In September 1776, General Sir William Howe's troops took possession of New York City, having badly defeated Washington's forces in the Battle of Long Island. Howe, who had accepted his assignment in America with the greatest reluctance, set about making life as pleasant as possible for himself and for those around him. He had grown greatly concerned about the morale and comfort of his troops in a city that, compared to London, was little more than a backwater. Howe wrote to Lord George Germain, Secretary of State for the American Colonies, in England: “The troops had been so much harassed in the course of the last campaign, that I could not but wish that no manoeuvre of the enemy might hinder them from enjoying that repose, in their winter quarters, which their late fatigues rendered necessary, and their services entitled them to expect.”

More than a century after Edward Gordon Craig published “The Actor and the Über-Marionette” (1908), the core of his conception of acting still poses a hermeneutical challenge to the theatre scholar. Many intriguing interpretations have stemmed from his statements on acting: from Denis Bablet's or Christopher Innes's argument that the Über-marionette is a metaphor for the perfect performer, to Irène Eynat-Confino's thesis that it is a real, oversized puppet; from the idea (Lindsay Mary Newman's or Cesare Molinari's, for instance) that the concept evolved with time along with the details of Craig's acting theory, to Patrick Le Boeuf's recent hypothesis that the Über-marionette is a full-body puppet. Le Boeuf's interpretation is somehow a telling example of the puzzling quality of Craig's acting theory: his studies originally led him to believe that the Über-marionette was a technically perfect gymnast, in perfect control of his own body, but he was induced to reconsider his hypothesis only a couple of years later, in the light of newly recovered documents. The same ineffable quality Jane Goodall detects in “stage presence” seems to be an inherent feature of Craig's ideal performer, and as with presence, the Über-marionette appears to be best definable by approximation.

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.

When Constantin Stanislavski's An Actor Prepares first appeared in English translation in 1936, the Moscow Art Theater had already made a great impact on American theatre. Particularly influential in the Soviet director's theories of acting was his concept of emotion memory. In An Actor Prepares, the young actor, Kostya, tries to understand how to access the “memory of life” rather than the “theatrical archives of his mind” and has an epiphany at the moment when he recalls and relives the violence of an isolated vehicular accident that had dismembered its victim:

Though it has been almost completely overlooked, the arbitrary cancellation of the Seattle Negro Repertory Company's 1936 Lysistrata provides a remarkable opportunity to explore the connections between a single, seemingly localized action and a network of socially, politically, and racially repressive forces. Lysistrata's closure on ostensibly moral grounds reveals the operation of a set of cultural and social controls masked as standards of decency. An array of racist assumptions as rigid as those anywhere in the country, though somewhat more subtle, obscured the generally repressive ends that the control system served, both in Seattle and nationwide. The incident thus provides clues to the institutionalized antireform mechanisms that soon coalesced in a successful congressional attack on the Works Project Administration's Federal Theatre Project (FTP), of which the Negro Repertory Company (NRC) was a major unit. The Lysistrata cancellation's connection with that broader offensive also demonstrates the manner in which Hallie Flanagan's “free, adult, uncensored” national theatre threatened the nation's essentially conservative political power structure and drew the decisive backlash that eventually overturned efforts at social change during the Depression Era.

The Baltimore Company of Comedians which had performed openly and successfully in Maryland since 1782 attempted to gain a foothold in the traditionally hostile state of Pennsylvania in November, 1783. The troupe's manager, Dennis Ryan, petitioned the Pennsylvania legislature to rescind its statute prohibiting plays. When his petition was denied, he produced three evenings' entertainment through the use of a clever subterfuge: The Temple of Apollo, a play and pantomime disguised as a concert, reading, and dance. Although Ryan's ruse was clever, it was not wholly successful: he and his actors had to take precipitous leave of Philadelphia when a riot swept through the house during the last of their three scheduled performances and alerted the sheriff to their activities. Nevertheless, Ryan was the first actor-manager to attempt to evade post-revolutionary legislative opposition to theatre by making plays appear non-theatrical.

In the “last analysis” the concern must always be for insight. Saul Bellow made it a demand: “Now I want insight.” So, too, should the reader of theatre history. Unfortunately, in the vast majority of recently published material on American theatre history that demand is not being met. Among the many young scholars researching and writing on this subject, few appear even to aspire to that mastery of the material which will produce major scholarship. The old guard persists, but today's youthful historians of American theatre tend toward an annual birth and death pattern rather than perennial growth. Obviously, such an observation should not be construed as an adverse criticism of all existing scholarship; yet, it does describe a general condition of research in American theatre history. There are surveys, general observations, memoirs, descriptions, expository and critical essays on various topics, studies of theatres and playwrights, essays on popular entertainment and ethnic or racial theatre. Some of these publications contribute meaningfully to an understanding of American theatre; few, however, suggest insight into the history of that theatre.

