Project MUSE®: Theatre Journal - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/196
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Theatre Journal.daily12026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 48 (1996) through current issueLatest Articles: Theatre JournalTWOProject MUSE®Theatre Journal1086-332X0192-2882Latest articles in Theatre Journal. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Smell and Taste in Theatre History: A Roundtable Series Table One, 1500s–1800s
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987091
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Contributors introduce themselves with a smell or taste related to their research (from left to right, top to bottom): Elizabeth McQueen holds Zina Saro-Wiwa's illicit gin, Sarogua; Devon Baur holds a bottle containing a scent designed by scientists to smell like nothing on Earth; Michelle Liu Carriger holds higashi, a sweet from Kyoto, Japan; Angela L. Robinson holds Hawaiian Pikake perfume; Daniela Gutierréz-Flores holds a fresh loaf of bread; Holly Dugan displays her wrist wearing CK Obsession, a contemporary version of civet.Smell and Taste in Theatre History: A Roundtable Series is part of one fell swoop, a writing collective for performance across disciplines.Smell and taste are overlooked yet vibrant parts
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/196/image/coversmallSmell and Taste in Theatre History: A Roundtable Series Table One, 1500s–1800s2026-04-06text/htmlen-USSmell and Taste in Theatre History: A Roundtable Series Table One, 1500s–1800s2026-04-062026TWOProject MUSE®604502026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-04-06Editorial Comment
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987092
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It's hard to know where to begin the 78th volume of Theatre Journal. In recent months, and alongside many others, I have been thinking more and more about why and how we as theatre, dance, and performance studies researchers do what we do amid ongoing crises. I have been galvanized by recent work from Sarah Mesle, who describes a range of reasons why we might continue to write, revise, edit, and read in our current moment. For Mesle, when we "consider why each of us should write now, our answers might depend on the company that writing enables us to constitute, at a time when so many collectivities are shaking."1 This impulse to be in company with one another is what roots me in the purpose of my editorial work in
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/196/image/coversmallEditorial Comment2026-04-06text/htmlen-USEditorial Comment2026-04-062026TWOProject MUSE®113282026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-04-06Cakewalks in Kimono: Kawakami Sadayakko, Itō Michio, and the Oscillations of Cross-Racial Performance
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987093
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In December 1915, The Afro-American (Baltimore) ran an advertisement for a "Grand Japanese Cakewalk Dance," to be taught by Prof. James Wise, with accompaniment by Prof. Eubie Blake (who would go on to write the music for Shuffle Along in 1921). This newspaper ad is one of numerous examples of how the US fad for all things "Japanese" permeated daily life. It also provides evidence for the growing field of scholarship that considers Asian racialization in order to think about cross-racial performance beyond the Black–white color line. Formative work by Shannon Steen laid the groundwork for more recent inquiries by scholars such as J. Lorenzo Perillo, Josephine Lee, and
Figure 1
Advertisement for "Grand Japanese
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/196/image/coversmallCakewalks in Kimono: Kawakami Sadayakko, Itō Michio, and the Oscillations of Cross-Racial Performance2026-04-06text/htmlen-USCakewalks in Kimono: Kawakami Sadayakko, Itō Michio, and the Oscillations of Cross-Racial Performance2026-04-062026TWOProject MUSE®1180052026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-04-06Theatre of the Vitrine: Materializing the Brander Matthews Dramatic Museum at Columbia University
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987094
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Among the most cherished original holdings of the Brander Matthews Dramatic Museum at Columbia University is a meticulously crafted model of the Fortune Playhouse as it is hypothesized to have appeared in early modern London. Enclosed in a vitrine in a rear vestibule of Columbia's Rare Books and Manuscript Library, the model's materials are not as precious as its preservation in glass would imply: Cardboard is used to indicate lath and plaster, with neatly painted details giving the impression of Tudor-style boarded paneling (fig. 1). Constructed at a scale of 300:1 by civil engineer James P. Maginnis around the year 1912, it is an object of unwieldy size, several feet in each dimension, an analog precursor to
