A Note from the Editors: Postcards from the Brink by Brian D. Valencia and Bryan M. Vandevender
In their 1953 backstage musical comedy Me and Juliet, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II satirize the early twentieth century’s flood of reports announcing theatre’s imminent demise. A group of spectators watching the play within the play, identified as “Happy Mourners,” sings:
The theatre is dying,
The theatre is practically dead!
The ones who are backing it
Take a shellacking,
And never get out of the red. (511)
Even so, the whole audience continues, “actors keep acting, / And plays keep attracting / And seats are not easy to buy” (511). In Hammerstein’s impish lamentation, the theatre’s expiration seems certain—yet remains conspicuously in progress. A similarly protracted expiration unfolds across the full span of Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman’s The Fabulous Invalid, their 1938 play ostensibly about the theatre industry’s slow grind toward death, in which the secretary of a Broadway producer reports to her boss, messenger speech-style, “The theatre just seems to be dying” (65). In both cases, progressive verb tenses signal that theatre “is not dead yet”—as they sing in Spamalot (Idle 13–16), the lucrative Monty Python musical whose title alone has been invoked as shorthand for the theatre’s end times (LaChiusa 33).
These examples eulogize a specific cross-section of theatrical performance: first-class commercial anglophone production. The present decline and sense of imminent dispatch they capture is a condition far more universal, however. It is the nature of theatrical performance to exist for but a moment—to burst forth from the imagination, then almost as quickly to fade away—even under the best of circumstances. Under anything less, this inherent ephemerality slips into precarity, threatening the viability of that bursting forth in the first place.
The Latin phrase in extremis marks a step beyond precarity, into outright calamity, where death is probable if not imminent. Although the term appears most often in legal and medical discourses, British scholar Baz Kershaw extends it to theatre and performance. In Theatre Ecology: Environments and Performance Events (2007), Kershaw uses “theatre in extremis” to describe a performance text or tradition, or an entire performance culture, that has reached the “end of its tether,” such that only extraordinary measures can “preserve it, restore it, or connect it to some other more urgently meaningful domain” (57–58). Complex networks of pressures—veritable ecosystems of economic, cultural, institutional, and material hazards, sometimes arising from within the theatre itself—can push theatre into extremity, threatening its health and survival.
The articles and Notes from the Field in this special issue of Theatre Topics devoted to theatre in extremis furnish forth case studies in these pressures, at a time when contemporary life feels poised on the lip of a volcano—with the environment, the sociopolitical landscape, and the global economy threatening to pull everything else into the crater with them. Taken together, the contents of this issue illuminate epistemic, ontological, ethical, and artistic dilemmas that lurk beneath, or hover over, theatre at the end of its tether. The diverse objects of analysis, representing performance traditions spanning four continents and nearly seven centuries, glimpse, in sometimes surprising ways, a universal phenomenon of theatre on the brink of obsolescence, extinction, and oblivion. Proceeding chronologically by date of play composition, at least at the outset, these case studies expose not only what stands to be lost should these performance ecologies be allowed to collapse and their attendant theatres fade away, but more importantly what stands to be gained by rescuing, rehabilitating, or otherwise reconceiving them.
Ying Lan launches this issue’s investigations across space and time with a consideration of its oldest play text, the late thirteenth- or early fourteenth-century Yuan zaju drama The Chalk Circle, examining how the play reached and escaped a state of extremity through long-term transformations in theatrical transmission. From circulation in Ming dynasty print anthologies to nineteenth-century translation into European languages, these transformations—including the expansion of print, the erosion of embodied performance lineages, and the emergence of new reading publics—both preserved and fundamentally altered the play’s theatrical life. Lan argues that although textualization sustained early Chinese theatre as literature, it largely stripped plays like The Chalk Circle of their codified systems of vocal technique and gestural vocabulary, less easily captured on the page. This effective erasure, in Lan’s analysis, gives rise to the “archiveme” as a critical concept: the minimal structural unit that persists through transmission, enabling not only the survival of Yuan zaju but also its potential reactivation as an inherently embodied tradition.
Bertolt Brecht benefited directly from The Chalk Circle’s endurance; his 1944 adaptation of it is a cornerstone of the Western dramatic canon. In contrast, his earliest play, Baal, first drafted in 1918, is not. In her article on the latter, Melissa Sturges provocatively argues that Baal has lain in extremis—eclipsed by the playwright-theorist’s later works that more fully model received notions of Epic Theatre—because it is a potently queer text: a dramaturgical outlier in Brecht’s oeuvre and a play that centers love between two men. Critics have not only overlooked this queerness but have actively displaced it in favor of dominant, masculine-coded Brechtian analytical frameworks. In response, Sturges mobilizes “embarrassment” as a critical operation, troubling inherited readings of the play, restoring Baal to critical view, and reopening Brecht’s work to queer analysis.
Nigel O’Hearn then turns to theatre produced under conditions that may themselves be classified as in extremis, examining the Austin, Texas–based Rude Mechs’ treatment of Thornton Wilder’s 1938 classic Our Town, a play buoyed by nostalgia yet very much alive. His article follows along with the company as it produces a faithful staging of Our Town and begins work on a future devised production inspired by Wilder’s text. This text, O’Hearn argues, advances a theory of community—at once necessary, fragile, shared, idiosyncratic, and universal—that Rude Mechs seizes on, however inadvertently, to illuminate the slow, attritional pressures shaping theatrical practice and daily life in Austin. Situating the company within a local ecology marked by gentrification, resource scarcity, and “slow violence,” O’Hearn demonstrates how theatre’s survival remains tethered to the conditions of its environment, even as Rude Mechs’ immersive, communal methods seek to rebuild that relationship.
