Palestine, as an Ottoman province, was distanced from the main Arab cultural activities of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries; no literature bearing distinctive marks of Palestinian national identity was to be found before the First World War. After the war there was some national cultural revival, but it was mainly poetry, not fiction or theatre, that was traditionally perceived as a possible national weapon against external threats. The national revival however also covered folklore and religious culture, both of which combined some semitheatrical dimensions—the shadow theatre (khayāl al-ẓill), the storytellers (ḥakawātī; shāעir), and the peep show, that is, "Box of Wonders" or "Magic Box" (ṣundūq al-dunyā or ṣundūq al-עajab); the religious festivals, such as the traditional Prophet's birthday (mawlid) or the birthdays of saints (mawālid), the nighttime shows presented during the fast of Ramadan; and the popular peasant culture, such as the dabka dances. Modern theatrical and dramatic activities—most of them marked by European influence, whether by way of translations or adaptations—were very limited; because many of the plays were intended for staging in schools, most of them were flavored with didactic aims. Visiting troupes from Egypt and Lebanon created some public demand for theatrical activities, and in both the 1930s and the 1940s there were active Palestinian devotees of theatre, such as the brothers al-Jawzī.

Theatrical performance has often played an important role in communicating the manners and morals of one culture to another. In the main the information so communicated is valid and the impact is positive. There are instances, however, where one culture's theatre, yielding to its popular nature, has been too quick to apply the assumptions of its own concept of what foreign cultures ought to be. The effect then may be widespread misinformation about other peoples.

After a century-long attack from the Puritan progeny of nineteenth-century America, the theatre by 1860 had long since come to accept as a way of life the religious public's antipathy to the stage. The story of the war between church and theatre is an old but, understandably, not a very popular one with theatre historians; nevertheless, some of the most surprising ironies in American cultural history lie in the dynamics — the death of a president, the death and burial of a respected actor, and an ultimate concession on both fronts — which by the turn of the twentieth century brought a winding down of clerical attacks against the stage and a qualified victory for the comparatively poor, scorned, unorganized theatrical forces over their powerful adversary.

On the short shelf of theatrical autobiographies that continue to be read long after their author has ceased to be newsworthy, Konstantin Stanislavsky's My Life in Art stands foremost. It is a textbook for acting classes, a sourcebook of theatrical history and a guidebook for those workers in the theatre who have lost touch with the meaning of their efforts and seek in Stanislavsky's trials and errors, goals and achievements, an artistic True North to put them back on their course. In the Soviet Union, it is lauded, in the words of the director Aleksey Popov, as “a model of superb literature and comparable to such books as Herzen's My Past and Thoughts.” In the West, no less a colleague than Jacques Copeau praised it in terms that made My Life in Art sound like the vita of an anchorite.

This is a tale of two directors. The setting is the Republic of Cape Verde, a former Portuguese colony and a tiny archipelago nestled off the coast of Senegal in West Africa. Framing the story is Cape Verde's annual Mindelact International Theatre Festival, which since 1997 has invited Lusophone theatre artists from three continents to perform a wide array of theatre genres on a mainstage program alongside Cape Verdean troupes. João Branco, a Portuguese director who moved to the islands in the early 1990s, is the artistic director of both the Mindelact Festival and the veteran Cape Verdean theatre troupe GTCCPM (Grupo de Teatro do Centro Cultural Português do Mindelo/Theatre Group of the Mindelo Portuguese Cultural Center). For Mindelact 2003, GTCCPM performed an abridged version of King Lear rendered in Cape Verdean Crioulo, a mix of Portuguese and several West African languages. Beyond bolstering Branco's cherished goal of creolizing Shakespeare's plays by transporting them to Cape Verde's Afro-European cultural milieu, Rei Lear worked in concert with the festival's media blitz to extol local spectators in Mindelact's host city, Mindelo, for their good taste. Two years later, Herlandson Duarte, a young Cape Verdean director and Branco's former theatre student, staged a Crioulo-language Midsummer Night's Dream at Mindelact with his new theatre company, Solaris. Duarte's production transformed Bottom's play-within-a-play into a searing critique of Mindelense audiences and the structures of authority that prop up the festival itself.

In 1962, Polish director Jerzy Grotowski mounted an adaptation of playwright Stanisław Wyspiański's 1904 play Akropolis. When James MacTaggart filmed it in 1968, the production gained immediate cult status among American theatre critics, scholars, and practitioners. Although Grotowski's production had already been seen internationally (though by a very limited audience), the film made it available to those outside major theatre centers. Notwithstanding the buzz that surrounded the film's release, most of the interest was focused on the acting and the set design; the fact that the show was based on an obscure modernist drama evoked little critical comment. Although the film's voice-over translated some lines of the play, the dialogue was not the main focus of commentary about the film or criticism of the play after the film was released. In 1974, Harold Clurman wrote that “the lines [of Grotowski's adaptation] spoken at incredible speed are not dialogue; they are tortured exclamations projected in the direction of another being, but with no shape as personal address. (It has been said that a knowledge of Polish does not make the lines readily intelligible… ” Clurman sidestepped discussing the text altogether, arguing that one does not need to understand it in order to understand the production.

