The “experimental” playwrights of continental Europe have been experimental not because they have imitated modern literature or poetry, but because they have sought to express themselves in theatrical terms, and the great directors, like Jouvet, Barrault, Viertel, and Brecht have been there to make their plays “exist” on the stage.

The New York Hippodrome theatre brought together many different types of performance on its massive stage. Its opening production in 1905, for instance, included circus acts, a ballet, and a fictionalized Civil War battle (Fig. 1). Many of the acts focused on a key feature in the theatrical environment, a water tank beneath the apron of the stage that could be filled to a fourteen-foot depth. High

In 1967, the US Vocational Rehabilitation Administration (VRA) awarded $331,000 to the Eugene O'Neill Memorial Theatre Foundation to fund a new company, the National Theatre of the Deaf. Endowing such an enterprise was bold, but not entirely unprecedented for this federal agency tasked with restoring disabled Americans to productive employment. Founded in 1920, the federal–state vocational rehabilitation

As most of my human contact became restricted to the Zoom screen in spring 2020, I discovered a serious limit to my capacity for looking. I also began finding it difficult to read. A ten-month headache taught me to stop taking ibuprofen and learn to manage tensions around my eyes and head as well as to shift roughly half of my reading to screenreaders and audio books. The need to restructure my own

In 1920, Oscar Hammerstein II—fresh from the modest success of his debut musical Always You—was eager to write the show for Frank Tinney that his uncle Arthur was to produce. As Hugh Fordin wrote, “Arthur, confident of his nephew's ability but aware that he needed to learn more about his craft, brought in Otto Harbach to collaborate on the book and lyrics.” The two men joined forces on that show—Tickle

Stock characters named “Nobody” and “Somebody” were mainstays of British performance culture in the mid- to late eighteenth century. Playbills and newspaper advertisements show that these roles were popular with audiences in London, Dublin, and Edinburgh, as well as on the regional stages. Men and women alike took on these personae to deliver songs, prologues, and epilogues, often as part of benefit

The effect of this “colonial cringe” is an enduring and debilitating performance anxiety on a global stage.

It was May in Eau Gallie, Florida, and Zora Neale Hurston was headed to church. Shutting the door to her cottage near the shores of the Indian River, Hurston set out to join the local Baptist congregation, where she would hear a sermon delivered by its pastor, the Reverend C. C. Lovelace. Hurston had been pondering the question of how to represent the experience of a church service in a theatrical

ideas and landmarks in theatre and political economy since the 1850s: nineteenthcentury industrialization, the waxing and waning postwar UK welfare state, Irish peace in the 1990s, North American border panics after 9/11, and austerity politics in the 2010s. In all of these frameworks, McKinnie sees and communicates clearly how the mechanics of theatremaking make political and economic meaning as much

the burgeoning field of reenactment studies by adding significant insight into the eighteenth-century origins of the form and its relation to the performance of justice. It is a pity the author does not engage with Rebecca Schneider’s influential work on the topic, as dialogue with her main terms and ideas would have broadened the implications of his excellent analyses and arguments. One also wonders

appears amid discussions of the common use of the term “bourgeois” as a pejorative in contemporary (bourgeois) culture. Disidentification thus describes the author’s (and perhaps reader’s) own sense of their relationship to the term “bourgeois.” In subsequent chapters we find that the figure of disidentification may in fact be intrinsic to theatre (insofar as the use of theatre as a machine of ideological

For good reason, proscenium staging has fallen out of favor in recent decades. Taken to be a synonym for passivity, its constraints on the theatrical imagination have been largely replaced by a suite of more active, immersive, and site-specific strategies. In performance spaces across the Global South, however, it is not only this rising taste for interaction that has driven the proscenium’s demise

A raging global pandemic handled inadequately and indifferently by the Republican-led US federal government, with Dr. Anthony Fauci in a featured role; an antiracist uprising in response to police brutality; a resurgent political Right fomenting and stoking culture wars; activists’ demands for a diverse and equitable art world; increasing fiscal precarity for small, innovative live art spaces; a looming

In an 1847 lecture before the Female Anti-Slavery Society of Salem, William Wells Brown stated: “Were I about to tell you the evils of Slavery, to represent to you the Slave in his lowest degradation, I should wish to take you, one at a time, and whisper it to you. Slavery has never been represented; Slavery never can be represented.” In these oft-cited lines, Wells Brown makes a strong claim for the

In April 1885, a New York Herald journalist rushed to Madison Square Garden for a special reception highlighting Jo-Jo, the Dog-Faced Boy. A feature of P. T. Barnum's traveling show, Jo-Jo was confounding scientists who had requested a stand-alone inspection of the mysterious attraction. Accordingly, the reporter provided an anthropological description of the boy: “He stands about five feet high.

