The thirteen essays in Performance and the City offer a variety of responses to a pair of central questions laid out in the introduction by editors D. J. Hopkins, Shelley Orr, and Kim Solga: “(1) what roles do theatre and performance play in the development, negotiation and renewal of urban space?, and (2) how does our interaction with a performance event shape our individual and collective interactions with the city at large?” (2). Highly theoretical and often deeply personal, these responses collectively offer a compelling exploration of the mutual constitution of performance, the city, and contemporary subjectivity.

Performance and the City does not aim to be geographically comprehensive. Citing fears of “tokenism” or of minimizing the difference in conditions between cities in the developing world and those in the industrialized West, the editors limit the scope of the volume to “the urban Anglosphere” (7). Within this already limited territory, the study sharply focuses on its cultural capitals: London, Toronto, and, especially, New York. The editors suggest that, in some ways, this was inevitable, as New York is both “the West's iconic city stage” and “the scaffold upon which extraordinary acts of cultural and economic hegemony have been erected, with world-shaking results” (8), a situation magnified by the desires of many scholars to consider the city after 9/11. Rather than fighting this “compulsion to mourn New York out of all proportion” (8), the editors guardedly embrace it. While this decision is understandable, the single essay focused primarily on an American city beyond New York—Solga's contribution, which uses a revival of Lois Weaver and Peggy Shaw's Dress Suits to Hire in Austin, Texas, as an opportunity to reimagine the relationship between rural margins and urban centers in queer spatial mythologies—left me wondering what might have been gained from greater attention to urban spaces on the cultural periphery.

Despite the fact that the geographic territory covered by the volume is quite narrow, the essays themselves are wide-ranging in both subject matter and approach. Part I focuses on the relationship between memory and urban pedestrianism, reconsidering Michel de Certeau's landmark essay “Walking in the City”—which famously begins with the author gazing at New York City from the top of the World Trade Center—from a historical vantage point marked by the absence of those structures. Essays by Marla Carlson and Hopkins and Orr explore the memorial functions of specific walks they have taken through post-9/11 New York, whereas Rebecca Schneider looks at the ways in which monuments, memorials, and the sentiments they evoke in passersby are mobilized by and for a “Patricidic Culture… invested in insuring that the dead remain, and the live pass by” (52).

Part II explores the relationship between urban performance and the state and civic institutions of global capitalism. Ric Knowles's essay tracing the effect of Canada's official multiculturalism on Toronto's theatre ecology focuses on the tactics by which grassroots intercultural performance troupes reconfigure this sometimes-coercive idealism from below, whereas Rebecca Anne Rugg's analysis of the various uses of New York's stages following 9/11 (i.e., Giuliani's transformation of Broadway into a site of patriotic consumption, protesters' silent occupation of Times Square, and the Republican National Convention's appropriation of the city) works within a more straightforward dynamic of appropriation and resistance.

Part III, investigating the relationships between cities and the bodies that inhabit them, features Marlis Schweitzer's excavation of “the Spectacle of the Urban Female Body” through an inquiry into publicity stunts performed by New York actresses, in which she explores the interplay of anxieties regarding the feminine and the urban at the beginning of the twentieth century. Compellingly tracing the intersection of sexuality, press agents, and the modern city, she argues that new kinds of visibility left actresses vulnerable, but also “uniquely positioned” to voice feminist aspirations (147).

Part IV tests the geographical and conceptual limits of the work done in the book, with essays on performance and architecture and the interplay of imagined cities and material spaces. Especially rewarding is Laura Levin's examination of what it would mean to take space seriously as an active collaborator in site-specific art.

Rigorous and often moving, these essays offer keen insight into the interrelationships of performance and urban space. Its most important success, however, lies in the evidence that the collection as a whole offers in support of one of the book's primary theses: contrary to the dominant metaphor employed by those who think about the city, the city is not written—it is performed.