Editorial Comment

Abstract

Editorial Comment Joanne Tompkins This issue begins and ends with “the end.” The first essay’s ending is the untimely death of playwright Federico García Lorca in 1936, whereas the final essay tackles the staging of the ultimate end, the Apocalypse. In each, there is a sense of a haunting, whether of the past or, in the final essay, the future. This semblance of haunting links all the essays, each returning to something that has appeared before. At one level, this is not surprising, given that theatre as an art form continues to rehearse and perform versions of what has come before; but its articulation in this issue is remarkable, as each essay enacts a “return” that reminds us of the critical and cyclical endurance of the form. In “Memory, Silence, and Democracy in Spain: Federico García Lorca, the Spanish Civil War, and the Law of Historical Memory,” Maria Delgado explores the ways in which Lorca’s death continues to influence the politics of memory in Spain. She traces the story of both Lorca’s physical remains and his artistic legacy through General Francisco Franco’s lengthy dictatorship and its aftermath to explore how the national imaginary continues to pursue a willingness to forget. She argues that Lorca was considered to be “non-grievable” (to use Judith Butler’s terminology) during the Franco regime because to mourn his death would compromise the regime’s narrative of the past. When Lorca’s literary capital did come to be exploited, it was carefully curated and expurgated, such that he continued to be “contained” in a circumscribed form of sanctioned “Spain.” Then, neither his political preferences nor his homosexuality was permitted to be discussed in any way. Spain’s return to democracy following Franco’s death in 1975 saw not a reconciliation with/of the past, but a further articulation of this politics of forgetting. This pacto del olvido (the pact of forgetting) continues to haunt Lorca’s legacy. The specter of Lorca’s body—its literal presence and absence, and the cultural commodification associated with his work—calls into question Spain’s approach to the past, and even the concept of official memory itself. Like Delgado, Christin Essin also addresses the materiality of performance in her essay, “Unseen Labor and Backstage Choreographies: A Materialist Production History of A Chorus Line.” The ghosts in her materialist critique are the invisible workers who move scenery and operate lights behind the actors of long-running Broadway musicals like A Chorus Line. She pairs the production about trying to get work onstage with the actual work behind its scenes, without which there would be no performance. Yet, more than simply shining a spotlight on the work of these technicians, she charts the important transition in work practices that occurred during the lengthy run (and return) of A Chorus Line: the musical marks the shift to computerization in the industry. She interviews the electricians and technicians who worked on A Chorus Line to investigate their practices and what were then revolutionary changes in lighting management: the move from cumbersome lighting equipment (using what was known as the “piano board”) to computerized lighting boards, the precursor to contemporary electronic lighting boards. Essin’s essay charts what she calls an offstage “parallel choreography of counting rhythms in unison,” an act that needs to be as precise as [End Page ix] each dancer’s action. Combining conventional research materials with her account of the stagehands and electricians, Essin offers a thorough alternate performance text for this landmark musical. The examination of A Chorus Line from this alternative perspective leads neatly to Donatella Galella’s essay on another well-known American musical in “Redefining America, Arena Stage, and Territory Folks in a Multiracial Oklahoma!” She provides a history of Oklahoma!, in particular the mixed-race dynamics in the 1930 play by Lynn Riggs, which addresses indigenous dispossession quite differently from the more famous and celebratory 1943 Rodgers and Hammerstein vehicle. Galella interprets Molly Smith’s production of Oklahoma! at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., which deployed a multiracial approach to casting, in terms of what it sought to achieve, before exploring the further racial matters that its multiracial...