The speculative act in theatre and performance studies

Theatre and Performance Studies have travelled a long way since I fled the dim, dusty stacks of Butler Library at Columbia University where I was researching my dissertation on Middle English drama to sit ringside watching professional wrestlers training at Gleason’s Gym in Brooklyn almost thirty years ago. To write about fifteenth-century moral interludes like The Castle of Perseverance and Mankynde required a kind of speculative triangulation between the playtext, its socio-historical context and my own visceral understanding of how the theatre works in time and space. My supervisor, Howard Schless, a literary scholar who was renowned for his scholarship on Dante and Chaucer, and otherwise largely reliant on the magisterial work of E. K. Chambers,1 asked me: “what can you bring to the study of these old plays that others do not?” I said, “As a theatre director, when I read a play I find theatrical cues, both to how the characters might act on the platform (the platea) and to how the audience might be expected to react on the ground (the locus).” “Write that” was his response, and so I did. But first there was the wrestling, to which I had turned (causing Howard some consternation), because it got me out of the library and into a space where I could see a contest between good and evil that was, in my overheated imagination, very much like that staged by medievals six centuries before.