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/196/image/coversmallTheatre of the Vitrine: Materializing the Brander Matthews Dramatic Museum at Columbia University2026-04-06text/htmlen-USTheatre of the Vitrine: Materializing the Brander Matthews Dramatic Museum at Columbia University2026-04-062026TWOProject MUSE®1148672026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-04-06A Techno-colored Tempest: Racism, Slavery, Witchcraft, and the Nation in Giuvlipen's Roma Adaptation of Shakespeare
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987095
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The Roma feminist theatre company Giuvlipen's 2024 adaptation of Shakespeare's The Tempest—written and directed by Mihaela Drăgan under the title Caliban and the Witch—begins with actor Anastasia Dade (Miranda) introducing herself to the public using her real name.1 Her monologue addressing the predominantly white, middle-class audience of the National Theatre in Craiova touches on aspects of representation of the Roma ethnic minority in present-day Romania.2 Poised, yet emotionally invested, Dade confesses:
This is the first time I'm claiming my Roma identity and I'm happy about it because I lived a long time without connecting with this part of myself. … I haven't experienced the hardships and challenges of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/196/image/coversmallA Techno-colored Tempest: Racism, Slavery, Witchcraft, and the Nation in Giuvlipen's Roma Adaptation of Shakespeare2026-04-06text/htmlen-USA Techno-colored Tempest: Racism, Slavery, Witchcraft, and the Nation in Giuvlipen's Roma Adaptation of Shakespeare2026-04-062026TWOProject MUSE®1285452026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-04-06When the Warmth Leaves, Where Do We Go?: Sharing the Corpse in Thermography's Necropolitical Aesthetics
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987096
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Entropy (2004), installation view at Lappeenranta Art Museum. (Courtesy of Terike Haapoja.)The horse renders as a red-hot scream. It hangs on the wall in a thermographic projection, a heat signature, a performative diffusion of energy. The image quality is fuzzy, almost pulsating in the body's boundary blur, in the bleeding out. Is it (a)live? No life here. The horse is dead. Or? …Finnish artist Terike Haapoja's Entropy (2004) and In and Out of Time (2005) utilize a thermal imaging camera to display the ins-and-outs of a recently deceased horse and calf, respectively, losing their body temperatures. In Entropy, the video performance lasts about nine hours but is cut down to a twenty-five-minute loop for observation
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/196/image/coversmallWhen the Warmth Leaves, Where Do We Go?: Sharing the Corpse in Thermography's Necropolitical Aesthetics2026-04-06text/htmlen-USWhen the Warmth Leaves, Where Do We Go?: Sharing the Corpse in Thermography's Necropolitical Aesthetics2026-04-062026TWOProject MUSE®1155332026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-04-06Electra by Sophocles (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987097
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Celebrating its seventieth anniversary in 2025, the Athens Epidaurus Festival is Greece's annual summer arts festival produced across three months and multiple venues both in Athens and on the Peloponnese. The premier events of the festival take place at the Ancient Theatre of Epidaurus. In 2025, they spanned sixteen separate nights between June 27 and August 23. With construction dating to the fourth century BCE, the Ancient Theatre of Epidaurus is both a UNESCO World Heritage Site and one of the largest and best-preserved theatres of antiquity, boasting a large, open-air amphitheatre and an audience capacity upward of 14,000. It was here that I sat among the masses to witness the second (and final) night of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/196/image/coversmallElectra by Sophocles (review)2026-04-06text/htmlen-USElectra by Sophocles (review)2026-04-062026TWOProject MUSE®91932026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-04-06Scenes from a Repatriation by Joel Tan (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987098
