Project MUSE®: Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/571
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism.daily12026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 22 (2007) through current issueLatest Articles: Journal of Dramatic Theory and CriticismTWOProject MUSE®Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism2165-26860888-3203Latest articles in Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Editor’s Note
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982172
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The articles in this Fall 2025 issue of the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism technically do not cohere around a central theme; no special section connects them. The essays included in this issue, however, have their eyes on living differently. Two of the pieces—Teemu Paavolainen’s and Nick Ruiz Orvis’s—have utopia in their titles, and the other three articles ask us to confront difference, to sit with being uncomfortable, or—as audience members do in the piece Megan Lewis describes in her article—get up and move.At my institution in Florida, I am thinking constantly about how to navigate the dangers and pitfalls presented to me by the governments to whom I am beholden and who manage the school where I work
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/571/image/coversmallEditor’s Note2026-02-04text/htmlen-USEditor’s Note2026-02-042026TWOProject MUSE®66312026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-02-04The Decolonial Proscenium: Nora Shumba Chipaumire’s Nehanda and Nhaka Practice
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982173
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I am watching a rehearsal performance of Zimbabwean artist Nora Shumba Chipaumire’s1 ongoing project—an opera called Nehanda—described as an “immersive, participatory and durational spectacle where participants can collectively perform and investigate the process of law-making and its crucial role in the European colonial project,”2 at the Quick Center for the Arts in Fairfield, Connecticut.3 Shumba offers me earplugs before the rehearsal begins: “We get Africa loud,” she says, chuckling mischievously. Over the next five hours of the performance, I understand what she means. Shumba and her performers sonically saturate the space, annexing the traditional proscenium with her Shona culture’s spirit and cosmology.4
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/571/image/coversmallThe Decolonial Proscenium: Nora Shumba Chipaumire’s Nehanda and Nhaka Practice2026-02-04text/htmlen-USThe Decolonial Proscenium: Nora Shumba Chipaumire’s Nehanda and Nhaka Practice2026-02-042026TWOProject MUSE®1065222026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-02-04Queer Utopian Time and Gameful Theatre
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982174
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As interactive performances multiply in the twenty-first century, game design practices and paradigms have begun to deeply inform the creation of theatre in the United States and the broader Anglosphere. This should come as no surprise, given the steady march of what Eric Zimmerman declared in 2013 the “ludic century,” in which “information has been put at play” and we “live in a world of systems.”1 From corporate-branded extensions of gaming properties like Off-Broadway’s Dungeons & Dragons: The Twenty-Sided Tavern (2024) to more experimental performances drawing on a long heritage that includes Fluxus and the Situationist International, what I term gameful theatre is moving toward the mainstream of theatrical
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/571/image/coversmallQueer Utopian Time and Gameful Theatre2026-02-04text/htmlen-USQueer Utopian Time and Gameful Theatre2026-02-042026TWOProject MUSE®957642026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-02-04Kafka’s Immanent Utopias: The Cage, the Axe, and Prague School Theatre Theory
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982175
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*Gregor Samsa wakes up to find himself a bug, and his first thought is whether or not he will get in trouble for being late to his job, which he hates but can not quit or his family will starve*High school teachers: “this is a commentary on how life in general is absurd.”Existential Comics Facebook page, October 1, 20191On the centennial of his death, the Prague author Franz Kafka (1883–1924) is most likely recalled as an introverted existentialist or a dark poet of the human condition, with much to offer in anxiety, guilt, and despair, but little in hope, humor, or politics. The comic blogger cited in the epigraph has a somewhat provocative explanation for this: “If the same books were written in the USSR they’d
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/571/image/coversmallKafka’s Immanent Utopias: The Cage, the Axe, and Prague School Theatre Theory2026-02-04text/htmlen-USKafka’s Immanent Utopias: The Cage, the Axe, and Prague School Theatre Theory2026-02-042026TWOProject MUSE®863232026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-02-04Time in Another Culture and in the Theatre: Phenomenologies of Difference and Similarity
