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The founding artistic director of Double Edge Theatre talks about the process of moving from Boston to rural Western Massachusetts where the theatre has become part of the Ashfield community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author pays tribute to theater personalities who have made an impact on his life. He met Paul Gray, a theatre director and filmmaker, who became his teacher and fellow student telling him that the theater director was the author of what happened onstage. He cites meeting and working with African American director John O'Neal for a project and remembers him for his commitment to black freedom and culture. Another is theatre designer Jerry Rojo whom he worked with as a visiting scholar.

The author reflects on humanity's endgame. Topics discussed include Samuel Beckett's parable from his one-act play "Endgame," the May 2019 report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, and the threat posed by human activities on climate change.

This section presents an interview with actress and professor Anna Deavere Smith. Topics discussed include the documentary theatrical project "The Pipeline Project," her research efforts and objectives for developing the social justice theatrical initiative "Notes From the Field," and her insights on charter schools, teaching at New York University, and her role in the television (TV) series "Nurse Jackie."

The article reviews a September 2016 performance of the theatrical production "Caught" at the LaMama theater in New York City, produced by the group Play Company, directed by Lee Sunday Evans, starring Louis Ozawa Changchien, Leslie Fray, and Jennifer Lim.

The article presents views of the author who raises questions on the U.S. president Donald Trump's ability to govern. He cites Trump's decisions including sabotaging of NATO and pulling out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact and signed an order to build that wall on the Mexican border and stopping people from six Muslim countries from entering the US as his rationale for his view.

Two obituaries for theater director and actor Judith Malina known for her work with the theatre collective and company the Living Theatre are presented.

The article reviews the theatrical production "Becoming--Corpus," choreographed by Ximena Garnica and visual artist Shige Moriya, performed at Brooklyn Academy of Music in Brooklyn, New York City in September 2013.

An interview with Marianne Weems, James Gibbs, and Moe Angelos of the New York City-based theatre company The Builders Association is provided. They describe the origins of the company and their involvement in various productions including "Master Builder," "Alladeen," and "Supervision." Other topics include the technical aspects of producing shows and the possibility of making a living in theater.

In this article several artists, performers and writers are asked to consider their own work, or another artist's work, within the context of what is new. Those surveyed are encouraged to contemplate what makes a performance, a play, a piece of music or a piece of art contemporary. Responses are provided from individuals including the designer and visual artist Robert Wilson, the author Charles Bernstein and the art historian Roselee Goldberg.

The article condemns the Syracuse University Press (SUP) for its withdrawal of the book "Lahore with Love: Growing Up With Girlfriends, Pakistani-Style," by Fawzia Afzal-Khan. It states that the book received positive reviews, but was withdrawn by SUP when threatened by a lawsuit from Madeeha Gauhar, whom the book's main character, Madina, is supposedly based on. Though the suit was withdrawn, SUP refused to produce reprints, and the reasons are explored through recorded communications between those involved. Afzal-Khan decided to self-publish, instead. INSETS: From "Review, Fawzia Afzal-Khan's Lahore with Love";The Booklist;From "Love Is a Battlefield".

The author discusses the agreement of scholar André Lepecki to restage the 1959 exhibit "18 Happenings in 6 Parts" of artist Allan Kaprow. The decision of Lepecki is reportedly influenced by the consent of Kaprow to the project, in addition to his desire to explore a sense of first encounter with the works of the artist. In the restaging of the exhibit, Lepecki has two issues to address regarding the original presentation which include Kaprow's presentation of his works in an empty loft in New York City and only close associates viewed it. Compared to other restagings, the author says that the Kaprow exhibit is not popular.

This article presents a critical response to the publication of "Theory for Performance Studies" by Philip Auslander, in 2007 by the publishing company Routledge. The author asserts that the work is primarily plagiarized from William E. Deal's and Timothy K. Beal's book "Theory for Religious Studies," published in 2004. Further discussion is given regarding the handling of the texts by Routledge and the author accuses Routledge of intellectual dishonesty. INSET: William E. Deal and Timothy K. Beal Answer Richard Schechner's Qs.

