Editor's Note

Abstract

Editor's Note Eero Laine As 2020 tips over into 2021 we have a lot to consider about the state of theatre and performance. In light of recent news and political transitions, it seems that the new year might bring the possibility of attending theatre in an actual theatre. Something resembling life from a year ago could be back on the horizon, even as it is difficult to say when we might again be packed into a crowded theatre sitting elbow to elbow, knees to the back of seats. In any case, the barometer of theatre will tell us a lot about how we're all doing. And the pandemic is just one part of the equation. Since the last issue of JDTC was published, there have been many calls to reconsider what any return to theatre practice might bring without simply turning back the clock. Indeed, one must think through such matters alongside the pronounced disparities heightened and highlighted by COVID-19, global movements in support of Black Lives Matter and against police brutality and murder, shifts in household and other labor responsibilities, expectations, and requirements, pressing questions about finances and budgets, to say nothing of the ways that various technologies have impacted and altered daily routines and ways of interacting and working. There is no business-as-usual right now in theatre, so it might be time to seriously reconsider what theatre might be in the future. In this issue we find theatre that seeks to alter the world and the ways we experience it, methods of considering artists' lives in various, sometimes distressed, relations to their work, as well as critical examinations of the incursions of the stage into the world and vice versa. For many of the authors in this issue, violence—both staged and systemic—is a theoretical portal into and through these larger questions. Together, these authors are grappling with difficult, often unanswerable questions, and the articles in this issue exemplify the kind of outward-looking critical and theoretical reading that JDTC affords. Reading across the work here, we see the importance of social, political, economic, and personal contexts. Indeed, we see that those categories are intricately linked and enmeshed, and that they coincide in plots, characters, staging decisions, and the communities that engage and create these theatrical objects of study. It wasn't planned this way, but every article in this issue closely considers a particular playwright or production. The lead article, Gwendolyn Alker's "Fornesian Animality: María Irene Fornés's Challenge to a Politics of Identity," revisits the work of Fornés, troubling assumptions and working against polite readings of complex and uneasy work. Isaiah Matthew Wooden reminds us of the deep importance of theatrical production, not only for our discipline of theatre, but for broader matters of public and political discourse. In "How Bigger Was Born Anew: Adaptation, Refiguration, and Double Consciousness in Nambi E. Kelley's Native Son,'" Wooden illustrates the ways that theatre can engage and stage work from other artistic forms, generating new understandings and intervening in longstanding theoretical debates. Danielle Drees's article "Burnout Dramaturgy: Revaluing Sleep [End Page 7] in Caryl Churchill's Sleepless Plays" introduces a form of social dramaturgy that considers how and when and why characters sleep (or don't). With attention to labor and the circumstances of burnout, Drees theorizes a particularly pertinent condition of contemporary life both on and off the stage. Andrew Kimbrough's "Disability, Sentiment, and the Capabilities Approach: Amy Herzog's Mary Jane" offers important considerations of disability and caregiving in and through theatre. The article rereads Herzog's Mary Jane, inverting many of the assumptions in reviews and audience response from a focus on empathy for personal suffering to a more systemic critique. Ryan Poll's "Lynn Nottage's Theatre of Genocide: Ruined, Rape, and Afropessimism," thinks dialectically through global antiblackness and the cruelties of capitalism. Poll opens conversations about the ways that atrocity is represented, staged, and otherwise made visible, amongst totalizing violences that emerge historically and in the present. Peter Yang's "Postmodern Violent Conditions in Loher's Innocence" confronts the critical response to Dea Loher's work and the ways that it...