A new issue of the longstanding theatre journal, documenting conversations that traverse disciplinary boundaries The essays in the thirty-first volume of Theatre Symposium traverse disciplinary boundaries to explore what constitutes the "popular" in theater and performance in an increasingly frenetic and mediated landscape. Amid the current resurgence of populist discourse and the enduring impact of popular culture, this volume explores what is considered popular, how that determination gets made, and who makes it. The answers to these questions shape the structures and systems of performance in an interaction that is reciprocal, intricate, and multifaceted. Productions often succeed or fail based on their ability to align with what is popular--sometimes productively, sometimes clumsily, sometimes brazenly, and sometimes tragically. In our current moment, what constitutes the popular profoundly affects the real world politically, economically, and socially. Controversies about the electoral college system hinge on the primacy of the "popular" vote. Streaming services daily update lists of their most popular content and base future decisions on opaque measures of popularity. Social media platforms broadcast popular content across the globe, triggering new products, social activism, and political revolutions. The contributors to this volume engage with a range of contemporary and historical examples and argue with clarity and acuity the interplay of performance and the popular. Theatre and performance deeply engage with the popular at every level--from audience response to box office revenue. The variety of methodologies and sites of inquiry showcased in this volume demonstrates the breadth and depth of the popular and the importance of such work to understanding our present moment onstage and off. CONTRIBUTORS Mysia Anderson / Chase Bringardner / Elizabeth M. Cizmar / Chelsea Curto / Janet M. Davis / Tom Fish / Kyla Kazuschyk / Sarah McCarroll / Eleanor Owicki / Sunny Stalter-Pace / Chelsea Taylor / Chris Woodworth

Illustrates how theatre's engagement with politics changes over time

Outdoor drama takes many forms: ancient Greek theatre, open-air performances of Shakespeare at summer festivals, and re-enactments of landmark historical events. The essays gathered in "Outdoor Performance," Volume 17 of the annual journal Theatre Symposium, address outdoor theatre's many manifestations, including the historical and non-traditional. Among other subjects, these essays explore the rise of "airdomes" as performance spaces in the American Midwest in the first half of the 20th century; the civic-religious pageants staged by certain Mormon congregations; Wheels-A-Rolling, and other railroad themed pageants; first-hand accounts of the innovative Hunter Hills theatre program in Tennessee; the role of traditional outdoor historical drama, particularly the long-running performances of Paul Green's The Lost Colony; and the rise of the part dance, part sport, part performance phenomenon "parkour"-- the improvised traversal of obstacles found in both urban and rural landscapes.

Comedy Tonight! in Volume 16 of the annual journal Theatre Symposium illustrate well the range of material that falls under the heading "comedy" as it is played on stage.

The essays gathered together in Volume 15 of the annual journal Theatre Symposium investigate how, historically, the theatre has been perceived both as a source of moral anxiety and as an instrument of moral and social reform. Essays consider, among other subjects, ethnographic depictions of the savage “other” in Buffalo Bill’s engagement at the Columbian Exposition of 1893; the so-called “Moral Reform Melodrama” in the nineteenth century; charity theatricals and the ways they negotiated standards of middle-class respectability; the figure of the courtesan as a barometer of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century moral and sexual discourse; Aphra Behn’s subversion of Restoration patriarchal sexual norms in The Feigned Courtesans; and the controversy surrounding one production of Tony Kushner Angels in America, during which officials at one of the nation’s more prominent liberal arts colleges attempted to censor the production, a chilling reminder that academic and artistic freedom cannot be taken for granted in today’s polarized moral and political atmosphere.

First multi-year cumulation covers six years: 1965-70.

The book series CDE Studies invites monographs (and collections) on issues in contemporary Anglophone dramatic literature and theatre performance. The book series is dedicated to the analysis and renegotiation of contemporary writers and plays and their historical, political, formal, theoretical and methodological contexts.

The Theater of Tony Kushner is a comprehensive portrait of the forty-year long career of dramatist Tony Kushner as playwright, screenwriter, essayist, and public intellectual and political activist. Following an introduction examining the influences of Kushner’s development as an artist, this updated second edition features individual chapters on his major plays, including A Bright Room Called Day, Hydriotaphia, or The Death of Dr. Browne, Angels in America, Slavs! Thinking About the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness, Homebody/Kabul, Caroline, or Change, and The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures, along with chapters on Kushner’s adaptations, one-act plays, and screenplays, including his two Academy Award-nominated screenplays, Munich and Lincoln. A book for anyone interested in theater, film, literature, and the ways in which the past informs the present, this second edition of The Theater of Tony Kushner explores how his writings reflect key elements of American society, from politics and economics to race, gender, and spirituality, all with the hope of inspiring America to live up to its ideals.

Theatre History Studies (THS) is a peer-reviewed journal of theatre history and scholarship published annually since 1981 by the Mid-America Theatre Conference THEATRE HISTORY STUDIES, VOLUME 38 PART I: Studies in Theatre History MATTHIEU CHAPMAN Red, White, and Black: Shakespeare’s The Tempest and the Structuring of Racial Antagonisms in Early Modern England and the New World MICHAEL CHEMERS AND MICHAEL SELL Sokyokuchi: Toward a Theory, History, and Practice of Systemic Dramaturgy JEFFREY ULLOM The Value of Inaction: Unions, Labor Codes, and the Cleveland Play House CHRYSTYNA DAIL When for “Witches” We Read “Women”: Advocacy and Ageism in Nineteenth-Century Salem Witchcraft Plays MICHAEL DENNIS The Lost and Found Playwright: Donald Ogden Stewart and the Theatre of Socialist Commitment Part II: HEMISPHERIC HISTORIOGRAPHIES EMILY SAHAKIAN, CHRISTIANA MOLLDREM HARKULICH, AND LISA JACKSON-SCHEBETTA Introduction to the Special Section PATRICIA YBARRA Gestures toward a Hemispheric Theatre History: A Work in Progress ERIC MAYER- GARCÍA Thinking East and West in Nuestra América: Retracing the Footprints of a Latinx Teatro Brigade in Revolutionary Cuba ANA OLIVAREZ-LEVINSON AND ERIC MAYER-GARCÍA Intercambio: A Visual History of Nuevo Teatro from the Ana Olivarez-Levinson Photography Collection JESSICA N. PABÓN-COLÓN Digital Diasporic Tactics for a Decolonized Future: Tweeting in the Wake of #HurricaneMaria LEO CABRANES-GRANT Performance, Cognition, and the Quest for an Affective Historiography Part III: Essays from the Conference The Robert A. Schanke Award-Winning Essay, from the 2019 Mid-America Theatre Conference JULIE BURRELL Reinventing Reconstruction and Scripting Civil Rights in Theodore Ward’s Our Lan’ The Robert A. Schanke Honorable Mention Essay, MATC 2019 MATTHEW MCMAHAN Projections of Race at the Nouveau Cirque: The Clown Acts of Foottit and Chocolat

This book offers an exhaustive approach to all forms of staged violence and an in-depth analysis of their emergence and repercussions (dramaturgically and physically). This study explores instruments to surpass the dichotomic opposition victim-oppressor, to demystify the spell of violence, and to get rid of the morbid voyeurism often connected to staged violence, and eventually, it proposes transformative tools to explore empowering experiences through violence. Considering all the aspects of a theatre performance engaging with staged violence (the story displaying violence, the actors’ embodiment of violence, the spectators’ experiences of being exposed to violence, and the process of performing violence), this book proposes analytical and practical tools to explore the limit and to transform the experience of performing violence. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars in theatre and performance studies.