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In spring 2023, I collaborated on a blog post, “Marco Goecke’s Shitstorm,” for Cambridge University Press and TDR to promote the special issue on contemporary German theatre I had coedited with Matt Cornish. CUP’s choice betrays irreducible differences—theatre in Germany is simply a different beast from what it is in New York or London. Goecke chose his target carefully: the dance critic for a leading, center-right newspaper headquartered in Frankfurt, a city which, not coincidentally, is home to both the German and European Central Banks.

With his reinvention of absurd farce, Herbert Fritsch has become one of the most celebrated directors in the German-speaking world. Most remarkable are Fritsch’s original pieces, which he also designs, composed in collaboration with actors and musicians. These defy generic categorization and allow audiences to rethink what is possible to see and hear onstage.

For those of us from countries without publicly financed theatres, the most important fact about the German stage is its scale: its vast size and the billions of euros that cover 90% of the budgets of the roughly 130 Staatstheater and Stadttheater, the subsidized state and city theatres. The Freie Szene [independent arts community] is also impacted, both through state grants and because more and more independent work is being made in collaboration with publicly funded theatres. [...]because most theatres invest sizable sums in performances for children and students, the German public is familiar with theatre-going as a cultural practice from an early age, as well as with the dramatic canon. In the early 1990s, Germany experienced a recession, and the cultural sphere underwent budget cuts and major reorganization: “the dismantling of long-standing theatre institutions, the advent of new institutions, and the refunctioning of older institutions with new purposes and orientations” [10]. Nonetheless, the dense network of locally subsidized theatres in Germany means there are more intimate and spontaneous connections between performers and audience than in most Anglophone theatres. Because theatre in Germany is not a museum, one goes to a play to engage with what is happening here and now.

From the Beat poets' incarnation of the \"white Negro\" through Iron John and the Men's Movement to the paranoid masculinity of Timothy McVeigh, white men in this country have increasingly imagined themselves as victims. InTaking It Like a Man, David Savran explores the social and sexual tensions that have helped to produce this phenomenon. Beginning with the 1940s, when many white, middle-class men moved into a rule-bound, corporate culture, Savran sifts through literary, cinematic, and journalistic examples that construct the white man as victimized, feminized, internally divided, and self-destructive. Savran considers how this widely perceived loss of male power has played itself out on both psychoanalytical and political levels as he draws upon various concepts of masochism--the most counterintuitive of the so-called perversions and the one most insistently associated with femininity. Savran begins with the writings and self-mythologization of Beat writers William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac. Although their independent, law-defying lifestyles seemed distinctively and ruggedly masculine, their literary art and personal relations with other men in fact allowed them to take up social and psychic positions associated with women and racial minorities. Arguing that this dissident masculinity has become increasingly central to U.S. culture, Savran analyzes the success of Sam Shepard as both writer and star, as well as the emergence of a new kind of action hero in movies likeRamboandTwister. He contends that with the limited success of the civil rights and women's movements, white masculinity has been reconfigured to reflect the fantasy that the white male has become the victim of the scant progress made by African Americans and women. Taking It Like a Manprovocatively applies psychoanalysis to history. The willingness to inflict pain upon the self, for example, serves as a measure of men's attempts to take control of their situations and their ambiguous relationship to women. Discussing S/M and sexual liberation in their historical contexts enables Savran to consider not only the psychological function of masochism but also the broader issues of political and social power as experienced by both men and women.

In a theatre world increasingly dominated by multinational corporations, in which brand-name companies make the rounds of international festivals and multilingual performances are bankrolled by consortia of state-supported theatres, the national identity of theatrical productions is becoming more and more difficult to decide. This identity crisis is especially pronounced in the case of the one theatre form that for generations has been associated with a single New York thoroughfare that for people around the world symbolizes singing and dancing, glamor and dazzle. The form to which Broadway is categorically linked, the Broadway musical, may have circumnavigated the globe countless times, but a national and municipal identity remains embedded in its name. In the twenty-first century, however, this jet-setting genre needs to be analyzed less from a national or international perspective than a transnational perspective that emphasizes interconnectedness and the cross-border fluidity of cultures and species of capital. Shows such as The Lion King and Wicked may have premiered in New York, but their continuing multibillion-dollar success in cities on six continents suggests that the traffic in the most popular form of theatre in the world can no longer be linked to one metropolis or one national tradition.