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By the time I attended Joel Tan's Scenes from a Repatriation, the production had already generated a flurry of attention in London, not least for tackling the fraught politics of cultural restitution, but for its intricate, experimental form. Tan, whose work deftly straddles Singaporean and British contexts, confirmed himself again as a dramatist of both intellectual clarity and emotional nuance.What unfolded over two hours was not a polemic or a linear narrative but a daring mosaic of perspectives. Across twelve discrete yet resonant scenes, Tan offers a kaleidoscopic meditation on the power, symbolism, and contested ownership of a thousand-year-old statue of the Bodhisattva Guanyin. Removed from China and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/196/image/coversmallScenes from a Repatriation by Joel Tan (review)2026-04-06text/htmlen-USScenes from a Repatriation by Joel Tan (review)2026-04-062026TWOProject MUSE®103942026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-04-06Macbeth in Stride by Whitney White (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987099
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A backdrop of vertical metallic strips glimmered like a curtain of burnished copper, catching and diffusing the stage lights. The stage floor extended in angular diagonals. A grand piano rested to the left, a drum kit anchored the right, and three microphones occupied the center of the stage. This scenography provided the frame within which creator and performer Whitney White reimagined Shakespeare's Macbeth. In Macbeth in Stride, White created what she called in her director's note "a love letter to music and Shakespeare." She adapted the play, adding original songs spanning pop, rock, gospel, and R&B, drawing inspiration from Tina Turner and other Black icons. She also played Lady Macbeth, or the Woman, appearing
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/196/image/coversmallMacbeth in Stride by Whitney White (review)2026-04-06text/htmlen-USMacbeth in Stride by Whitney White (review)2026-04-062026TWOProject MUSE®93642026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-04-06Doom: House of Hope by Anne Imhof (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987100
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In moments of social and political unrest, art is often seen as a means to envision a more equitable world. German artist Anne Imhof leaned into this conceit with the title and concept of her most ambitious performance to date: DOOM: House of Hope, which was on view at the Park Avenue Armory in New York City, March 3–12, 2025. In the Armory's press release, Rebecca Robertson explains that "with DOOM, [Imhof] casts her audience within the performance, bringing them on a journey underscored by renewed feelings of hope and collectivism—a much-needed tonic for our current moment." This statement likely surprised critics because Imhof's performance art is often met with scrutiny that tacks toward pessimism.Indeed
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/196/image/coversmallDoom: House of Hope by Anne Imhof (review)2026-04-06text/htmlen-USDoom: House of Hope by Anne Imhof (review)2026-04-062026TWOProject MUSE®107722026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-04-06A Refutation dir. by Bryan Doerries (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987101
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"The symptoms which characterized the first stage of the fever, were, in the greatest number of cases, after a chilly fit of some duration, a quick, tense pulse … frequent sick qualms, and retchings to vomit, without discharging any thing, except the contents last taken into the stomach—costiveness." Such visceral descriptions of illness are not unfamiliar to those who have been in The Johns Hopkins Hospital. Yet when I heard these remarks given on the morning of April 24, 2025, in the hospital's Hurd Hall, they were read not by a medical professional but by an actor as part of Theater of War Productions' A Refutation. In this performance, four actors read from five historical texts concerning the 1793 yellow fever
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/196/image/coversmallA Refutation dir. by Bryan Doerries (review)2026-04-06text/htmlen-USA Refutation dir. by Bryan Doerries (review)2026-04-062026TWOProject MUSE®94082026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-04-06Krapp's Last Tape by Samuel Beckett (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987103
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Gary Oldman's auteur version of Krapp's Last Tape, which he directed, designed, and performed, was staged as a benefit performance to inspire younger audiences while also supporting regional theatre. Although Samuel Beckett originally crafted the role of Krapp for Patrick Magee, and John Hurt's performance remains iconic, Oldman reimagined the role with distinct vitality. While typically performed by an elderly man listening to a tape recording from his thirty-ninth birthday, Oldman blurred this distinction. His voice, both live and recorded, was essentially the same, collapsing past and present into one moment. Rather than dwelling in decline, this
Gary Oldman in Krapp's Last Tape at York Theatre Royal.
