When Modern Drama was founded, just over halfway through the twentieth century, its defining, titular terms appeared to be transparent. Modernity was in full swing, and was assumed to be so everywhere – at least everywhere that counted, in a field that concerned itself primarily with European and American dramaturgies – and it was uncontroversial to dedicate a journal with that title to drama since 1850, as though the so-called modern age (or modernist “style”) arrived everywhere at the same time and extended, always, to the present. Since then, globalization (on the one hand) and interculturalism (on the other) have, together with postcolonialism, troubled historical master narratives and the stability of the journal’s starting point across cultures. Meanwhile “the contemporary,” and most especially “the postmodern” – not to mention the turn of yet another century since the beginning of the “modern” – have troubled understandings of its terminus a quo. In companion areas of study, moreover, the terminology that designates the field continues to be interrogated on historical, political, and generic grounds. What used to be called “the Renaissance,” for instance, has increasingly, if controversially, come to be called the “Early Modern” period, in recognition that for an overwhelming percentage of the world the period was one of literal or cultural genocide. Given all of this, and the turn of the millennium too, I felt that it was important to re-examine the assumptions upon which the “modern” in “Modern Drama” rested.

But “Drama” itself presented no fewer complexities as I contemplated the mandate of the journal that I had been invited to edit. When Modern Drama was founded, the meaning of “drama” seemed fairly clear: it was used, in contradistinction to “theatre,” to refer to a body of so-called “dramatic literature” that was distinguished from narrative (with its story and, crucially, its storyteller) and lyric (with its expressive or descriptive mode – storyteller with no story) as a body of writing whose narrative drive was presented directly in the words of its various actants – story with no storyteller. “Drama” was not narrative or lyric, prose or poetry, then, because it presented unmediated direct discourse that nevertheless enacted a central (Aristotelian) action driven by narrative. But, crucially at the time, neither was drama “theatre”; rather, it was the more serious, literary mode, the universal blueprint upon which the ephemeral theatrical performance depended. “Theatre” was most often theorized as either the interpretative enactment of a stable, universal, dramatic text or the translation of that text into different (and usually unstable) codes or semioses of enunciation, gesture, embodiment, design, and so on. Presumably it was these distinctions that led to the literary quality of the analysis that has dominated Modern Drama through much of its history and that accounted for the absence from its pages of photographic or other visual evidence, while textual documentation abounded.

For many years now, however, the primacy of “drama,” of “the play” (in contradistinction to “the performance” or “the script”), has come under scrutiny. Scholars first increasingly aligned themselves with a position familiar to theatre professionals for decades, one that saw “drama” not simply as the blueprint for theatre but also, or rather, as its somewhat quaint residue, the mere record of the “real” event that took place on stage before a “live” audience. For these scholars and others, theatre was lived experience, while drama took the form of archival recording, annotating for readers understood as audiences manqués (often through descriptive, adjectival, or adverbial stage directions) the experience that they might have had, had they been so lucky to have been there in the (genuine, originary) moment.

More recently, “theatre” itself has come under attack as scholars have increasingly questioned the genuinely originary nature of the theatrical moment. Theatre has increasingly been seen, in fact, as the repository of cultural reproduction – the reinforcement of currently dominant and oppressive social structures and naturalized “realities.” How, the argument goes (at least by implication), can a discipline based on (Aristotelian) mimesis and grounded in the always-already of a dramatic script as political unconscious avoid reproducing dominant, hierarchical constructions of human subjectivity according to gender, race, sexuality, ethnicity, and class? A new, more inclusive, and seemingly omnivorous discipline has therefore emerged called “performance studies,” within which theatre itself is both subsumed and rendered the object of critique, as the apparently unmediated immediacy of “performance” – genuine enactment in the here and now – is set against mimetic repetitions that are seen to be at the root of theatre as the more conservative discipline, and as the apparent cultural inclusiveness of “performance “is set against the Eurocentrism of “theatre.” (Ironically, in some of its manifestations, performance studies has elevated the private reading of a script as a “performative” act to a level of immediacy that the same discipline frequently disputes in its performance.)