For people around the world, “Broadway” means the Broadway musical, the epitome of singing and dancing, glamor and dazzle. Although the Broadway musical is customarily perceived as the most distinctively U. S. theatre form – whose national and municipal identity is embedded in its name – it has circumnavigated the globe countless times. As the globalized cultural economy increasingly facilitates the worldwide circulation of multinational theatrical productions, Broadway-style musicals are being manufactured from Hamburg to Shanghai. They are no longer a specifically U. S. form, but a global brand that freely crosses borders, genres, and styles. The mobility of the newly deterritorialized Broadway musical is the result of many phenomena, notably the rise of a generation of producers, writers, directors, and actors around the world who have absorbed the musical’s conventions and vernaculars and who disseminate locally-produced musical entertainments. In the twenty-first century, these new Broadway-style musicals have become the preeminent transnational theatre form, whose conventions have also been absorbed into both popular and elite theatrical entertainments around the world.

Critics have long noted the association between the Broadway musical and gay men as both producers and consumers. But rather than claim that musicals are gay, lesbian, or queer, this essay analyzes the circulation of desire in the work of two composer-lyricists, Cole Porter and Stephen Sondheim, by focusing on their mastery of the list or catalog song, a form that requires only that its lyric contains an inventory of people, places, or things. The essay argues that the list song functions as a kind of desiring-machine, an assembly line of words that represents a musical consequence and signature of the Fordist means of production. The list songs of Porter and Sondheim, which herald the beginning and end of Broadway's so-called Golden Age, divulge in their differing ways the contrasting sets of desires and anxieties that swirl around the closet—and the Broadway musical—in the decades before and after the Stonewall riots.

[...]the 1920s, Europe supplied almost all of what counted as elite culture in the United States: Rembrandt, Shakespeare, Brahms, Cervantes, Molière. More covertly, the CIA founded the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) in 1950 to try to prove that liberal democracies could produce elite culture that outshone that of the Soviet bloc. Because the US \"was struggling against the international view that it was essentially a nation without culture\", culture became \"a crucial arena\" in which to fight for global dominance.1 In Europe, Tennessee Williams (who, in fact, had attended the inaugural meeting of the CCF) became a favorite import and A Streetcar Named Desire, Philip C. Kolin notes, \"took the world stage by storm\".2 The play was quickly translated or directed by some of Europe's most eminent theatre artists, Jean Cocteau, Luchino Visconti, Laurence Olivier and Ingmar Bergman, and became a popular success and subject of critical controversy. The recurrence of these two critiques is, I believe, especially important because it is symptomatic of persistent post-war European fantasies not only about Williams, but also about US society and culture. Because the implications of each fantasy are different, let me begin by taking up the question of cinema. [...]the transatlantic traffic in cultural commodities, under the aegis of neoliberal globalization, has become less freighted with nationalist anxieties.

During the late 1940’s and 1950’s, argues David Savran, the baiting and brutalization of “communists and queers” were high on the national agenda. Within this historical context, Communist, Cowboys, and Queers offers a bold and radical reassessment of the works of theater’s most prominent and respected figures - Arthur Miller, the alleged communist, and Tennessee Williams, the self-acknowledged “queer.” Savran analyzes the radically different configurations of gender and sexuality in Miller’s and Williams’s writings and studies the ways in which each confronted and negotiated the postwar homophobic and anticommunism crusades. Through a detailed reexamination of their plays, films, and short stories, Savran argues against the popular images of both playwrights and the findings of most academic critics. Ultimately, his provocative exploration of the constitution of the Old Left, the demographic changes following World War II, the gay rights movement, the New Left, and the counterculture distinguishes Communists, Cowboys, and Queers as the first book rigorously to historicize the achievements of Miller and Williams.

With scene design by Bernd Damovsky, the opera's first two acts take place in Pollux's starkly monumental palace of concretelike slabs, a kind of giant, gray, mottled cube (that reminded me of a World War II bunker), filled with large Renaissance and Mannerist canvasses that depict the four mythological queens who appear later in the opera, the objects of Jupiter's previous seductions: Jupiter (Mark Delavan) first appears disguised as Midas in gold while the real Midas (Matthias Klink) enters as a messenger, wearing leather gloves lest whatever he touch turn to gold. [...]she tells him that he has not lost Maia: \"She'll keep on blossoming forever and ever! / The gift that the god gave to his sweet Maia / Blooms again and again, spring after spring!\" And she gives him her last piece of gold, a clasp hidden in her hair, which in this production becomes the music hidden in the suitcase. A kind of living memorial to the victims of the Nazis and the Stasi, Berlin seems always to cry out: \"Nie vergessen!\" (\"Never forget!\") Harms's Danae, performed in the austere, geometrical splendor of the 1961 Deutsche Oper house, is carefully calculated to evoke Berliners' memories not only of the tortured past of their city, but also of a German cultural heritage that was similarly ruined and remade.