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/196/image/coversmallKrapp's Last Tape by Samuel Beckett (review)2026-04-06text/htmlen-USKrapp's Last Tape by Samuel Beckett (review)2026-04-062026TWOProject MUSE®72072026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-04-06Here we Are by Stephen Sondheim (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987104
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Stephen Sondheim's œuvre defined musical theatre for a generation of theatregoers, his works defying the expectations of what the art form could do. Although he never shied away from deconstructing and reimagining the form, Sondheim's surrealist final work, Here We Are, just did not quite come together at the National Theatre. As the lights came down on a glowing white stage, we met Leo and Marianne Brink (Rory Kinnear and Jane Krakowski) greeting unexpected guests Claudia Bursik-Zimmer and her husband Paul Zimmer (Martha Plimpton and Jesse Tyler Ferguson), who believed they were invited for brunch. While the Brinks quibbled over the surprise intrusion we met more of their friends: diplomat Raffael Santello Di
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/196/image/coversmallHere we Are by Stephen Sondheim (review)2026-04-06text/htmlen-USHere we Are by Stephen Sondheim (review)2026-04-062026TWOProject MUSE®96462026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-04-06Turds in Hell by Charles Ludlam and Bill Vehr (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987105
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When Charles Ludlam died in 1987, his position in the pantheon of US theatre artists seemed secure: His obituary appeared on The New York Times front page, his script The Mystery of Irma Vep was one of the nation's most produced, and he had written twenty-nine diverse plays, all of which had been produced by his Ridiculous Theatrical Company
The cast trapped in the embassy in Here We Are. (Photo: Marc Brenner.)
(RTC), left for companies to discover and make their own. Yet, while his legacy as a queer, avantgarde artist inspired a generation of theatremakers, his plays never achieved the enduring presence so many of us believe they deserved.The cast trapped in the embassy in Here We Are. (Photo: Marc
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/196/image/coversmallTurds in Hell by Charles Ludlam and Bill Vehr (review)2026-04-06text/htmlen-USTurds in Hell by Charles Ludlam and Bill Vehr (review)2026-04-062026TWOProject MUSE®100682026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-04-06Two Sisters Find a Box of Lesbian Erotica in the Woods by Emma Horwitz and Bailey Williams (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987106
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Audiences for Two Sisters Find a Box of Lesbian Erotica in the Woods, a coproduction between New Georges and Rattlestick Theater, entered the black box space at HERE Arts Center to find a set (designed by Normandy Sherwood) constructed of archival bankers boxes. The walls of cardboard boxes, each hand-labeled in Sharpie—"Mt. Holyoke Yearbooks 1975–1978," "Fancy Nancy Gets Taken Down a Peg," "55+ Knitting Circles," to cite a few examples—constituted a whimsical lesbian archive. Against this backdrop, Emma Horwitz and Bailey Williams briefly welcomed the audience before Horwitz stepped up to a microphone to read some playfully trope-laden lesbian erotica from a printed page. Close enough to the mic that her breath
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/196/image/coversmallTwo Sisters Find a Box of Lesbian Erotica in the Woods by Emma Horwitz and Bailey Williams (review)2026-04-06text/htmlen-USTwo Sisters Find a Box of Lesbian Erotica in the Woods by Emma Horwitz and Bailey Williams (review)2026-04-062026TWOProject MUSE®95892026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-04-06We are Gathered by Tarell Alvin McCraney (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987107
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What if instead of heralding vast horizons or utopic elsewheres, cruising landed us someplace much more common, like a wedding? For Wallace Tre, the central character in Tarell Alvin McCraney's We Are Gathered, this question was a source of tremendous introspection throughout the nearly ponderous, three-hour drama. A chance encounter at his favorite pick-up spot in the park with a sprightly man ten years his junior named Free caused the brooding astronaut to consider whether matrimony was the next inevitable step in their love story. Adding a sense of urgency to Wallace Tre's ruminations is his growing unease about the rolling back of hard-won civil rights advances, including the Supreme Court's 2015 decision in
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/196/image/coversmallWe are Gathered by Tarell Alvin McCraney (review)2026-04-06text/htmlen-USWe are Gathered by Tarell Alvin McCraney (review)2026-04-062026TWOProject MUSE®83622026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-04-06Redwood by Tina Landau (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987108
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Over thirty years ago, Una Chaudhuri called on theatre artists to center animal and vegetal subjects onstage. Since then, ecotheatre—theatre in, about, or with the environment—has burgeoned, largely in
Becca (Khaila Wilcoxon) and Finn (Michael Park) climb Stella, a redwood tree. (Photo: Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman.)
