Volume 78 Issue 2 (June 2026)
Editorial Comment
Christina Baker
Just over a year ago, I was at my lowest point. On my way back from a Mexican studies conference in sunny Irvine, California, I made a stop in Las Vegas. Sitting poolside at The Bellagio, I should have been relishing my proximity to paradise, but instead I wondered if I could physically manage the flight home to Philadelphia. I had "failed" yet another medication to treat my rheumatoid arthritis—which is the language medical professionals use—and even though that lounge chair was divine, I was in extraordinary pain. My conference talk itself was dictated rather than written, and most of my time was spent not listening to my incredible colleagues and friends but instead laid out on a bathroom floor where, from time to time, I heard a cockroach scuttle back and forth. Angry that this is what aging means for me, a body that refuses to be controlled or productive, I found myself thinking about Xandra Ibarra transforming into a cucarachica at the end of her performance/film Fuck My Life.1 If in my experience abjection was private and debilitating, Ibarra's work stages it as excessive, liberating, and public, which prompted me to think about how bodies are made uniquely il/legible by way of theatre, performance, and dance praxis and scholarship. My experience last May resonates with the themes of disease, travel, aging, raging, and water that the five essays in this issue analyze. Charting distinct yet interconnected dimensions of human and nonhuman livelihood, the essays progress in (mostly) chronological order and begin and end with water.
Stephanie Vella's "Antonin Artaud's Oceanic Cruelties: Eroding Anthropological Certainty in Two Performances from 1933 to 1934" contemplates the content and staging of works that lay bare the aftershock of disease and colonialist ideologies. Vella analyzes "The Theater and the Plague," which homes in on the Great Plague of Marseille in 1720, and "The Conquest of Mexico," which considers Hernán Cortés's arrival to Mexico in 1519. Beginning with "The Theater and the Plague," Vella describes how Artaud performed in a medical setting at the Sorbonne, foregrounding what she calls an "uncontrolled plague body" as a site of disruption in discourses of power and survival. Turning to "The Conquest of Mexico," she examines how Artaud staged the work in Paris's Left Bank before potential donors whose wealth derived from colonial extraction, extending this disruption into the realm of colonial capital and its spectators. Drawing on archival coverage ranging from Anaïs Nin's diary to news coverage, and from Artaud's own "Theatre of Cruelty," Vella posits the term "oceanic feeling" to understand the "vectors of colonial and capitalist exchange" that Artaud activates. By evoking the Atlantic, his works sought to dissolve the "illusory superiority" of his audiences and "the people they exploited."
Wei Feng and Shan Yang continue this line of inquiry related to power, travel, and artistry in "The Conversion of Celebrity Capital: Mei Lanfang's Contingent Diplomacy During His US Tour." In this essay, rather than excoriate the wealthy, Feng and Yang argue that Mei Lanfang leveraged elite connections to finance his 1930 travel to the US, positioning himself as a cultural ambassador and authority hailing from Chinese soil. This tour was intended, in part, as a means of easing Sino-American tensions indelibly shaped by the Chinese Exclusion Act. Known throughout his home country for his work in traditional Chinese theatre (xiqu), Mei held a celebrity status within the world of high art that made this possible. By extension, he was able to engage in what Feng and Yang call "contingent celebrity diplomacy," envisioned as a mechanism to reshape racist perceptions of China. However, as they explain, the actor was often tied up in social events and forced to adopt a specific brand of exotic legibility to maintain that status. Based on extensive archival work and photographic analysis, Feng and Yang offer a compelling argument about the ways in which Lanfang had to tread lightly as a non-Western figure, as "recognition had to be negotiated under market dependence" and unequal power dynamics.
In "An Epistemology of the Automobile: Fun Home, Queer Aging, and Lesbian Narrative Futurity on the Musical Stage," Adin Walker evaluates power dynamics as they become manifest in familial ties and car trips. Analyzing Alison Bechel's 2006 graphic memoir, Fun Home, and its musical theatre adaptation, Walker proposes the "epistemology of the automobile" to approach themes of futurity, livelihood, and aging as they relate to the lesbian experience. As Bechdel turns 43, the age her closeted father died by suicide, Walker argues that the scenic and staged moments of convening in the automobile becomes both an awakening but also a place of "waiting-in-motion." Drawing on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Epistemology of the Closet, contemporary queer theory, and Bechdel's own words, Walker's achingly beautiful prose takes us through moments of recognition and despair as Bechdel navigates what it means to live while her father remains in the past, with no future. Analyzing a series of songs performed throughout the musical staging, Walker maneuvers between metaphorical and literal car keys as well as remembered cartographies of escape and stagnation. In closing, Walker puts Bechdel's work in conversation with works by Paula Vogel, Tracy Chapman, and David Wojnarowicz to showcase how his theoretical approaches can be applied to myriad lesbian, feminist cultural productions.
