A Note from the Editor

This issue of Theatre Topics is noteworthy for its diversity of authors, essays, and themes. This is my first issue as editor of the journal and, as a scholar who works constantly to bring issues of racial, gender, and cross-national diversity to the table, I am especially pleased to introduce the essays that comprise this first issue of our twenty-sixth volume.

As is becoming a welcome habit with the winter issue, we are proud to offer some selections from ATHE’s 2015 conference. The association’s incoming president, Patricia Ybarra, has graciously allowed her address from the Montreal conference to be archived with TT. While some of you may have seen this speech on ATHE’s website, publishing it here ensures that this important critique of academic labor will be available in perpetuity. We are also pleased to add Penny Farfan’s acceptance speech for ATHE’s Excellence in Editing Award and Marie Brassard’s keynote performance (with an introduction by Lionel Walsh, ATHE’s Vice President, Conference 2015) to these archival records of last summer’s live event.

Rounding out the ATHE content, and indeed forming an entire subsection of its own, we are delighted to include two roundtables from last summer’s festive celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the LGBTQ Focus Group. The first panel highlights histories of LGBTQ scholarship within theatre and performance studies through the words of notable scholars, such as David Román, Robert Schanke, Bud Coleman, Jill Dolan, Robin Bernstein, Stacy Wolf, and others; the second looks to present-day scholarship, with reflections by Brian Herrera, Sean Metzger, and Clare Croft. As a whole, this collection highlights how publishing is indeed a political act. We give thanks to LeAnn Fields for her progressive thinking around publishing queer theory (and her contribution to this section), and are pleased to participate in this ongoing conversation about gender and sexuality in our field.

Our peer-reviewed essays begin with a fascinating discussion of Native American dramaturgy by Courtney Elkin Mohler. Through a careful examination of two works by the Cherokee author Lynn Riggs—Green Grow the Lilacs (1931) and The Cherokee Night (1932)—Mohler brings Native American specificity into the ongoing discussion of casting practices in US theatre. Her analysis serves to make the reader rethink not only historical benchmarks in Native American theatre, but also the possibilities for intelligent casting of current productions of these and other plays in which Native American representations come to the fore.

Christin Essin’s smart and quirky article “Theatre History is/as/through Production Labor” follows as the second essay. Using a case study from her own teaching experience, she gives an intriguing description of a hybrid theatre history/production class in which a pageant wagon was constructed as part of the seminar’s investigation into medieval drama. Subsequent discussions of labor—both of the trade guilds that were historically invoked, as well as the students’ own experience as impromptu builders—emerge in intriguing ways.

Rich Brown and John Weise’s essay “Collaboration in Time: An Interdependent Production Process” provides useful insights into the frequently exasperating separation between the design team and the actors’ rehearsal process in college productions. An essay that truly plays to TT’s base, Brown and Weise give strategic insights into how to boost the collaborative process within a theatrical production while facing the rigid schedules and demands of educational theatre.

In very different ways Duška Radosavljević and George Rodosthenous continue this discussion of unusual collaborative processes and temporal innovation in their essay “Reversing the Process: Investigating Multidisciplinary Compositional Practices in The Fall of Icarus.” This essay follows a performance designed and directed by the authors in Leeds, England, in which the usual points of origin—book, score, and so on—were eradicated. Instead, this director/dramaturg team began with the themes of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the specificity of the company’s constituents, and a few specific images to devise a piece of musical theatre. While devised theatre is quite customary these days (and indeed will be the central focus of our next issue), this example points to...