Introduction

Abstract

Introduction Lisa Jackson-Schebetta (bio) It is September 2021. As I write this and compile the final files for this volume, I am in the midst of directing the play Somewhere: A Primer for the End of Days by Marisela Treviño Orta, writing an article about the hippo population and folklore in Colombia, teaching and mentoring theatre students who have spent the last three semesters either fully or partially remote, and running my department as chair. I am tending to family and loved ones. As my networks, communities, and loved ones continue our long-term work of making our practices and processes and pedagogy anti-racist, we and the world continue to confront COVID-19. My upstate New York sky is no longer limned with the smoke of West Coast wildfires, but that memory, and its attendant worry for my West Coast loved ones, remains etched in my mind. I am working on being in and with this new, next moment. In this field of ours, this field broadly conceptualized as theatre, we are extraordinarily complex beings. For many of us, our lives are bound to and by "praxis." I was fortunate to be a student of the late Dr. Herbert Blau. He would fiercely remind us, in class, as in his writing: "theatre is theory is theatre is theory." Indeed. What is directing, but trying out an idea through the body to see if it works? That upstage to downstage cross, that cross-fade timing, that stage image. As we interpret a playscript into three (or, perhaps four) dimensions, with multiple collaborators across disciplines and expertise, we are both "making theatre" and theorizing. The process is resonant with writing history. I was a director before I was a scholar. When I am directing, I am returned anew to the relationships between theory and practice in the broad field of theatre. I am intrigued anew by the bridges that praxis builds, or might yet build, between the disciplines of our discipline and beyond. Orta's play is about, in some sense, the end of the world … or, rather, the end of a world, and the ways [End Page 1] that endings are beginnings. Somewhere begins with the premise that all the insects have disappeared. As Orta writes, "things went very wrong, very fast," and humans find themselves in a dead and dying world.1 Cassandra, an entomologist, holds in her lab the last remaining monarch caterpillars. As the play begins, the caterpillars have pupated into chrysalis stage. The monarchs eclose and Cassandra sets them free. Motivated by visions, Cassandra and her brother follow the monarchs across the country. She takes flight. Meanwhile, a clutch of four other humans are digging in, holed up on a truffle farm, working to (re)create family, love, home. The six humans collide, and the earth continues to take what it needs. Some are sacrificed. Some make offerings. All transform. This beautiful and terrible play had its premiere at Temple University in February 2019. The play's depiction of isolation and fear, families rent apart, and a damaged planet feels all too prescient, all too present. As I took the script up in earnest this summer, I was also completing final copyedits on volume 40 (2021) of Theatre History Studies. You will recall I invited authors to contribute to the general editor's introduction in that issue. Chrystyna Dail wrote so very movingly about the moment of late summer 2020. In her section of the editor's introduction, she shaped her reflections around some of the work of Pema Chödrön. Chrystyna quoted Chödrön's assertion, "Becoming intimate with the queasy feeling of being in the middle of nowhere makes our hearts more tender. … By not knowing, not hoping to know, and not acting like we know what's happening, we begin to access our inner strength."2 This quote is a touchstone for the play I am directing. But it also has become a steward for me, as a scholar and an editor—my newer identities. Director and teacher and actor, that is, were my first identities, and they remain my most long-standing. As such, my older identities sit...