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The Oxford Companion to American Theatre
Abstract
2nd Ed
... Deriving its name from the greek theasthai and théātron, meaning 'behold' , or 'the seeing place' , the american theater has long been regarded as one of the greatest and most influential colonial art forms (merriam-Webster, 2019;simpson et al., 1989). heavily animated by ancient greek and British stylistics, the early american theater hosted traditionally london-based acts such as hamlet, othello, richard the iii and its inaugural 1752, and 1767 performances, the merchant of Venice and the Prince of Parthia (Bordman, 1984;hornblow, 1919). however, like many socially progressive forms of art, the american theater found itself relegated to the fringes of society, where it soon took on a life of its own (arcadia Publishing, 2021;Dunlap, 2005;hornblow, 1919;rubin & solórzano, 2000;Walter, 1994). ...
... given their concerns, British authorities quickly enacted a series of continental congressionally supported legal performance bans that quickly spread across the thirteen colonies (arcadia Publishing, 2021;Britannica, 2019;rakove, 1979). however, with the onset of the revolutionary war, the emergence of the second continental congress of 1775, and the nationally expressed desire for independence from Britain, the american theater found its freedom (Bordman, 1984;Walter, 1994). armed with a willingness to challenge traditionally British socio-ideological narratives and its expanding influence, the stage became, in many ways, the ideal platform for telling the new american story (arcadia, 2021;Britannica, 2019;rakove, 1979;Walter, 1994). ...
The American theater is a place of possibilities. As such, it utilizes performative discourses to develop and propagate values, beliefs, identities, and ways of being. While the historical significance of the American theater leaves little room for debate, its continued dependency on Eurocentric values, vantages, and aesthetics is now being called into question. Still, there remains a dearth of research exploring the roles/impacts of race within the profession. This study addresses this gap by exploring the professional/educational experiences of 18 African-Americans within the profession. Results include experiences of Normative-whiteness, Personal-disembodiment, and Professional-despondence. Implications for the American Theater are also discussed.
... The leading character (or author-hero) in an expressionist play often pours out his or her soul in long monologues usually couched in an elliptical language that is not so much framed to carry statements as to emit what is called Expressionist schrei (scream). (Bordman, 1984) The expressionist dramatist is not concerned to show normal life lived at a normal level or tempo. Instead, he( dramatist) strives for the exceptional and extreme. ...
Expressionism arose in Europe in the late 19th and early 20th.centuries as a response to bourgeois complacency and the increasing mechanization and urbanization of society. At its height between 1910 and 1925, just before and after the first world war, expressionist writers distorted objective features of the sensory world using symbolism and dream-like elements in their works illustrating the alienating and often emotionally overwhelmed sensibilities. The term refers to a movement in Germany very early in the 20th.century in which a number of painters sought to avoid the representation of external reality and, instead, to project themselves and a highly personal vision of the world. The term can be applied to literature, but only judiciously. The theories of Expressionism had considerable influence in Germany and Scandinavia. In fact, expressionism dominated the theater for a time in the 1920s. Theatrically it was a reaction against realism and aimed to show inner psychological realities. This paper endeavour to analyse the Tennessee Williams’ “Orpheus Descending” based on the features of Expressionist drama. In his play Williams have efforted to depict his personal expression according to the society after the first world war. First, with the reference to the features of Expressionist drama a pattern of analysis will be structured. Then, the analysis of Williams’ play based on these features will be indicated. Finally, the result of analysis will be investigated for better reading and comprehend the plays of this type.
