Editorial Comment Harry J. Elam Starting with an essay that considers unpublished and unproduced plays and ending with a study of one of the longest running recent Broadway musicals, the articles contained within this issue delve into matters of the known and the unknown, race and gender, nation and identity, sexuality and psychosis. Despite this variety, each article articulates a concern for the body and how the body represents and is represented in theatrical time and space. These articles interrogate bodies marked by race and gender, ravaged by hunger, and informed by national origin. Branislav Jakovljevic, in "Daniil Kharms, the Hunger Artist: Toward Eden, and the Other Way Around," examines Kharms's unpublished plays written before his death by willed starvation in Leningrad, 1942. The notion of hunger referenced in the title has both real and symbolic import for Jakovljevic, who analyzes these plays in relation to Kharms's own mind and emaciated body. Jakovljevic's article is not simply a psychological exegesis, but rather a careful critical analysis that exposes how Kharms's plays negotiate between text, body, and language. He closely reads the plays, pointing out their intertextuality, teasing out their physicality, and revealing the ways in which they, as he puts it, "actualize an idea." Focusing particularly on Kharms's obsessive dramatic explorations of the Biblical myth of the Fall, Jakovljevic posits that Kharms's own body functions as the primary site for the staging of these unperformed plays. In "Bodies, Race, and Performance in Derek Walcott's A Branch of the Blue Nile," Joyce MacDonald explores how Walcott, a Nobel Prize-winning author, uses the racialized and gendered body to signify the politics of Caribbean culture in his adaptation of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra. The rarely produced A Branch of the Blue Nile chronicles the attempts of a troupe of Trinidadian actors to mount a creolized version of Antony and Cleopatra. As MacDonald points out, Walcott's text exposes the racialized dynamics of producing Shakespeare in the Caribbean. The actors, visibly marked by their bodies—not quite black and not quite white—must struggle with questions of cultural legitimacy and racial authenticity. Through this representation of the actors' story, MacDonald suggests that the play challenges the tacit racial assumptions inherent in universalized notions of actor training. Yet, as MacDonald argues, Walcott's adapted Antony and Cleopatra becomes the occasion for more than an exposition simply of the racial dynamics in the production process. Rather, she contends, the play employs Shakespeare's text to propose a less conventional postcolonial narrative. Phillipa Kelly, in "Performing Australian Identity: Gendering King Lear," turns to another colonial site, Australia, and its contested historical and cultural relationship with the legacy of Shakespeare. Kelly documents how Lear has functioned as a significant cultural and educational tool employed to reinforce notions of Britishness within the Australian subject. She then examines key contemporary Australian productions of Lear—Gale Edwards's 1988 State Theatre of South Australia production, Gary Dooley's 2003 Genesian Theatre production, and three recent productions that featured crossgender casting, including a 2002 Queen Leah presented in New Zealand—in order to delineate how these stagings can subvert the British cultural heritage or reinforce questions of Australian identity. By looking particularly at how these productions and their directors structure the roles of the female characters, Kelly examines not only the issue of a national body, but also its intersections with matters of gender in Lear. Interrogating these performances as texts, Kelly considers what constitutes a feminist staging of Lear, and explores how in these productions Australians lay claim to Shakespeare. Su, Hongjun's essay, "Reinserting Woman into Contemporary Chinese National Identity: A Comparative Reading of Three 'New Immigrant' Plays from 1990s Shanghai," also explores questions of gender and national identity. Su turns to China in the age of globalization and analyzes three works staged by the Shanghai Dramatic Arts Center during the 1990s: The Lady Who Stayed Behind (Liushounushi, 1991), Wife from America [End Page vii] (Meiguo laide qizi, 1993), and Student Wife (Peidufuren, 1995), all of which address the new Chinese immigration and its impact on women. Reading these works against the backdrop of contemporary Chinese gender politics, Su shows how...