Volume 35, Number 2, July 2025
by Sukanya Chakrabarti and Proshot Kalami
As women of color, as international scholar-artist-educators in the US theatre industry and academia, we are often confronted with several unexamined biases and normalized stereotypes while navigating professional spaces. Between us, we have encountered moments when our accents were noted as too foreign, different, or simply questioned as unintelligible. We are not unfamiliar with instances when in our theatremaking experiences we bore the burden to explain and justify to a creative team the necessity of cultural specificity in dramaturgy, in linguistic, cultural, and emotional aspects of a new play; when comments such as “incomprehensible” or “sounds jarring” formed reactions to us and our endeavors, for we and/or our works were labeled as “challenging” or “unfamiliar” to the American taste or ear. When starting to brainstorm about this special issue, we found the common ground of discontent between us, as we both have often felt demoralized, lonely, dejected, and utterly exhausted. We knew we were not alone in our experience, hence the call to invite valuable experiences, works, and interventions of those who have felt and experienced similar resistances to the laborious and slow, and yet urgently necessary, work of decolonization.
At ATHE 2023, we met other scholar-artist-educators whose works resonated with the common feelings we had. When we published the call for proposals in the July 2024 issue of Theatre Topics, we were consumed, individually and collectively, by thoughts of voice, agency, autonomy, and ownership of narratives against the backdrop of larger factors such as classicization, canonization, colonialism, racism, and sexism. Whose story? we asked ourselves. Whose voice? Whose narratives, and whose framing? While theatre tells stories and has been a platform for unveiling narratives, we are also hyperaware of the potential of such platforms to conceal, bury, or selectively present narratives. Our call for proposals was also an invitation and a call to action for reimagining, rethinking, re-visioning, and re-forming ideas around canonicity and classicization through practice, pedagogy, research, and scholarship.
Inspired by what we witnessed on the ground in the 2023 national gatherings of ATHE, we asked: What are the ways we can think of dramaturgical practices in reshaping master narratives? What kinds of pedagogical practices can we engage in for our reimagination of the canon? How do intersecting forms of oppression, such as race, class, sexuality, and disability, intersect with gender performativity within the canon? How can theatre practitioners and scholars reimagine classic texts and canons to foreground marginalized perspectives and voices?
In this special issue, “Whose Story? Resisting and Reimagining Master Narratives,” we share contributions that responded to the call with valuable, personal, and pedagogical experiences, expertise, and insights. We read them in the light of questions each author explored in their often personal journeys. Each contributor in this issue offers the wealth of “being there,” as it were, in the midst of reimagining possibilities when reading, performing, teaching, and creating against the canon, questioning the canon, and redefining the canon.
What does it mean to teach and perform mythology in the twenty-first century? “Devising Myths: Reimagining Canonical Narratives through Tectonic Theater Project’s Moment Work” by Lisa S. Brenner and Jolie Tong urges us to grapple with this question, opening with Karen Armstrong’s call to reimagine myths as living, evolving reflections of our world. From that premise, the authors ask: How can canonical narratives—especially gendered, patriarchal ones—be reclaimed and reformed by students through theatrical devising? At the heart of this endeavor is Moment Work, the signature process of Tectonic Theater Project. Rather than using text as a point of origin, Moment Work begins with theatrical elements—light, space, sound, gesture—as tools for invention. Students at Drew University are not passive interpreters of mythology, but rather coauthors and reimaginers, driven by hunches and personal stakes. Decentering the text, asset-based framing, and process over product are among the critical takeaways the authors offer. This is why, as Brenner and Tong remind us, mythology can help us live more intensely in this world—but only “if we equip students to discover not only what stories they want to tell, but how to tell them.”
