The preview performance of Julie Bovasso’s Angelo's Wedding on 11 May 1985 imploded after an altercation between the playwright and the staff of Marshall Mason's Off-Broadway Circle Repertory. Bovasso, then almost fifty-five years old, attended the performance against the explicit wishes of the production team; the rehearsal period had been fraught. Suspecting unauthorized cuts, Bovasso took a seat in the audience, but then, midshow, confronted the backstage crew and demanded the chance to give the actors notes. The staff refused. At the start of the third act, Bovasso changed tactics: she alighted the stage and instructed the audience to leave the theatre. Members of the crew blocked her access to the actors, leading to a physical altercation, a 911 call, and, eventually, her forced eviction from the theatre.

That theatre is a place of work seems beyond debate. But what kind of workplace is it? And under what conditions does theatre conform to a capitalist production process? At first glance these questions may seem obviously, even inextricably, linked; but investigating theatre as somewhere people go to work is a far different enterprise than specifying its economic connection to capital.

Six African students enact a somber, silent dance. They stage a series of striking images at the base of South African artist Willie Bester's sculpture Sara Baartman, in the Chancellor Oppenheimer Library at the University of Cape Town (UCT). Their faces and bodies smeared with black paint, the students articulate their protest of Sara Baartman in explicitly racial terms, aligning their critiques of economic, colonial, and racial oppression under the sign of blackness.

Stories of American democracy, whether critical or congratulatory, canonical or popular, feature “the public” as their recurring protagonist. “The public” is a rhetorical fixture of political campaigns and democratic theories, opinion polls and calls to action. Its influence is formidable: the very idea scores political speech, and calls citizens into being. Yet as many scholars have argued, “the public” is a moving target, and possibly even a total fiction. Perhaps the best-known challenge in recent decades has come from literary critic and social theorist Michael Warner. “Publics” he writes in his Publics and Counterpublics, “have become an essential part of the social landscape, and yet it would tax our understanding to say exactly what they are.” If a public is difficult to describe, it is in part, Warner explains, because the idea hovers in modern imaginaries between the concrete and the abstract. “A public” can conjure at once: a bounded audience—“a crowd witnessing itself in visible space”; a more abstract “social totality” like the constituents of a nation; and a community conjured through shared texts or identities.

Most know Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–81) for his dramatic theory, specifically that which is found in his periodical the Hamburg Dramaturgy (1767–69), a collection of 101 essays that has since earned Lessing the moniker of “the first dramaturg.” Many are also familiar with Lessing's major plays, Miss Sara Sampson (1755), Minna von Barnhelm (1767), Emilia Galotti (1772), and Nathan the Wise (1779). Fewer, however, may be familiar with his acting theory and his long association with actors, an association that began in his college years and which so disturbed Lessing's father that the respectable pastor lured the wayward student home by falsely claiming that Lessing's mother was ill. During his time as a university student in Leipzig, Lessing translated plays for the troupe of Karoline Neuber (1697–1760) and socialized with the company's actors; over time he would continue to accrue significant firsthand knowledge of actors and the art of acting, not only through his frequent theatregoing but also through the coaching of his own plays. Lessing's familiarity with actors and acting informs both his performance and dramatic theory, including that which one finds in the Hamburg Dramaturgy; in Anglophone studies of Lessing's journal, however, one infrequently sees Lessing's dramatic theory placed in conversation with his acting theory, reception theory, or performance reviews. Due to the short and contentious life of the Hamburg National Theatre, the experimental theatre project to which the Hamburg Dramaturgy was ostensibly attached, historical narratives more often focus on Lessing's strained relations with the actors of the Hamburg acting company. If one views Lessing's writing about performance solely in terms of a frustrated critic's attempts to rein in “unruly” actors, however, one loses sight of how Lessing's acting theory supports his wider ideas about the form and function of theatre and about how the Hamburg Dramaturgy and the Hamburg theatre experiment might function as a force for social change.

