?In 2005 literary and film critic Edward Turk immersed himself in New York City’s ACT FRENCH festival, a bold effort to enhance American contact with the contemporary French stage. This dizzying crash
Throughout the nineteenth century, people heard more music in the theatre?accompanying popular dramas such as Frankenstein, Oliver Twist, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Lady Audley’s Secret, The Corsican Brothers
The story of America’s earliest extant play begins with a petty crimea crime that would have passed largely unnoticed had it not been for one fact: it prompted a beleaguered royal governor of one of B
What does it mean to perform whiteness in the postcolonial era? To answer this question—crucial for understanding the changing meanings of race in the twenty-first century—Megan Lewis examines the way
Whereas previous studies of poverty and early modern theatre have concentrated on England and the criminal rogue,Poverty and Charity in Early Modern Theatre and Performance takes a transnational appro
From 1918’s Tickless Time through Waiting for Lefty, Death of a Salesman,A Streetcar Named Desire, A Raisin in the Sun, and The Prisoner of Second Avenueto 2005’s The Clean House, domestic labor has f
More than a chronicle, America in the Round is a critical history that reveals how far Washington D.C.’s Arena Stage could go with its budget and racially liberal politics, and how Arena both di
Between the world wars, several labor colleges sprouted up across the U.S. These schools, funded by unions, sought to provide members with adult education while also indoctrinating them into the cause
The American Progressive Era, which spanned from the 1880s to the 1920s, is generally regarded as a dynamic period of political reform and social activism. In Performing the Progressive Era, editors M
When most of us hear the title Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, we think of Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell’s iconic film performance. Few, however, are aware that the movie was based on Anita Loos’s 1925 co
A pioneer of American modern drama and founding member of the Provincetown Players, Susan Glaspell (1876–1948) wrote plays of a kind that Robert Brustein defines as a “drama of revolt,” an expression
Traveler, There Is No Road offers a compelling and complex vision of the decolonial imagination in the United States from 1931 to 1943 and beyond. By examining the ways in which the war of interpretat
If one went looking for the tipping point in the prelude to the American Revolution, it would not be the destruction of the tea in Boston Harbor, or the blockade of Boston by British warships, or even
Foregrounding critical questions about the tension between the study of drama as literature versus the study of performance, Melinda Powers investigates the methodological problems that arise in some
