Framing this conversation is recent scholarship in theater and performance studies which has worked to move beyond “repetition” as a governing paradigm for the field. This project is taken up in the recent anthology Race and Performance After Repetition (Duke 2020), edited by Soyica Diggs Colbert, Douglas A. Jones, and Shane Vogel; Rebecca Schneider’s work on theatrical reenactment (Routledge 2011) also provides crucial theoretical context for the panel. Our discussion contributes to the ongoing search for a repertoire of terms and approaches beyond repetition, aiming to develop more nuanced tools for contextualizing performance events which trouble conventional classifications by period and genre.

“Bad Revivals” engages with these scholarly conversations through three case studies, each of which emphasizes the artistic and ideological variances of such untimely restagings. The panel will consist of three fifteen-minute papers, followed by ten minutes allotted for the official respondent and fifteen minutes for open discussion.

The panel begins by considering how unruly repetition produces misinformation. Minou Arjomand’s paper, “Reviving Fake News,” addresses the long history of radio adaptations of H.G. Wells’s novel War of the Worlds. In October 1938, thousands of Americans fled their homes to escape a Martian invasion after hearing Orson Welles’ radio adaptation of H.G. Wells’s novel. This revival was “bad,” Arjomand argues, because it was too well-executed. Within the context of heightened tensions in Europe, and the escalating use of radio propaganda by the National Socialists, War of the Worlds led to extensive public debate about the power of radio to disseminate misinformation in ways that print media could not. Despite the notoriety of Welles’ production, War of the Worlds was subsequently revived as a radio play multiple times, sometimes with deadly results. Arjomand’s paper engages with the long history of War of the Worlds adaptations, asking why people keep reviving this novel and—perhaps more importantly—why people keep believing it.

Our next panelist explores how irreverent revivals in the modernist theater both exposed and reinforced hegemonic structures. In “Unfaithful Revivals: Resurrecting Sadakichi Hartmann’s Passion Play,” Rebecca Kastleman investigates Christ, a drama whose 1893 publication led to Hartmann’s arrest. This play restages the familiar Christian narrative of the Passion as a sensuous spectacle, foregrounding Christ’s awakened sensuality and radically experimenting with the representation of Christ’s body in performance. Hartmann, who is often described as the first Asian American playwright, used Christ to identify and destabilize the presumption of whiteness that attended Christ’s body in U.S. majoritarian culture. Kastleman situates Hartmann’s Christ within a broader context of unruly revivals of devotional performance in the modernist theater. By reimagining, redacting, and re-gendering the sacrificial body of Christ, such works aspire to a mode of enactment that will transform the modern stage.

Kelli Shermeyer’s paper, “Bad Revivals through Creative Anachronism,” further expands on the consequences of white supremacist discourses for performance forms while assessing the stakes of recent historical reenactments. Shermeyer uses a 2018 controversy in the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA) to explore how living history performance can enable white supremacists to covertly weaponize historical iconography in the service of false, racist, and anachronistic histories of “whiteness.” Shermeyer’s work also acknowledges how, for many participants in the SCA, a rigorous commitment to historical research serves as a bulwark against the encroachment of contemporary politics and a refutation of the misappropriation of European history by “folkish” neopagans and white nationalists. The paper demonstrates the need for a more rigorous theorization of creative anachronism that engages with its many possible uses: a performative strategy that can lend “authenticity” to cultural or national traditions, a tool for those who seek to protect historical symbology from misappropriation, and a mechanism for constructing false notions of “white” culture.

Across these case studies, we explore how these “bad revivals” in theater and performance—despite their ostensible failures—catalyze new artistic and social potentialities. As the respondent, Jennifer Buckley will draw out the common threads among these papers and ensure a fruitful conversation.