from much of the existing literature, however, is the nature of this "unscripted performance series that provides a live forum for veterans to share their stories with their communities" (179). Her ensuing exegesis of these witty and vulnerable improvisatory performances do much to complicate notions of gender and identity in the US armed forces. The use of such ethnographic theatre—this project is now in its fifth year—has allowed for a constant evolution and contemporary response to the ongoing stream of veterans as they reintegrate back into our national and local communities.

Katelyn Hale Wood's "Curative Pedagogy in the Undergraduate Theatre Historiography Classroom" is an eminently useful essay that speaks to one of the core missions at TT: giving theatre teachers tools to keep their materials and teaching methods innovative. Utilizing the term curative to present an alternate mode of teaching theatre history to undergraduates, Wood challenges all faculty to think beyond the confines of historical narrative. She also situates this conversation (smartly) within our larger cultural conversations of the moment, including what is "fact" and how to negotiate teaching such truths to our students. Read this essay for some useful ideas to apply to almost any introductory theatre lecture.

The next essay is also particularly timely and, in many ways, continues the conversations raised in the special issue on Latinx theatre from earlier in this volume. In "Deferred Action's Visibility for Legal Nonexistence and Legislative Power," Shelby-Allison Hibbs examines a recent production of Dallas Theater Center that was created with Cara Mia Theatre and staged in the spring of 2016. This play staged and challenged the conflicts that have been all too present within activist and political communities (both locally in North Texas and in Washington, DC). In particular it centers around the so-called Dreamers—young immigrants who were given legal protection from deportation due to President Barack Obama's executive action, known as DACA, in 2012.¹ Such legal action has been a flashpoint of controversy since that time—especially after the election of Donald Trump and his administration's anti-immigrant rhetoric—making this play, and Hibbs's analysis of it, extremely timely.

Emily Jane Warheit's fascinating and detailed investigation of Boalian techniques, specifically Forum theatre, within the context of public health work in Africa completes the essay section of this issue. In "Devising Theatrical Health Interventions in East Africa," she questions how the competing agendas of Boal's work and the funding streams that often enable such work coexist in both useful and problematic ways. Specifically, the basic nature of Boal's bottom-up methodologies often conflict with the top-down structures of international development organizations. Warheit's discussion of the specific challenges and successes of Magnet Theatre enlightens the evolving Boalian tradition as it moves into increasingly varied locations and applications.

In this issue we are pleased to include three notes from the field: one in print only, one an online-only offering, and one a hybrid piece that will appear in both formats. Our first note is a more developed version of a roundtable that began at the Congress on Research in Dance and the Society of Dance History Scholars Joint Conference in November of 2016. Here, Anurima Banerji, Anusha Kedhar, Royona Mitra, Janet O'Shea, and Shanti Pillai share the cross-cultural possibilities and challenges of transferring the guru–shishya parampara (a South Asian teacher–disciple mentorship model) to US classroom environments. The particular challenges of changing certain pedagogical traditions and of carrying these histories on...