Although Langston Hughes's Mulatto holds the record as the second longest Broadway production of a play by an African American playwright (surpassed only by Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun), the reasons behind its commercial success have been virtually ignored. This oversight in part reflects a tendency among theatre scholars to treat the dramatic text as the primary (if not the only) source of a play's meaning. In the case of Mulatto, academic critics have debated its literary merit according to questions of form and genre. Webster Smalley, in his introduction to the collected plays of Langston Hughes, for instance, defends Mulatto as a tragedy, arguing that the play avoids the tendency of social dramas of the 1930s “to oversimplify moral issues as in melodrama” because of the recognition of Bert's “tragic situation” (he must kill himself or be killed by an angry lynch mob). For those critics who insist that Mulatto is melodramatic, Smalley advises, “let [them] look to the racial situation in the deep South as it is even today [i.e., 1963]: it is melodramatic.” Smalley presupposes a dichotomous relationship between fiction and reality, advancing a mimetic theory in which representation directly corresponds to the real. Rather than answering specific charges, he defines contemporary race relations as melodrama, implying that Mulatto, even if melodramatic, is “natural” and “accurate.”

The vast caravan out of Ceylon … arrived safely in Europe in April 1884 … There were sixty-seven people, twenty-five elephants … and a great many oxen of various kinds. The ethnographic exhibition included hundreds of different shows, and even the vegetative world was represented in numerous exhibits … My Singhalese troupe was veiled in the ancient wondrous world of India; not only had we captured the vibrant, picturesque, outward appearance of India, but also the shimmer of its mystique. The colourful, captivating sight of the caravanserai, the majestic elephants, partly bedecked in golden saddlery, partly in work harnesses, pulling gigantic loads; the slim, attractive, doe-eyed dancers with their sensuous movements and last of all the great religious Perra-Harra procession-conjured up a magic web which subjected the public entirely to it … The exhibition was opened in Hamburg… After Hamburg came Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, and Vienna … From Vienna it went to Berlin … In the following years, 1885 and 1886, I traveled with the same exhibition through southern Germany, Switzerland and Vienna a second time, and finally set out for England … It was in Paris, at the height of its success, that the Ceylon exhibition finally came to an end. The average number of visitors to the Jardin d'Acclimatisation on a Sunday was 50,000-60,000. Throughout the two and a half month duration of the exhibition, the number of visitors was nearly one million.

“Plays are but the Mirrours of our Lives,” wrote Colley Cibber in 1707, recognizing the special relevance of a timeless metaphor to the theatre of his own day. A man generally given to hyperbole, Cibber here underestimates the theatre's affective power for influencing and transforming society. Of all the many reflections and transformations one may see in the mirror of late-Restoration theatre, however, the most important, I believe, are the images of warfare. In the early eighteenth century, the theatrum mundi was indeed a theatrum belli, for the theatre of war was not confined to Vigo, Blenheim, and Malplaquet, to the fields of Sanders or Spain, but was enacted on the proscenium stages of Drury Lane, Lincoln's Inn fields, and the Haymarket. Nearly every new play written and produced on the London stages in the first decade of the eighteenth century has a Redcoat or a Tar in its dramatis personae or has topical references to the War of the Spanish Succession, to disbandment, to conscription, or to the debate over the issue of a standing army. Concurrent with the theatre's reflection of the nation's concern over the rise of the standing army is a transformation in the representation of army officers in stage comedies. After 1700, portrayals of military men shift so dramatically that they seem to attain an ideological significance; the historical causes and the aesthetic effects of this shift—which are the focal points of the ensuing essay—suggest a widespread ideological effort by writers to enlist public sympathy not only for the soldier but also for the notion of a standing army.

Historians of the Provincetown Players generally recognize Nina Moise as an individual who made a significant contribution to the company at a crucial period in its existence. Those who acknowledge her as an important member of the group commonly agree that Moise was Provincetown's first professional director and that her success as a director facilitated a shift away from amateurish collectivism toward more professional production techniques. That Nina Moise was largely responsible for this critical transformation in the company's production policies is not in dispute; the factors underlying her success, however, have not been examined. What were the qualities, personal and professional, that enabled Moise to make her significant contribution?

The world storm, which has now passed, left its marks on all areas of artistic creation. Everywhere that Fascism reached, it disturbed the internal coherence of things, and their respective relationships, in order to create a formless, passive mixture, incapable of initiative. As far as art is concerned, Fascism has proclaimed the slogan of perverse art, and declared a struggle of annihilation against such art. In praxis, however, the particular artistic methods that had been created—through the modern art that was blacklisted—remained intact, because those methods did not create a system, or express a particular artistic desire, through which an intentional artistic will could have created a gap in the totality of violence. It is natural that this state of affairs endangered not only the cohesion of the internal elements of the artistic structure, but also the consistency of the functional organization of persons and institutions serving the art. The artistic schools and movements disappeared, or were at the very least disrupted. The affiliations of creative artists with distinct associations and societies became in many instances more a matter of external circumstances than of artistic decision.

The aesthetic concept of montage finds its origins in film and film theory. Montage, as understood by Sergei Eisenstein, is not only a mechanical linking at random, a “sticking together” of pictures from scenes and shots. The basis of montage is dramatic and dialectical; among the elements of the montage chain there are contradictory relationships, and from these new meanings develop what the separate elements do not contain. “Any two pieces, put side by side, are inevitably linked together and form a new idea, which arises from this comparison as a new quality.” The inception of new meanings through a mere connection of parts arises from the perception of a montage of parts as one unit, even though the connection was only arbitrary.

This article deals with a very short period in the long history of the semiotic conception of theatre. It concentrates on the relationship between the theatrical avantgarde and the theories developed during some twenty years in Czechoslovakia, by Otakar Zich on the one hand and the members of the Prague Linguistic Circle on the other. Broadly speaking, this is the Prague School theory of theatre. A Polish scholar has called it “semiotics of theatre in statu nascendi.” This designation is no doubt pertinent as far as the recent development of the discipline is concerned; its more remote past still remains largely unexplored. But another commentator went much further, claiming that until 1931, the year when Zich's treatise on the theatre and Mukařovský's article on Chaplin's City Lights appeared, “dramatic poetics—the descriptive science of the drama and theatrical performance—had made little progress since its Aristotelian origins.” In fact, semiotics is a very old discipline and the semiotic interpretation of the theatre was not invented in Czechoslovakia between the two World Wars.

In the renegotiations of borders and cultures currently underway in former Soviet Europe, the situation in Slovakia stands out as one in which uncertainty itself is perhaps the primary obstacle to renewal and growth. The Slovaks were occupied by Hungarian forces for a millennium, emerging as a modern nation first under the shadow of the Czechs in the first republic, then clouded by a Nazi-style clerico-fascist state which discredited the moral impulses of much Slovak nationalism, and finally dominated by a colonial Comecon culture in which the interests of an integral, cohesive Slovak state were always compromised by its role in a larger international Soviet politics. By virtue of the remarkable Velvet Revolution, the Slovaks have been able to claim unique nationhood for the first time since the Great Moravian Empire in the 9th century. Yet the thousand years between has created a culture which lacks the foundations for the kind of quick, assured policy-making that will succeed financially, and in the international culture market, for the new countries of Europe. Separated from the Czechs, the Slovaks now face a slower pace of industrial conversion, slower ecological recovery, a fading currency, and the legacy of a violent nationalism—personified in Meciar's leadership—that has not made the transition from government by executive fiat to reasoned debate and majority politics.