This article presents the author's reflections on the work and influence of the Polish dramatic theorist and director Jerzy Grotowski. The continued strong influence of Grotowski's theories on 20th and 21st century avant-garde theater is emphasized. The development and changes of Grotowski-like theater after his death in 1999 is also discussed, commenting on the larger philosophy of his work rather than the specifics of his technique or writings.

This article presents the author's reflections on the structure of U.S. society since World War II, highlighting its perpetual state of war and the amount of resources devoted to that purpose. The large amount of financial resources dedicated to warfare in U.S. policy is analyzed. The dramatic elements and performance analysis of propaganda and public image are explored. It is suggested that the political projections of being at peace and at war simultaneously are contradictory and wrong. INSETS: From "President Dwight D. Eisenhower's Farewell Address to the;Nation" 17 January 1961;Planning Ahead with Adolf Hitler.

This article presents views from several theater critics about performance studies and its effects on everyday life. Most of them agree that the varieties of performance studies developed by scholars and artists shape the performing arts field curving interests and methods in the field. One critic says that performance studies is not imperialist, but it can be. It can expand and touch cultural issues, issues of standards and the society and that the whole concept of the term imperialist depends on the perception of the students.

This article presents a narrative of the author's experience of working for The Drama Review (TDR) as editor. The author begins by offering an account how he landed as TDR editor. According to him, his editorship of TDR work was partly formed by his education at Cornell, Johns Hopkins, Iowa, and Tulane. The author then proceeds to describe what kind of journal he made TDR into. He also relates his decision to quit as TDR editor in 1969 and then return after several years.

This article relates the author's experiences in visiting Shanghai, China, Taipei, Taiwan, and Hong Kong with particular interest to performance studies or theater studies in these societies. In addition, the author attempts to establish cultural and political relations between the three states with Beijing, China's cultural and imperial capital. There are significant differences in the three cities I worked in. But the one hand, many fingers metaphor captured for me the fact that whatever local life has to offer in terms of opportunities and limitations, free speech and censorship, artistic expression and innovation, and even shopping, life is always-already inflected by the question: what does, or might, Beijing think? When all is said and done, what excited me most about my trip was the sense that performance studies works and is important in China and to many of the Chinese artists, intellectuals, and activists I met. The Chinese appreciate both the academic and everyday uses of performance studies. There is no need to convince them of the difference between performance studies and theater studies. They know that performances take place everywhere--that is, artists, scholars, and students were all supportive of the idea that performance is everywhere; that it is not only an object of study but a way of getting hold of experience, of learning about the world as it is emerging and changing.

Discusses about the history and development of social theater. Social theatre's relationship to aesthetic theatre; Social aspects of aesthetic theatre or the aesthetic aspects of social theatre: Differences of purpose, audiences, venues, and production values; Dominance of the aesthetic theatre from the last decades of the 19th century through to the 1970s; Rise of approaches developed over the previous century; Emergence of many different kinds of theatres, including social theatre; Definition of social theatre; Diversity of locations; Importance of theory that pertains to the particular locations where the projects happen in social theatre.

This article presents an analysis of three closely related solo performances by artists from the Hispanic Caribbean island scene. You Don't Look Like, by Puerto Rican Javier Cardona, is a choreographed score of movements and situations, a framework within which the artist indicts the racist, classist, and sexist prejudices of the colonized Puerto Rican society. In You Don't Look Like, words are kept to a minimum. The actor divides himself into the numerous stereotypes that are applied to blacks within a society that is eager to whiten itself. In Pargo, los pecados permitidos or Pargo, the Permissible Sins, the Dominican artist Waddys Jáquez links the narrative performativity of a group therapy session with the spectacle of a seedy cabaret to create the pathetic and scathingly humorous session of the Patronato de Recuperacio' n Global Organizado or the Organized Global Recovery Foundation. In Blanche Dubois, Cuban Marianela Boán works with the main character of Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire, for whom she confesses a long-standing fascination. Blanche DuBois can be understood as a woman from the middle class, refined and worldly, who let herself be swept up in the transformations of the Cuban Revolution.

Reviews the theater "Strakstuk," written and directed by Sjoerd Wagenaar.

Presents a letter to the editor in response to an article about the production of Heiner Müller's "Germania 3."

Pays tribute to Joseph Chaikin, a theater actor and director in the U.S.

