Editorial Comment

Theatre and theatre scholars are no strangers to controversy. Indeed, the very social nature of theatrical practice as a communicative act renders conflict, misunderstanding, and debate inevitable. How do we as scholars engage critically with such controversy? The five essays included in this general issue approach five diverse topics, each article standing as an example of how theatre scholarship contributes to ongoing critical discussions of controversial subjects.

The issue opens with Stanton B. Garner, Jr.'s essay, "Artaud, Germ Theory, and the Theatre of Contagion." Centering on arguably the twentieth century's most controversial theatre theorist, Garner builds upon his own earlier investigation into turn-of-the-century theatrical and medical discourses to posit an alternative understanding of Artaud's relationship to his own time. He proposes that we look at Artaud's "profoundly ambivalent attitude toward the body as organic entity and toward medicine as a science of the flesh" within—rather than opposed to—the larger contemporary historical field. The development of modern epidemiology, and in particular germ theory, may have provided avant-garde artists with a metaphorics of contagion; however, as Garner persuasively argues, Artaud's "relentless concern with actual somatic and mental symptoms" resulted in "the most extensive theatrical discussion in modern drama of the body transfixed by disease, and its implications for a medium constituted in terms of the human organism," even as it subverted prevailing "medical models of human corporeality and disease."

Hala Kh. Nassar's essay, "Stories from under Occupation: Performing the Palestinian Experience," brings controversy and politics to the foreground and, in the process, demonstrates the challenges posed to scholars confronted with restricted access, partisan sources, and a theatre that insists upon its own politicized nature. After briefly tracing the history of Palestinian theatre, Nassar focuses on the popular figure of the Arab storyteller, transformed in contemporary Palestinian theatrical practice as a means to cultural survival, and examines the storytelling tradition in the work of three theatre groups. The companies—based in Acre, Jerusalem/Ramallah, and the Aida refugee camp—"emphasize the collective Palestinian experience—past and present—to portray the hardships of occupation, to remind us of the lost homeland, and to champion a political solution and the creation of an independent state." All three troupes have sought international attention and support for their work, in the process adding one more contested layer of politics to performance. Indeed, writing about the Palestinian theatrical experience seems so dauntingly complex that we begin to understand—without condoning—the paucity of criticism. This essay is a contribution to a necessary but still limited scholarly discussion.

Playwright Suzan-Lori Parks's formal experiments have been a controversial sticking point in critical debates about her theatre as representative of African American experience and aesthetics. Jennifer Johung, in "Figuring the 'Spells'/Spelling the Figures: Suzan-Lori Parks's 'Scene of Love (?),'" reads one scene from the playwright's 1996 Venus to demonstrate how its "formal imprecision" forces us to negotiate in a different way the raced bodies of the two characters. In this encounter—between Venus (the South African "Hottentot Venus," Saartjie Baartman, exhibited in nineteenth-century freak shows) and the Baron Docteur (the European scientist who, after freeing her from the freak show, became her lover and, after her death, took careful measurements of her body parts)—Parks makes extended use of what she terms the "spell," "an interpretive conundrum" Johung describes as "neither dialogue nor stage direction." Interpreting such challenging typography "necessitates an adjustment in the way that readers and producers of Parks's work think about the intersections between the activities of writing and performing, as well as the interactions between the interpretation of the written marks on the page and the embodiment of the corporeal markings of performers onstage." Johung looks at multiple productions of Venus to suggest that Parks's spell operates as an index of historical presence and individual subjectivity demanding our attention to, responsibility for, and complicity with the transformation of "writerly marks" into onstage words and bodies.

Another ongoing contentious staging issue is the subject of Kim Solga's essay, "Rape's Metatheatrical Return: Rehearsing Sexual Violence Among the Early Moderns...