fringe and experimental spaces. Redwood is notable for being one of the few eco-musicals to receive the Broadway treatment. Premiering at California's La Jolla Playhouse before running for 127 performances at Broadway's Nederlander Theatre, Redwood, as its title suggests, attempts to give a vegetal character a starring role, with varying degrees of success.Becca (Khaila Wilcoxon) and Finn
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/196/image/coversmallRedwood by Tina Landau (review)2026-04-06text/htmlen-USRedwood by Tina Landau (review)2026-04-062026TWOProject MUSE®87482026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-04-06Noordung::1995–2045 by Vladimir Stojsavljević (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987109
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Noordung::1995–2045 is a theatrical production that, if entirely successful, could fundamentally change how we think about theatre on a planetary scale. The show is named after Slovenian space science pioneer Herman Potočnik Noordung, whose book The Problem of Space Travel: The Rocket Motor (1928) is a key reference in early space architecture and greatly influenced subsequent rocketry and astronautical
Overhead view of Noordung::1995–2045's set design by Dunja Zupančič. Left, from top down: Blaž Šef, Marko Mlačnik, and Damjana Černe. Right, from top down: Mojca Partljič, Ivo Godnič, Jonas Žnidaršič, Romana Šalehar, Mateja Rebolj, and Marinka Štern. (Photo: Felipe Cervera.)
technology. For director Dragan
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/196/image/coversmallNoordung::1995–2045 by Vladimir Stojsavljević (review)2026-04-06text/htmlen-USNoordung::1995–2045 by Vladimir Stojsavljević (review)2026-04-062026TWOProject MUSE®105402026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-04-06The Antitheatrical Prejudice by Jonas Barish (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987110
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Jonas Barish's The Antitheatrical Prejudice—now republished with a new foreword by Joseph Roach—is an undisputed classic. Originally published in 1981, it received ASTR's Barnard Hewitt Award for best book in theatre history the following year and has since become a staple of both syllabi and scholarship. It certainly is a staple of my own. I first encountered the book while preparing for my doctoral exams. (My notes run to twenty single-spaced pages, putting Barish on par with Friedrich Nietzsche.) Barish's remarks on French theologian Pierre Nicole inspired my first article, focused on the twentieth century, and my first book, which focused on the seventeenth and eighteenth. Barish influenced and in many cases
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/196/image/coversmallThe Antitheatrical Prejudice by Jonas Barish (review)2026-04-06text/htmlen-USThe Antitheatrical Prejudice by Jonas Barish (review)2026-04-062026TWOProject MUSE®112962026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-04-06Choreography, Visual Art and Experimental Composition 1950s–1970s by Erin Brannigan, and: The Persistence of Dance: Choreography as Concept and Material in Contemporary Art by Erin Brannigan (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987111
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In both Choreography, Visual Art and Experimental Composition 1950s–1970s and The Persistence of Dance: Choreography as Concept and Material in Contemporary Art, Erin Brannigan examines the complex, intertwined relationships between experimental dance and avant-garde visual arts since the mid-twentieth century. In these companion monographs, she argues for the relevance of avant-garde dance as an independent art object, which has both influenced visual art and created its own particular relationship to the space of the museum. As Brannigan explains in Choreography, Visual Art and Experimental Composition, she is interested specifically in "work both historical and current that is distinct from contemporary dance
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/196/image/coversmallChoreography, Visual Art and Experimental Composition 1950s–1970s by Erin Brannigan, and: The Persistence of Dance: Choreography as Concept and Material in Contemporary Art by Erin Brannigan (review)2026-04-06text/htmlen-USChoreography, Visual Art and Experimental Composition 1950s–1970s by Erin Brannigan, and: The Persistence of Dance: Choreography as Concept and Material in Contemporary Art by Erin Brannigan (review)2026-04-062026TWOProject MUSE®138882026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-04-06Disability Works: Performance After Rehabilitation by Patrick McKelvey (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987112
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I am reviewing Patrick McKelvey's Disability Works: Performance After Rehabilitation as somebody who has tried to practice disability theatre for twenty-one years with learning-disabled colleagues. I am deeply interested in whether there is such a thing as a disability theatre historiography, given the epistemic injustice to which many of the practitioners of such a form are subjected. I am also interested in the material conditions of such performance and the possibilities for research and development of the form. A number of disability theatre companies and related organizations are currently seeking to collaborate across nation-state boundaries and to preserve, value, and pass on the legacy of previous