Presents an excerpt from a dialogue between theater directors Robert Wilson and Fred Newman on the significance of theater in politics and therapy.

The monologist narrates the story of his life—or one version of it—in an encounter with his longtime friend and former director, Richard Schechner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents an interview with author and theatrical director Richard Foreman. Number of plays directed by Foreman; Information on the drama 'Maria del Bosco'; Reaction about the September 11, 2001 attacks in the U.S.; Effect of the event on his work.

Discusses the Indian concept of rasaesthetics in theater performance. Comparison between the books 'Poetics,' by Aristotle and 'Natyasastra,' by Bharat-muni; Concept of the rasa and the theory of rasaesthetics; Information on etymologies and distanced knowing; Pleasures of rasic performance; Perception on rasic performance.

Urges the building of bridges between post-structuralism and mainstream performance. Evolution of post-structuralism; Influence of post-structuralism on performance studies; Suggestions for performing artists.

Interviews Julie Taymor, a personality in the performing arts industry, who worked in the production of `The Lion King.' Significance of getting connected with the body on the dialogue that takes place between the mask carrier and the mask itself; Opinion on acting out emotions; Explanation on the essence of ideograph; Details on her journey in Indonesia.

Features director Jerzy Grotowski and his importance in theater. Grotowski as one of the four great directors of Western 20th-century theater; Concept he uses in the Grotowski Workcenter in Pontedera, Italy; His impact on the theater industry.

Interviews Augusto Boal, a city councillor in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, about the Legislative Theatre and the Chamber in the Streets. Role of the City Council; Social issues handled by the council; Discussion on the arts.

Interviews Peter Minshall, a masquerader in Trinidad. How he started his job; What made him want to go to the United Kingdom; His views on the most impressive things about the Carnival. INSETS: River;A family tradition, by Pat Ganase.

Pays tribute to late Michael Kirby, playwright, actor, director, visual artist, teacher, editor and scholar. Personal and academic background; Contribution to the field of arts; Life philosophy; Works on performance theory and aesthetics.

Presents a transcript of e-mail discussions on performance. Includes announcement of a World Wide Web site for the Centre of Theatre Practice; Expression of gratitude to the organizers of the e-mail conference; Observations on the future of e-mail conferencing.

Opinion. Proposes a new mission for theater departments of colleges and universities. Three levels or tracks in theater departments; Teaching for popular entertainment such as television soaps, talk shows and commercials; Performance studies or amateur art theater.

Comments on the findings presented in the 1993 Theater Facts. Regional theater as the American theater; Financial difficulties; Analysis of regional theaters; Experimental theater.

Interviews actor Ron Vawter. Joining the Performance group; Political beliefs; Views on gay rights; Impressions of Roy Cohn; Importance of Jack Smith's ashes; Intensity of performance; Views on Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome; Biographical detail.

Opinion. Questions the National Endowment for the Arts' (NEA) decision to cancel appropriation to The Drama Review (TDR). Services to the Field Division; Letter to Marene Alston, Program Specialist; Response; Factual errors; Nostalgic perspective; Criticism against previous panels regarding censorship; Discussion on profession.

Presents an excerpt from a speech given by the author at the keynote panel of the August 1992 Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) national conference in Atlanta. The idea of a multicultural American society; The intercultural subject; Argument that the cultural crisis signaled by multiculturalism and interculturalism can be creatively met by radically changing theater departments' goals and curricula; More.

The article presents an interview with theatrical director Augusto Boal about the state of political theater. When asked about the Brazilian situation in 1989, Boal mentions the impact of President Jose Sarney's election victory on the forum theatre and other school programs implemented in Rio de Janeiro. He emphasizes the essence of political theater. He explains the concept of the cultural animators, along with its origin.