When the Abbey Theatre installed a nightly police cordon to silence protesting playgoers during the 1907 run of Synge's The Playboy of the Western World, spectators voiced their objections in newsprint. Under pseudonyms like “A Western Girl,” “A Commonplace Person,” “A Much Interested Foreigner,” and “A Lover of Liberty,” correspondents sent letters to the Dublin Evening Telegraph, Freeman's Journal, and Dublin Evening Mail. “Vox Populi” wrote that the arrested protesters “showed an admirable public spirit, which in any other country would be highly honoured.” “Oryza” reported a conversation overheard from the stalls in which Synge had said that the audience's hissing was “quite legitimate.” After journalist and Galway MP Stephen Gwynn penned a letter supporting the Abbey, biographer D. J. O'Donoghue responded that “the vindictiveness which has been shown night after night in expelling and prosecuting people who ahve [sic], in their excitement, called out ‘It's a libel’ or ‘shame,’ or otherwise mildly protested, is a serious menace to the freedom of an audience.” He referred to the furor as a “newspaper controversy”; others called it a “newspaper war.” In a public discussion at the Abbey after the play's run, Yeats quoted from the correspondence when defending his decision to call in the police. According to playwright William Boyle, the controversy boiled down to political representation. In a letter to the Freeman's Journal, he argued that protesters had not reacted “by staying away,” as some supporters had suggested they should, “because the ‘Abbey’ is a subsidised theatre, independent of the money taken at the door. Therefore … the public had no remedy, but the one resorted to.” Private subsidy had muffled the democratic shuffling of playgoers’ pocketbooks; forced to shut their mouths inside the theatre, playgoers opened up to the newspapers that circulated around it.

The theatre pedagogy of Jacques Lecoq (1921–99) is founded on the principle that all physical, psychological, intellectual, and emotional performance registers can be accessed by prioritizing the moving body. Therefore, a Lecoq-based approach is in contrast to dominant principles of psychologically based acting that privilege working through emotion and psychology. While Lecoq pedagogy does not discount these performance registers, normally considered to belong to the “internal” world of the actor, Lecoq's work reaches them through physical action. Lecoq pedagogy considers it possible to learn how to shape and manage these registers by mastering the moving body as creative theatrical agent. This pedagogical strategy at first reiterates and then inverts the mind privilege of a Cartesian mind–body dichotomy, but ultimately confounds it, reorienting the constitution of body and mind. This reconstitution results in a new, emergent, antidualistic configuration where somatic intelligence accesses and encompasses all intelligence, and is initiated and accomplished through the physical act.

While researching the history of performance at Berlin's Friedrichstadt-Palast I had come across this rejection of the idea of “a socialist handstand” many times, before I realized the extent to which the judgment had been qualified:

Theatre scholars and historians assume too easily that theoretical reflection on the performative qualities of the theatre began only in the eighteenth century. In mid-eighteenth century France, writers and philosophers such as Denis Diderot, Jean le Rond D'Alembert, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Antoine-François Riccoboni, or Jean-Georges Noverre (to name but a few) showed a passionate interest in the aesthetics and the morality of performance practices in dramatic theatre, music theatre, or dance. Compared to this rich diversity of ideas in the eighteenth century, seventeenth-century French writings on theatre and the performing arts seem, at first sight, far less interesting or daring. However, this is merely a modern perception. Our idea of le théâtre classique is still rather reductionist, and often limited to the theatrical canon of Pierre Corneille, Jean Racine, and Molière. It affords a view of the performing arts that is dominated by tragedy and comedy and that, firmly embedded within a neo-Aristotelian poetics, privileges dramatic concerns above performative interests.

