Stages of Conflict offers the first critical anthology of Latin American theatre and performance published in the English language. The volume includes nineteen translations of plays and performance scripts from a wide range of geographical locations and historical periods. It introduces some of the most salient issues explored in Latin American theatre and performance, ranging from indigenous performance in fourteenth-century Guatemala and the feminist class-conscious theatre of Luisa Capetillo in Puerto Rico in 1913 to contemporary feminist performance in Mexico and Argentinean theatrical reactions to the national trauma of the Dirty War. The texts are accompanied by critical introductions that locate each of the works within their historical and cultural milieux. These thoroughly annotated introductions offer most valuable interpretive keys to material as varied as the sixteenth-century morality play Final Judgment, performed in Mexico as part of Franciscan efforts to convert indigenous communities to Catholicism, and Alberto Pedro Torriente's Manteca, a piece addressing Cuba's ‘special period’ of economic hardships in the 1990s. In its totality the collection makes available to the English-language reader an unprecedented sampler of a vast and relatively understudied history of theatrical and performance activity by scholars outside the region.

In their introduction to the volume Taylor and Townsend offer a brief panoramic view of Latin American theatre and performance history. Working through the key terms – Latin America, theatre and performance – they show the difficulties and potential profits of grouping together such a wide array of performance activities from a region presently comprising twenty-six nations with an equally diverse range of social and cultural history and contemporary dynamics. What results from this meticulous survey of the terms of engagement is a multivalent geographical expanse and cultural territory that requires an attentive historiography accounting for the exigencies of varied indigenous world views, encounters with European imperialism and conquest, historical migrations (forced and otherwise) from Africa and elsewhere, nation-building projects, revolutionary politics, contemporary negotiations of race/ethnicity, class, gender, and other categories central to the particularities of experience addressed by the pieces included in the collection. Introducing such an extensive collection of traditions and contexts requires an understanding of the role of theatre and performance within the larger movements of history both as vehicles of conquest, as was the case with the theatres of conversion to which many indigenous populations were subjected, and as sites of resistance that range from strategic significations within the colonial paradigm itself to more overt protest theatre and performance. Stages of Conflict centres these tensions as its organizing principle and productively presents a view of Latin American theatre and performance unmatched in the field to date.

In Contemporary Latina/o Theatre, Jon Rossini meanwhile executes careful close readings. The analysis is critically focused on the formation and negotiation of ethnicity as a process-based intersectional identity for communities of Latin American descent in the United States whose ‘shared’ culture or location within the national imaginary is generally overdetermined by governmental, media, and political generalizations of Latinas/os as a coherent and often stereotyped amalgam. Positioning theatre as a space-making practice where playwrights, directors and actors ‘wright’ ethnicity, Rossini attends to the ways theatre-makers critique and correct (right) dominant scripts of latinidad and write alternatives to these representations that are less attached to expectations of homogeneity or political correctness.

Analysing works by Miguel Piñero, Luis Valdez, José Rivera, Cherríe Moraga and others, Rossini sets out to demonstrate the myriad of ways in which Latina/o playwrights invoke and question assumptions of community. Central to his analysis are not only rhetorical strategies of the written word, but the spectatorial relations assumed by theatrical practices that challenge passive readership. The study's strength lies precisely in its devoted attention to these dynamics, which range from Piñero's construction of the performance space as a frontier space where audiences become players, to Moraga's critical inclusiveness.