Extending Kershaw’s ecological framing, Khristián Méndez Aguirre exhumes an “unnaturalist” ecotheatre in Manuela Infante’s 2024 play VAMPYR, a work that rejects the epistemological limits of theatrical naturalism and conventional ecotheatre. Situating this contemporary Chilean play within a broader critique of ecotheatre’s reliance on scientific paradigms to render environmental harm legible, Méndez Aguirre argues that such approaches risk narrowing both dramaturgical possibility and political reach. Resisting these constraints, VAMPYR assembles disparate registers—biological evidence, Gothic mythology, and the embodied experience of labor exploitation—to destabilize the terms by which environmental knowledge is typically produced and understood. This unnaturalist ethos expands the kinds of work ecotheatre can do, privileging affect, embodiment, and uncertainty alongside scientific inquiry to expose (and conceal) the human and environmental costs of energy production. In doing so, theatre in extremis can not only represent environmental degradation but also reshape audiences’ understanding of and responses to such degradation.
The final article departs from forward linear chronology to return to East Asia, where the issue began, shifting focus from mainland China to a tale of two islands: Taiwan and Prospero’s island in The Tempest. Xu Caifang considers the Taipei-based Contemporary Legend Theatre’s 2004 jingju (Peking opera) adaptation of Shakespeare’s 1611 play, staged as an effort to revitalize a centuries-old performance tradition in extremis amid declining audiences and shifting cultural priorities. Drawing on the Bard’s global capital and the romance genre’s tendency toward reconciliation, the production sought to stage a form of cultural repair among Taiwan’s diverse ethnic communities through an ambitious intercultural synthesis. Yet, as Xu shows, this strategy proved double-edged: The production’s casting, choreography, and visual design did indeed bring disparate traditions into alignment onstage, but ultimately reinscribed the hierarchies they aimed to redress, revealing the political risks and material consequences of interculturalism as a means of theatrical revitalization.
William Shakespeare again holds court in the first of two Notes from the Field, in which Rosemary Ewing calls on spectators to question the pleasure they take in humor that ridicules fat bodies, particularly in The Comedy of Errors (c. 1592–94). Ewing contends that traditional fatphobic approaches to the play threaten its continued viability in performance, and she challenges directors to reimagine how its kitchen servant Luce and other canonically fat characters might be depicted positively and celebrated as sources of joy and sexual desire onstage. Returning to Brecht for the grand finale, in a second Note, Susanne Shawyer also attends to the problem of reconceptualization by indexing questions guiding her adaptation of Die Dreigroschenoper (1928), written with Elisabeth Hauptmann and Kurt Weill, for twenty-first-century student performers. While the musical has long served as a useful vehicle for teaching tenets of Brechtian Epic Theatre, it has in recent years lost purchase with justice-minded students who take umbrage at the systems of oppression it fails to interrogate. Shawyer’s questions seek to activate the creative imagination, inviting consideration of how Die Dreigroschenoper’s lumpenproletariat figures might become not only legible and provocative but also effective agents of Brechtian critique in the current cultural moment.
Additionally, in the issue’s online essay, edited by Heather Barfield, Patrick Sabongui (www.patricksabongui.com) lauds the pedagogical advantages of live switcher technology in the postsecondary Acting for the Camera classroom. The Book Review section, edited by Jashodhara Sen, features reviews of Jo Beth Gonzales’s new book on high school theatre, spirituality, and critical consciousness and of Syrus Lowe’s guide to corporate role play as a professional side hustle for working actors.
Theatre in extremis presents a vexing, albeit productive, conundrum for scholars, practitioners, teachers, critics, and anyone invested in theatrical heritage writ large. In the shadow of Shawyer’s questions, others arise: What does one do with theatre at the end of its tether? When, and by whom, should there be extraordinary measures taken to restore, prolong, and sustain texts and traditions—and at what cost? What does survival look like following the severance of a performance culture from its original historical, geographic, cultural, and epistemic conditions—from its native environment? At what point should theatre be relegated to the archive, its material traces reduced to inert artifacts?
The essays in conversation here suggest that preservation efforts are neither neutral nor uniformly beneficial: They may extend theatrical life, but they also recraft the terms of its survival, sometimes with unintended consequences. If, as Kershaw observes, theatre and performance demonstrate the interrelational interdependence of “organisms-inenvironments” (16), then it is incumbent on the theatre’s many diverse stakeholders to attend carefully to the fragile ecological balance upon which its, and our, survival ultimately depends. In other words, “We’re all in this together”—as they sing in Disney’s High School Musical (Simpatico 82–83), a lyric that might fairly register either as a call to collective responsibility or as a facile confirmation of the theatre’s creative exhaustion. For all our sakes, let us choose the former.
We dedicate this issue to the memory and intellectual legacy of Baz Kershaw, who died on 31 March 2026 as we were preparing it for publication.
— Brian D. Valencia,
Florida International University and Wright State University
Bryan M. Vandevender,
Bucknell University
Works Cited
Hart, Moss, and George S. Kaufman. The Fabulous Invalid: A Cavalcade of the Theatre. Random House, 1938.
Idle, Eric, librettist. Monty Python’s Spamalot. Lyrics by Eric Idle, music by Eric Idle and John Du Prez, Theatrical Rights Worldwide, 2014.
Kershaw, Baz. Theatre Ecology: Environments and Performance Events. Cambridge UP, 2007.
LaChiusa, Michael John. “The Great Gray Way.” Opera News, Aug. 2005, pp. 30–35.
Rodgers, Richard, and Oscar Hammerstein II. Me and Juliet. 1953. Six Plays by Rodgers and Hammerstein, Modern Library, 1966, pp. 452–527.
Simpatico, David, librettist. High School Musical on Stage! Music and lyrics by Matthew Gerrard et al., Music Theatre International, 2007.