While the broader work of dramaturgy centers around the query, “Why this play now?” Jane Barnette’s absorbing study on the witch as a theatrical type, Witch Fulfillment: Adaptation Dramaturgy and Casting the Witch for Stage and Screen, asks: “Why do we wish for this Witch now?” (4). Barnette explores how witches onstage and onscreen often function as “a site of wishing” (4), revealing patriarchal desires (such as possession) as well as the rejection thereof (such as the unraveling of hetero-femininity) (101). In other words, the performance of witches on the stage and screen works to “fulfill (or purposefully reject) patriarchal wishes” (180). One of the more interesting aspects of the book is the author’s positionality. First, she discloses in the introduction that she is “a polytheist as well as a witch,” reminding readers that witches are real human beings, “not figments of imagination or inhuman monsters” (10–11). While she is careful to honor the historical particularities of different minorities, her position as part of an oft-maligned and historically persecuted group roots her in social justice discourses like critical race theory and queer theory.

Another interesting element of Barnette’s positionality is the myriad roles she plays in productions of her case studies. For instance, when discussing Susan Gayle Todd’s play Sycorax, she offers her perspective as the director of the University of Kansas’s 2019 production. When discussing Jen Silverman’s play Witch, she is able to offer both the perspective of an audience member at Writer’s Theatre in 2018, and of a production dramaturg at Theatreworks Colorado Springs in 2021. For older plays such as Macbeth (both the Shakespeare and the William Davenant version) or Euripides’ Medea, she also provides the thorough sociopolitical context of a historian. These shifts in position and point of view speak to the multifaceted nature of dramaturgy.

The book is structured based on the ritual of “call[ing] circle” that some witches use to “establish a boundary between the mundane and the numinous (or magical)” (15). Each chapter is aligned with a direction (East, South, West, North), with each direction associated with an element (Wind, Fire, Water, Earth), a Tarot suit (Swords, Wands, Cups, Pentacles), and a theme (flight, desire, prophecy, possession). Because of all these interconnected elements, the book’s true shape is something more intricate and reticulated than a circle, akin to a spider’s web. Barnette weaves together ideas like time and shadows using connections that may initially seem tenuous, but that gain strength in their accumulation.

The first chapter, “Cast,” is a highlight for its crucial contribution to the ongoing academic and industrywide conversations about identity-conscious casting. Barnette reveals that the many uses of the verb “to cast” (a spell, a play, a fishing line, etc.) are united by their common goal of pushing something forth in an effort of transformation. She draws on speech-act theory and critical race theory with accessible, clearly written prose that make it an ideal text to introduce undergraduate students to these ideas. Through analysis of media spectacles like the Johnny Depp–Amber Heard trials, the debate surrounding a Black actress originating the role of Hermione in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, and the casting of Glinda and Elphaba in the stage musical Wicked, this chapter illustrates how casting transforms both the dramaturgical meaning of the performance and, potentially, “contemporary cultural understandings of identity markers” (27).

The second chapter, “Flight,” examines the witches of Oz, including the The Wizard of Oz novel, its 1939 film adaptation, and several different stagings of The Wiz. This chapter highlights Barnette’s facility with historical texts, as she brings in sources from the twelfth and thirteenth century that shed light on how the myth of a witch’s flight emerged out of anxiety surrounding women and sexual autonomy. She also situates L. Frank Baum within the Theosophy movement, pointing out how his work removed the connection between witches and Satan worship and introduced the possibility of a “Good Witch.”

The next two chapters, “Desire” and “Prophecy,” examine a source text and its multiple adaptations, focusing on how they animate the “spirit of the source” (69). First, Barnette analyzes the “unrestrained longing” (68) at the core of the Medea myth, tracing the witch’s desire for accountability, belonging, and unbecoming through adaptations like Cherrie Moraga’s The Hungry Woman and Luis Alfaro’s Mojada. Then, she examines the Weird Sisters at the heart of Macbeth, analyzing not only two productions of the William Shakespeare version (one horror-themed, another on Zoom), but also a production of the William Davenant version and an adaptation by Erica Schmidt. These chapters best highlight Barnette’s investment in “adapturgy” (2), her term for the art of adaptation dramaturgy, and would serve well as instructional texts for modeling adaptation.

In the fifth chapter, “Possession,” Barnette focuses on two witches that are most famously cast by white men: Sycorax from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and Tituba, from Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. However, Barnette challenges this possession by centering feminist interventions that emphasize Sycorax and Tituba’s perspectives, such as Susan Gayle Todd’s Sycorax, Esiaba Irobi’s Sycorax, Winsome Pinnock’s Tituba, and Obeah Opera by Nicole Brooks.

The sixth chapter, “Time,” questions the “line between magic and madness” (137) through performance analysis of Jen Silverman’s Witch (loosely adapted from the 1621 play The Witch of Edmonton) and Joanna Baillie’s Witchcraft. The book’s final chapter, “Shapes,” features a deep analysis of the Marvel television program WandaVision, showing the moral complexity of its protagonist on her journey of “unbecoming” Wanda and re-forming herself as the Scarlet Witch. A brief coda, “Glamour,” concludes the piece, spotlighting drag performer Jinkx Monsoon and the ways that she (and drag performance writ large) achieves transformation in the eye of the beholder.

Ultimately, the book makes a strong case for both witchcraft and theatre as forms of transformation. It also anticipates an influx of “witchy” media that has already begun. Barnette asserts that “Arguably, it is precisely because life seems unsteady and uncertain today that stories featuring Witches have resurfaced with such intensity” (143). As uncertainty grows and more witches arrive on both stage and screen, this enchanting book will continue to provide scholars a useful framework for understanding the wishes they reveal.