I think, then, that Negroes must concern themselves with every single means of struggle: legal, illegal, passive, active, violent and non-violent. That they must harass, debate, petition, give money to court struggles, sit-in, lie-down, strike, boycott, sing hymns, pray on steps—and shoot from their windows when the racists come cruising through their communities.—Lorraine Hansberry (1962)

In March 2020, Southern Illinois University in Carbondale (SIU) went into lockdown. With the annual Big Muddy New Play Festival about to kick off—two productions entering tech and four full-length staged readings rehearsing—SIU's M.F.A. Playwriting Program had been left in the lurch. COVID-19 and the scramble to move courses online and to graduate our M.F.A.'s canceled the entire festival. A year later

During the summer of 2020, I intended to make my second visit to Iqaluit, Nunavut, to speak with people involved in performance and climate science practices, engage in “co-performative witnessing” (methodology after Dwight Conquergood), and work to make my doctoral research useful to communities in Nunavut.1 Needless to say, that didn't happen. However, the limitations imposed by COVID-19 have also

As collaborators who have been working together virtually since 2017, we have written plays and articles, conducted artist interviews, and are in the process of writing a book about teaching older adults theatre. When the pandemic came, everything else in our lives moved online, and we encountered new challenges with both our teaching and our scholarship. We were tasked with transitioning our theatre

In April 2020—only weeks after the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic—the New York Times published an article titled “Why Zoom Is Terrible.” Quoting a gustatory simile from Sheryl Brahnam of Missouri State University, the article declared, “In-person communication resembles video conferencing about as much as a real blueberry muffin resembles a packaged blueberry muffin that

Because sensory theatre productions are designed with neurodiverse audiences in mind, practitioners are first and foremost concerned with accessibility at all levels for their audience members, incorporating multiple senses throughout a performance to allow a variety of entry points for audiences that may have wildly divergent—and often competing—access needs. One-to-one interaction between performers

In March 2020 I came home from a theatre conference with a nagging cough, which I had been fighting for some time. Yet, it deepened and strengthened over the next few days. In the following week, symptoms accumulated and were strange and fluctuating: an experience with which I would become all too well acquainted in my COVID journey. Two weeks later on a second telemedical appointment a doctor heard

My experience of this pandemic began with bureaucracy. I want it to end with dancing.

There was certainly much about the hurried switch from in-person to online teaching and learning in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic that inspired angst. The decisions that many colleges and universities made to halt on-campus activities and deconcentrate their communities left scores of us scrambling to pack up some of the things we hoped would help us withstand a few weeks away from our

The last seminar of my “Introduction to Literary Theories” course in the fall semester of 2020 involved really difficult material on gender and race; it was exposing; none of the students had their cameras on. I was nearly in tears. Kept composure. We had been navigating well through the semester, with this and the other first-year module on poetry—subjects adjacent to theatre as a result of my situation

The year of COVID-19 social distancing is a reminder that people can and will gather in person in mass acts of resistance and community care, even in a pandemic. This year highlights how theatres, theatre skills, and theatrical techniques can be a key part of community building and dissent. The examples of the Twin Cities in summer 2020; Portland, Oregon, in 2020–1; and France in spring-summer 2021

The crowded marketplace in Thiruvananthapuram (aka Trivandrum) thronged with people in the late nineteenth century. Men and women clad in white mundu teemed about the busy street buying oil and salt, horseshoes and iron farm implements, coarse cloth, coir rope, jaggery, and palm toddy. The men were mostly bare-chested, though some, unmindful of the sweltering heat, wore white long shirts or an upper-body

dell’arte aurally conditioned early modern audience to the emergence of opera (32). The final focus of the chapter is on discussions of gesture in performance. Turning again to Quintilian, a touchstone in this book, Crohn Schmitt explains that he “lays out general guidelines about the interrelationship between words, gesture, and voice, and between gestures” (40). Crohn Schmitt next applies Quintilian

potential and prompts a kind of productive destabilizing of artistic hierarchies. Such mischief making, she argues, is relevant to the work twenty-first-century artists and audiences are creating and consuming. Notably, Hunter makes good use of some data from actual game players and television fans in the latter half of the book; similar use of audience data in her other case studies, especially the

The passing of the Trump presidency has left much of the academic world in a state of PTSD. “How could this have happened?” we ask in delayed shock. “Has the virus merely been suppressed?” It seems the right moment to ask ourselves fundamental questions, and the publication of The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Performance Historiography, a collection of twenty-four essays meticulously edited by

in original. 10 See Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (2004): 225–48. 11 Academic debate about this term was triggered by Rustom Bharucha’s essay “Notes on the Invention of Tradition” in his Theatre and the World: Performance and the Politics of Culture (1990; London: Routledge, 1993), 193–211. 12 Dipesh Chakrabarty

various cultural trends—a Grecian style of dress and posing inspired by Isadora Duncan, orientalism, wartime patriotism, and of course, European modernism— to spice up her act. As in previous parts, Stalter-Pace’s analysis illuminates the intersecting attitudes toward art, gender, and race in the reception of Hoffmann’s performances, as with the implications of the not-so-temporary dye she used to

