Editorial Comment

This general issue of Theatre Journal ranges across highly varied content but is marked by a recurrent focus on performative transformation that is signaled in the cover image and that metamorphoses through the performance events and practices under consideration in the four essays that follow.

In "Acting Black, 1824: Charles Mathews's Trip to America," Tracy Davis challenges the view that Charles Mathews used blackface to portray the African American characters in his solo performance Trip to America, suggesting instead that he achieved his transformations through vocal and physical means. Davis further notes that while Mathews's African American characters have been regarded as racist antecedents of blackface minstrelsy, "his editorial thrust was not toward racism, but instead a critique of the lower orders of white Americans." Thus, whereas his African American characters "recapitulated the social order of England," his Yankees represented England's "dystopic inversion." In Davis's analysis, "Mathews performed a distillation of national, ethnic, and racialized characteristics, yet he pointed to the incommensurabilities of status and worthiness across class, racial, and national markers."

Marla Carlson's essay "Furry Cartography: Performing Species" traces a range of performative behaviors at and across borders between human and nonhuman species. At the center of her analysis is Stalking Cat, a human who has modified his body toward what he understands to be his nonhuman identity. For Carlson, Stalking Cat's "perpetual performance" overlaps not only with the more temporary performances of "alternative-species" identities associated with furry fandom, but also with current thinking about interactions between humans and companion species and about autism. Tracing overlapping networks of human/nonhuman animal relations through an intricate "cartography," Carlson maps points of connection among various modes of inter-species performance, including the "psychic and commercial snares that continually adapt in order to recapture and contain the desires" that drive them.

In "Performance as Pathology: The Case of Munchausen's Syndrome and Performative Illness," Natalie Alvarez observes that Munchausen's is characterized not simply by the simulation of symptoms without apparent motive, but also by a "perceived pleasure in performance." Thus, a diagnosis of Munchausen's is, in effect, a pathologization of performance. Insofar as the recognition of symptoms as performed enables the diagnosis of an actual illness, however, Munchausen's calls into question conventional distinctions between the simulated and the real: in patients diagnosed with Munchausen's, illness is performatively produced through acts of simulation. Illuminating other performed illnesses as well as debates within acting theory, Alvarez's analysis also points toward the relation between linguistic and theatrical perspectives on performativity. As she concludes, "the performative's linguistic and theatrical valences fuse in the somato-psychic Munchausen's patient, when the mimetic representation of the symptom has the power to kinetically produce the symptoms the patient represents."

Joanne Tompkins's essay "Site-Specific Theatre and Political Engagement across Space and Time: The Psychogeographic Mapping of British Petroleum in Platform's And While London Burns" considers the complex site-specificity of an audio-walk created in 2006, and how the walk transforms participants' engagement with the city of London and its situation within the global "carbon web," even as the city and the historical and political context for the walk have themselves transformed over time in conjunction with such recent events as the global financial crisis and the Deepwater Horizon oil-rig explosion and spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Mobilizing what Tompkins describes as a "self-motivated, multi-sensory engagement with the cityscape" and using headphones to create the feeling of an affectingly intimate voice within the head, And While London Burns activates a lived experience of the need to halt climate change through a psychogeography that maps not only the city's past, but also a "future" that has come closer to being the present even in the few years since the work's inception. Ultimately, Tompkins suggests, And While London Burns exemplifies how the form of the audio-walk "renders critical thinking into physicality through both time and space—even generating a visceral response—which has more potential to stimulate us to act than likely happens in most other theatre experiences."

Tracy Davis notes that...