A personal and disciplinary reckoning, Arnab Banerji’s “Take Back Our Histories: The Colonialist Bias of Theatre History Surveys and Some Practical Steps to Dismantling an Unfair System” begins by tracing the colonialist DNA embedded in foundational theatre history curricula, using Brander Matthews as a symbolic progenitor. What emerges is a realization that theatre education in the US continues to serve outdated, Eurocentric narratives, thinly masked by token gestures toward diversity. By offering pedagogical interventions like thematic restructuring, curriculum revision, or considering the syllabus as self, Banerji also goes beyond the canon to warn against the risk of reinscription. The truth he reveals is that even “decolonized” syllabi can reproduce privilege if they flatten complexity or tokenize. We hope our readers, as we did, go through the journey he has invited us on, exploring how theatre history could be taught as history—with all its structural biases, blind spots, and power dynamics laid bare. The task is not just to add voices, but rather to interrogate the frame. Banerji closes with a call for us, the community of scholars, creators, doers, and decision makers, to experiment, revise, and reflect—and to embrace discomfort as part of building something new.
In “Pussy Power, Puppets, and Projections: In Performance of an Iranian Anger,” Marzi Ashrafian poses a provocation rooted in the body of the performer, space of performance, and the universe surrounding her creativity. “Whose anger gets to be heard?” Ashrafian asks. Beginning with her own body as archive and epistemology, she questions both Western Orientalism and internal theological despotism. The performative autoethnography refuses to sanitize trauma for a palatable Western gaze and reclaims anger as an aesthetic and political tool. Orientalist tropes along with domestic oppression are the double bind of representation, one from the Western feminist frames and the other from Middle Eastern intellectuals. What makes Ashrafian’s approach valuable is a third aspect: neither victim nor sanitized symbol, but an artist carrying embodied rage as creative fuel. Drawing on Sara Ahmed, Audre Lorde, and Ann Cvetkovich, Ashrafian situates anger not as pathology, but as a knowledge system—a force that transforms affect into political clarity and creative action. Anger becomes a method for confronting injustice both at home and abroad. Directing Jen Silverman’s Collective Rage becomes an opportunity for embodied intervention, using puppets as radical form, and critical interrogations such as critiquing both text and context without disavowing the power of collective feminist anger. Performance in this work is not just storytelling—it is method, resistance, and reimagination. Anger is aesthetic. The body is knowledge. The stage becomes a battleground where Orientalist dichotomies fracture and a complex, defiant Persian feminine epistemology takes centerstage.
Daniel Barnard, Lucy Tyler, and Lisa Woynarski’s “Fast Familiar’s The Acquisitions Panel and the Decolonizing Potential of Interactive Performance” aligns with wider decolonizing movements in museum practice, echoing calls for restitution and critical engagement with colonial legacies, putting current discourses around decolonizing in heritage and museum studies in dialogue with participatory performance practices. The Acquisitions Panel (2022–), a digital interactive performance by Fast Familiar, invites audiences to act as a museum acquisitions panel tasked with deciding whether to acquire a Congolese thumb piano made from a Huntley & Palmers biscuit tin. The piece enacts decolonizing practices by questioning traditional museum narratives and emphasizing the colonial histories embedded in heritage objects. Set in Reading, UK—historically known as Biscuit Town due to its industrial connection to Huntley & Palmers—the performance critiques the town’s uncritical celebration of its imperial past. Through interactive content, including testimonies from members of the Congolese diaspora and fictional museum staff, participants reflect on colonial violence, object provenance, and the sociocultural meaning of the likembé. The piece challenges the supposed neutrality of institutions like the British Museum and highlights how object biographies can perpetuate or resist colonial narratives. Ultimately, The Acquisitions Panel demonstrates the power of participatory performance to foster dialogue, critique imperial histories, and reimagine museum methodologies through community-driven reflection and storytelling, “asking complex questions about heritage, place, and identity while staying in a productive discomfort.”
