Editorial Comment

As the new coeditor, I had hoped to impress long-time readers of Theatre Journal with the acuity of my observations on the five essays that constitute the present issue. In my fantasy I would move effortlessly among them, illuminating the essence of each essay and drawing attention to significant points of intersection between seemingly disparate aspects of the collective: melancholia in 4.48 Psychosis and hybridity in contemporary Arab theatre; Zora Neale Hurston's angular dramaturgy and Caterina Biancolelli's subversive Colombina. In a final gesture of editorial brilliance I would frame them all in the queerness of Wicked. Unfortunately, the task was more difficult than I anticipated. While skipping lightly over clouds of text, I tripped on the first incongruity, plummeted downwards through the ozone of my fantasy, and landed squarely on the reality of a general issue—a reality that insists upon a certain level of conceptual disunity among the essays gathered herein.

Naturally, these essays cover a broad range of ideas, issues, places, and people: from Sarah Kane to Moroccan playwright Fatima Chebchoub, from written text to performance space, and from enactment of race to performance of gender. Even in the face of considerable difference, however, commonalities emerge that suggest shared visions of object and method. That is surely why issues of race and gender, reception, identity, enactment, and subversion appear repeatedly in the essays you are about to read and enjoy. The first and last consider gender and reception in two popular genres, the contemporary American musical and seventeenth-century commedia dell'arte. The space in-between is occupied by "melancholic witnessing" in Sarah Kane's dramaturgy; the intersection of theatre and anthropology in Zora Neal Hurston's lost plays; and the hybridity of postcolonial Arabic theatre and drama.

The issue opens with Stacy Wolf's "'Defying Gravity': Queer Conventions in the Musical Wicked." In her analysis of this enormously popular musical, Wolf argues that it is hardly necessary to "queer" Wicked, because Wicked is inherently queer. Indeed, precisely because the queer reading is the preferred reading, Wicked stands out among musicals in the queer canon. Using Raymond Williams's "structures of feeling," Wolf suggests how, through appropriation and citation of the conventions of "golden age" musicals, Wicked seduces spectators into a romance between the two principal women, Elphaba and Glinda. Framed by the formulaic conventions of commercial musical comedy, Wicked's queered content is simultaneously transgressive and lucrative.

From a blockbuster Broadway musical about the triumph of difference, we turn to the experimental minimalism of Sarah Kane's alleged suicide note, 4.48 Psychosis. In "'Victim. Perpetrator. Bystander': Melancholic Witnessing of Sarah Kane's 4.48 Psychosis," Alicia Tycer challenges the apparently common assumption that Kane's play is necessarily autobiographical and must, therefore, be viewed through the lens of her suicide. Tycer switches the lens from suicide to psychoanalysis, arguing that, with respect to Kane's plays, "melancholia" and "witnessing" are more useful tools of analysis than autobiography. Drawing upon Freud's "Mourning and Melancholia," she asks whether the author can still bear the full weight of meaning when both text and production encourage melancholic identification and transform spectators into witnesses of psychological trauma. The play, Tycer argues, must also be understood as a political intervention into the mental health system, thus further distancing it from the author's autobiography. If 4.48 Psychosis is personal, it is also fundamentally political.

Jennifer Cayer's "Roll yo' hips—don't roll yo' eyes: Angularity and Embodied Spectatorship in Zora Neale Hurston's Play, Cold Keener" recuperates Hurston for the theatre. Although many readers of Theatre Journal surely know of the discovery several years ago of Hurston's "lost plays" at the Library of Congress, her reputation still rests on her ethnographies, novels, and short stories. Certain evidence of her absence from the theatre may be found in Hurston's Wikipedia entry, which does not mention the plays! Despite initial excitement over the discovery, Hurston's plays are rarely produced. While acknowledging, however, that they challenge hegemonic production practices and Eurocentric expectations of linear narrative, Cayer argues that Hurston's playwriting practice, which draws upon the "angular structure...