This thesis reassesses the Canadian and Scottish artistic production of Scottish
watercolourist and caricaturist Katherine Jane Ellice (1812-1864). Adopting a
transnational perspective, the thesis offers a portrait of Ellice’s artistic practice,
humour and social networks. Her political culture was that of the British aristocracy,
which followed the parliamentary calendar by moving from the capital to the country
houses where politics took place in the more informal circles in which women were
very influential. Such politically motivated travel led Ellice to Lower Canada in 1838
when she accompanied her husband Edward Ellice Junior (1810-1880), at the time
private secretary to Governor-general Lord Durham (1792-1840) during his mission
to solve the political crisis taking place in Upper and Lower Canada. Travelling from
Quebec City to Beauharnois, where the seigneurial house of her father-in-law was
located, Ellice also visited the United States and the Upper Canada. The thesis draws
on original documents by Ellice held in state archives (Library and Archives Canada,
National Library of Scotland), notably her travel diary and the drawings and
watercolours that she painted and exchanged within her social networks. The distinct
contributions of Ellice to art history are elucidated through detailed analysis of her
artistic production, drawing a special attention to one of the watercolours that she
painted during her confinement at the presbytery of Beauharnois in November 1838
when a group of patriots made her their prisoner for nearly a week. This analysis
fosters new interpretations and adds to the evidence of women taking arms during the
rebellions. This study also addresses for the first time Ellice’s caricatural production
and her participation in exchange networks of humorous images. Finally, the thesis
examines the political role played by Ellice from the 1840’s to the 1860’s when,
living in Glenquoich (North of Scotland) with her husband and her father-in-law, in a
house visited each year by hundreds of persons, she assumed a political responsibility
that also furthered the unique role that she played in the circulation of visual culture.
The transatlantic (and also global) mediation of theatre during the period covered by this study is unthinkable without a corresponding infrastructure enabling global travel, communications and trade. Transport and new communication technologies such as telegraphy, but also the boom of news and image agencies are basic constituents of globalisation. By using examples from the history of technology, media and culture, this chapter discusses these constituents, which were also decisive for the theatre business during the period under study.
In 1990, the New-York Historical Society decided to end an enigma that had caused (art) historians to ponder the origins of a portrait depicting a lady in a blue dress and a beard shadow. The portrait for the longest time was believed to represent Viscount Cornbury, royal governor of New York and New Jersey in the early 1700s, who was rumored to have appeared in public in lady’s clothes to better represent his cousin, Queen Anne. This essay explores the anecdote of the cross-dressing Cornbury, tracing three hundred years of debate about evidence of such improper behavior. Known as “worst British governor,” Cornbury asserted his despotic rule in many ways, one of which may well have been his use of cross-dressing to distress his most fervid political opponents. While some critics claim that the factual evidence of his cross-dressing was but an effort of his enemies to slander his reputation, others take this habit as mark of eccentricity associated with aristocratic self-fashioning. The continuous debate about whether Cornbury appeared and acted as representative of the queen in drag is proof to the lasting power of deep gossip. After all, what if Cornbury, royal governor in colonial America, really was a drag queen?
As shown in Romanian-American Saviana Stănescu’s plays, when postsocialist immigrants arrive in the United States, they enter into US discourses of gender, migration, and, in some cases, of post-9/11 terrorism, in ways that also include them in US practices of othering as undocumented immigrants or disposable females. Scholars like Suchland propose that the postsocialist be considered different from the West in thought, location, and future aspirations, as these aspirations have been shaped by the practice of lived socialism. Furthermore, she suggests the emergence of a stronger transnational lens on the postsocialist space and its migrants, following Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan (2000), who explain that they “use the term transnational instead of international in order to reflect our need to destabilize rather than maintain boundaries of nation, race, and gender” (quoted in Suchland 2011: 849). Thinking of the postsocialist as its own category defined by its specific history rather than as an unsuccessful and incomplete First World project opens up new theoretical pathways to understanding its place in US narratives of national identity, immigration, and diversity. The postsocialist has to think from outside of the position of inferiority, which is a position of mimicry. Multiplicity becomes an asset in the void created by the fall ofcommunism and the postsocialist need for new identifications (Kligman and Gal 2000; Kligman 1998). Like the female characters in Stănescu’s plays, the postsocialist needs to be creative, active, and powerful as well as multivocal, multilingual, and transnationally multicultural.
