As the conventions of theatre design would have it, a clock onstage is a distraction for the audience. This has not always been true. Late nineteenth-century popular plays were alive with the sights and sounds of working clocks, their pointing hands, swinging pendulums, and striking bells announcing the time of significant events and actions in the fictional stage world. Visible on the mantelpiece, or audible in the town square, stage clocks in this era lent verisimilitude while heightening suspense, mirroring the broader aesthetic conventions of popular fin-de-siècle productions, in which highly realistic and detailed settings coexisted with the suspenseful plots and broad character types familiar from older melodramas.

For US actor, playwright, and theatre manager Harry Watkins (1825–94), the 1852–3 season was a whirlwind of ups and downs, elation and despair, triumph and tragedy. His engagement as an actor in C. R. Thorne's stock company at the New York Theatre ended abruptly in mid-September, leaving him without work at a point when few theatres were hiring. He mourned the loss of a beloved cousin, Jane Mott, who passed away one rainy day in October after a drawn-out illness. He endured many a headache while spearheading a fund-raising effort among his fellow actors to contribute a memorial stone to the Washington Monument. He was elected to the board of the American Dramatic Fund Association, but infighting among the directors left him feeling insulted and underappreciated, ultimately leading him to cease his involvement. By far, his biggest frustration was his inability to obtain reliable employment. He wrote many letters to many managers, to no avail. More than once, he considered giving up the theatre altogether.

The two white male cosponsors, a Democrat and a Republican, dressed as King George and Hamilton, respectively, as they rapped the resolution in the state senate. In Hamilton, chief creator Lin-Manuel Miranda stakes out space for an immigrant from the Caribbean who was in the room where the United States of America was founded. Based on Ron Chernow's biography, Hamilton follows the struggles and successes of Alexander Hamilton in a story largely told by his nemesis, Aaron Burr. The musical opened Off-Broadway at the Public Theater in 2015 and subsequently moved to Broadway. With its Founders Chic historical approach, hip-hop aesthetic, and multiracial cast, this Broadway blockbuster has earned substantial commercial and critical acclaim from across the political spectrum. Former President Barack Obama joked, “Hamilton, I'm pretty sure, is the only thing Dick Cheney and I agree on.”

“Theatre is not political action. Political action happens in the streets.” This is how the German director Thomas Ostermeier addressed the audience in a recent conversation with Branden Jacobs-Jenkins at the Brooklyn Academy of Arts. All theatre can do is make us realize the “lies we tell ourselves.” Thomas Ostermeier made a name for himself staging the socially conscious dramas of Sarah Kane and Mark Ravenhill. After becoming the artistic director of Berlin's Schaubühne, Ostermeier turned to Henrik Ibsen because he thought that Ibsen's bourgeois world would appeal to the patrons of the Schaubühne: “Characters in Ibsen constantly worry about money.” Perhaps, this is also the reason behind Ostermeier's desire to bring his production of Ibsen's An Enemy of the People, adapted into English by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, to the patrons of Broadway in the fall of 2018. It's a Trojan Horse. Get the haves into the theatre and make them see their own complicity in perpetuating the injustices of capitalism. Ostermeier's version of An Enemy of the People breaks the fourth wall during the play's town hall meeting and invites the audience to share their thoughts about capitalism and democracy. Ultimately, this audience participation reveals the anxiety that theatre might simply be a distraction.

On 30 March 2018, protesters in the Gaza Strip engaged in a peaceful demonstration for “Land Day,” a Palestinian commemoration of the expropriation of lands for Israeli settlements in 1976. During the march, Palestinians approached the border with Israel where the Israeli army opened fire with live ammunition and tank shells, killing at least fifteen demonstrators. Dozens of others were wounded. In the weeks and months that followed, Palestinian protesters continued to protest at the Gaza border. As this issue goes to print, the International Committee of the Red Cross reports that at least 116 Palestinians have been killed in protests framed as the “Great March of Return” since 30 March 2018, and as many as thirteen thousand have been injured. This spring's events, coinciding with the seventieth anniversary of the founding of the state of Israel and the US decision to move its embassy to Jerusalem, offer yet another reminder of the violence and dispossession that for decades have characterized Palestinian life under Israeli occupation.