The official journal of the Mid-America Theatre Conference

Theatre History Studies (THS) is a peer-reviewed journal of theatre history and scholarship published annually since 1981 by the Mid-American Theatre Conference (MATC), a regional body devoted to theatre scholarship and practice. The conference is dedicated to the growth and improvement of all forms of theatre throughout a twelve-state region encompassing Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, and Wisconsin. The purposes of the conference are to unite people and organizations within the region and elsewhere who have an interest in theatre and to promote the growth and development of all forms of theatre. THS is a member of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals and is included in the MLA Directory of Periodicals. THS is cataloged in numerous periodical indexes and databases.

Along with sixteen book reviews on the latest publications from established and emerging voices in the field, this issue of Theatre History Studies contains four sections with two introductions and nine essays total. In the general section, three essays consider performance histories and reevaluations of historiographical approaches. The special section on queer historiographies responds to calls for a more expansive and inclusive understanding of trans histories and for centralizing contemporary queer performers. In part III, the Robert A. Schanke Research Award-winning paper from the 2024 MATC conference by Ali-Reza Mirsajadi addresses erasures in the theatrical archive and highlights the long legacy of queer, Southwest Asian, and North African representation in dramatic texts. Taken together, volume 44 captures how this journal serves theatre historians as scholars and laborers as they work to attend and tend to their field.

Jocelyn L. Buckner is an associate professor of theatre at Chapman University. She is editor of A Critical Companion to Lynn Nottage. Her scholarship and reviews have been published in African American Review, American Studies Journal, Ecumenica Journal, Journal of American Drama and Theatre, HowlRound, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Popular Entertainment Studies, Theatre History Studies, Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey, and Theatre Topics. She is the immediate past president and a current board member of the American Theatre and Drama Society.

List of Illustrations

Introduction by Jocelyn L. Buckner

Part I: Studies in Theatre History

Cultural Objects and Transatlantic Entrepôt Capitalism by Michal Kobialka

“I Want to Save the Flag”: Childhood Flag Veneration, American Nationalism, and World War I–Era Entertainment by DeAnna M. Toten Beard

“Performing His Epic Acting”: What the Piscator Papers Can Tell Us about H. T. Tsiang’s “American Epic,” The Hanging on Union Square by Christopher Seiji Berardino

Part II: Queer and Trans Readings of the Theatrical Past

Introduction to the Special Section: Queer and Trans Readings of the Theatrical Past by Kristin Leahey, Special Section Editor, Allison Backus, Associate Editor, and Les Gray, Consultant

Stage (Tr)aces: Asexuality in The Roaring Girl by Anna Maria Broussard

Gender Inclusivity and Spanish Golden Age Theatre by Kailey Henderson

“The Past Lives Here”: Split Britches in Conversation with Benjamin Gillespie by Benjamin Gillespie with Lois Weaver and Peggy Shaw

Made You Look: Staring, Drag, and Trans Performance History from the Jewel Box Revue to Broadway by Bess Rowen

Temporal Ruptures: Time Travel, the Queer Body of Color, and Healing History in the Collaborative Works of Anna Luisa Petrisko by kt shorb

Part III: Essay from the Conference

The Robert A. Schanke Award–Winning Essay, MATC 2024. The Case for Al-Mutayyim: Queer Genealogies and Theatre Historiography by Ali-Reza Mirsajadi

Part IV: Book Reviews

Craig N. Owens, Staging Technology: Medium, Machinery, and Modern Drama, reviewed by Mackenzie Bounds

Nicole Hodges Persley, Sampling and Remixing Blackness in Hip-Hop Theater and Performance, reviewed by Jordan A. Ealey

Siyuan Liu, Transforming Tradition: The Reform of Chinese Theater in the 1950s and Early 1960s, reviewed by Yizhou Huang

Jordana Cox, Staged News: The Federal Theatre Project’s Living Newspapers in New York, reviewed by Macy Jones

Trevor Boffone and Carla Della Gatta, Editors, Shakespeare and Latinidad, reviewed by Marin Laufenberg

Emma Lipton, Cultures of Witnessing: Law and the York Plays, reviewed by Carla Neuss

Ryan Donovan, Broadway Bodies: A Critical History of Conformity, reviewed by Anne Melissa Potter

Gabriela Cruz, Grand Illusion: Phantasmagoria in Nineteenth-Century Opera, reviewed by Ryan M. Prendergast

Brian Valente-Quinn, Senegalese Stagecraft: Decolonizing Theater-Making in Francophone Africa, reviewed by Yohann C. Ripert

May Summer Farnsworth, Feminist Rehearsals: Gender at the Theatre in Early Twentieth-Century Argentina and Mexico reviewed by Brian Rocha

Katelyn Hale Wood, Cracking Up: Black Feminist Comedy in the Twentieth & Twenty-First Century United States, reviewed by Eleanor Russell

Jisha Menon, Brutal Beauty: Aesthetics and Aspiration in Urban India, reviewed by Sharvari Sastry

Michael D’Allessandro, Staged Readings: Contesting Class in Popular American Theater and Literature, 1835–75, reviewed by Elaine Hendriks Smith

Noémie Ndiaye, Scripts of Blackness: Early Modern Performance Culture and the Making of Race, reviewed by Megan Snell

Penny Farfan and Lesley Ferris, Editors, Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Plays by Women: The Early Twenty-First Century, reviewed by Benjamin P. Stanford

Joseph Cermatori, Baroque Modernity: An Aesthetic of the Theatre, reviewed by Elliott Turley

Books Received

Contributors