This article presents information on the establishment of the American National Theater and Academy (ANTA) in 1935. That charter was not acted on in the 1930s, the depression having preempted moves toward an ordinary kind of national theater. But in 1940, Edith J.R. Isaacs announces that National theatre is in the air. Isaacs argued that the U.S. was so large, with so many diverse cultures, that the standards and the purposes of an American National Theatre will differ radically from those of smaller and more homogeneous nations. Also in 1940, Brooks Atkinson, writing in the New York Times, pumped for a national theatre. Noting that nearly every other country in the Western world has a national theatre. Atkinson listed American plays he would put in the repertory and argued for encouraging the kind of folk theme theatre exemplified by The Lost Colony developed by Eugene O'Neill. Hence, the debate stopped for World War II. But in October 1945 Robert Porterfield and Robert Breen proposed what became the model for the regional in the country. They boldly called for decentralizing the professional theatre. As well, they wanted a U.S. Public Theatre Foundation using the ANTA charter to pay for the program.

This article focuses on the impact of colonization on the use of wayang method in theater produced and performed in Java, Indonesia. Javanese shadow theater, wayang kulit, presents nothing short of a world view, the physical and spiritual, the sacred and profane. It is also able to incorporate and propagate Hindu and then Islamic values and themes. The purity of the normative expectation to the shadow theater is a strategy not only to drain the politics from wayang, to freeze it in authenticity and nonmodernity, but to conceal the Dutch colonial presence and the Javanese responses to it. The Dutch intervention into wayang prevented dalangs from depicting the struggle of the Javanese against the Dutch and from representing the many changes taking place in the Dutch East Indies during the long colonial epoch. The Dutch stripped wayang of its politics and historicity, its ability to relate contemporary events, and tried to invent it in a form emphasizing its basis in ancient myths, its timeless aesthetics and its mystical functions. In tying wayang to the supine courts the Dutch wanted to keep such a strong weapon out of the hands of the emergent revolutionary nationalists.

This article argues against the emphasis given by the U.S. government to its military activities in 1990. The present entrenchment of the U.S. is a result of the effort of its government to rescue its economy from the Great Depression of the 1930s. The New Deal developed by former President Franklin Delano Roosevelt failed to produce the kind of economic recovery hoped for because the $103 billion resulting in full recovery from the Great Depression. Since that time the nation have grown wealthy and stayed wealthy by maintaining a military-based economy. Yet, its citizens calls for a real change of priorities, but doesn't clarify exactly what priorities are already in place, rather suggesting through criticism and advocacy that two opposing sets of priorities are available to its people, mainly, conservation and exploitation. Thus, this shared priority is the source of the economic successes attained by the country as well as the cause of the self-created ecological disasters in the nation.

This article presents a discussion of Chinese directors and playwrights that took place at the Beijing headquarters of the Chinese Theatre Association in January 1988. In January and February 1988 Richard Schecbner traveled in China observing performances and meeting artists and scholars. He spent five days in Beijing before going to Shanghai and then on to various places in Guizhou, Guangdong, and Fujian provinces. In China, he was hosted by the Chinese Theatre Association, the Shanghai Drama Institute, the Shanghai Peoples Art Theatre, and a number of organizations in Guizhou, Guang-dong, and Fujian. The Asian Cultural Council paid for Schecbner's trip. In May and June 1989 Schechner, funded by the United States Information Agency (USIA), returned to China to direct Sun Huizhu's Miangri Jiuyao Chushan (Tomorrow He'll Be Out of the Mountains) (in Chinese) at the Shanghai People's Art Theatre .The China Youth Art Theatre was founded in 1949, the year the People's Republic of China came into existence. It is one of the biggest spoken drama theatres in China (the others include the Central Experimental Spoken Drama Theatre in Beijing, the Beijing People's Art Theatre, and the Shanghai People's Art Theatre). The Youth Art Theatre is well known for its innovative productions, although for quite some time it has not been a youth theatre.

This article interviews Anna Halprin on her dancing career in theatres. The theatre world is more inclusive than dance in Western culture. Particularly when it comes to using movement connected to feelings. The role of the witness is to understand the dance and support the dancers who have undertaken the challenge of performing. Spectators often come with their own personal aesthetics. They sit back and watch and judge to see if what is done lives up to their preconceived notion of a particular, very culture-bound idea of a certain kind of art. There is a very basic principle that underlies traditional rituals. The people enact in the ritual what they want to have happen in their lives. This principle bas been around for a lot longer than our more recent notions of how to make things happen. If a collection of communities dances together in a planetary dance all around the world--releasing their fear of war and enacting their desire for peace--and then if all these people agree to take specific actions for peace in their own lives and in the life of their community, this is pretty likely to help and not likely to be harmful.

