Every theatrical group which nerves itself to the effort of production has some goal which it hopes to achieve, but that of the Workers' Theatre was unique and the attempt to realize it resulted in unique organizations with unusual working methods. This goal was not cultural, but political—not art, but revolution. The production of a play was regarded as a means of organizing the workers of America into an army capable of winning the struggle for a classless society: “A theatrical performance becomes a communal rite, not unlike the primitive dances or religious ceremonies during which solo actors… tried to arouse the spectators… to participate in the rite, to take part in the struggle.” Because of this aim, each Workers' Theatre group in America between 1932 and 1942 attempted to be “an active political organization of… class conscious revolutionary workers” which would provide a model of effective revolutionary organization for its audience.

During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, there was a major effort in the United States to remove child performers from professional stages. The campaign began in New York State with the passage of An Act to Prevent and Punish Wrongs to Children (1876), prohibiting children from a variety of performance venues, and subsequently grew into a nationwide crusade. The movement was spearheaded by the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (SPCC) and its leader, Elbridge T. Gerry. The intense response of the theatre industry resulted in a protracted political struggle.

In a theatre world increasingly dominated by multinational corporations, in which brand-name companies make the rounds of international festivals and multilingual performances are bankrolled by consortia of state-supported theatres, the national identity of theatrical productions is becoming more and more difficult to decide. This identity crisis is especially pronounced in the case of the one theatre form that for generations has been associated with a single New York thoroughfare that for people around the world symbolizes singing and dancing, glamor and dazzle. The form to which Broadway is categorically linked, the Broadway musical, may have circumnavigated the globe countless times, but a national and municipal identity remains embedded in its name. In the twenty-first century, however, this jet-setting genre needs to be analyzed less from a national or international perspective than a transnational perspective that emphasizes interconnectedness and the cross-border fluidity of cultures and species of capital. Shows such as The Lion King and Wicked may have premiered in New York, but their continuing multibillion-dollar success in cities on six continents suggests that the traffic in the most popular form of theatre in the world can no longer be linked to one metropolis or one national tradition.

The future of theatre history is interdisciplinary. The inevitable question is, of course, What does one mean by interdisciplinary? There is indeed a whole field of interdisciplinary, or integrative, studies, with its own academic departments, conferences and journals. (Which in turn raises the troublesome question, Is interdisciplinarity still interdisciplinary, or is it now a discipline? But I won't go there—yet.) The common view is that interdisciplinarity employs more than one discipline to address a complex problem. Interdisciplinary studies tend to privilege unity, convergence, synthesis, complex questions, and broad issues.

Unquestionably an awning or system of awnings was used as a protective cover over Roman theatres and amphitheatres during the Empire. Its appearance and operation however, still puzzle theatre historians.

Because only scanty descriptive evidence of it is available, historians mention the awning barely, if at all. What comments they do make are often incorrect. For example, Bieber's statement that the awnings were “to protect the spectators from rain and sunburn” is true only of the sunburn. In the light of this and other misconceptions about the Roman awning, a review of the evidence is now in order.

Librarian's nightmare or researcher's dream? Theatre historians frequently use and librarians happily acquire the rare theatrical scrapbook related to a single famous individual, but many undervalue and overlook ordinary theatrical albums, and with good cause: the ordinary theatrical scrapbook's provenance is often unclear, its compilers are usually unknown, and its contents are typically heterogeneous, commonplace, and decaying. The cracked bindings and flaking newsprint characteristic of such scrapbooks frustrate conservation, while their clippings, programs, and images pose serious cataloging challenges, shorn as they often are of identifying information. Finally, at least some of the material in these albums (such as newspaper clippings) is often duplicated elsewhere, making their contents easily seem redundant.

Among several sets of books kept by the treasurer and others at Covent Garden for the 1735–36 season, two have been preserved. British Library Egerton MS 2267 is a typical daybook. It records the daily box office totals, which have been reported in The London Stage. The other book is harder to identify and use. It exists in two nineteenth-century copies, one of which—a fair copy in the Frederick Latreille volume, British Library Add. MS 32,251, pages 299–308—has long been known to scholars. Yet full advantage has never been taken of it, perhaps because it is a transcription, not an original document, and is buried in the midst of a larger compilation. The authors of the Biographical Dictionary have made good use of the salary figures for particular performers and house servants, but the scattered reportage inherent in that format only hints at the value of this material. As far as we are aware, no one has made any serious attempt to utilize a slightly fuller transcription of the same source preserved in the “R. J. Smith” scrapbooks in the British Library (shelfmark 11791.dd.18, vol. 3, folios 177–89).

This essay addresses theatre scholars who self-identify as baby boomers or, more precisely, those who link the years of their youth to the decades of the 1960s and 1970s, those who, in the vernacular of that time, were participants in or influenced by “the Movement.” Of course, the singular “Movement” was really a number of different movements or forms of activism, public performance, and revolutionary effort. The unselfconscious use of singular terms like “Movement” was one of the defining conundrums of the period itself, but I do not want to begin with a never-ending series of qualifications indicating I have passed beyond the thinking of those years. I prefer, rather, to start with a basic affirmation of participation in the rhetoric as well as the struggles of that time. Although my discussion addresses a limited age cohort within the field of theatre and performance studies, I am ultimately suggesting that scholarly, pedagogical, or even performative projects based upon a period that one has lived through need, at some level, to incorporate openly and consciously a critical self-reflection based on that experience.

