Editorial Comment

Things get forgotten over the course of a life. Remembered differently, in fragments, or pushed to the side and replaced by more pressing or important moments. As I take up the role of coeditor of Theatre Journal I am immersed in a world of forgotten moments. For me personally I am suddenly once again drawn into worlds, topics, and ideas that have grown distant or are forgotten, supplanted by more focused areas of my research. Stepping into this role, midstream, into a well-established process that moves quickly forward, I am eager to slow down to take the time to remember and be reactivated by the many ideas filling my in-box. The surprise for me has been what a pleasure it is to return to my roots in historical interrogations of the theatrical, in theories that awoke in me a sense of new modes of thinking, in the wonder of archival findings. Immersing myself in this role has been like being a student again, investigating alongside the authors, following pathways I did not know existed, sharing in a collective appreciation for a field rich in detail, history, and imagining.

This issue itself contains narratives of forgetting, when forgetting can mean exclusion, or oversight, when forgetting can allow you to bracket off ways of thinking. When what has been forgotten can be richly remembered. The issue’s cover features portraits of Jacob P. Adler and his wife, Sara Levitsky Adler which have created a historian’s puzzle for author Elisabeth Kinsley around the dates of these depictions (you will have to read to find out), serving to reiterate, as she points out, Diana Taylor’s reminder that there are “myths attending the archive.” This collection of essays reminds me that it is always worth returning to history, to theatrical histories of plays and productions, to archival histories, to our own personal histories. As I write from the UK, where I have lived for over a decade, the US political-election machine is in full swing, and I remember my North American roots, afraid of the elisions and mis-remembering evoked as candidates scramble for a place in history. What will historians make of this time, I wonder? What will be forgotten or remembered?

The issue opens with Paige McGinley’s essay “Reconsidering ‘the American Style’: Black Performers and Black Music in Streetcar and Cat,” an important intervention into how race is “remembered.” While acknowledging the importance of multiracial or “colorblind” casting practices in recent revivals of classic American works, McGinley addresses a forgetting that has led to perceptions of these productions as “homogeneously ‘white.’” She takes on the crucial task of returning to the original production scripts to show that these productions were underscored by black actors, musical styles, and references that have been since omitted in New Dramatists playscripts. McGinley rethinks the “American Style” that emerged out of the collaboration among Tennessee Williams, director Elia Kazan, and designer Jo Mielziner in the 1950s to propose that it was in fact blackness that held its elements together. In readings of both plays, McGinley factually replaces the roles of the characters and actors of color in the original production, a potent reminder of how easily omissions can alter actual historical representation. In her impassioned analysis of the music in these productions McGinley sheds light on these Williams/Kazan collaborations by pointing out how Kazan’s (perhaps romanticized) interpretations of Williams’s musical stage directions represented not only “local color,” but also the “off-stage South” of 1955 and the politically charged atmosphere surrounding civil rights. Through McGinley’s attention to what is forgotten, omitted, or written out of these scripts (it is interesting to note that New Dramatist scripts omit the lyrics for the plays used in the production, and that no photographs of the black actors in these productions were readily available), another layer is returned to these historic productions.

From “American Style” to the “American Stage,” the term American resonates with a exclusionary tone, and in Kinsley’s “‘The Jew That Shakespeare Drew, at Least in Outlines’: Renderings of a Yiddish-Speaking Shylock in New York, circa 1900,” Yiddish theatre actor...