Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, 40.1

This issue contains five really great articles: Megan Lewis’s “The Decolonial Proscenium: Nora Shumba Chipaumire’s Nehanda and Nhaka Practice,” Nicholas S. Orvis’s “Queer Utopian Time and Gameful Theatre,” Teemu Paavolainen’s “Kafka’s Immanent Utopias: the Cage, the Axe, and Prague School Theatre Theory,” Jeanne Tiehen’s “Time in Another Culture and in the Theatre: Phenomenologies of Difference and Similarity,” and Dean Wilcox’s delightfully teachable “Strange Attractors, Bullet Time, and Nonlinear Narratives: A Chaos-Infused Postdramatic Primer.”

Opening to My Introduction to the Issue

The articles in this Fall 2025 issue of the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism technically do not cohere around a central theme; no special section connects them. The essays included in this issue, however, have their eyes on living differently. Two of the pieces—Teemu Paavolainen’s and Nick Ruiz Orvis’s—have utopia in their titles, and the other three articles ask us to confront difference, to sit with being uncomfortable, or—as audience members do in the piece Megan Lewis describes in her article—get up and move.

At my institution in Florida, I am thinking constantly about how to navigate the dangers and pitfalls presented to me by the governments to whom I am beholden and who manage the school where I work, how to discuss students’ concerns about the job market as they graduate, and how to offer hope to my students. In short, like many readers of JDTC, I spend a great deal of time thinking about the difficulties of teaching. Turning my attention to teaching and what the students need at any given time is one way for me to move out of my own existential angst about the
state of the world. I focus on what the students need in small, technical ways, and this allows us all to move forward. From my own vantage point teaching nearly one hundred first-year students, I find the students this year just as excited about
theatre and performance as ever. Despite the state of the world, they are motivated and energetic, and they have great ideas. What I’ve been most annoyed by this fall semester is the students’ desire to get answers as quickly as possible; what I’ve been most delighted by, on the other hand, is their genuine desire to play.