From the Editor

I want to start by congratulating Janne Risum for winning the 2021 American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR) Translation Prize with her translation and meticulous introduction of the “Minutes of Evening to Sum Up the Conclusions from the Stay of the Theatre of Mei Lanfang in the Soviet Union,” published in the fall 2020 issue of ATJ. In its award citation, the prize committee highly valued the significance of Risum’s work: “On 14 April 1935, the legendary Chinese actor best known for his influence on Brecht had an extraordinary conversation with key Russian theatre artists, including Meyerhold, Tretyakov, Eisenstein, and Viktor Shlovsky. With the beginning of the Stalinist purges in 1936, the record of the evening was repeatedly suppressed and censored. Our committee was deeply impressed by Professor Risum’s efforts over many years to retrieve and reconstruct this text, the quality of her translation, and the thoroughness of her scholarly commentary—a model we hope future submissions will follow when they are dealing with historical documents and the theatre cultures of the past.”

This is the second honor ATJ has received from ASTR since I became ATJ editor five years ago, the other for Elizabeth W. Son’s “Korean Trojan Women: Performing Wartime Sexual Violence,” which received an honorable mention for the 2017 Gerald Kahan Award for best essay. Son’s article appeared in the fall 2016 issue, edited by my predecessor Kathy Foley.

The current issue begins with two translations, starting with Tsuneda Keiko and Colleen Lanki’s translation of Ekibyō ryūkōki (A Journal of the Plague Year, 1975) by Terayama Shūji in collaboration with Kishida Rio. Terayama was one of the leaders of the Japan’s avantgarde theatre movement and Kishida, who collaborated with Terayama on many of the plays by his company, was an award-winning playwright in her own right. Part of this translation was read on Zoom during the 2020 AAP conference and the complete English script received world premiere in June 2021, again on Zoom, during the RioFest, a yearly gathering in memory of Kishida. Inspired by Danial Dafoe’s fictional memoir of the same title, the play is especially timely and poignant during the current pandemic in its depiction of contagion as imagination and memory.

Following this play is Owen Stampton’s translation of Yi Kwang-su’s one-act Gyuhan (Sorrows of the Inner Room, 1917), which Stampton argues is Korea’s first modern play, the result of Yi putting into practice his advocacy of drama as a modern literary genre in his highly influential critical work “Munhak iran hao” (What is Literature?, 1916). Yi’s effort paralleled similar attempts in China and Japan, with the latter serving as a source of inspiration for the other two East Asian countries. As such, Stampton’s translation and examination of the play’s modern significance in his introduction add another datapoint to our understanding of dramatic modernity in the region.

The issue’s article section starts with Yunjie Hu’s methodical examination of guildhall theatres sponsored by Shanxi province merchants in Qing-dynasty China. Using a wide array of historical sources, Hu argues their sponsorship of theatrical performance in these venues functioned beyond entertainment, as a tool to discipline and morally educate guild members as well as to promote the guilds’ reputation. More significant, because of the wide geographical reach of Shanxi merchants’ commercial activities, these performances also resulted in the proliferation of Shanxi regional theatre in the rest of the country.

The other four articles all focus on contemporary practices, starting with two pieces on gender performance in Korea. In “The ‘Homosexual Code’ in Contemporary Korean Theatre: The Case of Shakespeare’s R & J in Seoul,” Yeeyon Im engages a 2015 Theatre Journal article that focuses on a 2013 production with a similar theme to her focus, Shakespeare’s R & J (2018). Challenging the previous article’s praise of the earlier production as “a highly contentious challenge to the status quo and a way of thinking about human sexuality that has almost no representation in mainstream Korean culture,” Im points to the surge of queer-themed films and theatrical productions...