When the first serious studies of the homosexual past began to appear in English, they bore titles like Hidden from History and Who Was That Man? Even now such studies may describe themselves as “disclosures,” “the secret life,” “the untold story.” The suggestion is that there has been, if not a deliberate suppression, then a less-than-benign neglect of those aspects of history that revealed the presence of same-sex desire and behavior. To unearth and disclose them was regarded as essential to the struggle for gay liberation. By establishing homosexual individuals as a presence from time immemorial, one could make the study of them respectable and thereby bestow respectability on their practices, sexual and cultural, as well. This endeavor was complicated by the increasingly heated debate between the “essentialists,” who regard a homosexual identity to be innate and ahistorical, and the “social constructionists,” followers of Foucault, who insist on the evolution of a modern homosexual identity as the result of changes in the concept of sexuality. Often the fruits of research have been obscured by contentions over whether they supported one camp or the other. Valuable data, which might have gone to challenge traditional attitudes or conventional postures, fell unheard on ears deafened by the grinding of axes.

I am grateful to the Francis W. Parker School, Chicago, for allowing me free access to Morning Exercises and to the archives housed at the school. I would also like to thank the many current and former teachers and students who took the time to answer my questions, especially Andy Kaplan and John Holabird. I also thank Eric Martin, Christine Harris, and the anonymous readers at Theatre Survey for their patient editorial work.

In 1658, having been invited to perform at court for the first time in his career, Molière paired his farce Le Docteur amoureux with Nicomède, a 1651 play by France's reigning dramatist, Pierre Corneille. The choice of Nicomède is surprising for political reasons, since the play is shot through with suspicion of royal authority: Corneille's hero is a great military leader unjustly imprisoned by the weak king he selflessly serves. The choice becomes less surprising when one considers a different set of reasons. Corneille's play is a generic oddity that marries its tragic tropes to elements of historical drama and a surprisingly comic ending. Molière's provincial troupe may have felt more at ease in such a play than in a proper neoclassical tragedy, since they lacked training in rhetorically complex stage declamation and in the codified gestures and postures preferred to convey tragic stage emotion at the time. In particular, they lacked the facility of the king's (and Corneille's) favorites, the esteemed Hôtel de Bourgogne actors, who were in the audience as guests of the monarch. No doubt anxious in their presence and in the presence of the king, Molière might have sought to mitigate the unfavorable comparison he anticipated between the talents of his troupe and those of the reigning Paris tragedians.

In order to lay the groundwork for the link I mean to make between ashes and the theatre archive, let me start by recollecting a few disasters.

In his second year at the University of California, Berkeley, Arthur William Ryder (1877–1938), the Ohio-born Harvard scholar of Sanskrit language and literature, collaborated with the campus English Club and Garnet Holme, an English actor, to stage Ryder's translation of the Sanskrit classic Mrichchhakatikam, by Shudraka, as The Little Clay Cart. The 1907 production was described as “presented in true Hindu style. Under the direction of Garnet Holme, who … studied with Swamis of San Francisco … [and] the assistance of many Indian students of the university.” However, in the twenty-five-plus cast, there was not a single Indian actor with a speaking part. The intended objective was grandeur, and the production achieved that with elaborate sets and costumes, two live zebras, and elephants. Seven years later, the Ryder–Holme team returned with Ryder's translation of Kalidasa's Shakuntala, “bear cubs, a fawn, peacocks, and an onstage lotus pool with two real waterfalls.” While the archival materials do not indicate the involvement of any Indian actors (barring one Gobind B. Lal, who enacted the Prologue), its importance is evinced by the coverage it received in the Oakland Tribune, the Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine, and the Los Angeles Times.

The University of Houston (UH) Libraries' Special Collections possesses several groups of papers and other items related to theatre and the performing arts, one of which is the Nina Vance Alley Theatre Papers. These items were donated to Special Collections in 2000. What follows is a brief biography of Nina Vance and history of the Alley as well as some highlights of items contained within this collection. Nina Vance was the Alley's first artistic director, from 1947 until her death in 1980. Along with Margo Jones and Zelda Fichandler, she helped shape the American regional-theatre movement in the later twentieth century. During her tenure at the Alley she directed 102 plays, produced 245 shows, and was awarded major grants, including significant funding from the Ford Foundation. Despite Vance's achievements in these areas, as well as in establishing the Alley as a respected theatre in the United States and across the world, few works of scholarship exist on her career. This could be partially due to the fact that many primary sources on the Alley Theatre and its founder, such as those found at the UH Libraries' Special Collections, have not been well publicized.

“This overheated and distasteful little book—for me the wrong book in many ways—addresses matters about which there is, precisely, nothing left to say.” The Rutgers University library believed this antihype and never purchased Paul Mann's The Theory-Death of the Avant-Garde (1991), a book so amusingly dour, so relentlessly dialectical, as to be, for me, irresistible. A member of Mike Sell's Vectors of the Avant-Garde seminar at last month's ASTR, I decided really to read instead of skim my Alibris-purchased copy of Mann's distasteful little book. In it the main figures of futurism, dada, and surrealism become a failed or self-recuperating aggregate whose discourse of inflammatory “anti-” stances served only to undermine their revolutionary intentions: “[T]he avant-garde's assaults on tradition, cultural establishments, and the formal structure of the work of art tended to place it in the service of, not . . . the revolution, but of its deferral, its displacement. . . . The avant-garde's historical agony is grounded in the brutal paradox of an opposition that sustains what it opposes precisely by opposing it” (11).