Introduction

In the essay that opens this volume, Professor Alan Sikes describes teaching the Abydos Passion Play during the first week of class (as many of us do) because he wants to help students to think about what theatre is and what it does and how to recognize it when they see it. This volume has made me think about theatre history in that way, for it is a different practice now in 2015 than when this disciplinary journal was founded by Ron Engle in 1981. Indeed these essays on the history of performance and theatre are also evocative treatises on historiography, for they all ruminate in their own way about the practice of writing history.

The essays are arranged chronologically, beginning at the beginning with the exploration of the Abydos Passion Play. In a provocative rethinking of this text, Sikes takes a new look at history by questioning our position of inquiry as theatre historians in claiming such an event in our chronology—a query that examines how mythmaking lies at the center of historiography. Sikes’s rich contextualization—the work of an expert historian indeed—sheds light on the Abydos ritual and proves that terms like “passion play” and “mimesis” are not relevant signifiers for the funerary expressions of ancient Egyptians. The conceptual tool Sikes uses to unlock this new interpretation is semiotic theory; using sign and referent to revise previous ideas about mimesis, he sheds new light on a familiar subject, the origins of theatre itself. Andrew Gibb also considers sign and referent as he discusses the complex meanings of minstrelsy in antebellum California. For Gibb, previous scholarship that interprets minstrelsy based on its performances in the eastern United States fails to explain the way a white performer in blackface signified to a San Francisco audience, whose ancestries might be Native American, Mexican, African American, or Anglo—or, more likely, representative of a rich intermingling of multiple ethnicities. Through the story of Jewish African Caribbean immigrant William Alexander Leidesdorff, a californio elite in Mexican California, Gibb reminds theatre scholars that despite the “national scope of the argument,” any performance text is always, “to a greater or lesser degree, played out at a local level.” Nicole Berkin’s essay, like those of Gibb and Sikes, examines a subject familiar to theatre historians: the antebellum star system. Her study expands our understanding of this well-known practice, however, and contributes to a recent body of work on cultural circulation in nineteenth-century America. Berkin, employing theories adapted from cultural geography, argues that actors and managers attempted to “use circulation to reinforce or re-map the social and cultural categories that circumscribed them, including legitimate vs. popular, respectable vs. scandalous, and star vs. unknown.”

The last two essays in the volume reflect current theatre scholars’ interest in performance studies, a term not widely in use when this journal began. In 1980, when TDR added “a journal of performance studies” as a subtitle, the majority of theatre historians were not engaged in what they would term “performance studies” scholarship despite certain shared methodologies. As the studies by Megan Geigner and Heide Nees demonstrate, theatre scholars now look at a broad range of texts, both dramatic and performative, for unlike that of more traditional historians, our work has always been interdisciplinary, relying on diverse approaches and theoretical frameworks.

As you examine this volume of Theatre History Studies, you will notice that the typical balance of essays and book reviews is a bit askew. In volume 34, the scale has tipped toward the review; book review editor Rob Shimko and I have decided to include all of the reviews written for the original 2013 issue of the journal, an issue that never materialized due to changes in editorial staff and unexpected circumstances relative to key personnel. I would like to extend my thanks to Rob Shimko, who did the lion’s share of editorial work for this issue, and together we would like to recognize the former book review editor Cheryl Black for her expert editorial work on many of the reviews that appear in this volume.