During the spring of 1917, New York’s Metropolitan Opera lavishly launched the premiere performances of Reginald de Koven and Percy MacKaye’s The Canterbury Pilgrims.1 One of the first full-length American grand operas to appear on the Metropolitan’s stage, the opera received primarily lukewarm reviews: it seemed neither very grand nor very American. Sung in English by a largely German cast, the opera was frequently critiqued for being no more intelligible to the audience than an opera in German or Italian.2 The only English words universally recognized by the audience were in Act Two, when the German-accented “Vife of Bat” cried “Shud upp-phh!”3 On the evening of the fifth performance, however, the audience was probably less concerned than before about discerning the fine points of the pilgrims’ journey to Canterbury, preoccupied instead with the news due from the White House at any minute.
IN THE AMERICAN PUBLISHING WORLD, the years before the Wall Street crash of 29 October 1929 produced a number of small publishers whose aim was the production of books of the highest quality not only in design but in content. Among the most interesting are those that were connected with and distributed by Random House, including the Bowling Green Press, the Fountain Press and that of Crosby Gaige.
In August 1892, the American Dramatist Club gathered in Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey, for their monthly meeting. Martha Morton, an up-and-coming playwright, was the invited guest, but while the men met at the Grand View Hotel, Morton lunched with their wives in a nearby cottage.3 Fifteen years later in March 1907, the American Dramatist Club finally broke their long-standing men-only tradition by inviting established women dramatists to join them for their yearly dinner at Delmonico’s. It was at this auspicious event that Morton, now known as the “Dean of the Women Playwrights,” announced the formation of the Society of Dramatic Authors, consisting of thirty women and one man. In her address to Club members Morton concluded: “Gentlemen, we are not going to blame you for something of which you are entirely innocent—about which you were never even consulted—your sex—we are not going to ostracize you because you are merely men—we invite you all!. … All dramatists are one in their work; therefore, as moderns we make no restrictions of nationality or sex.”4 Shortly thereafter, the two groups merged into the Society of American Dramatists and Composers, forerunner to today’s Dramatists Guild.
During the 1920s, theatre flourished as never before during its long history in the United States. Broadway was the vibrant centre of theatrical activities, a ‘paradise for playwrights’, in Brenda Murphy’s words.1 On the average, more than 200 new productions opened each year on the Great White Way.2 By 1927, there were 76 theatres in New York City used for plays and musical comedies, twice as many as had been available only 12 years before.3 Although playwrights such as Elmer Rice, Philip Barry and George S. Kaufman became certified Broadway favourites, they all were overshadowed by a relative newcomer, Eugene O’Neill, who was repeatedly singled out, even during the 1920s, as the inheritor of the mantle of Shakespeare, Ibsen and Shaw, and the chief native architect of what one well-regarded critic, Walter Prichard Eaton, called ‘the true theatre, the true spoken drama’.4 O’Neill, more than any other playwright, succeeded in establishing ‘America’s kinship’, in the words of one of his earliest champions, ‘with the stage of the modern world’.5 With O’Neill’s long string of Broadway successes during the 1920s, from Beyond the Horizon to Strange Interlude, ‘American drama’, Barnard Hewitt announced, finally ‘came of age’.
The aim of this thesis is to critically examine Weill‘s negotiation of American
cultural industries and his collaborative practice in making musicals there. It
addresses the influence of the earlier, now discredited, concept of "Two
Weills", which has engendered an emphasis on identity within the current
literature. It proposes that Weill scholarship has been further constrained by
problematic perceptions of Weill‘s position as both a European modernist
composer and an exile in America. Each of these contexts suggests
romanticised notions of appropriate behaviour, for a composer, and of
autonomy and separation from popular culture. This thesis examines how
Weill troubles those notions by engaging with the musical, a so-called
‗middlebrow‘ form, with a disputed cultural value. It traces the
reconsideration of the musical as a location for sociocultural analysis,
highlighting David Savran‘s requirement that approaches to the musical
recognise the form‘s material conditions of production. The thesis establishes
its methodology built on Ric Knowles‘s cultural materialist approach to
contemporary performance. This enables Weill‘s activities to be seen in their
proper context: Weill‘s negotiation of entry into American art worlds, and the
subsequent exchange of economic assets and Weill‘s active management of his
cultural capital through the media are followed for the first time, clearly
revealing the composer‘s working practices. The thesis suggests that Weill is a
practitioner who consciously engages with American cultural industries. It
addresses questions of authorship, demonstrating how Weill‘s contribution
can be understood within complex sets of agencies. It establishes how Weill
can be seen through his own model of the ‗composer as dramatist‘ and
through Adorno‘s depiction of the composer as a Musikregisseur.
