The documentary reminders of Edward Gordon Craig's influence on the world of theatre are in museums and libraries all over the world, partly because he was such a prolific writer, but also because his genius and the personality that went with it were impossible to ignore. Almost every piece of paper that contains his work, whether in published form or manuscript, feels like a vital clue to the mystery of the man whose opinions about the role of theatre and art in society helped shape those worlds. Craig felt obliged by his own sense of importance to record his thoughts on paper, and his friends, family, correspondents, readers, critics, and reviewers have helped preserve his written legacy by saving those records, more of which become available to researchers every year.

The Galli-Bibiena Family, whose members were summoned, one or another, sometimes several together, to the principal centers of Baroque culture, created fantastically grand scenic decorations for the lavish courts of Europe and built magnificant theatres for both prince and populace. Although charm of artistic beauty and power of phantasmal scenic creation were found in varying degrees among all of this mighty line of scenographers, their grandiose conception was epitomized in the illusionistic immensity of Giuseppe Galli-Bibiena. The Baroque period was the supreme age of illusion in the sphere of theatrical scene design and decoration, and Giuseppe was its reigning genius.

Three auspicious premieres attested to an international “sixties” presence in the Argentinean capital. The Sala Planeta produced Jean-Claude Van Itallie's America Hurrah! under the direction of Carlos Gandolfo, an influential leader of the 1950s Buenos Aires independent theatre movement. Premiering as well at the Planeta was Joe Orton's Entertaining Mr. Sloan, directed by Alberto Ure, soon to travel to the United States to study the work of the Open Theatre, the Performance Group, and the Theatre of the Ridiculous. Shortly after his return to Buenos Aires, Ure would become known for his own psychodramatic performance techniques. The cast of Entertaining Mr. Sloan included Eduardo Pavlovsky, an actor who was rapidly establishing himself as one of Buenos Aires's important “absurdist” playwrights. A third production launched the Equipo Teatro Payró; their staging of Megan Terry's Viet Rock would run for three years and 409 performances. The production's director and Payró cofounder, Jaime Kogan, soon became one of Buenos Aires's most respected independent theatre directors, and its principal actors went on to successful independent and commercial theatre, television, and film careers. The legendary Argentine rock band Manal performed the production's music.

Since theatre emerged as an academic discipline, scholars and artists have argued over how to define it. These debates have had various motivations: the desire to capture the full dimensions of their object of study, the search for appropriate methods of analysis, and the fight for intellectual ground in academic power struggles. The increasingly popular term “performance,” which arose out of dissatisfaction with the narrow aesthetic and cultural limits that the concept of “theatre” seems to impose, has been likewise much debated (as demonstrated in Marvin Carlson's 1996 survey).

Editor's Note: For this issue of Critical Stages, Ari Osterweis and Barbara Browning consider the multiple publics at play in the work of artist-performer Narcissister.

In the fall or winter of 1661, Chapoton's tragédie à machines, La Descente d'Orphée aux Enfers, was produced at the Phoenix or Cockpit in Drury Lane by a visiting French Company. The performance is recorded in a rare pamphlet, The Description of the Great Machines of the Descent of Orpheus into Hell. Presented by the French Commedians at the Cockpit in Drury-lane, a copy of which survives in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. This pamphlet consists of a resumé in both English and French of Chapoton's work. Its purpose was to allow an English audience to follow the opera, which was performed in French.

Communism was not always hated and feared by everyone in Eastern Europe. At a certain moment in recent post-war history, a group of influential intellectuals in Poland—now a place where even ex-communist politicians are careful to swear their allegiance to free markets—wanted to reform but still keep a Communist system. That moment was the Polish October, named for the month in 1956 when Wladyslaw Gomulka, a man who believed in a “Polish road to socialism,” took power as First Secretary of the Communist Party. Just as the Czechs in 1968 believed in “socialism with a human face,” the Poles in 1956 believed that Communism could be, in the jargon of their day, “revised” to better fit people's needs. The Polish October was the result of a complex network of events beginning with Stalin's death in 1953, coming to a climax with workers' strikes in June, 1956 in Poznan, and ending in Khrushchev's acquiescence to Gomulka's election in October, 1956. During this period, one of the important contributors to the intellectual ferment that led to the October, the theatre group Studencki Theatr Satyryków or STS, established a cultural niche for alternative theatre that mocked the Communist system and led to one of the most political, vital alternative theatre movements in the world.

Rather than negotiate first with protesting and then striking students, the administration of the University of Puerto Rico (UPR) shut down its flagship Río Piedras Campus from 21 April to 6 July 2010. Regular academic activity on the campus came to a standstill, and as a consequence the semester programmed to end in mid-May could not be finished until mid-August. Yet in those seventy-plus days of closure (cierre) a poignantly expressive culture of resistance took shape out of the continuous tension among the striking students who occupied the campus, the remote administration that refused to respond to their issues, the heavily armed state police officers who were stationed just outside the campus's gates, and the crowds of professors, nonteaching personnel, parents, and student supporters who gathered daily to urge the administration to open a dialogue with the students. Along with independent radio broadcasts, the skillful use of cyberspace, celebrity concerts, and other strategies to capture public and media attention, the protest movement also fostered the spectacle of mass rallies and marches that featured acts of performance and theatre. If the university's theatres were dark, the streets that surround the campus became the stages for seminude, placard-carrying bodies moving serpentine through crowds; stilt-walking masked portrayals of local politicians and university administrators; large, painted-cardboard dragons and wolf heads to stare down police officers; a twenty-foot-tall puppet whose shirt front read “the university is not for sale” (“La UPR no se vende”); processions of black coffins accompanied by black-clad lloronas (mourners); and red-nosed, broom-carrying clowns decked out in tactical police gear to parade comically in front of the heavily armed and real tactical forces.