Lastly, Rah Eleh extends the scope of our queries and questions in her Note from the Field, “Curious George, The Monkey on My Back: Reenactment and (P)reenactment in Speculative Practice,” asking what happens when the body reenters the archive of its own trauma. She frames her work through lived experience as a diasporic refugee artist, weaving together personal history with theoretical inquiry into time, memory, and futurity. Drawing on Andrea Fraser’s psychoanalytic readings and Rebecca Schneider’s notions of unfinished histories, Eleh positions enactments not as mere repetition, but as critical negotiation with past, present, and speculative futures. Rah offers a fresh perspective of enactment, reenactment, and (p)reenactment as temporal methodologies. She turns her gaze toward Afro-, Indigenous-, and counterfuturist traditions as models for temporal activism—rejecting linearity, revisiting past ruptures, and crafting future visions. Rather than passively memorializing past injustices, Eleh’s practice demands critical reworking of history through ritual, embodiment, and futurist speculation. Performing liminality becomes a political act: unsettling nationalist fantasies, refusing erasure, and insisting that diasporic memory is not past, but ongoing, dynamic, and radically unfinished.
In this issue, we therefore engage in discourses on decolonizing colonialist institutions such as museums as well as curricular methodologies; decentering the canon or the archive by “revisiting, reenacting, rearticulating” through destabilizing the center-periphery orientation; and deconstructing “master narratives” through reexamining gender performativity onstage, reimagining classical texts, embracing devising as a philosophy of decentering text, and critiquing patriarchal values embedded within these master narratives. While we are inspired and encouraged by the works of our contributors, we know this is not enough and more work is called for, hence the necessity of this special issue.
In our online offerings, James Beaudry’s “Voice as a Verb: Enhancing Voice Training through Kinesiology” reminds us of the importance of an integrated and embodied voice training. The training processes that he uses in voice training include a deep understanding of anatomy, kinesiology, and rehabilitative alignment exercises, which allow the students to experience voice as a full-body process and to relate vocal production to their unique bodies. Teaching voice as embodied action—rather than a fixed outcome—transformed Beaudry’s course and affirmed that true technique is knowing “what you have to do next.”
Xiting Qiao’s online Note from the Field, “Rereading the Witch’s Minds: Ethics of Affects in Winsome Pinnock’s Tituba,” critiques Arthur Miller’s The Crucible by interrogating its portrayal of Tituba, a Black enslaved woman, and contrasts it with Winsome Pinnock’s reimagining of the character in her 2016 play Tituba. While Miller uses Tituba as a narrative trigger for white characters’ moral dilemmas within a fear-driven emotional framework tied to McCarthyism, he strips her of emotional subjectivity. In contrast, Pinnock recenters Tituba’s voice and emotions, historicizing her fear and anger through layered storytelling that connects her diasporic trauma with her lived resistance. Rather than perpetuating the stereotype of the “angry Black woman,” Pinnock empowers Tituba with emotional and affective agency through satire, laughter, and strategic confession. Ultimately, Qiao advocates for ethical storytelling that restores the suppressed subjectivity of Black women and confronts canonical narratives. Pinnock’s Tituba becomes a subversive intervention, reframing emotions not just as personal responses but as powerful tools for political and ethical resistance against white-centered historical and theatrical conventions.
Putting this special issue together has been a work of love, labor and collaboration. We are sincerely grateful for the generosity of our authors who have responded to our call with courage, empathy, openness, and compassion; for our anonymous peer-reviewers volunteering their time, energy, and engagement with these pieces; and for the care, commitment, labor, and dedication of our Managing Editor Aileen M. Keenan, Coeditor Susanne Shawyer, Online Editor Trevor Boffone, Book Review Editor Nathan Bowman, and Editorial Assistant Katie Van Winkle, all of whom have contributed significantly to the creation of this special issue.
We invite you, our readers, to be on this journey alongside us, navigating often uncomfortable, messy, and unclear spaces of what Daniel Barnard, Lucy Tyler, and Lisa Woynarski identify as “productive discomfort.” We also invite you to reconsider the role of anger as a critical and aesthetic tool of transformation, as Marzi Ashrafian puts it: “We are here, angry and demanding to be seen, heard, and respected.”