« Entree des artistes » porte sur la venue des premiers professionnels de theâtre. Apres la Revolution americaine, des comediens d’origine britannique et francaise quitterent le Congres pour la Couronne. Leurs efforts furent appuyes par les troupes de tournee du Boston Theatre. La plupart d’entre eux rentrerent aux Etats-Unis avant la Guerre de 1812, mais ils furent relayes plus tard par des cirques-theâtres. Certains de ces professionnels contribuerent a l’integration d’auteurs et d’artistes locaux et a vehiculer — notamment l’acteur, journaliste et imprimeur William Moore — des valeurs post-colonisales. Ils ont fonde des ecoles de danse, de musique et de theâtre.
This thesis explored Asian American ethnicity in Asian American drama from the end of the nineteenth century until the present time. The choice of the plays was confined to Philip Kan Gotanda's Yankee Dawg You Die (1987) and Elizabeth Wong's Kimchee and Chitlins (1990). The introduction showed the main parts of the whole thesis. Chapter one was dedicated to some important Asian American playwrights and theatre companies that contributed to identifying and grabbing the attention of the mainstream American audiences and critics. Also of importance are the political events that had their effects on Asian American theatre like the civil rights movements and the American wars in Asian countries. Likewise, the introduction had shed light on the lives of Asian Americans and how they transformed from being a national threat to an ideal minority. Chapter two was dedicated to Philip Kan Gotanda’s play Yankee Dawg You Die (1987). The
play discussed the challenges that two Asian American actors from different generations faced while working in the American entertainment industry and being shattered between their dreams of stardom and their responsibilities towards their original roots. Chapter three discussed Elizabeth Wong’s Kimchee and Chitlins (1990). In this play, Wong explored the social relationships and cultural misunderstanding that resulted in the 1990 boycott of Korean greengrocers by black communities in Brooklyn, New York. The thesis finally provided a conclusion where the main ideas and notions about Asian American ethnicity in the plays are conveyed. The conclusion offered the main reasons that made Asian American dramatists fail in conveying the true identity of their ethnic group and some solutions for their social and literary problems.
Chicago has long had strong theatre and music traditions, and at times has been an important dance city, even if for somewhat mysterious reasons it has never had a resident ballet company to equal the Chicago Symphony, the opera, or the newer Steppenwolf theatre company. Certainly there have been many distinguished teachers there, from Adolph Bolm, Laurent Novikoff, Andreas Pavley, and Serge Oukrainsky through Edna McRae, Berenice Holmes, Bentley Stone, and Walter Camryn to Maria Tallchief. The one important ballet to be created in Chicago, however, came out of a heady mix of the Depression, the WPA Federal Theatre Project, local artistic politics, and two of Chicago's most durable dance figures, Ruth Page and Bentley Stone. The subject was as American as Carl Sandburg, although rather less respectable, being based on the song about which Sandburg remarked, "If America has a classical gutter song, it is the one that tells of Frankie and her man."' The story of the creation of this ballet also raises a number of interesting points in attribution as part of the complex workings of collaboration in dance, especially apportioning the credits for choreography and design. Frankie and Johnny was first shown on a program presented by the Federal Theatre Project of the Works Progress Administration
Clyde Fitch was the most famous playwright of the early twentieth century, but today no one studies him. The disconnect between his fame in his lifetime and his obscurity after death points to a major historiographical problem, a problem that began in Fitch's own day. Fitch's numerous contemporary critics, many of whom were early proponents of theatrical realism, criticized his plays as effeminate, bound by the narrow conventions of the legitimate theater that relied on women as its predominant patrons. By contrast, realism, as the critics under-stood it, was masculine, bringing the gritty reality of what contemporary commentators regarded as the real world to the stage. Criticizing Fitch's feminine dramatic sensibilities became a way of prodding him toward a strained realism in his own plays. Fitch's story illustrates the close connection of realism to the gendered hierarchy that became an unconscious element in the determination of literary value. In dismissing Fitch as worthy of scholarly attention, current theatrical historians have followed Fitch's contemporary critics. Even as they have eviscerated the gendered standards of the early twentieth century, present-day scholars have retained the critical judgments and the generic categories that the gendered standards produced.
