Special Issue: Re-Thinking the Real: Editorial Comment

Combined with this was another perversity—an innate preference for the represented subject over the real one: the defect of the real one was so apt to be a lack of representation. I like things that appeared; then one was sure. Whether they were or not was a subordinate and almost always a profitless question.

—Henry James, "The Real Thing," 1892

There is no reality except in action.

—Jean Paul Sartre

Although my two epigraphs are not from plays or even from critical writings about the theatre, I think that they proffer significant critical currency for this special issue on re-thinking the real. Speaking in the voice of a fictive visual artist, Henry James in 1892 makes a strong case, I would argue, for the power of theatre. James's artist inverts the conventional relationship between the real and representational by claiming that the real was not enough, that the real was the site of falsity and that he as a result preferred the represented subject. Correspondingly, in the world of the theatre, the real constantly proves insufficient or at the very least ambiguous. We must continuously reimagine what constitutes the real and negotiate how we understand the real through representation. In the theatre, as in the James quote, it is ironically through "appearance" that we are made sure, that we can reach for more profound meanings. In our postmodern age when appearance has become valued as all the more substantive and phrases such as "keeping it real" have become the vogue, the James quote is remarkably prescient. While James values appearance, "being," the Sartre quote puts the emphasis on the doing and performance is just that: a doing and a thing done. Performance, as it is often understood, functions as representation without reproduction. Its actual doing is what produces the "reality" of performance. Always at issue in the active engagement of performance is how we sight and cite the real. Consequently, what these quotes suggest and what the five papers contained in this issue contest is this relationship between the real and the representational. In diverse ways, they consider how the real is particularly staked out and historically situated. Collectively they reveal ways in which the real and the representational are mutually constitutive.

What is also implicit within these quotes and explicit in the five essays is the politics that surrounds the structuring of the real. The dictates of what is real and what is not have profound political ramifications. Certainly in the nineteenth century, Western notions of and utilization of realism, both on the stage and in literature, permitted certain representations and restricted others. Edward Ziter discusses this power of realism and the nineteenth-century fetish for exoticism in the final essay of this issue. In our more contemporary world, the aforementioned concept of "keeping it real" erects borders of authenticity around the hip hop nation that both promote and police certain ideologies around race, gender, class and sexuality. The relationship of the real to nationalism is an important one that both Freddie Rokem and Rosemarie Bank address in their articles. Articulating a real can be a critical element of nationalist projects, thus the exclusionary policies of ethnic cleansing and ethnic absolutism fundamentally reinforce a national real. Chicana playwright Cherríe Moraga, for example, takes up these issues in her recent work The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea where, as a setting for her adaptation of the Medea myth, she imagines the political paradigms of Chicano cultural nationalism of the 1960s and 1970s carried to an extreme fruition and an ethnic civil war that has balkanized the United States. Inherent in such politics is the adamant reliance on false conceits that the real is a self-evident, obvious condition, like the color of one's skin, but determining the real, as James indicates above and as these papers explore, has never been that simple.

Alice Rayner's article, "Rude Mechanicals and the Specters of Marx" considers an aspect of theatre that critics generally...