This article presents a response to an editorial by Bonnie Marranca and Gautam Dasgupta entitled Critical Positions, in relation to a proposal for the development of performance studies or the broad spectrum approach. Marxism is a way of understanding historical process, but not the only way. As the new historians, feminists, deconstructionists, and others have compellingly argued, all forms of analysis are inscribed with definite, historically locatable value systems or, if you will, ideologies; and all develop within specific historical contexts. So if the goal of PAJ's editors is to remove the study of theatre from the arena of ideology, forget it. The metaphors speak. Are hard sciences and the humanities (erect, respectable, male) preferred over the soft sciences? Are academic disciplines contained within various realms (royal domains of elitist privilege)? Who gets included in the history of civilizations and who excluded--are the ancient Greeks in and the modern Apaches out, for example? What are values as distinct from value-free positions? Surely there are values (also called truths), temporary and slippery, always in need of debate and redefinition, hedged by contexts and historical processes. But talk of value-free . . . what is more desirous of being value-free than the art for art's sake ideology whose proponents want to rid themselves of the social, political, and economic circumstances circumscribing the production of art?

Discusses gender, race, age and body type as a criteria for playing a character or dancing role. American theatre and dance have two kinds of performing arts in regard to gender, race, age and body type. In mainstream theatres and dance companies a nominal open casting policy is enunciated, but practice actually conforms to prevailing social values. The second kind of casting and company-making is particularist. Groups are formed according to gender or race of social class or disability or ideology or age. Casting against gender, race, body type and age has a history in European and American theatre and dance. The American theatre reserves the majority of its best roles for white males, not because these are the best performers available but because the characters to be presented are white males. As for dance, youthful, slim body types prevail, and most companies are predominantly white. In terms of performance, the naturalistic bias trains spectators to desire a neat fit of who the performer is to what the performer represents. In Western theatre there are no codes or performative behavior distinctly separable from the codes of behavior prevalent in everyday life. Actor training is under the aegis of the Stanislavski system which is based on the construction of a psychology of everyday life. However in Western classical and modern dance there are codes of performative behavior as rigorous as any found in Asia. The nature/nurture or biologically determined/socially constructed debate is a classically irresolvable conflict. Categories of race, gender, body type and age are in fact social categories constructed from the interpretations of biological data, but the biological data themselves are always changing in terms of social constructions and interpretations.

Presents an interview with theatrical directors Federico Tiezzi, Giorgio Barberio Corsetti, and Mario Martone regarding their transition from a dramaturgy of space to a dramaturgy of performance. Information on the theater company Magazzini Produzioni; Drama styles presented in the work of the company; Views on the practice of allowing playwrights to write texts for specific actors; Role of space in theatrical productions.

This section presents discussions on the article Ways of Speaking, Loci of Cognition. Johannes Birringer has forgotten the subtleties of deconstructions theory and what they may have meant in the early 1980s yet he is truly puzzled by the editorial's confession that the locus of the tenured professor's writings is without consequences and in any case to other positions would be available if indeed a form of critical or political action put the position at risk. According to him the problem is hardly language itself once one begins to look at political issues and takes a stand and at the impotence and lack of action that TDR or any other elitist forum might infer from its theoretical/discursive positions. Richard Schechner said, to avoid political involvement is to support the stronger side, while understanding the process of political action entirely inculcates cynicism. Everyone's lives are affected by foreign policy, arms control, allocating spending on scientific research, social programs, the arts and the humanities. Politicians arrange how government deploys itself, and the government arranges the work of the secret police, the torturers, the intelligence community and the rest of a modern state's apparatus.

This section presents an interview with performance artist Karen Finley. According to Finley, bookers are canceling The Constant State of Desire and her other pieces because people are scared of her information. They really don't know what she's going to do, they don't like her dealing with sexual issues or political issues. At Scream, a club in Los Angeles, California, they canceled her a week before she was to go on. Lydia Lunch performed there, and they were scared of what she was going to do. They told her the vice squad threatened to take their license if they put on someone like her. Finley says that she stirs people to be responsible for what's going on in their own personal lives, in their one-to-one relationships, interweaving this into the whole society's corruption.