As I write this, the United States is undergoing a radical test of its democratic structures and the very notion of “truth” is increasingly questioned. The White House often functions more as a reality show catering to big personalities, ratings, and large crowds, and so I’m going to take the opportunity of this introduction on “rousing theatre” to attempt to read the political and cultural landscape in terms of performance as I saw it in fall 2017. Though Sara Freeman and I didn’t know when we put out the call for papers that the mood in the United States would so profoundly change in the fall of 2016, global politics will likely influence the immediate understanding of this section, and for someone picking it up in twenty years, such reflection might be necessary to provide context. And, since each issue of Theatre History Studies has a long production time line, at least a year will have passed between the period when I wrote this introduction and the time you are reading it, so given the tremendous instability of the current US administration and the rapid apprehension of its every nuance by the national media, I expect the world you’re currently experiencing to be different than mine. Political events are riper for performative analysis than ever before. From my couch in July 2017, I witnessed the media’s clamor over the “dramatic” vote of Republican Senator John McCain against the “skinny repeal” of the Affordable Care Act.1 Earlier this week I lived through the fallout from and breathless media analysis of Anthony Scaramucci’s phone call to New Yorker journalist Ryan Lizza, wherein, amid trying to get Lizza to identify a confidential source, the gregarious Scaramucci also claimed he had no interest in gaining publicity for himself, because, as he said so eloquently, “I’m not Steve Bannon, I’m not trying to suck my own cock.”2 Scaramucci was fired days later, and Bannon left the

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专区介绍

在我撰写本文时，美国正在对其民主结构进行彻底的考验，“真相”这一概念正日益受到质疑。白宫通常更多地是一个迎合大人物、收视率和大量人群的真人秀，所以我将利用这个关于“激动人心的剧院”的介绍的机会，尝试从几个方面来解读政治和文化景观我在 2017 年秋季看到的表现。虽然我和 Sara Freeman 不知道我们什么时候发出征文通知，美国的情绪会在 2016 年秋季发生如此深刻的变化，但全球政治可能会影响对这一部分的立即理解，对于二十年后才开始学习的人来说，这种反思可能是提供上下文的必要条件。和，由于每一期《戏剧史研究》都有很长的制作时间，从我写这篇介绍到你阅读它的时间至少要一年，所以考虑到美国现任政府的巨大不稳定和快速国家媒体对它的每一个细微差别的担忧，我希望你目前正在经历的世界与我的不同。政治事件比以往任何时候都更适合执行分析。2017 年 7 月，我在沙发上亲眼目睹了媒体对共和党参议员约翰麦凯恩“戏剧性”投票反对“平价医疗法案”的“粗略废除”的喧嚣。 本周早些时候，我经历了媒体对Anthony Scaramucci 给纽约客记者 Ryan Lizza 的电话，其中，