Among the first things that I undertook to do, then, on assuming the editorship of what was clearly an important and widely influential journal was to think through ways of addressing these issues that seemed so central and yet so unstable as the millennium clicked over and a whole new “period” (perhaps no longer “modern”?) began in global history – while editorialists incessantly looked back in global terms on the twentieth century and theorists began to write books about the “post-postmodern”). I began, in consultation with the Modern Drama Executive Committee and Editorial Advisory Board, to consider ways of opening up the journal to renewed consideration of the terms of its title. These have included an attempt to begin internationalizing and extending the reach of the editorial team, the Board itself, and the pages of the journal and to open up those pages to more extended and detailed analyses than the previous 4000-word limit for contributions allowed. Crucially, they also included, in consultation with my new Associate Editors, Joanne Tompkins of the University of Queensland and W.B. Worthen of the University of California at Berkeley, inviting some of the most active, provocative, and challenging scholars working in the field(s) to a conference in May 2000 with the express purpose of interrogating the terms “Modern” and “Drama” and of initiating the process of (re)“defining the field.”

That three-day “Modern:Drama” conference, held at and co-sponsored with the Graduate Centre for Study of Drama at the University of Toronto, the institutional home of Modern Drama, was conceived primarily as a consultation on the state of the field and was organized to allow for a maximum of discussion and debate. As such, it was perhaps the most stimulating conference I have attended, as outstanding scholars, both emerging and established, grappled with serious issues in always challenging ways. Some discussed the ways in which non-European cultures have challenged and extended understandings of what “drama,” “theatre,” and “performance” might mean, while also challenging the modernist record of cultural appropriation. Some approached period, national, and generic classifications in drama criticism and theatre history through queer and feminist lenses. Some put pressure on the sources, origins, and relationships between modernity and modernism, locating “modern drama” historically in critical relation to other forms of social, political, and cultural production. Many brought sophisticated, interdisciplinary perspectives to bear on the questions driving the conference and produced often surprising reconsiderations of the field itself and its relationship to other areas of study.

Issues 43.4 and 44.1 of Modern Drama represent some of the proceedings of the “Modern:Drama (defining the field)” conference-as-consultation, and, as the first full volumes of material accepted since Joanne, Bill, and I started our work with the journal, they launch the new editorial team’s vision for its immediate future. Not all of the papers presented at the conference appear here, though we hope and expect that some of them will show up in future issues. There were many scholars we would like to have invited but were unable to, for reasons of time and money, but we hope that they will contribute actively to the debate through the pages of the journal itself. And, of course, not all those invited to the conference were able to attend, though some have generously contributed essays to these volumes nonetheless.

Ultimately, and not surprisingly, the conference reported no single answer to the questions it raised, no definitive outlining of “the field,” and no easily articulated new mandate for Modern Drama. The journal remains open – more open than ever, we hope – to all kinds and sources of writing that can be understood to relate to the increasingly multiplicitous meanings that its title evokes in all cultural locations. The essays in the two volumes that this introduction prefaces, however, do model a type of analysis – historically grounded, archivally based, thickly described, theoretically sophisticated, and politically engaged – to which Modern Drama aspires. They also point to an archive, or “object of study,” that extends beyond the “modern,” narrowly conceived, and beyond “drama” (or even “theatre”), narrowly understood, to include questionings and challengings of the very period and generic categories its title invokes, particularly insofar as both represent a  “disciplining” of scholarship, an exclusion of “difference,” an exertion of control, or an exercise of power.

These issues announce, then, what we hope is a new openness in the pages of Modern Drama to questionings of period and generic boundaries; to questionings of scholarly and generic privilege based on class, race, nation, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality; and to questionings of all kinds, especially those that the journal and its editors have not yet thought of or understood. We are very proud of these issues, and we hope that they signal and open the way for work that we ourselves are not yet able to imagine.

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