The 1860s and 1870s are generally considered a hiatus in the history of Shakespearean production on the London stage. Accounts of the period usually move quickly from Charles Kean's retirement in 1859 (or the end of Samuel Phelps' management of suburban Sadler's Wells in 1862) to the beginning of Henry Irving's regime at the Lyceum in 1879—acknowledging the Phelps-Chatterton collaboration at Drury Lane as worthy, but hardly remarkable, and mentioning in passing such isolated events as Fechter's new Hamlet in 1861. Nevertheless, while no management comparable to Kean's or Phelps's, devoted principally to poetic drama, appeared during this time, there were occasional Shakespearean productions of exceptional interest. One such was the Bancrofts' version of The Merchant of Venice, which opened at the Prince of Wales's Theatre in out-of-the-way Tottenham-street on 17 April 1875. It ran for only thirty-six performances and lost the famous actormanager team £3,000. Despite its financial failure, however, the production attracted considerable critical attention at the time, much of it favorable, and it has since gained an honorable place in stage history. Beerbohm-Tree, for example, in an address to the Oxford Union Debating Society in 1900, called it “the first production in which the modern spirit of stage management asserted itself.”

Stage naturalism made its first appearance in Denmark—and, for that matter, in Scandinavia as a whole—unaccompanied by the fanfare or enthusiastic manifestoes which heralded its arrival in many other countries. The breakthrough of this new style of theatrical production did not coincide with the founding of small, independent art theatres like André Antoine's Théâtre Libre (1887), Otto Brahm's Freie Bühne (1889), J. T. Grein's Independent Theatre (1891), or, somewhat later, Stanislavski's Moscow Art Theatre (1898). Nor was it acclaimed from the outset as a pioneering realization of a novel aesthetic program. On the contrary, the methods and techniques of the new naturalism were introduced, and proceeded to take root inconspicuously, when the Danish Royal Theatre in Copenhagen engaged the 36-year-old playwright William Bloch as a stage director in 1881, having been impressed with an “unusual eye for scenic requirements” in his plays. Two years later, Bloch's epoch-making production of Ibsen's An Enemy of the People firmly implanted the new ideas.

Triumphalist accounts of the spread of “the Method” in post-World War II America generally explain its success as the victory of natural truths over benighted illusions about acting. In Method Actors: Three Generations of An American Acting Style, for instance, Steve Vineberg follows his summary of the primary attributes of “method” acting with the comment: “These concerns weren't invented by Stanislavski or his American successors; they emerged naturally out of the two thousand-year history of Western acting.” Hence, the final triumph of “the Method” was natural, even inevitable. Vineberg's statement, however, raises more questions than it answers. Why did it take two thousand years for actors and theorists of acting to get it right? Or, to localize the explanation to the United States, why did more American actors, directors, and playwrights not jump on the Stanislavski bandwagon and reform the American theatre after the appearance of the Moscow Art Theatre in New York in 1923 and the subsequent lectures and classes from Boleslavski and others? The Group Theatre demonstrated the power of Stanislavski-derived acting techniques in the 1930s, but their substantial successes barely dented the conventional wisdom about acting theory and technique in the professional theatre. Yet, in the late 1940s and early fifties, “method” acting, substantially unchanged from its years in the American Laboratory and Group theatres, took Broadway and Hollywood by storm.

Of particular interest to scholars of the early American theatre is a 1798 water-color by Cotton Milbourne entitled “Saint Paul's Chapel, Broadway Between Fulton and Vesey Streets,” in the possession of the New-York Historical Society. Besides depicting the Chapel, the watercolor shows the Park Theatre as it appeared at the time of its opening in 1798. As such, it replaces the unreliable Elkanah Tisdale engraving, found in David Longworth's 1797 American Almanack, New-York Register and City Directory, as the most accurate view of the theatre prior to its reconstruction in 1820.

In the honor roll of nineteenth-century theatrical producers of Shakespeare, the name Frederick Balsir Chatterton has never been entered. Even in his own time he was often considered more of an entrepreneur or entertainer than a serious advocate of Shakespeare. Since then he has either been ignored or ridiculed by critics and historians, the lone exception being Odell, who gave Chatterton's productions their only serious attention. What historians remember instead is Chatterton's infamous maxim— “Shakespeare spelt ruin and Byron bankruptcy”—a saying he did not invent and did not totally believe.

In his introduction to the excellent Revels edition of The Duchess of Malfi John Russell Brown provides a brief, updated stage history of John Webster's best known tragedy. Although Brown does much to correct the impression that Samuel Phelps' nineteenth-century revival was unsuccessful, even he does not fully indicate the Duchess' popularity during the twenty-five years following the Sadler's Wells performance of November 20, 1850. Nor does the statement of Don D. Moore in John Webster and His Critics 1617–1964 that “only in the mid-twentieth century—and then infrequently— has Webster on the stage been acceptable” help to correct the traditional misconception.