On the first day of April 1649, on the predominantly rural manor of Walton, Surrey, the sight of people preparing land for the plow was unremarkable. To see men up at dawn, dressed for the field in broad-brimmed hats, homespun waistcoats, and short breeches, loosening or breaking up clods with their spades, stooping to toss aside root and rock, was typical. What did raise eyebrows, however, was the

Stephenson argues that although the theatre of the real promises authentic encounters, these are not possible;instead performances "meditate on that impossibility and the conditions under which a singular secure real fails to manifest" (17) The book comprises eight chapters, the first ("Introduction") and last ("Coda: Theatres of the Real in the Age of Post-Reality") of which situate the project geographically

In the Introduction, Walsh writes that “part of the challenge in editing this book has been to manage interdisciplinary study across a long historical sweep, but there is no way to neatly contain contagion” (7), and this refusal to be contained characterizes the collection, which enacts and encourages interdisciplinarity and the positive processes of contagion with which it is thematically concerned

environmental racism tacit in the Environmental Protection Agency’s use of “bunding” (retaining walls) at the Irish Traveller settlement at Dale Farm, in Essex. Bunding is designed to contain toxic waste, but its usage effectively designates the Travellers as social contaminants (as well as positions them in proximity to literal contaminants). In Part 3, Ana Pais critiques the neoliberal ideologies

sonic landscape” (174) of Koothnytz disrupts the elite, caste-coded space of Bangalorean nightclubs in productive ways by allowing exciting vernacular choreographies and engagements in urban nightlife. Although the registers of pleasure and aesthetics are useful here, ishtyle as an analytic does not always work. It is too vaguely defined and can seemingly be applied to anything; its very definition

Chapter 1 explores the viral dramaturgy that circulated between Antonin Artaud (among the first to conceptualize theatre as a viral contagion) and the Living Theatre The third viral dramaturgy exploited these via a dramaturgy of "publicly performed fiction - spectacular stories unbounded by theatrical stages" (113) In I Viral Performance: Contagious Theaters from Modernism to the Digital Age i , Miriam

Night is falling in the city. Holiday shoppers bustle down the sidewalk, some pausing to gaze at a colorful billboard publicizing the delights of an upcoming exposition. A few crafty rats scamper along a tall wooden fence, stalked by a sinister ratcatcher of the Dickensian mold. Children frolic, fight, and tease one another in front of the fence, the familiar syncopated strains of Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker

In 1806, Longman & Co. publishers commissioned the accomplished actress, playwright, and novelist Elizabeth Inchbald to compose a series of prefatory remarks for the plays to be included in their British Theatre series. One hundred and twenty-five in all, each of the plays for Longman's British Theatre was originally published and sold separately at a rate of about one per week. Once the series was

On the Fourth of July, 1860, the New York Times introduced readers to a new persona treading the minstrel boards: Matinées are the order of the day, two at both the Bowerys, at George Christy's, at Bryant's, and at the Palace Gardens. Here “versatile performers” and “talented danseuses” will diversify the hours of patriotic emotion with comic pantomime and grand “Japanese ballets,” led by “Little Tommy

Noted British actress Fanny Kemble lived eighty-four years on and off the theatrical and political stages of the nineteenth century. Kemble was an active writer who authored her first five-act play, Francis the First, at the age of eighteen. She would go on to write at least ten other published works, including a second full-length play, multiple journals recording her personal observations, notes

Unlike other Shakespearean tragedies, King Richard III was never turned into a comedy through the insertion of a happy ending. It did, however, undergo a transformation of dramatic genre, as the numerous Richard III burlesques and travesties produced in the nineteenth century plainly show. Eight burlesques (or nine, including a pantomime) were written for and/or performed on the London stage alone

It is difficult to exaggerate the level of critical praise that American solo performer Ruth Draper received during her long career, which stretched from 1920 until her death in 1956. As one critic notes: “Very few people have ever talked very coherently about Ruth Draper. There are no standards by which to gauge her. The magic she conveys is as inexplicable as air or light or love.” Indeed, after

Over the course of four days in September, 1666, a fire sparked in a bakery turned four-fifths of central London to dust. Wandering the streets around his home three days after the Great Fire subsided, the diarist John Evelyn describes a city in ruins—its buildings and landmarks “mealted, & reduc'd to cinders by the vehement heats,” its “bielanes & narrower streetes … quite fill'd up with rubbish,

Just a few pages later, the book opens up into some of the larger theoretical questions it will consider: “Beyond Broadway illustrates the widespread presence and persistence of musical theatre in US culture, examining it not as an object or a cultural artifact (as much musical theatre scholarship does), but as a social practice, a doing, a live, visceral experience of creating, watching, listening”

phenomenology is the means by which to resolve this conundrum, as it allows us “to identify the shared variables that render difference and individuality conceivable” (27). His deft descriptions of how this operates in a series of experiences of kinesthetic spectatorship in the theatre give us valuable insight into how meaning is created in each instance. My one quibble with the book is its rather