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/196/image/coversmallDisability Works: Performance After Rehabilitation by Patrick McKelvey (review)2026-04-06text/htmlen-USDisability Works: Performance After Rehabilitation by Patrick McKelvey (review)2026-04-062026TWOProject MUSE®86812026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-04-06The Radical Act of Listening: Making Documentary and Investigative Theatre by KJ Sanchez (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987113
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KJ Sanchez's The Radical Act of Listening: Making Documentary and Investigative Theatre argues that listening is not a preliminary step in documentary theatre but a central ethical, methodological, and dramaturgical practice. Sanchez reverses the conventional structure of scholarly monographs on documentary theatre: The first seven chapters trace her own investigative process through listening, memory, and ethics, while the latter sections broaden outward to offer an overview of the field of documentary theatre and conclude with interviews with key contemporary practitioners. Drawing on interdisciplinary research, conversations with fellow artists, and her own body of work—plays such as Too Much Water (2001)
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/196/image/coversmallThe Radical Act of Listening: Making Documentary and Investigative Theatre by KJ Sanchez (review)2026-04-06text/htmlen-USThe Radical Act of Listening: Making Documentary and Investigative Theatre by KJ Sanchez (review)2026-04-062026TWOProject MUSE®96142026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-04-06Readying the Revolution: African American Theater and Performance from Post–World War II to the Black Arts Movement by Jonathan Shandell (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987114
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In his insightful book Readying the Revolution: African American Theater and Performance from Post–World War II to the Black Arts Movement, Jonathan Shandell makes a bold and vital claim: African American theatre historiography lacks a critical focus on the "transitional period between the conclusion of World War II in the mid-1940s and the rise of the Black Arts Movement and the emergence of Black Power politics in the mid-1960s" (2). He offers a corrective to this oversight, examining theatre, performance, and expressive culture in this crucial but understudied hinge moment and emphasizing how they mobilize importance justice work.Readying the Revolution is organized into six chapters and a conclusion, with its
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/196/image/coversmallReadying the Revolution: African American Theater and Performance from Post–World War II to the Black Arts Movement by Jonathan Shandell (review)2026-04-06text/htmlen-USReadying the Revolution: African American Theater and Performance from Post–World War II to the Black Arts Movement by Jonathan Shandell (review)2026-04-062026TWOProject MUSE®95232026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-04-06Milestones in Queer us Theatre ed. by Dennis Sloan (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987115
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Milestones in Queer US Theatre arrives as part of Routledge's Milestones Series, a collection of accessible, field-shaping textbooks designed to introduce foundational social, cultural, political, and artistic developments to students and early-career scholars. Like companion volumes on feminist performance, musical theatre, and staging contemporary genders and sexualities, this collection edited by Dennis Sloan balances historical survey with critical intervention. Its central achievement is not the construction of a single argument but rather the mapping of queer US theatre as an evolving, contested, and methodologically plural field.As a volume, Milestones in Queer US Theatre privileges stylistic breadth over
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/196/image/coversmallMilestones in Queer us Theatre ed. by Dennis Sloan (review)2026-04-06text/htmlen-USMilestones in Queer us Theatre ed. by Dennis Sloan (review)2026-04-062026TWOProject MUSE®94742026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-04-06Mother Courage and Her Children by Bertolt Brecht (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987116
<p></p>
On a blustery spring day in Horden, a town in northern England (population 6,807), Brecht's canonical Mother Courage and Her Children opened in a modest decommissioned church built in 1910. My prior experience seeing Mother Courage was the National Theatre's 2009 production starring Fiona Shaw. That production was soaring and brash, with the most memorable moment being Shaw's firing a live flamethrower onstage. The Horden production, jointly presented by South Africa's Isango Ensemble and the newly formed Horden-based Ensemble '84, had an opposite effect of Shaw's tour de force; this Mother Courage was intimate, an exemplar of rough theatre and possibly the most truly Brechtian performance of the play to grace the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/196/image/coversmallMother Courage and Her Children by Bertolt Brecht (review)2026-04-06text/htmlen-USMother Courage and Her Children by Bertolt Brecht (review)2026-04-062026TWOProject MUSE®104732026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-04-06