I don't remember the very first time I watched The Wiz (1978). Growing up in a black household during the 1980s, the film was as much a part of my upbringing as the countless hours I spent removing my Jheri curl activator from the sofa, practicing the moonwalk, or listening to my mother and sister's annual Thanksgiving argument about how much salt should go into the collard greens. What I do remember is how much I enjoyed watching The Wiz. Each Thanksgiving Day my six sisters and I would gather around the television set and watch our heroine Dorothy (Diana Ross) travel from her aunt's Harlem apartment to the magical land of Oz. We celebrated the fact that Dorothy ultimately vanquishes her seemingly more powerful foe Evillene, the Wicked Witch of the West (Mabel King). As young black girls, we identified with Dorothy's plight. While we were not battling powerful witches, we were constantly resisting our mother's attempts to socialize us into “respectable” young women. As such, we were fascinated by Evillene, the most oppressive force within Dorothy's life. The gargantuan size of Evillene's body, the hideousness of her face, and the force of her supernatural powers both excited and repulsed us. We eagerly anticipated her first appearance in the film, bursting through the doors of her sweatshop belting, “Don't Nobody Bring Me No Bad News.” We reveled in drawing comparisons between Evillene and our mother, hoping that one day we too could defeat her.

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 1806, Longman & Co. publishers commissioned the accomplished actress, playwright, and novelist Elizabeth Inchbald to compose a series of prefatory remarks for the plays to be included in their British Theatre series. One hundred and twenty-five in all, each of the plays for Longman's British Theatre was originally published and sold separately at a rate of about one per week. Once the series was complete, the plays were bound together and sold as a twenty-five-volume set. As the surviving diary entries from the two-year period during which she wrote her Remarks testify, the task proved both arduous and unrelenting for Inchbald, especially as she had no hand in selecting the plays to be included and no control over the order in which she was asked to compose her critical commentaries. Working almost constantly, no sooner had she read one play, drafted her remarks, and copyedited the proof, than she had to turn to the next play sent by Longman, collect her thoughts, and start the process all over again. For the most part, as Annibel Jenkins has noted, “[T]here seems to be no pattern of publishing by date or genre; a tragedy by Shakespeare came out one week and a contemporary comedy the next.” At one point, the strain of this process was so unbearable that Inchbald even tried to renege on her contractual obligations, writing to Longman, “begging to decline any further progress.” This request, as her first biographer, James Boaden, records, Longman “could not be expected to permit; and she was therefore compelled to remark through the whole year.” In the event, and however “dreadful” the task may have been for Inchbald, the widely advertised series proved a “great commercial success,” and Inchbald's Remarks have come down to us as one of the first great achievements in English dramatic criticism of the early nineteenth century.

In April 2020—only weeks after the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic—the New York Times published an article titled “Why Zoom Is Terrible.” Quoting a gustatory simile from Sheryl Brahnam of Missouri State University, the article declared, “In-person communication resembles video conferencing about as much as a real blueberry muffin resembles a packaged blueberry muffin that contains not a single blueberry but artificial flavors, textures and preservatives.”1 It has been a year marked by the absence of “in-person” connection, or in the language of our field, of spatial copresence. The COVID-19 pandemic has fundamentally disrupted our ability to share space. Spatial copresence, it turns out, is what the coronavirus requires to spread. The virus, in this sense, is a phenomenon of the live. While technologies like Zoom have maintained our capacity for temporal copresence, the now ubiquitous status of “Zoom fatigue” points to new ways to consider spatial copresence, and by extension “liveness.”

Regency toy Theatre flourished in England in the years between 1811 and 1830. At the height of its popularity thousands of middle and working class youths, together with their upper class “betters,” escaped the grim realities of industrial London for the joys of staging — and playing all the parts of — The Fairy of the Oak, or Harlequin's Regatta (1811), Ferdinand of Spain, or Ancient Chivalry (1813), Bluebeard (1824), or even more exotic pieces such as “The Grand New Spectacle called Korastikan, Prince of Assassins” (1824).

The general outlines of Vanbrugh's Haymarket theatre project are well known. Since 1695 two companies had been playing in London: Christopher Rich's, with rights to Drury Lane and Dorset Garden; and Thomas Betterton's rebels, making shift in the cramped old Lincoln's Inn Fields theatre. The Queen's Theatre in the Haymarket was the first new theatre in London since “Wren's” “plain built” Drury Lane (1674), and the first lavish one since Dorset Garden (1671)—which had fallen into disrepair, and by the turn of the century was barely usable. The standard account of Vanbrugh's project is Colley Cibber's.

In 1599–1600, after a lapse of almost ten years, the children's acting companies reappeared in London. The Paul's Children seem to have been the first to resume playing, quietly and modestly, no doubt testing the waters. After all, the boys' companies had one after another been officially suppressed between 1584 and 1590 because of their penchant for controversial material and the continual litigation among investors in the various earlier companies. Seeing the growing success of Paul's Boys, one of these earlier investors, Henry Evans, a Welsh scrivener, worked to reconstitute a company of boy actors at Blackfriars, seeking to make good on his aborted first attempt as a theatrical entrepreneur.