When Richard Klepac's monograph on Charles Mathews' “At Homes” appeared a few years ago, it addressed a glaring need in early nineteenth-century British theatre history. Mathews, one of the lions of the stage in his era, had been too long neglected, and existing biographies, aside from the two-volume memoir assembled by his wife, consisted of no more than a few puffing pamphlets.

This is a tale of two directors. The setting is the Republic of Cape Verde, a former Portuguese colony and a tiny archipelago nestled off the coast of Senegal in West Africa. Framing the story is Cape Verde's annual Mindelact International Theatre Festival, which since 1997 has invited Lusophone theatre artists from three continents to perform a wide array of theatre genres on a mainstage program alongside Cape Verdean troupes. João Branco, a Portuguese director who moved to the islands in the early 1990s, is the artistic director of both the Mindelact Festival and the veteran Cape Verdean theatre troupe GTCCPM (Grupo de Teatro do Centro Cultural Português do Mindelo/Theatre Group of the Mindelo Portuguese Cultural Center). For Mindelact 2003, GTCCPM performed an abridged version of King Lear rendered in Cape Verdean Crioulo, a mix of Portuguese and several West African languages. Beyond bolstering Branco's cherished goal of creolizing Shakespeare's plays by transporting them to Cape Verde's Afro-European cultural milieu, Rei Lear worked in concert with the festival's media blitz to extol local spectators in Mindelact's host city, Mindelo, for their good taste. Two years later, Herlandson Duarte, a young Cape Verdean director and Branco's former theatre student, staged a Crioulo-language Midsummer Night's Dream at Mindelact with his new theatre company, Solaris. Duarte's production transformed Bottom's play-within-a-play into a searing critique of Mindelense audiences and the structures of authority that prop up the festival itself.

In her essay in the most recent Re: Sources column, Sharon Marcus argues for the importance of theatrical scrapbooks as historical resources and notes that, to date, they have been largely neglected. I offer the current essay as a companion piece to Marcus's in that I would like to argue for the importance of another largely neglected resource for theatre researchers: trade catalogs. Specifically, I will focus on the mail-order trade catalogs of magic supply houses that were prevalent throughout the twentieth century until Web sites took over as the primary marketing tools for these establishments. I also draw upon Christopher B. Balme's idea that historiographic rewards can be earned by paying close attention to the information contained in theatrical playbills. Balme posits that one reason playbills have been neglected is because they are considered to be further removed from a theatrical performance than visual evidence such as photographs, designs, or videos:

On 30 March 2018, protesters in the Gaza Strip engaged in a peaceful demonstration for “Land Day,” a Palestinian commemoration of the expropriation of lands for Israeli settlements in 1976. During the march, Palestinians approached the border with Israel where the Israeli army opened fire with live ammunition and tank shells, killing at least fifteen demonstrators. Dozens of others were wounded. In the weeks and months that followed, Palestinian protesters continued to protest at the Gaza border. As this issue goes to print, the International Committee of the Red Cross reports that at least 116 Palestinians have been killed in protests framed as the “Great March of Return” since 30 March 2018, and as many as thirteen thousand have been injured. This spring's events, coinciding with the seventieth anniversary of the founding of the state of Israel and the US decision to move its embassy to Jerusalem, offer yet another reminder of the violence and dispossession that for decades have characterized Palestinian life under Israeli occupation.

In the closing months of 1699, the winter of his discontent, an established London actor and occasional dramatist hit upon a plan to change his public image from comedian to tragedian; he would fashion for himself a leading tragic role in which his uncontrollable voice and ungainly figure might prove to be assets rather than liabilities; in this way he would demonstrate to himself and to the world that he was unquestionably a complete master of his art. The alteration of Shakespeare's Richard III, the effort by which Colley Cibber, dramatist, attempted to aid the career of Colley Cibber, actor, was for the adapter a decided failure; Cibber's portrayal of England's most notorious monarch was too comic to be convincing. Yet in reshaping Shakespeare's play to suit the taste of the contemporary playgoer, he unknowingly manufactured one of the greatest box-office attractions in the history of the theatre. His alteration was to be the most lasting of all the many revisions of the plays of Shakespeare and was to hold the stage in preference to the original for nearly two hundred years. Although Cibber never explicitly admitted the reasons behind his choosing the role of Richard III for his tragic bow, his motivations become clear to the reader who patiently follows his career through the intricacies of An Apology for the Life of Mr. Colley Cibber.

Edward H. Sothern and Julia Marlowe, two of the most popular Shakespearean actors in the history of the American theatre, are usually regarded as practitioners of a fading nine-nineteenth-century tradition in American acting. The judgment is essentially correct. They acted Shakespeare in the spirit of the “gentlemanly” melodrama: excluding the ugly and exalting the beautiful. Julia expressed the philosophy that guided the Sothern-Marlowe productions: “For the Land of Romance for that I was bound, and I desired those who were tired or troubled to follow.” However, the repeated reference to “natural” acting both in Sothern and Marlowe's discussions of acting as well as the judgments of certain of their contemporaries indicate that they were at least responsive to the trend toward naturalistic Shakespearean acting of the twentieth century.

To view street actions of the American colonial period as theatrical events is nothing new. As Jeffrey Richards has shown in his much-admired book of 1991, writers of the colonial period—even in towns where “official” theatre performances were strictly prohibited—preferred the metaphors of theatre over any others in describing the actions of individuals and crowds upon what these writers saw as the “world stage.”