Introduction

Working across the array of articles in volume 39 of Theatre History Studies, I kept returning to a quote from Miguel Rubio, founding member of Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani. In the 2003 program notes for Hecho en el Perú: Vitrinas para un museo de la memoria (Made in Peru: Display Cases for a Museum of Memory), Rubio writes:

A present without memory condemns us to a poor future.

To believe that today owes nothing to yesterday allows us to think that we have no responsibility to tomorrow.

On the contrary, memory and imagination complement each other since they allow us to represent what has already passed and what one day might occur.¹

Yuyachkani has worked for more than thirty years in Peru, through violent conflict, state and para-state terrorism, reconciliation commissions, social up-heaval, and cultural healing processes. Employing and experimenting with diverse performance modalities and methodologies, Yuyachkani unflinchingly represents and imagines past, present, and future worlds. Like so many performance collectives in Latin America, Yuyachkani’s work testifies to the stakes of history. Rubio’s statements carry with them an ethical exigency: Memory is fraught, targeted, dangerous. Rubio, and the work of Yuyachkani, remind me that history, likewise, is fraught, targeted, dangerous. History is embattled. History is resistance and survival. To participate in history—by writing, performing, dialoging—is an urgent labor.

History, as we know well, can be lost: archives burned or mildewed, stories forgotten, lives overlooked or un-valued. Such loss can leave us looking around in a stupor at our present moment, asking, “How did this happen? How did we get here?” The simplification of history constitutes a loss of history. The work and challenge of the historian is not only to keep memory but also to return to memory and continue to complicate our understanding of the past, by looking again, by looking elsewhere, by looking from a different viewpoint. The authors in this volume of Theatre History Studies take up just such a challenge, through diverse work and ways of working.

In part I, Studies in Theatre History, Matthieu Chapman and Chrystyna Dail both demonstrate the vital need for nuance in histories and experiences of Otherness. Chapman mobilizes an Afro pessimist–informed historiographical methodology to reread Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Chapman exposes the political and bodily stakes of Caliban’s enslavement in contrast to Ariel’s condition of servitude, a distinction that refigures histories of blackness and indigeneity in the early modern Anglophone world. Through a careful analysis of witch stage characters, religious texts, and suffrage writings, Dail exposes the violent linkages between ageism and anti-suffrage rhetoric in the early eighteenth and late nineteenth centuries in the United States. Dail’s article, a provocative read on its own, will also whet your appetite for the special section of volume 40 of Theatre History Studies, coedited by Dail and Jane Barnette, on figures of the witch throughout theatre and performance history.

Michael Chemers and Michael Sell invite us to rethink relationships between history, technology, and theatre practice. Chemers and Sell argue that we must, as a field, confront both “conventional understandings of dramaturgy and Eurocentric and inadequately historicized understandings of technology” if we are to engage with the ever present, ever changing, and ever eroding borders between the live and the digital. While Chemers and Sell seek to reorient us away from Eurocentric perspectives on technology, theatre, and culture, Jeffrey Ullom invites us to imagine how our field shifts when centered within regional, midwestern US histories of performance. Ullom details the struggles of Cleveland Playhouse director Frederic McConnell with labor unions in the 1920s and 1930s. Centering the idea of inaction, Ullom’s study suggests that we, as theatre historians, might explicitly take up the challenge of accounting for what did not happen as a means through which to apprehend individual and institutional decision-making processes.

Finally, Michael Dennis offers a close examination of Emily Brady, a play by the Hollywood writer Donald Ogden Stewart. Dennis challenges us to reconsider what we think we know about the political left, commitment, and communism in both the late 1930s and in our present moment. In revisiting the...