Editorial Comment

Abstract

Editorial Comment Penny Farfan The cover of this issue, designed by Gavin Semple, suggests something of the nature of a general issue—or at least of this particular general issue of Theatre Journal—bringing to center stage certain formations within the current vista that is the field of theatre/performance studies. The issue begins with an analysis of the politics of multiculturalism as enacted through Shrek the Musical and particularly the character Donkey, and of how DreamWorks’s branding of the musical corresponded with the branding of Barack Obama during the recent US presidential-election campaign. Beyond the timeliness of this essay’s intervention into current political and cultural discourses on race, the sheer number of authors of this essay—twelve in total: Jessica Brater, Jessica Del Vecchio, Andrew Friedman, Bethany Holmstrom, Eero Laine, Donald Levit, Hillary Miller, David Savran, Carly Griffin Smith, Kenn Watt, Catherine Young, and Peter Zazzali—points toward a cluster of interrelated concerns in the contemporary academy: how to integrate teaching and research, how to engage students in the research process, how to professionalize doctoral students. The work of the “Freak Flags” team may be seen as exemplary in relation to these concerns: the essay is the outcome of a collective research exercise for Savran’s spring 2009 doctoral seminar in the “Sociology of Theatre” at The Graduate Center/CUNY that was subsequently expanded, developed, and reworked as the integrated essay published in this issue. In addition to sharing some of the themes introduced in the opening essay—the politics of popular culture, the representation of race—the following four articles suggest something of the interdisciplinarity of the field of “theatre studies” as it is currently understood. Dance scholar Anthea Kraut approaches the complex intersection of copyright, intellectual property, and nontextualized performance from the perspective of black vernacular dancers in the early twentieth century in the United States, tracing out some of the extra-legal ways through which dance artists asserted ownership of their “signature moves,” even as they recognized that the development of their art form depended on a collective practice of “stealing steps” from fellow dance artists. In an analysis of the Tony Award–winning musical Passing Strange, Brandon Woolf articulates, by way of W. E. B. Du Bois’s notion of “double consciousness” and Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic, the complex relation between racial and national identity that Stew’s insistently hybrid work proposes. Art historian Rosemary Barrow’s study of the use of “classical” tropes borrowed from “high art” Royal Academy painting in British toga plays and tableaux vivants during the late-Victorian and Edwardian eras finds that such classicizing popular performances were, in certain respects, democratizing, bringing “previously unmistakable markers of exclusivity into a much wider arena.” At the same time, however, they reinforced conservative gender stereotypes that, like both the classical tradition and academic painting, were increasingly being challenged with the emergence of modernism. Tzachi Zamir’s philosophical exploration of the “existential amplification” afforded by acting and watching acting leads back to Plato’s concerns about the role of theatre in the Republic and about the possibility that the performer might in some way be infected by the role being performed. Ultimately, Zamir concludes with Plato that “‘role-playing’ does not magically safeguard one’s identity,” because acting must be understood “not as mere pretense, but as a form of becoming.” The final essay of this issue, Elizabeth Cullingford’s up-to-the-minute “Evil, Sin, or Doubt,” relates quite literally to today’s headlines: as I write this editorial on Easter Sunday 2010, Pope Benedict XVI’s moral authority in the face of the Catholic Church’s decades-long cover-up of clerical sexual abuse is under intense scrutiny, despite Cardinal Angelo [End Page vii] Sodano’s dismissal of speculations about the pope’s possible complicity as “chiacchiericcio”—idle chatter or gossip—during the Easter mass in St. Peter’s Square. In her analysis of the representation of clerical sexual abuse across three different genres, Cullingford finds that an imagined drama, John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt (2004), allows for an ambiguity that is better suited to the complexities of the issue than more black-and-white treatments of...