Continuing with physical and material objects, Dahye Lee's "Raging with Things: Performance of Smashing in Rage Rooms" examines the performative nature of rage rooms. Inspired by her own experiences in these spaces, Lee writes with compelling prose. Focused on the objects themselves, ranging from televisions to rubber crash dummies, Lee proposes a "double focus" to appreciate both the objects' performative agency and the human's role as "smasher." As she posits, by looking to the human-nonhuman "choreography," we become more attuned to the obedience-disobedience dialect that can define power relations between the human and nonhuman. Employing theoretical approaches from fields of material studies such as Jane Bennett's Vibrant Matter and Bill Brown's now canonical "Thing Theory," Lee offers a robust scholarly conversation that intersects with theatre and performance by way of puppets, dance, and new materialisms. For Lee, the rage room becomes a lens through which we may begin to perceive objects not simply as having agency but rather as coperformers, "teeming with life," operating alongside human bodies. Her approach to material choreography and dis/obedience offers not only a unique way to understand the rage room but also the chance to see destruction as generative.
In this issue's final essay, "Ecocritical Performances of Water and Northeastern Brazilian Imaginaries Along the Jaguaribe River in Ceará, Northeast Brazil," Cydney K. Seigerman examines water in two ecocritical performances from Northeast Brazil to build on more-than-human interventions into archives and repertoires. Seigerman explores the devised theatre performance Dramaturgias da água e da seca by Pavilhão da Magnólia and the short film A retirante by Chico Oliveira and Débora Ingrid as productions that position the Jaguaribe River as a coperformer in the re-creation of regional imaginaries. At their core, these works, as Seigerman attests, highlight the need to address water injustices throughout the region. The author situates their argument in relation to critical frameworks from ecodramaturgy and historical power structures that revolve around water in Northeast Brazil, which have enabled access to water to become a site of conflict. By making water imaginaries central to their repertoire, these artists underscore socioecological injustice, which, as Seigerman points out, has been further exacerbated by global phenomena like the COVID-19 pandemic. Analyzing elements of these performances like tears, drought, and empty water jugs called moringas, Seigerman draws our attention to human suffering that exists in direct relation to more-than-human bodies in this time of extreme scarcity and water crises.
Amidst the many wonderful book and performance reviews, similar themes to those outlined above emerge. For example, Andrew Sofer's evaluation of Cue Tears: On the Act of Crying by Daniel Sack highlights contemporary artists ranging from Mariana Abramović to Andy Warhol, as well as walks readers through the book's central claim that tears themselves are not indicative of a particular emotion but rather accompany an affective act that forges a bond between weeper and witness. Following this emotive line of thought, Phillip Zapkin's analysis of Metamodernism in Contemporary British Theatre: A Politics of Hope/lessness by Tom Drayton underscores how British-millennial theatre engages feelings while maintaining a postmodern critique of "the real" by way of moving between detachment from and desire for an objective truth. Turning to specific performances, J. Ellen Gainor's review of Fancy Dancer details a piece that stages the experiences of a young Native woman navigating the world of ballet dancing while confronting a physical disability and bullying. Gwyneth van Son's review of Tehral is as much about a performance that forefronts travel and voyages as it is a reflection on the material and cultural conditions in Saudia Arabia that have enabled public theatre performance. Thinking about empire, Barbara Fuchs's analysis of La Desconquista and Libres tackles Spanish colonialism and nineteenth-century Latin American nation-building enterprises as mechanisms through which to critique contemporary politics. Lastly, Cow | Deer, as Sam Collier describes, privileges the sonic realm to tell the story nonhuman figures, most notably a cow and deer on a summer day in the English countryside.
I want to close by thanking Ariel Nereson and Laura Edmondson for their generosity in bringing me into Theatre Journal operations. The countless hours Ariel has spent answering my questions, sometimes the same question, as well as helping me grow as a mentor and scholar, are beyond anything I could have imagined. I also want to extend my deepest gratitude to Managing Editor Aileen M. Keenan at Johns Hopkins University Press and to Aimee Zygmonski and Kristin Leahey at the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) for similarly orienting me with kindness and patience. It has been a pleasure to collaborate with Tarryn Li-Min Chun, outgoing Online Editor, Gad Guterman, outgoing Performance Review Editor, and Alex Ferrone, Book Review Editor. I'm thrilled to be joining such a fantastic team and look forward to working with our newest members, Performance Review Editor Benjamin Gillespie and Online Editor Sam Aros-Mitchell. Teya Juarez and Fariha Ahmed have been lovely to work with as Assistant Editors, and I'm particularly excited to be joined in digital design by Jesús Rubén Sifuentes. For this stunning cover, I would also like to thank Arielle Chirinos for collaborating as a model.