The first third of the nineteenth century is described by most theatre historians, from the enormously influential William Archer down to the present day, as the “winter solstice” of the British stage. The generally held estimation of the theatre in Britain at this time is that it was a wilderness of vulgarity, bad writing, and self-indulgent acting that pandered to the lowest common denominator of popular taste. This judgment is, of course, an ideological construct, and one that began to be forged at the time to which it is applied. I would contend that “the decline of the drama” was a concept generated in the press and in critical writing of the period for the particular purposes of a newly ascendant hegemonic fraction, the literate (and overwhelmingly male) middle classes, whose project was to recapture the stage, a powerful medium of communication, for the exclusive transmission of their own voice. One tool of this appropriation was the assertion of a superior public morality; and for that purpose it was necessary to cleanse the stage of its immoral associations—especially its association with independent women. It has recently been argued, by Julie Carlson, that “anxieties about women…drive the age's antitheatricality” and account for the failure of the canonical Romantic writers to produce plays.

The theatre pedagogy of Jacques Lecoq (1921–99) is founded on the principle that all physical, psychological, intellectual, and emotional performance registers can be accessed by prioritizing the moving body. Therefore, a Lecoq-based approach is in contrast to dominant principles of psychologically based acting that privilege working through emotion and psychology. While Lecoq pedagogy does not discount these performance registers, normally considered to belong to the “internal” world of the actor, Lecoq's work reaches them through physical action. Lecoq pedagogy considers it possible to learn how to shape and manage these registers by mastering the moving body as creative theatrical agent. This pedagogical strategy at first reiterates and then inverts the mind privilege of a Cartesian mind–body dichotomy, but ultimately confounds it, reorienting the constitution of body and mind. This reconstitution results in a new, emergent, antidualistic configuration where somatic intelligence accesses and encompasses all intelligence, and is initiated and accomplished through the physical act.

It's 10∶30 at night, the day after Halloween 2003. I'm standing in line outside of the Freedom Assembly of God Church in Tallahassee, Florida, to watch their first annual Hell House. Every October, hundreds of congregations across America mount religious dramas conceived as Christian Halloween alternatives. Such productions typically invoke and alter haunted-house conventions, replacing ghosts and monsters with demons and sin—all designed to confront unsaved audience members with the reality of spiritual warfare and the necessity of being born again. Whereas the Tallahassee version promised to be relatively modest, many other Hell House events boast huge production budgets and attract thousands of visitors annually. In recent years, these shows have garnered considerable media attention for their shocking, graphically staged scenes of “sin” and its consequences. Infamous images include gay people dying of AIDS and burning in hell, black-clad, Columbine-style gunmen mowing down Christians in schools, and blood-soaked abortions featuring vacuum-cleaner noises and bowls of raw meat meant to resemble fetuses. Criticism pours in from both left-wing advocacy groups and other evangelical Christians. It's “pornography for the soul,” it's “simplistic theology,” it's “spiritual violence.”

Although the long-awaited murder of Arden in the anonymous Arden of Faversham (ca. 1592) takes place during a game of tables, or what we call backgammon,1 critics have been quick to overlook the choice of game in this climactic scene, underestimating its importance to the play's central concerns and even mistakenly calling it a game of dice or cards.2 These games do share some common features—backgammon, for instance, involves the use of dice—but the distinctions among them are significant, especially for the play's often-observed interests in geography and place. In attending to the intersection between games and theatre, I participate in a long tradition of performance studies scholarship. But in contrast to much of this scholarship, I emphasize the formal qualities of particular games—which vary widely from one game to another—arguing that different games call for unique competencies in players and in spectators of games.3Arden of Faversham reflects on spatial relations in the early modern theatre by staging and enacting the ludic competencies peculiar to backgammon.

Historical scholarship, despite the many changes in methodologies and models over the years, is one of the abiding missions of the discipline of theatre studies: yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Yesterday, as is well known, Theaterwissenschaft was the foundational methodology for scholarship and doctoral education. Today, of course, our approaches to theatre history encompass several dozen research methodologies and analytical models. And tomorrow? Will cultural, social, political, and intellectual histories still provide a reliable foundation? Or will we develop fields of investigation and modes of analysis that draw upon new ideas in psychology, neuroscience, and biology? One thing is clear: our methods and models will continue to change.

