A Note from the Editor

Abstract

A Note from the Editor John Fletcher Returning to the classroom after a spring sabbatical, I realized that this fall was for me the first semester to feel post-pandemic. I met classes in the rooms I usually taught them. I gingerly reestablished some participation and attendance standards (with generous options for medical excuses, of course). Students and I interacted mostly without the distancing, universal masking, and HEPA-filter hum of years past. It feels new. Amid this newness, I've found myself struggling to talk about the former high pandemic period. I gesture vaguely to the last few years as a long, frustrating season for theatre students and teachers. We were not lethargic; emergency and innovation energized us. From the efflorescence of creative strategies for remote performance in lockdowns to the exasperated fury at assaults on Black lives and threats to democracy, the past few years kept us busy as artists, teachers, and scholars. Yet the fuels of rage and fear, potent as they are, can burn out easily. It has taken a long time for me to recover enough to feel new, to rediscover the passions that got me into theatre and the classroom in the first place. To be sure, stressors like the pandemic and rising white nationalism are not altogether gone; thus, pandemic innovation and emergency response will remain part of our collective toolkits. But we are perhaps moving past the time when these were our only options. I am refreshed, then, that this issue's offerings all in one way or another engage not just living but thriving. Each is about passion—a deep, durable yearning toward something beyond mere survival. And for the first time in years, I sense my own readiness to think about teaching, studying, and producing theatre in ways other than crisis reactions or desperate experimentation. I hope you are similarly primed to indulge in some passion. I am especially pleased to begin this issue with "Shadow Play: Visualizing Asexuality in New Queer Plays" by playwright and scholar Kari Barclay. This is the first article in Theatre Topics to engage asexuality directly. Barclay both provides a crash course in asexuality (and other identities within the asexual/aromantic spectrum) and showcases how several queer playwrights stage this identity category within the constellation of sexual and gender identities. Barclay adroitly dispatches any misconception that lives not centering on sexual desire means lives missing out on passion. The plays they survey in the article (including their own) deepen and expand possibilities for non-normative sexualities, playing in the shadows of more conventional identities' visibility politics. Such shadow play resonates with what Michel Foucault imagined in 1981 when he identified the most exciting element of homosexuality not as a new normative category for sexual expression but as "a historic occasion to reopen affective and relational virtualities" more broadly (138). That is, homosexuality (in Foucault's context) and asexuality (in ours) offer us the chance to reimagine possibilities for modes of life and friendship we haven't yet thought possible. Barclay and their cohorts help us start such a reimagining. Surely such a project is something to be passionate about. I look forward to seeing more work about asexuality in this and other theatre/performance studies journals. In "Contemplating the Afterlife," Bryan M. Vandevender addresses a more familiar source of passion: his students' love of musical theatre. He usefully names and grapples with a common pedagogical conundrum, that students' passionate fandom for musical theatre can sometimes hinder their willingness to engage such texts critically. Vandevender then elaborates a useful strategy for helping students deepen their appreciation for musical theatre by incorporating into his lessons the lens of [End Page 1] revival. Studying musicals as revivals, Vandevender demonstrates, can invite students into a higher critical awareness. They learn to see musicals not merely as static works (the singular cast albums or iconic stage versions they know best) but as iterative events that emerge, reemerge, and respond to shifting contexts. Such awareness also helps them to be more responsible producers, prompting them to pose vital historiographic questions about their own decisions of which musicals to produce and how or why to produce them. Vandevender helpfully provides several sets...