Abstract: Istanbul’s Rum minority used theatre as an amnesic machine during the twentieth-century migratory expulsions. While scholarship frames minority performance primarily as memory preservation, the Rum community staged comedies, revues, and operettas to forget their vulnerability and assert their determination to remain. Drawing on archival research and interviews, I trace how theatrical forgetting functioned as nontransference during the Allied occupation and Treaty of Lausanne negotiations (1918–23), collective healing amid “soft expulsions” (1923–64), and recollection during final demographic decline (1964–75). By asserting the community’s determination to remain, Rum theatre reveals forgetting as a decolonial methodology for theatre historiography.
Abstract: This article examines the Spanish productions of Terrence McNally’s Love! Valour! Compassion! (1994) and Harvey Fierstein’s On Tidy Endings (1987), which premiered in Madrid as Amor, coraje y compassion (1995) and Algo en común (1996–1997). I read the productions against the social backdrop of the AIDS crisis, assessing them as interventions that attempted to bring HIV/AIDS to the commercial stage but failed to earn a positive reception. The article analyzes both productions as reflections of a larger trend on the Castilian-speaking stage in Spain, which, deviating from the example set in Catalonia’s theatre industry, remained largely averse to the epidemic’s noncommercial appeal.
