Editor's Introduction to the Special Section: Shifting Shapes: Witch Characters and Witchy Performances

"It's the witch from next door."

—stephen sondheim and james lapine, into the woods (1986)

The Baker's line in Into the Woods introduces the character moments before we gaze upon her: aging and hunched, dressed in tattered rags, and maybe even drooling. In this brief interstitial space between aural and visual perception, the audience erupts in hesitant laughter. Perhaps this is the elicited reaction because many audience members assume the Baker's subtextual intention is that the visitor is actually the bitch from next door. In contemporary US culture, these words often conflate to vilify intelligent, assertive women. And that is precisely what the Witch is in Into the Woods. She is a decisive, hardworking, single mother much maligned by her neighbors' ancestors and populace. She is not lacking in empathy; she also doesn't value one person's loss over another's. The Witch contextualizes what ultimately separates her from the rest of the community in her pre-death song "Last Midnight," addressed to the remaining fairy-tale characters in the woods (The Baker, Cinderella, Little Red, and Jack):

You're so nice.You're not good, you're not bad, you're just nice.I'm not good, I'm not nice, I'm just right.I'm the witch. You're the world.¹

For the editors and authors of this special section, Sondheim's lyrics in this moment reinforce the trope of the witch as an outsider standing up to—often politically and ethically—her community. We see this trope replicated throughout theatre and performance history to various degrees: the witch-demons in kyōgen; the virgins in Hrotsvitha's Dulcitius; Adeola and several witch doctor characters in Amos Tutuola's plays; the weird (or "wyrd") sisters in Shakespeare's Macbeth; drag witch Jinkx Monsoon; the men creating Ufe and Wine in Carmen Boullosa's Cocinar Hombres; the "good/bad" witches in iterations of The Wizard of Oz. Onstage witch characters, depending on cultural context, vacillate between being scapegoats for the fears and superstitions of a community and operating as instruments of wisdom and healing. Occasionally feared, often respected, and almost universally marginalized, witch characters are notoriously powerful and sublimely fragile. This duality is perhaps best represented through the Japanese Hannya mask present in Noh and in Balinese performances including the Rangda mask. As performance ethnographer Margaret Coldiron explains, "Whether viewed as a projection of man's fear of woman as 'Other' or as a demonstration of the power of evil to transform that which is 'good,' positive, and nurturing into something wicked, negative, and deadly, there is perhaps no other image as universally fearsome. In both of these masks these contradictory qualities of fiendishness and goodness coincide."² Witch characters may levitate or curse a family, burn or melt, and in more than a few instances, claim no knowledge of magical arts at all. Many of the authors in this special section write about the prevalence of witch tropes or archetypes. But it is perhaps more appropriate to argue that no universal applies to the witch character—except their outsider status. Therefore, treatment of witch characters onstage mirrors what in their offstage communities may be perceived as an innate human desire to destroy or condemn what is feared, misunderstood, or undesired. Interrogating why witches are present in performance allows us to better understand the complex social constructs undergirding a cultural moment. For example, stage witches of Greek and Roman antiquity such as Circe and Medea are knowledgeable herb and root workers but were also described by poets and playwrights in various adaptations through their inviting or distasteful scents. This connection between magic and scent was then projected onto women in antiquity as a whole. As classics scholar Britta Ager argues, "While a variety of scenting agents were important in religious and magical rituals, witches use scented spells in classical poetry less because of the real practices of ancient magicians than because the evolving witch trope equated them first with root cutters, women with access to specialized and dangerous knowledge, and later with wearers...