Some stages are better left untouched if all they bring us is grief and sorrow, while others—those sites of hope where we gather to share the joys of being human—may welcome us in comfort. When I look back at the last two years and begin to make sense of what we are starting to leave behind, I can’t help but feel a deep sense of loss over all those stages of joy and surprise, of laughter and tears invoked by the wonders of performance—of the plays, songs, and applause that could have brought us together, but never did. And yet, all those postponements and cancellations, all those closures and abandoned projects that for many months left us starving in isolation, are slowly being replaced by new stages of hope that will once again treat us with the pleasures of the theatrical experience. As I write these lines, in the early summer of 2022, the announcements of theater festivals and academic conferences, the promise of a new season with exciting premieres along with the reopening of new and old spaces are reasons to believe that hope is both the preferred stage of recovery and the name of the stage to visit.It is at this juncture that Comedia Performance begins a new chapter. The journal will continue featuring essays on many of the topics and questions that drove its first two decades of existence. These include, but are not limited to, early-modern and contemporary stagings of the comedia, translations for the stage, and textual issues pertaining to theater production, as well as historical phenomena such as audience composition, theater design, costuming, blocking, and spectator response. At the same time, it will expand its range of interests to theoretical questions related to performance in its dialogue with both the past and the present, including relations between drama and current sociopolitical issues. In this regard, the journal will welcome pieces on emerging concerns embedded in or related to representation, such as those participating in current debates on race, gender, and sexuality. Until recently, the staging of Golden Age theater had a very uniform take when it came to producing views on these concerns, at times simplifying what in its origin was a nuanced understanding of the problem. Fortunately, this new century has witnessed an increasing number of thought-provoking and, at times, controversial takes on classic themes in the staging of genres such as those belonging to teatro breve. I hope that new approaches to these questions, ranging from theoretical reflections to performance reviews, will find in Comedia Performance a desirable outlet.I have wanted to start this new adventure with continuity and change by putting together a cluster of articles penned by some of the most established and exciting scholars of early-modern Spanish drama. This issue gathers pieces by A. Robert Lauer, Rogelio Miñana, Beata Baczyńska, and Javier Irigoyen García, closing with a theoretical reflection on metatheatre by Ignacio Arellano. A new section titled “In the First Person” showcases the work of Rachel Kaufman, Marta Albalá Pelegrín, Rhonda Sharrah and Laura Muñoz, and Sergio Adillo, who in their essays tackle some key questions on translation, recasting, and the impact of the pandemic in keeping theater alive. The sections titled “Performance Reviews” and “Interviews” capture some of the most significant events of the past year in the international stage and the academic world. Each issue will include a chronicle of a theater festival—we begin this year with the 16th edition of Festival Olmedo Clásico. Finally, we gradually abandon the practice of reviewing critical editions in the section “Book Reviews,” which from now on will be strictly concerned with studies on performance.This new epoch undoubtedly benefits from the achievements of my predecessor and founding editor, Barbara Mujica, whose vision and determination are responsible for the prestige and visibility the journal acquired in a relatively short period of time. I am also grateful to the members of the former Editorial Board and to those who are now an essential part of the new one, specifically my long-time friends and collaborators Esther Fernández (Interview Editor), Julio Vélez Sainz (Performance Review Editor), and Duncan Wheeler (Book Review Editor). This new and expanded team brings together a group of internationally renowned experts on some of the phenomena that the journal will be featuring: contemporary staging in European and Latin American contexts; institutional initiatives carried out in the Americas and Europe to promote early-modern Spanish drama; the role of Golden Age theater in formats such as television and film; the presence of the “classics” in geographies as varied as Asia and Eastern Europe, then and now; digital humanities and innovative textual methodologies to identify new texts and authors; and the presence of comedia in the classroom. I am grateful to all of its members for their willingness to assist and advise me in this new era of Comedia Performance, and to my colleagues in the Association for Hispanic Classical Theater for trusting me at its helm.