Eighteenth-century dramatists had little or no control over the production of their plays after the initial run. In spite of major strides made in copyright during the eighteenth century—developments that have long been studied and celebrated—dramatists were in an unenviable position when it came to owning their work. Literary property law initially extended only as far as print publication, not performance, and any theatrical company that was able to get hold of a playtext could produce that play without the permission of the author. As a result, dramatists received far less for their work than they otherwise might have.

The scene is New York City, 1958. That year, in two disparate arenas, American culture was attempting to come to grips with the difference between noise and art. A twenty-five-year retrospective concert of John Cage's work at New York's Town Hall helped create an intellectually coherent canon out of Cage's experiments, which critics had often treated as puerile provocations or exercises in whimsy to be regarded with bemused toleration. For some forward thinkers, noise was becoming intellectually exciting material for experimental music, whereas the audible audience outrage preserved by the recording of the Town Hall concert testifies to the continuing rearguard pique of more conservative sensibilities. Cage himself couldn't have imagined a more apt illustration of his theories than this aleatory auditory event, preserved for posterity by the recording apparatus.

Imagine a festival taking place before about five thousand people in a park in Adana, Turkey, in June 1992. In the middle of the park is a stage made of concrete. A touring Kurdish theatre company comprising four men, Hüseyin Kaytan, Kazım Öz, Nihat Öz, and Kemal Orgun, is performing a short play called Du Şivan (Two Shepherds). They enact a village raid and choose the villagers from among the audience. Kemal Orgun plays the commander of the task force raiding the village. The other three carry out the operation, rounding up the villagers. Orgun struts among the villagers, harassing them. All of a sudden, a woman jumps onstage and tries to grab the gun Orgun is carrying. He tries to wrest the gun from her, but she won't let go. A great commotion ensues, and more people clamber onstage to help the woman and attack the actors. When a man tries to strangle Orgun, he yells out in Kurdish, “Bira ma tu çi dikî, te ez kuştim?” (Hey my friend, what are you trying to do, kill me?). When the attacker finally understands Orgun is Kurdish, he releases and embraces him. Recounting this incident in his interview with me, Orgun remarks that they were almost lynched. The Kurdish woman who had jumped onstage and impulsively attacked Orgun had thought this was a real raid, just like those that had been taking place in Kurdish villages in Turkey for years. Her rage and instinctive self-protection is at one level slightly amusing, but this was also a bitter episode that demonstrated the consequences of the oppression of Kurdish people in the country. After the festival, Orgun and the other members named their theatre company Teatra Jiyana Nû (New Life Theatre). This became the foremost Kurdish theatre company and has trained many Kurdish actors, who in turn have further sustained and promoted Kurdish theatre by establishing their own companies.

In 1761, Count Carlo Gozzi created a “reflective analysis” of an Italian fairy tale about three oranges, framing his commedia dell'arte–infused scenario with a series of polemical attacks on his theatrical rivals. In 1914, Vsevelod Meyerhold and two collaborators, Konstantin Vogak and Vladimir Soloviev, published a reflective analysis of Gozzi's reflective analysis. This new Love of Three Oranges (Liubov k trem apel'sinam, translated as Love for Three Oranges), served as the source material for Sergei Prokofiev's opera (1919; Chicago world premiere, 1921). It is also one of the most illuminating, yet strangely understudied sources of information on how Meyerhold redefined the theatrical event, the creative process of the director, and the role of the actor in the years preceding the October Revolution. In particular, this Russian Three Oranges explores how a conscious relationship between actor and character in concert with framing devices that delineate levels of fiction can emphasize an experience peculiar to the theatre: regardless of style, audiences inevitably maintain both belief and disbelief in what they see and perceive theatrical performance as simultaneously real and not real.

Atop a raised pedestal leans the man himself (Fig. 1). He wears pink breeches, white hose, an orange cloak draped open to the ground, and a blue jerkin beneath it, from which a muslin-colored shirt protrudes, these last two liberally gilded. His posture is in obvious if distant emulation of the Kent and Scheemakers memorial in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey: the left elbow rests on a closed book with gilt-edged pages, the legs are crossed at the knee, and the ball of the left foot is perched in front of the right, jauntily askew, a position that makes the paint loss of its black slipper especially pronounced. Both hands rest at waist level, one clutching a page of manuscript at which the other points. The pose is puzzling, since the “writing” that appears there is just a scrawl of lines and dashes that shows where text ought to be, but conspicuously isn't. Left to index nothing that anyone has bothered to transcribe, the gesture is a lazy indication of literary noteworthiness, not unlike the women who sit at the poet's feet, gazing upward in an attitude of vague, noncommittal reverence. They might be heroines from the plays or they might not be; their contrasting costumes and identical expressions convey nothing beyond the usual laudatory relation of figural base to subject. Between them, garlanded with oak leaves and acorns, is the dial of a clock, its numbers and hands painted into place with the same gold that decorates the author's ensemble. The time is, and forever shall be, nine minutes past five.

If theatre historians had been paying attention to the proceedings at a Gilbert and Sullivan conference in Lawrence, Kansas in 1970, they would have heard a gauntlet strike the ground when Michael R. Booth delivered “Research Opportunities in Nineteenth-Century Drama and Theatre.” He called for research on audiences (“cultural levels, class origins, income, tastes, and development”), performance in the hinterlands (“we know that in 1866 60% of the theatre seats in metropolitan London were outside the West End”), economics (“theatre profits and losses, actors' wages, authors' income, management and organization, the pricing of seats”), and performance techniques (“technical developments in set construction, staging, lighting, traps, and special effects” as well as acting style). This cri de coeur to break the hegemony of literary teleologies is recognizable, in 2015, as a mandate to reorient inquiry toward how repertoires were delivered rather than how authorial talent was paramount, what buttressed profitability rather than what constituted fame, and who sustained a gamut of theatres rather than what demarcated elite taste. It set the agenda for aligning theatre studies in wholly new directions, and without citing a single source or calling out any particular historian it inventoried how theatre history could come into line with social history.