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982176
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Time can continuously surprise us in experience. I often think about time as a scholar, practitioner, teacher, and human, and encountered one of time’s many challenges looking for a rental after migrating to Dublin when competitive apartment viewings were offered in nonnegotiable sporadic time slots. Alice Rayner writes in Ghosts: Death’s Double and the Phenomena of Theatre, that “to show up on time is to agree to witness the time of the other in representation with the possibility of seeing the representation of our own investments in the time of the other.”1 Evident from Rayner’s words, it is hard to ignore the concept of time in the theatre. Evident from my experience as someone living in a different culture, it
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/571/image/coversmallTime in Another Culture and in the Theatre: Phenomenologies of Difference and Similarity2026-02-04text/htmlen-USTime in Another Culture and in the Theatre: Phenomenologies of Difference and Similarity2026-02-042026TWOProject MUSE®713732026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-02-04Strange Attractors, Bullet Time, and Nonlinear Narratives: A Chaos-Infused Postdramatic Primer
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982177
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A myth is not a story read from left to right, from beginning to end, but a thing held in full view the whole time.As much as I enjoy academic essays that lay out a clear direction, provide specific examples, and wrap everything up with a nice, neat conclusion, I find that subjects like postmodernism and the postdramatic with a focus on fragmentation, juxtaposition, and nonlinearity seem to resist this approach. The bulk of this essay is dedicated to gathering material for this inquiry, and, as the title suggests, there will be a number of what appear to be digressions into subjects like nonlinearity, phase space, and strange attractors. I’ve gravitated toward using chaos theory as a framework because it’s designed
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/571/image/coversmallStrange Attractors, Bullet Time, and Nonlinear Narratives: A Chaos-Infused Postdramatic Primer2026-02-04text/htmlen-USStrange Attractors, Bullet Time, and Nonlinear Narratives: A Chaos-Infused Postdramatic Primer2026-02-042026TWOProject MUSE®922612026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-02-04Staging Witchcraft Before the Law: Skepticism, Performance as Proof, and Law as Magic in Early Modern Witch Trials by Julie Stone Peters (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982178
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Julie Stone Peters’s monograph Staging Witchcraft Before the Law is a concise contribution to literature on performance and law that considers how performers in the courtroom staged proof in the witch trials of 1580–1620 in France and England. While previous studies of witch trials have emphasized performances that took place outside of the courtroom—like spells, curses, or magical activities—Peters attends to the procedural performance of the courtroom. Peters’s previous book, Law as Performance (2022), is a study of the relationship between performance and the law in ancient, medieval, and early modern Europe. In it, she argues that although “the law was produced in part through performance,” it was also defined
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/571/image/coversmallStaging Witchcraft Before the Law: Skepticism, Performance as Proof, and Law as Magic in Early Modern Witch Trials by Julie Stone Peters (review)2026-02-04text/htmlen-USStaging Witchcraft Before the Law: Skepticism, Performance as Proof, and Law as Magic in Early Modern Witch Trials by Julie Stone Peters (review)2026-02-042026TWOProject MUSE®87982026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-02-04Staging Interspaces in Contemporary British Theatre: Environment and Fluidity by Vicky Angelaki (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982179
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Vicky Angelaki has long explored the dramatic potential of overlooked or transitional spaces that reveal dynamic social, environmental, and aesthetic tensions. Her 2017 monograph, Social and Political Theatre in 21st-Century Britain: Staging Crisis, interrogated the lingering intersectional impacts of the 2008 global financial crisis and various forms of marginalisation they created. Her second book, Theatre & Environment (2019), elucidated contemporary theatre’s attempts to challenge insidious socially constructed binaries that precipitated the planetary ecological crisis, suggesting that ecological truths reside in the gaps between black-and-white certainties. Her latest monograph advances this overriding project