On February 19, 1923, a production of Sholem Asch's God of Vengeance (Got fun Nekome) opened at New York's Apollo Theatre on 219 West 42nd Street. The moment was auspicious for Jewish theatre in America. One of the more frequently produced and most critically acclaimed plays in the Yiddish canon, God of Vengeance had been performed internationally since its debut in 1907, not only in Yiddish, but in German, Italian, and Russian as well. However, it had never before been seen in English in New York at a major uptown venue like the Apollo. Coming off a two month run at two smaller downtown venues, where it had played to increasingly large and enthusiastic crowds, the English-language production seemed poised to “cross over” from the downtown margins to the Broadway mainstream, something which had never before occurred with any play from the Yiddish repertory. Moreover, the production represented the English-language stage debut of the celebrated Yiddish actor Rudolf Schildkraut in the commanding role of Yekel Tchaftchovitch. In other words, the event implicitly posed the question of whether there was a place for a “great” Yiddish play (albeit, in translation) starring a “great” Yiddish actor (admittedly, working in his third language) within the geographic and symbolic boundaries of Broadway.

Some of the most thoughtful analysis of the theatre during this century was generated by a group of semiotically-oriented linguists and aestheticians in Prague, Czechoslovakia, in the 1930s and 1940s. These Prague theorists considered all aspects of the theatre experience—the dramatic texts, the various production elements, the audience—but they gave special attention to the complex matter of acting, developing a three-part model for the analysis of this phenomenon that may be taken as typical both of their strategies and of their theoretical concerns. They began with the actor, the living being appearing on the stage. This actor utilized expressive work, physical and vocal, to create the impression of an absent personage. The sum of this work resulted in the creation in the theatre of the stage figure. This figure was then interpreted by the audience, using whatever strategies seemed appropriate to them, to result in their mental image, the character. The character in short was the stage figure as received by the audience.

The Italian mountebank of the early modern period was a figure of great power and fascination, both to Italians themselves and to English audiences via Thomas Coryate's documentary account and Ben Jonson's fictional portrayal of Scoto of Mantua in Volpone. Italian and Spanish antitheatrical clerics, prompted by San Carlo Borromeo to extend Counter-Reformation cultural critiques to the increasingly successful commedia dell'arte, were quick to identify the mountebank—an itinerant doctor/pharmacist who typically enticed potential patrons with an array of musical and theatrical entertainments—with the professional actor, who also performed for money in Italian piazzas. Without the moral animus of the post-Tridentine critics, late twentieth-century theatre historians have reassociated the mountebank and the actor, seeing in the former's capacity to sell theatrical entertainment anywhere and anytime (independent of the religious or civic festival) a harbinger of the professional commedia dell'arte, which had to develop means of economic self-support that were independent of traditional courtly patronage. Arte actors seem to have been aware of their perceived kinship with itinerant quacks; at the turn of the century, Giovanni Gabrielli performed a routine involving trunks and vases of the kind used by mountebanks, his own sons turning out to be the “vases.” But culturally ambitious actor-writers, who in the early seventeenth century began to counter antitheatrical attacks with apologies for the moral integrity and the technical sophistication of the new theatre, sharply differentiated themselves from the charlatans. If the conventionality of their moral defenses often hindered them from saying what comedy was, they could at least say what it was not, and it was not quackery.

J. T. Grein's Independent Theatre has long been considered the counterpart to Antoine's Théâtre Libre and Brahm's Freie Bühne: a subscription-based theatre introducing experimental drama to a coterie audience in the 1890s. However, just as in Paris there were rival production groups such as Paul Fort's Théâtre d'Art, so in London Grein was not the sole purveyor of the new drama. He had many individual competitors, the most important of whom were women who produced primarily the plays of Henrik Ibsen.

In the fifteenth-century East Anglian play, The Conversion of Ser Jonathas the Jewe by the Myracle of the Blissed Sacrament, five Jews desecrate a host to challenge the Christian doctrine of transubstantiation. In the play's image of Jewish characters, fifteenth-century English Christianity constructed an ethnic, religious, and cultural alterity. A Jewish merchant, Jonathas, bribes a Christian merchant, Aristorius, to steal a consecrated host from a local church. Five Jewish characters then stab the host, nail it to a pillar, boil it, and bake it in an oven over a fire. In this last trial, the oven bursts open to reveal the image of Christ as a bloody child. At the sight of the Christ, and upon hearing his reproach, the Jews confess and are baptized into the Christian faith.

“Marketing, that mysterious part of the theatre industry, can produce surprising effects,” observes Peter Holland in his recent book on Shakespearean production in Britain during the 1990s. Discussing the material constraints on the repertory of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Holland cites the promotion of the 1994 production of Coriolanus as it transferred to the Barbican, which, knowingly addressed a “youth” market versed in the work of Oliver Stone and Quentin Tarantino. The RSC poster displayed a blood-soaked Toby Stephens in the title role, accompanied by the slogan “A natural born killer too.” For an even more surprising and mysterious example of optimistically modish marketing, consider the tactics of the newspaper advertisement announcing the 1996 season at Stratford-upon-Avon. Avoiding any direct mention of Shakespeare, his plays, or theatre, it pictured an ominously darkened cloudscape, with slogans projected onto it, almost like skywriting. These posed a question, “Virtual reality?” and a riposte: “Try the real thing.”