This essay offers insights into the American nation's persistent denial and deep-seated fears of its own inextricably multicultural identity at the time of the American Revolution and the first half of the 19th century. American imperialism, and perhaps this is true of all imperialisms, was founded upon a stable hierarchical relationship between “civilized” and “savage.” Rhetorically, indigenous tribespeople seem to have fitted Frantz Fanon's description of “the real other whom the white man perceived on the level of the body image, absolutely as the non-self – that is, the unidentifiable, the unassimilable” (161 n.). On the one hand, the imperialistic drive across the continent in the name of Manifest Destiny, and, on the other, the nation's wishful thinking to constrict the boundaries of American identity into a fixed, pure and homogeneous body of values, unleashed the forces of cultural exclusion. In this essay, I try to show how the dominant white society's narcissistic view of itself as an empire operating under the auspices of Divine Providence actually resulted in a series of political acts of nativist violence. I have deliberately chosen to focus on the dramatic literature of the 19th century as a still largely unexplored territory of American literature in order to trace and expose the contradictory representations of the Native American as both historically absent and integral to the nation's conception of its own identity as the “center.”
The palefaces are all around us, and they tread in blood. The blaze of our burning wigwams flashes awfully in the darkness of their path. We are destroyed — not vanquished; we are no more, yet we are forever.
This article explores the literary responses of two nineteenth-century American playwrights to Shakespeare: Robert Conrad (1810-1848) and George Henry Boker (1823-1890). While Conrad aimed at providing a melodramatic counter-model to 2 Henry VI in Jack Cade, he failed to grasp Shakespeare’s ambivalent stance and to challenge his figure as a symbol of literary genius. Boker’s less radical and more reverential approach in Anne Boleyn and Francesca da Rimini prevented him from being more than an epigone. Although he altered his model and sometimes combined references to different plays, his use of Shakespeare was more a form of imitation than of reinvention. Conrad and Boker’s literary attitudes to the Bard proved to be quite different, but they both failed to defamiliarise him and to truly question Shakespeare as a literary icon.
These letters among two women and their husband offer a rare look into the personal dynamics of an LDS polygamous relationship. Abraham "Owen" Woodruff was a young polygamous Mormon apostle, and the son of LDS President Wilford Woodruff, who is remembered for the Woodruff Manifesto, a divinely-inspired call for the termination of plural marriage.The Woodruff Manifesto eased a systematic federal judicial assault on Mormons and made Utah statehood possible. It did not end polygamy in the church. Some leaders continued to encourage and perform such marriages. Owen Woodruff, himself married to Helen May Winters, contracted a secretive second marriage to Avery Clark. Pressure on the LDS church revived with hearings regarding Reed Smoot's seat in the U.S. Senate. After church president Joseph F. Smith issued the so-called Second Manifesto in 1904, polygamy and its more prominent advocates were mostly expunged from mainstream Mormonism.Owen Woodruff had often been "on the underground," moving frequently, traveling under secret identities, and using code names in his letters to his wives, while still carrying out his administrative duties, which, in particular, involved supervision of the nascent Mormon colonies in the Big Horn Basin of Wyoming. He was never excommunicated, as some of his apostolic colleagues were. Both he and his first wife, Helen, while living with Avery in Mexico and preparing for a mission to Germany, contracted smallpox and died suddenly in 1904. Avery later returned to Utah with her children along with those of Helen and Owen.
A brief discussion of the influence of modernism on the design of a particular building type necessitates two explanations: first, there is an assumption of the parameters of modernism in architectural design and second, there is the explanation of what modernism might represent to the function or use of the particular building type - in this case, theatre.
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