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.”

My subject this afternoon is “Early American Professional Acting.” To those who have not dipped into the beginnings of theatre history in this country, it may come as a surprise to learn that it's a vast subject, with a huge cast of characters, more scenes than the fourth act of Anthony and Cleopatra, and that liberal use of time which so offended Sir Philip Sidney.

After centuries of study, an untold number of scholars have agreed that the City Dionysia of fifth-century Athens involved an animal sacrifice to the god Dionysos, and that this event took place in the theatre before the beginning of the play competition. The usual assumption has been that this sacrifice was offered upon an altar situated at the exact center of a circular orchestra.

This placement fits well with the theory that tragedy grew from a dithyrambic chorus dancing in a circle around the altar of Dionysos. But now that the dogma of the originally circular orchestra has been questioned, some attention must also be given to the location of the altar, a supposedly standard piece of theatre furniture. The following pages will (1) discuss the origin of the concept of a centrally located altar; (2) examine the literary, artistic, and architectural evidence which relate to altar placement; and (3) suggest a possible alternative to the central location.

The love-hate nature of the relations between England and Italy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is well known. Ever since Henry VIII broke with Rome after Pope Clement VII refused to allow his divorce, things Italian were a popular object of satire and general disdain. An ever-increasing British nationalism founded on political, religious, and aesthetic principles during the seventeenth century fanned the flames of anti-Italian sentiment. This nationalism, newly consolidated in the seventeenth century by the ambitions of the Stuart monarchs to destroy Parliament, was intimately connected with English Protestantism. As Samuel Kliger has argued, the triumph of the Goths—Protestant Englishmen's Germanic ancestors—over Roman tyranny in antiquity became for seventeenth-century England a symbol of democratic success. Moreover, observes Kliger, an influential theory rooted in the Reformation, the “translatio imperii ad Teutonicos,” emphasized traditional German racial qualities—youth, vigor, manliness, and moral purity—over those of Latin culture—torpor, decadence, effeminacy, and immorality—and contributed to the modern constitution of the supreme role of the Goths in history. The German translatio implied an analogy between the conquest of the Roman Empire by the Goths (under Charlemagne) and the rallying of the humanist-reformers of northern Europe (e.g., Luther) for religious freedom, understood as liberation from Roman priestcraft; that is, “the translatio crystallized the idea that humanity was twice ransomed from Roman tyranny and depravity—in antiquity by the Goths, in modern times by their descendants, the German reformers…the epithet ‘Gothic’ became not only a polar term in political discussion, a trope for the ‘free,’ but also in religious discussion a trope for all those spiritual, moral, and cultural values contained for the eighteenth century in the single word ‘enlightenment.’”

An inquiry into eighteenth-century American scene painting must draw upon sources other than painter's renderings, since few are known to survive. The most promising source other than printed descriptions, barren at best, are the non-theatrical landscape and topographical (view) paintings of America's early scenic artists. No employment of these materials is possible, however, until the parameters of the relationship between easel and scene painting have been established.

The Weimar Republic occupies a period in German history that has long fascinated students of theatre and drama. It was a period of profound change in German social, political, and cultural experience, and rarely has the confluence of those experiences figured so influentially upon the performance of William Shakespeare's plays. In decades previous to Weimar, German Shakespeare productions manifested the awed reverence in which the playwright was held, since most German actors, directors, and designers regarded Shakespeare in the same light as they did Goethe and Schiller. In 1864, for example, Germany celebrated the three-hundredth anniversary of the playwright's birth with the founding of the Deutsche Shakespeare Gesellschaft and the proclamation that Shakespeare was not “a foreign poet, but one which England must share with us, due to his inborn Germanic nature.” In the Weimar Republic, however, the view of Shakespeare as playwright changed; it did so perhaps because everything else was changing in that volatile period, and also because Weimar culture encouraged innovation and experimentation. The republic itself, after all, was an experiment. If in retrospect the Weimar Republic's experimentation with democracy seems a failure, its success and achievement in painting, architecture, music, literature, and theatre cannot be denied. One overlooked area of particular achievement is the work of Weimar theatre artists who succeeded in their attempts to dismantle Shakespeare's status as a cultural icon.

