The corrosive effects of neoliberalism, which have led to the use and abuse of financial markets, the maximization of resources (from oil sands to garment workers), and the privatization of welfare state provisions, have not left art and performance unscathed. In recent years, scholars in theatre and performance studies have analyzed how the political and economic crises provoked by neoliberalism have irrevocably transformed art and cultural practices. Lara D. Nielsen and Patricia Ybarra's redoubtable anthology, Neoliberalism and Global Theatres, joins this bumper crop of work and expands the conversation on neoliberalism and the arts in a number of productive ways. First, they show that neoliberalism is not a static or top–down phenomenon; rather, as Margaret Worry's opening essay notes, “neoliberalism is a form of culture, as heterogeneous, historically contingent, contested, and mutable as any other, and just as worthy of scholarly attention” (27, italics in original). Second, the collection confronts us with the plurality of neoliberal cultures across the arts including local and state-appropriated Gandrung dances, African American social dances, New Orleans second-line parades, Hollywood films, theatre, and traveling exhibits. These are potent cultural practices that bind us to neoliberal agendas through affect and embodiment. Third, the book lives up to its claim to represent “global theatres,” offering analysis of state-sponsored cultural practices in Vietnam, Sri Lanka, and New Zealand; countercultural and politically resistant projects in (and about) the urban cores of Bangalore, Brasília, and Lagos; and the historical and contemporary permutations of neoliberalism in the theatre and music capitals of London, New York, and New Orleans.

Nielsen's introduction usefully examines how artistic and cultural production has both implicated itself within, and reflected upon, neoliberalism. This is especially true of artistic production that has internalized the “resource management” (1) techniques of neoliberalism such as flexible, outsourced, and mobile labor. Whether it is the transnational performance that Ybarra describes of Soame Citlalime, a group of women from San Francisco Tetlanohcan, a town in Tlaxcala, Mexico, who dramatize the stakes of migration from Mexico to the United States, or contributor Jisha Menon's adaptation of Chekhov's Cherry Orchard into a contemporary meditation about Bangalore, artists cannot reflect upon our collective capture to neoliberalism without also getting entangled within issues of wage labor, visas, or progress narratives that pit the local against the global. For this reason the conceptual cluster “‘abstraction,’ ‘appropriation,’ and ‘privatization’” outlined in the Introduction (3), and variously employed across different chapters as characteristics of both the arts and neoliberalism, is particularly revealing for its lack of fidelity to both. This conceptual fungibility is what makes countercultural art practices so susceptible to capture. For example, Brasília's now defunct Teatro Oficina Perdiz, discussed in this volume by local theatre director Nitza Tenenblat, operated outside of market rents in a space that acted as a car repair shop by day and theatre by night. The theatre stood in the way of private real estate development and proved a headache to city administrators who failed to see the difference “in value between cultural and real estate activities” (235). What Tenenblat and the other contributors in this anthology show is that neoliberalism cannot tolerate alternative social models—it needs government to enact its policies and art and culture to naturalize its vision.

The first part of the anthology, “Institutional Strategies,” is illuminating for its range of sites, which include Eng-Beng Lim's study of the franchising of public universities; Sebastián Calderón Bentin's take on another franchise, Steven Spielberg's Indiana Jones film series, which he links to the legal battle between the government of Peru and Yale University; David Savran's application of brand culture to the megamusical Hair; and Werry's analysis of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. Werry's chapter attests to how participatory sites in museums are key to enacting what she calls “neoliberal cultural citizenship” (26). Culture plays a deleterious role here by making us feel that we have accomplished a civic duty when in fact we have done nothing more than rehearse multicultural rhetoric for the benefit of tourist and consumer markets.

The remaining three parts, “Modes of Transmission,” “Formal Economies,” and “Sites of Articulation,” possess equally rich offerings. Khai Thu Nguyen's nuanced essay about playwright and poet Lưu Quang Vũ is unique for the way it maps melodrama onto neoliberalism, revealing the genre's performative power as a technique of contemporary politics. Nguyen argues that melodrama facilitated Vietnam's transformation into a neoliberal state through the performance of self-critical confessions by public officials. Equally insightful is Catherine M. Cole's close reading of Wole Soyinka's The Beatification of Area Boy: A Lagosian Kaleidoscope (1995). Demonstrating the ways the political and economic “reforms” that epitomize neoliberalism have produced wide-scale corruption and deprivation in Africa, her essay is an important reminder that Soyinka's more recent political plays about contemporary Nigeria and the African continent need to be productively paired with his earlier, more often read works.

The “concluding meditation” (20) by May Joseph stands out as separate from the themes in the volume, offering a personal reflection on the challenges of devising environmental work in New York City. It is clear that Joseph is both passionate about the city and about creating experimental theatre with “non-actors” (273). However, after reading a volume of essays that focus so closely on the material, political, and economic factors that influence artistic and cultural production in a neoliberal world, I was left wondering why the editors did not demand the same of the concluding meditation, specifically with respect to Joseph's division between commercial and amateur performers. I'm reminded here of the recent controversy surrounding Suzanne Lacy's 2013 piece Between the Door and the Street. This was a large-scale performance event produced by Creative Time that involved more than four hundred women, all volunteer performers, who shared their stories with the public about their lives as feminists and activists. It was only following the event that a contingent of the participants wrote an open letter to Lacy and Creative Time expressing their frustration about resourcing their stories and selves for free. Clearly, cultural volunteers need to voice their perspective, if only to corroborate the claims made by directors and others. Perhaps the next iteration of Neoliberalism and Global Theatres will feature the voices of the volunteer performers in New York and beyond alongside the scholars and artists who describe them.