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/571/image/coversmallStaging Interspaces in Contemporary British Theatre: Environment and Fluidity by Vicky Angelaki (review)2026-02-04text/htmlen-USStaging Interspaces in Contemporary British Theatre: Environment and Fluidity by Vicky Angelaki (review)2026-02-042026TWOProject MUSE®87772026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-02-04Performing Corporate Bodies: Multinational Theatre in Global India by Sarah Saddler (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982180
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Sarah Saddler’s Performing Corporate Bodies is an exceptional debut, a first monograph that makes the world of management training both intellectually engaging and disciplinarily integral to theatre studies. The book upends conventional ways that performance scholars frame their work in relation to neoliberalism, offering a transnational perspective that builds from a decade-long ethnographic investigation into the use of theatre workshops in corporate training (primarily in India but also South Africa and the United Arab Emirates). Refusing the reflexive impulse in our field to deny the significance of theatre deployed in corporate settings—or otherwise lament applied performance’s cooptation toward capitalist
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/571/image/coversmallPerforming Corporate Bodies: Multinational Theatre in Global India by Sarah Saddler (review)2026-02-04text/htmlen-USPerforming Corporate Bodies: Multinational Theatre in Global India by Sarah Saddler (review)2026-02-042026TWOProject MUSE®92492026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-02-04Transcultural Theater by Günther Heeg (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982181
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Günther Heeg’s Transcultural Theater articulates a critical theoretical perspective that moves beyond the essentialist premises of interculturalism; it envisions theatre not as a site for juxtaposing pre-existing cultural traditions, but as a space of ongoing transformation, epistemic disturbance, and relational becoming. Against the view of theatre as a discrete genre, Heeg anchors it as a dynamic and historically situated mode of inquiry—what he calls a form of “border traffic”—that continuously unsettles fixed oppositions between theory and practice, the familiar and the unfamiliar, scholarship and art.The book unfolds through three interrelated strands of thought that reflect this border crossing: “The Idea of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/571/image/coversmallTranscultural Theater by Günther Heeg (review)2026-02-04text/htmlen-USTranscultural Theater by Günther Heeg (review)2026-02-042026TWOProject MUSE®96842026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-02-04Reflective Affective Dramaturgies of Participatory Theatre: Larping Audiences into Performance by Sarah Hoover (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982182
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Live action role-play (LARP), used as both noun and verb, is an overtly theatrical form of play in which participants improvise a fictitious scenario. All that distinguishes a well-produced LARP from a theatrical production is the latter’s orientation toward an external audience. Despite this, scholars of role-playing and performance have, until recently, been infrequent fellow travelers. Sarah Hoover’s Reflective Affective Dramaturgies of Participatory Theatre seeks to describe and theorize an emergent performance form that bridges some of the theoretical and cultural gaps between the two fields. It’s a timely intervention and an engaging reflection on several years of practice-as-research undertaken during her
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/571/image/coversmallReflective Affective Dramaturgies of Participatory Theatre: Larping Audiences into Performance by Sarah Hoover (review)2026-02-04text/htmlen-USReflective Affective Dramaturgies of Participatory Theatre: Larping Audiences into Performance by Sarah Hoover (review)2026-02-042026TWOProject MUSE®92712026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-02-04Books Received
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/982183
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Book reviews should be between 800 and 1,000 words for single book reviews (1,500 words for double book reviews) and conform to the current Chicago Manual of Style. Reviews should include title and publication information, current price of the book in both cloth and paper (if applicable), and length in pages, inclusive of front matter and appendices. Reviews should speak to the book’s strengths and/or weaknesses, its contribution to the field in relation to similar/competing volumes (if applicable), and the particular audiences to whom the book would be most helpful. Reviews should end with the name of the reviewer, followed by institutional affiliation. See the list of books received below.Individuals interested
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-14T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/571/image/coversmallBooks Received2026-02-04text/htmlen-USBooks Received2026-02-042026TWOProject MUSE®939722026-05-14T00:00:00-05:002026-02-04