He used to come to the house and ask me to hear him recite. Each time he handed me a volume of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare.… He wanted me to sit in front of him, open the book, and follow him as he recited his lines. I did willingly.…And as his love for Shakespeare's plays grew with the years he did not want anything else in the world but to be a Shakespearean actor.

Toshio Mori

“Japanese Hamlet” (1939)

In this paper we will focus on the Hallams, major originators and sustainers of the eighteenth-century American theatre. We have not attempted to write their biographies, only to present new information that can provide answers to long-standing questions and suggest alternatives to earlier assumptions. Among other things, we present the case for George Hallam, not Thomas, being the father of the line of actors; we have established the probable paternity for Nancy Hallam; we have discovered the wills of both William Hallam and Lewis Hallam II; we have more fully identified Lewis II's first wife, Sarah Perry; and we have found new information concerning his second wife, Eliza Tuke.

Nearly a century-and-a-half after urban professional entertainers first attained instant popularity for music, dance, and humor performed in blackface, amateur minstrels in the rural Midwest continued to pack school auditoriums and smalltown theaters with their homespun variety. Blackening their hands and faces with storebought makeup (the modern equivalent of the burnt cork of the nineteenth century), farmers and schoolteachers sang spirited renditions of “There's Nothin Like a Minstrel Show” mechanics and school board members donned tutus in an exotic ballet burlesque; and a realtor with a rich baritone sang his version of “Mammy,” a perennial favorite.

On 21 April 1836, members of the Texian army under the leadership of General Sam Houston overwhelmed and routed the pursuing forces of General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, President of Mexico, in a bloody, twenty-minute conflict on the plain of San Jacinto. The Texian army and terrified settlers, who had heard that Santa Anna promised death to all Americans still living in Texas, had been retreating towards the Sabine River and the relative safety of the United States, when they suddenly turned and attacked. The Mexican army, camping on an open plain surrounded by three rivers and in the middle of siesta, were taken completely by surprise. As Houston's forces stormed the camp, shouts went up from the men—the battle cry of retribution: “Remember the Alamo!! Remember Goliad!”

An early stage in the writing of the Kern-Hammerstein musical Show Boat is captured in a typescript marked “from the Ziegfeld Collection” in the Theatre Collection at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. The script, #7430 in the Library numbering, is undated, but Paul Robeson, Elizabeth Hines, and Guy Robertson are penciled in for the roles of Joe, Magnolia, and Gaylord, with “Aunt Jemima” (Tess Gardella, in her famous blackface role) set for Queenie, Norma Terriss for Ellie, and Andy Tombes for Frank. These are principal parts. Magnolia is the ingenue who will fall in love with the dashing, undependable Gaylord, a gambler, in Act 1 and then will grow up to become a singing star after her marriage fails in Act 2; Ellie and Frank are performers on the show boat; Queenie is the boat's cook, and Joe—the part intended for Robeson—is her husband. As yet uncast are Julie, the leading actress who is forced off the show boat when it is discovered that she is mulatto, and Magnolia's parents, Cap'n Andy Hawkes and his shrewish wife Parthy.

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.

The notoriety of the two most popular antebellum stage versions of Uncle Tom's Cabin naturally has led theatre historians to examine both the adaptation choices and their political intentions, continuing a debate which began in earnest on 7 November 1853. On that day the Henry J. Conway adaptation opened at P. T. Bamum's American Museum in New York, entering into direct competition with the version by George Aiken, at that time in the fourth month of its run across town. Barnum aggressively promoted the Conway text as “the only just and sensible Dramatic version of Stowe's book,” despite such changes as a rewritten happy ending and the use of minstrel humor and music. Incensed abolitionist critics countered by dubbing the Conway adaptation “pro-South,” a label which still remains in use, especially in comparisons of the Conway and Aiken texts.

The Living Theatre is a metaphor for the sixties, its very name conjuring up the undulating movement, the pulsing flow, the argumentative spirit that characterized that time.

At the center of the Living Theatre's production of Sophocles' Antigone, translator and director Judith Malina presented the verbal battle between the State/Authority/Patriarchal-figure, kreon (played by Living Theatre co-director Julian Beck), and the Individual/Disenfranchised/Woman, Antigone, (played by Malina herself). At performances of Antigone presented throughout Europe during the dynamic years of 1967 and 1968, spectators were meant to see with new eyes the incendiary struggles taking place outside the theatre. Following Antigone's example, they were meant to take on—individually—the political responsibility and the challenge, and to take part in revolutionary actions. Foregrounded onstage was the battle of the sexes, the battle of the generations, the fire in the belly of the cultural/sexual/political Zeitgeist.

Sarah Blackstone is Chair of the Department of Theatre at Southern Illinois University and serves on the Advisory Board for the Theatre Museum of Repertoire Americana. Neil and Caroline Schaffner started collecting memorabilia from the repertoire theater movement during the 1950s. They dreamed of one day establishing a museum that would display their collection and other items connected with this wide-spread popular entertainment form. In 1973, with the help of the Midwest Old Settlers and Threshers Association, and endless hours of effort, their dream was realized in the small town of Mt. Pleasant, Iowa. Since that time, the Museum of Repertoire Americana has prospered, and it currently houses an impressive collection of uniquely American research materials. Dedicated to preserving the rural theatrical heritage of the Midwest, the Museum has materials related to opera houses, circle stock companies, Uncle Tom shows, showboats, and tent shows of all descriptions. I offer here a brief description of the collection, together with information about the National Society for the Preservation of Tent, Folk, and Repertoire Theatre and the annual Theatre History Seminar this organization holds at the Museum each April.