The popularity and scholarly interest in historical reenactment practices over the last two decades has changed the methods and insights that reenactors, teachers, scholars, playwrights, actors, ethnographers, dramaturges and tourist managers bring to their shared interest in accessing the past through embodied performances in the present moment. This far-reaching interest in the study of “performance” more generally has simultaneously changed the critical landscape of theatre studies and the variety of performance practices it addresses that take place outside traditionally circumscribed “theatrical” locations. In this broad ranging collection of new essays, edited by Scott Magelssen and Rhona Justice-Malloy, readers have the opportunity to peer into the eclectic world of performance across America – from battle reenactments in Texas, to Mormon spiritual pilgrimages that track the history of the religion across its geographical contours from New York to Salt Lake City, to renaissance festivals and museum theatre, to adventure tourism, to theatre productions that take place in university settings and question the very limits of historiographical certainty.

While the essays cover diverse territory (both formally and geographically), key concepts and themes emerge across the volume: authenticity and the “real,” theatricality and antitheatrical prejudice, and writing historiography with the archive and accessing and embodying historiography through participation in a performed repertoire. Owing to the editors’ choice to collate essays from scholars who are also performance practitioners (actors, dramaturges, directors, playwrights, professional reenactors and costumed interpreters), not only is each of the chapters clear and engaging at the level of content, but also the collection serves a far greater pedagogical agenda. The essays model diverse methodologies from which to tackle questions of how to access and test out historiographical problems and issues through performance. Indeed, these essays illuminate historiographical puzzles that cannot be understood without the benefit of methods that foreground embodied, practical experience. Collectively, the volume makes clear that the premise of reenactment practices – understood quite broadly – is not so much about getting history “right” (whatever that would mean), but about what these performative historical “returns” tell us about the contemporary moment in which they are enacted.

To give a brief summary of the diversity and the strength of the volume, in Richard L. Poole's essay he discusses his process of writing a play for the Lewis and Clark Biennial in his home town of Sioux City, Iowa and reflects on both the historiographical and performative challenges that emerged with this auspicious commission. Aili McGill also uses her experience as the organizer of the newly formed museum theatre at Conner Prairie History Museum in Fishers, Indiana to discuss the challenges of doing “theatre” in a world that is entirely performative but whose staff think of themselves not as actors, but as interpreters and reenactors. This well-written, sharp and incredibly rigorous analysis is one of the standout essays in the volume. It is a case study and model for how practitioners can take their own experience and make it applicable to a range of practices in related fields.

In Patricia Ybarra's fascinating essay, she discusses her experience directing a production of And Jesus Moonwalks the Mississippi at Brown University, during the time in which the university's Slavery and Justice Committee was established to consider Brown's culpability and role in the Atlantic slave trade. It is a theoretically rich account of how stage and social life are in a dialectical relationship. Most intriguingly, she focusses on “the relationship between historiography, performance, and rage” (114) to discuss how the anger and ambivalence among the actors during the rehearsal process served as a useful antidote to the idea of keeping history in the “past” and insisting on closure when it is neither historiographically possible nor ethically valuable.

Kimberly Karol-Evans's piece, which examines the experience of having the cast and crew of the television series Dinner: Impossible at the Maryland Renaissance Festival, makes for delightful reading. In placing different kinds of “reality” experience alongside each other, it also provides a good way to consider how reenactment is adapted and redeployed both in its “live” incarnation and in the televisual medium. Finally, Scott Magelssen's essay – where he reflects on his participation in an adventure-tourism event in Mexico where he simulated the experience of being an illegal Mexican immigrant crossing the US–Mexican border – is one of the most provocative examples of “enacting history” provided in the volume. It nicely encapsulates issues of authenticity, the commodification of cultural experience and the very ambivalence that so productively captures what is at the heart of reenactment practices in the contemporary world. They are, indeed, complicated.