This issue of Theatre Survey marks the end of an era for the journal—the last time it will arrive in your hands in this particular guise. With our next issue, readers will notice a very different look, a new cover design and a revamped interior. This “makeover” is part of our ongoing efforts to keep TS fresh and modern, pleasant to look at and hold and easy to read, whether you're viewing the articles digitally or in print. Of course, some of you may wonder about the necessity of changing the journal's appearance, particularly if you access it digitally. As former Theatre Survey Editor Nicholas Ridout mused in this section, “Although print subscribers may be reading the journal as a whole issue, most readers of the articles published here, and to which this text might be supposed to serve as some kind of introduction, will be reading the articles individually, in PDF form, downloaded from the academic content portal produced and maintained for Cambridge University Press” (58.3 [September 2017]: 1). So does it matter what shape the journal takes as a material object as long as the content is legible? I happen to believe it does. As a historian of performance and material culture, I believe the journal's materiality is an important part of its identity—how it looks, the weight and feel of the paper, the gloss or matte of the cover, as well as the particular images, fonts, and other design elements that go into the production of the material object; these elements can distinguish the journal from its peers, can hail new readers and welcome old ones. I look forward to sharing the new look with you in 2020.
For now, let's turn to what is indisputably the most important feature of any journal—the contributions of its authors. The issue opens with La Donna Forsgren's lively and incisive “The Wiz Redux; or, Why Queer Black Feminist Spectatorship and Politically Engaged Popular Entertainment Continue to Matter,” which addresses “the curious silence of queer black feminist spectatorship” within theatre and performance studies. Forsgren offers a powerful reading of three iterations of The Wiz—the original Broadway production (1975), the film adaptation (1978), and the most recent televised version, The Wiz Live! (2015)—successfully balancing close analysis of casting and staging choices with consideration of the broader social and political context that informed each production. The article makes a powerful case for the continued need to take popular entertainment seriously and to acknowledge the transgressive pleasures that musicals like The Wiz can offer to queer black female spectators.
Reginald Jackson likewise advances a strong feminist argument in “Frayed Fabrications: Feminine Mobility, Surrogate Bodies, and Robe Usage in Noh Drama.” Through his meticulous reading of a series of medieval noh plays, Jackson demonstrates how the robes worn by the male actors “serve as transformative vehicles that can trigger metaphysical transcendence even as they encumber motion, binding the actor's body.” Jackson is interested in fabrication as it relates both to the male actors’ performance of femininity and to their use of costuming to signify their character's gender and emotional state. Drawing on gender theory as well as recent developments in critical costume studies and mobility studies, he challenges assumptions about “the relative immobility ascribed to European feudal society,” arguing instead that an “investment in contested feminine mobilities” is a central trope within noh drama, one that can be traced by attending to female characters’ interactions with robes as costumes and surrogate bodies.
The remaining articles in the issue present three distinct views of mid-twentieth-century theatre culture. In “Kurt Hirschfeld and the Visionary Internationalism of the Schauspielhaus Zürich,” Wendy Arons chronicles the important work of the literary dramaturg Kurt Hirschfeld, who advanced a strong internationalist vision for the Zürich-based ensemble both during and after World War II. Throughout his career, Hirschfeld maintained a firm commitment to translating and producing plays from around the world, including England, France, Spain, Italy, Russia, and the United States. In so doing, Arons suggests, Hirschfeld helped shape the twentieth-century dramatic canon by, for example, introducing European audiences to the plays of T. S. Eliot, Thornton Wilder, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, and many others. In shining a spotlight on Hirschfeld, Arons also reminds readers of the vital role that dramaturgs play in the processes of canonization.
Claire Warden turns to another influential yet largely unrecognized figure in the internationalization of modern drama, the Russian translator Elisaveta Fen. In “‘A Glimpse of Another Russia’: Elisaveta Fen's Chekhov Translations,” Warden demonstrates that while Fen was instrumental in making the plays of Anton Chekhov accessible to British audiences in the post–World War II era, her contributions to the Anglicization of Chekhov have rarely been acknowledged. Warden attributes this snub to Fen's gender as well as to the tendency within theatre and performance studies to overlook or undervalue the critical labor of translators. As Arons does for Hirschfeld, Warden brings Fen forward from the margins of theatre history and shows how her translations continues to inform British understandings of Chekhov, onstage and off.
In the final article, “‘An Object Lesson in Americanism’: Performing Cultural Amnesia in Mosinee's Communist Invasion,” Elizabeth A. Osborne introduces readers to a very different act of translation—a mock communist invasion staged by the citizens of Mosinee, Wisconsin, on May Day 1950. Situating the event within the performance genealogy of immersive simulations and participatory performances, Osborne considers what the mock invasion reveals about how the people of Mosinee thought about the cold war and their place within it. More than a way to engage the community in an assertion of nationalist pride, she argues, the pageant invited participants to imagine a future they hoped would never come, and in so doing “redefine patriotism, even as it erased May Day's previous leftist associations.” Osborne concludes with a call for theatre and performance studies scholars to recognize performance's potential to “rewrite, reinscribe, and incite cultural amnesia.” These are words to remember.
