Theatre Journal

This essay offers a transnational exploration of Suzan-Lori Parks's dis(re)memberment of Saartjie (Sarah) Baartman, a Khoisan woman from South Africa who was displayed in Europe in the 1800s under the appellation "The Hottentot Venus." Juxtaposing two simultaneous events—post-apartheid south Africa's efforts to repatriate baartman's remains, and the volatile American reception of Parks's play Venus—reveals the ways in which Parks's aesthetic, defined here as a "drama of disinterment," calls into question the notion that historical trauma is a wound that must be healed in the name of unity, the idea that reconciliation necessarily entails the establishment of an objective truth, and the assumption that the restoration of dignity is the goal of the recovery process.

This essay engages with dramatic representations of womanhood in the Irish context during the first quarter of the twentieth century. Lacanian theory is used in conjunction with Irish women’s studies scholarship in order to inform the analysis of plays by dramatists including Maud Gonne, Padraic Colum, Lennox Robinson, and T. C. Murray. The aim is to show how women in Irish society were faced with the impossible task of fulfilling such idealized roles as Woman, Wife and Mother, and how this situation was variously represented and contested in the theatre.

In Elizabethan England, play after play took confusion, disguise, or madness as a central subject. This thematic interest in confusion followed a concern, prevalent during the 1570s, 1580s, and early 1590s, that drama was genuinely confusing to its audiences. Whereas plays and interludes from the middle decades of the sixteenth century frequently expressed a desire to make their performances clear to their audiences, performances of the later decades began to suggest that confusions are an unavoidable part of the experience of playgoing, and even perhaps a necessary part of theatre’s ability to inform and instruct. Accounts of early performances, like a 1594 Inns of Court Comedy of Errors, also hint that a play’s impact could be enhanced through a deliberate attempt to produce confusion among audiences and actors. Uncovering a dramaturgy of confusion implicit in Gascoigne’s Supposes and Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy, this essay argues that during this period, a practical recognition that drama relies on disorder to affect its audience supplemented a theory of didactic drama. By the late 1590s, though, the thematizing of confusion familiar from later plays replaced this real confusion.

This essay examines critical, theatrical, and popular attitudes toward Desdemona in the Northern United States during the half-century before the Civil War. It argues that the actions and purported essence of the character were embedded within cultural debates, not only concerning questions of miscegenation, but also issues surrounding the social construction of womanhood, the equality of women, and women's participation in anti-slavery societies. The Desdemona of this era is seen as both a product of changing attitudes and a participant in these debates, inasmuch as she served as an interventionary presence in political and social discourse.

The concept of New Asia is based on the belief that global capitalism has displaced the boundary between the First and Third worlds, redrawing the world map according to the distribution of capital. This essay examines the implication of interculturalism in New Asia and ultimately the relationship between West and East, focusing on Lee Yountaek's production of Hamlet that premiered in Seoul in 1996. The analysis of Lee's Hamlet in the context of Korean history showcases the dilemma and delusion of intercultural theatre in New Asia, whose political independence and economic growth allow only a passive postcolonial resistance to Western cultural hegemony that is subsumed by a desire to elevate the cultural status of Asia in the West without denying or resisting Western culture. Lee Yountaek's Shakespeare reflects the impasse of contemporary Korean society, whose postcolonial reality is obscured by an optimistic idea of interculturalism.