In the late 1990s, the endlessly reinvented Shakespeare has apparently become a popular and successful screenwriter. The recent release of Richard III, William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet, Twelfth Night and Hamlet have brought an enthusiastic movie-going public to see, among other things, the Capulets and the Montagues on the beach and Hamlet striding through a cast of thousands at Elsinore. But this is not to suggest that this particular genre success is either new or inappropriate; the collection of artifacts known as Shakespeare (including but not limited to the plays themselves) has long signified as high art dedicated to the education of not just a theatre-going elite nor the mass audiences of popular media, but everyone. On a global scale, Shakespeare means culture or, as Michael Bristol would more wittily have it, Shakespeare is “big time.” This history of the cultural capital that is Shakespeare continues to have a fascination for, and a usefulness to the producers and distributors of films. Thus, to turn Shakespeare from playwright to screenwriter is, culturally speaking, both a pragmatic and predictable strategy. And it is a strategy that has more or less existed as long as film itself.

Consider an unlikely scenario. In the midst of World War I, a motley group of Jewish refugees in their teens and early twenties becomes obsessed with the idea of creating a “Yiddish art theatre” modeled upon Stanislavski's famous Russian company. By day they work as laborers, storekeepers, housepainters, and wartime smugglers; by night they teach themselves the basics of acting and stagecraft from outdated Russian and German books. The only theatre building where they can afford to perform is a dilapidated former circus on the outskirts of town, repurposed by the German army as a military stable. The roof leaks, and the stage reeks of horse dung. It is a bitterly cold winter, and since there is no money for heat, the actors rehearse with frozen limbs and thaw their stage makeup over the footlights. They eat one meal a day—a single boiled potato—and rehearsals are routinely interrupted when actors faint from hunger.

In ‘“You Are Here’: H.I.J.O.S. and the DNA of Performance,” a chapter in The Archive and the Repertoire, Diana Taylor locates the intergenerational transfer of traumatic memory relating to Argentina's Dirty War geographically with a map—identifying, for example, where tens of thousands opposed to the country's military dictatorship (one-third of them women) were made to disappear—but she also locates this transfer genealogically and even genetically, in terms of the bodies of surviving relatives who remain as visible evidence (quite literally, through family photographs) of the material existence of their missing parents and children. Like Taylor, I attend to both the physical geography and the embodied genealogy of cultural memory in this article, which is concerned with making connections between the hemispheric traffic in missing and murdered Indigenous women of the Americas. I want to begin by acknowledging some of the sites of individual trauma and various sights of collective protest and witnessing related to this topic.

In this article I argue that Plato's allegory of the cave dramatizes democracy's dependency on slavery. Plato's cave forces the theatre, the political space of ancient Greek representation, to confront its material dependency upon a space from which it is otherwise visually and territorially separated: the mines where intensive use was made of slave labor. As many have argued, the most salient aspects of Plato's allegory of the cave are the complete absence of lexis (speech) and praxis (action), the evacuation of the acoustic and the distortion of the visual. These are also the most decisive features when delimiting the border between the free and the unfree in Greek antiquity:

Six African students enact a somber, silent dance. They stage a series of striking images at the base of South African artist Willie Bester's sculpture Sara Baartman, in the Chancellor Oppenheimer Library at the University of Cape Town (UCT). Their faces and bodies smeared with black paint, the students articulate their protest of Sara Baartman in explicitly racial terms, aligning their critiques of economic, colonial, and racial oppression under the sign of blackness.

At 12:30 P.M. on Monday, 30 April 1764, the curtain parted on the stage of the Little Theatre in the Hay-Market in London and revealed George Alexander Stevens about to begin his celebrated Lecture on Heads. For the remainder of the century this presentation became a staple in the English speaking theatre. It amassed a fortune for its creator, was copied and adapted by dozens of performers, and went through 30 published editions, authentic and spurious.

Theatre is predominantly a social form. Social history, which invites perspectives from “below,” stories of resistance, and awareness of how social organization stratifies, has had a profound effect on theatre studies since the 1970s. A wide scholarly purview on performative forms dates from the later nineteenth century, but social history changed awareness about historical contiguities of categories of community, amateur, and folk performance; tensions and exchanges among court, community, and professional performance constituencies; as well as greater respect for nonliterary traditions and unwritten forms of preservation and lineage. Social history, in short, prompted questions about who made theatre and how it mattered to the people who partook of it, including those who made it as well as others who consumed it, rather than more narrowly determining what constituted theatre (or drama) worthy of posterity. This approach—society as a group with common territory and interactions, enveloping each individual—could not be investigated as theatre history without a commensurate interest in culture. That is to say, not culture as the pinnacle of elites' achievements, but rather any social group's interpretation and use of common beliefs and values patterned by behavior and practices into religion, behavioral protocols, cuisine, and so on, including the arts. Wariness of a narrow elite construal of culture may be what keeps theatre historians from calling our field “cultural history,” for, though we embrace the ambit of social history, cultural history often comes in through the side door of sociological or anthropological theory. Cultural expressions are evident via how a society socializes, interacts, and adapts in ways that make the contours of the society legible to those within it, as well as differentiated from those who are outside it.