Philip Ridley has made a career of courting controversy in his work for the stage, from the claustrophobia and anxiety of his first play, 1991's The Pitchfork Disney, to the sprawling, ragtag Karagula, whose one-star review in the Telegraph led with the provocative headline, “Is Karagula the Worst Play of 2016?” But perhaps no play in Ridley's oeuvre has attracted as much notoriety as 2005's Mercury Fur, an intense, unrelenting, “interval-less two-hour piece” whose premiere divided critical opinion and provoked walkouts. Paines Plough, the company that commissioned the play, reports that “at least ten audience members a night left every show, unable to take the atmosphere of threat and violence portrayed on stage.” Mercury Fur is set in a futuristic English dystopia whose aimless youth find their grasp on history—and their own memories—slipping away as they become addicted to hallucinogenic butterflies released upon the populace by an ambiguous invading power. While the protagonist, Elliot, ekes out a living peddling butterflies in an ice cream van, he and his brother, Darren, make their real money from throwing “parties,” clandestine meetings for rich clients who pay exorbitantly to fulfill their most violent and murderous sexual fantasies. The play, performed in real time, sees the frantic preparation for—and eventual botched execution of—one such party for a City of London executive (the Party Guest), whose Vietnam War–themed fantasy involves torturing and killing a child Elvis Presley impersonator (the Party Piece) with a meat hook. Unsurprisingly, given the subject matter, moral outrage attended Mercury Fur’s initial run, with Faber, Ridley's longtime publisher, going so far as to refuse to print the play. But a number of critics and spectators rose to defend the integrity and artistic merit of Ridley's work, a position I extend in this paper.

This essay is about a performance by the musician, singer, and performance artist M. Lamar, who describes himself as a “Negrogothic Devil-worshipping free black man in the blues tradition.” I saw the piece, Destruction, in the American Realness Festival at Abrons Art Center in New York City in January 2016. During the seventy-minute-long performance, the countertenor sang and played the piano, and appeared in mediated form in a complexly assembled film montage. In both live and filmed form his performance was a labor to resurrect the dead into an insurrectionist revolt, an army of all the black people whose lives have been taken—from slavery to lynchings, to incarceration, to police shootings. The lush, sometimes heart-stopping sound environment was both live and recorded, a mix, mash-up, and collage of sounds and sources the core of which was Lamar's singing of fragments of slave spirituals. In what follows, I am prompted by Lamar's work to explore my own ongoing commitment to Marx through what I read as the work's temporal innovations. These innovations, I suggest, supplement Marx's failure to imagine a revolutionary strategy through anything but the standard progressivist notion of time and history. In so doing, I claim Lamar for an affiliation to Marxism and materialist thought by identifying in his work a material immortal.

The narrative works extremely hard to convince through evidence: we have a date, an eyewitness, and the events that inspired the song's conception. Since it is written in bronze and mounted on stone, the story seems fixed and immovable. However, cracks have begun to form in the beloved “Jingle Bells” narrative, and as with many such sentimental stories, we find there is always more to uncover. This essay confronts one of the most popular Christmas carols of all time: “Jingle Bells; or, The One Horse Open Sleigh,” whose history has usually been told in relation to a singular event—“Where was it first written?” The answer depends on where you ask, since both Medford, Massachusetts and Savannah, Georgia lay claim to being the song's city of origin. Commemorative plaques can be found in both cities, and this musical North–South discord carries on to this day.

In this article I argue that Plato's allegory of the cave dramatizes democracy's dependency on slavery. Plato's cave forces the theatre, the political space of ancient Greek representation, to confront its material dependency upon a space from which it is otherwise visually and territorially separated: the mines where intensive use was made of slave labor. As many have argued, the most salient aspects of Plato's allegory of the cave are the complete absence of lexis (speech) and praxis (action), the evacuation of the acoustic and the distortion of the visual. These are also the most decisive features when delimiting the border between the free and the unfree in Greek antiquity:

So wrote the Irish American poet John Montague of the great loss of culture under Great Britain's empire, a violent overmapping of identity whose poignant erasure was itself richly preserved in plays, poems, and songs. Nothing of Ireland's past, it seems, was remembered quite so vigorously as its erasure. And because that disappearance has become such a familiar text of loss, in poem, play, and song, I want to evoke that archive of absence for this study of a similar erasure, centuries earlier—not the Irish under English of Brian Friel's Translations, but the Gallic Celts under Rome; not The Dying Gaul whose images of self-slaughter ennobled their extirpation, but those who survived the conquest, the surrendered, widows and children of the slaughtered who grew that grafted tongue, the twice-born who learned to live again as refugees under Roman rule, and adopt foreign ways—to tease out what little remains there are of the theatre's role in that erasure, resistance, and that monumental realignment of identity called “Romanizing.”