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Introduction to the Special Section

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