American Theater History Research Articles

A history of African American theatre

List of illustrations Foreword Lloyd G. Richards Preface James V. Hatch Acknowledgments List of abbreviations Introduction Errol G. Hill 1. Slavery and conquest: background to black theatre Errol G. Hill 2. The African Theatre to Uncle Tom's Cabin Erroll G. Hill 3. The Civil War to The Creole Show Errol G. Hill 4. The American minstrelsy in black and white James V. Hatch 5. New vistas: plays, spectacles, musicals, and opera Errol G. Hill 6. The struggle continues Errol G. Hill and James V. Hatch 7. The Harlem Renaissance James V. Hatch 8. Educational theatre James V. Hatch and Errol G. Hill 9. The Caribbean connection Errol G. Hill 10. The Great Depression and Federal Theatre James V. Hatch 11. Creeping toward integration James V. Hatch 12. From Hansberry to Shange James V. Hatch 13. The Millennium James V. Hatch Appendix: Theatre scholarship at the year 2002 Bibliography Index.

Authentic Possibilities: Plantation Performance of the 1890s

African American theatre history has traditionally been a story of progress in which real and authentic representations of black culture displace false and coerced ones. Often, this story finds only a lack of agency or cultural betrayal in black participation in, and attendance at nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century popular entertainments. This case study of two plantation-themed shows from the late 1890s, South Before the War and Black America, argues for an alternative approach. Defining black culture as that which emerges fromÑrather than exists behindÑcommercial and social constraints expands the options for interpreting black participation in American theatre and the complex dynamics that link performance to racial identification.

A History of African American Theatre

A History of African American Theatre

Reviews: Unknown London: Early Modernist Visions of the Metropolis, 1815–45., Resistance, Parody, and Double Consciousness in African American Theatre, 1895–1910., the Royalty of Negro Vaudeville: The Whitman Sisters and the Negotiation of Race, Gender, and Class in African American Theatre, 1900–1940., African American Performance and Theater History: A Critical Reader., Women in British Romantic Theatre: Drama, Performance, and Society, 1790–1840

Reviews: Unknown London: Early Modernist Visions of the Metropolis, 1815–45., Resistance, Parody, and Double Consciousness in African American Theatre, 1895–1910., the Royalty of Negro Vaudeville: The Whitman Sisters and the Negotiation of Race, Gender, and Class in African American Theatre, 1900–1940., African American Performance and Theater History: A Critical Reader., Women in British Romantic Theatre: Drama, Performance, and Society, 1790–1840

Staging Desire: Queer Readings of American Theater History. Edited by Kim Marra and Robert A. Schanke. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002; pp. 404 + illus. $60 cloth; $22.95 paper.

Staging Desire: Queer Readings of American Theater History. Edited by Kim Marra and Robert A. Schanke. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002; pp. 404 + illus. $60 cloth; $22.95 paper.

Staging Desire: Queer Readings of American Theater History (review)

Staging Desire: Queer Readings of American Theater History (review)

Staging desire: queer readings of American theater history

Staging desire: queer readings of American theater history

Understanding Neil Simon

Widely known as Broadway's king of comedy, Neil Simon has written such popular and critical successes as Barefoot in the Park, The Odd Couple, Brighton Beach Memoirs and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Lost in Yonkers. In this guide to his work, Susan Koprince provides an overview of Simon's career and in-depth analyses of his major plays. Koprince suggests that, in addition to - or in spite of - his unmatched commercial success as a writer of comedy, Simon qualifies as a master dramatist of 20th-century theatre. Koprince recounts Simon's emergence from humble Jewish American origins to celebrated status as the most commercially successful playwright in the history of American theatre. She traces Simon's style to Greek New Comedy, acknowledges his affinity with Jewish humour, and emphasizes the Chekhovian blend of humour and pathos that has become the hallmark of Simon's writing. From Come Blow Your Horn, to Laughter on the 23rd Floor, Koprince examines 16 of Simon's most significant works. She underscores the range of Simon's dramaturgy and evaluates the reasons for Simon's popularity, including his gift for verbal and situational humour, his commitment to traditional values, and his mastery of a comedic style in which humour and sadness are inextricably intertwined.

Reviews: Popular Culture and Performance in the Victorian City, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle France, Writing London: The Trace of the Urban Text from Blake to Dickens, the Portable Theater: American Literature and the Nineteenth-Century Stage, Lines of Activity: Performance, Historiography, Hull-House Domesticity, Passing Performances: Queer Readings of Leading Players in American Theater History, Illegitimate Theatre in London,

Reviews: Popular Culture and Performance in the Victorian City, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle France, Writing London: The Trace of the Urban Text from Blake to Dickens, the Portable Theater: American Literature and the Nineteenth-Century Stage, Lines of Activity: Performance, Historiography, Hull-House Domesticity, Passing Performances: Queer Readings of Leading Players in American Theater History, Illegitimate Theatre in London,

The Cambridge History of American Theatre, volume 1: Beginnings to 1870. Edited by Don B. Wilmeth and Christopher Bigsby. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Pp. xvi + 525 + illus. $69.95 Hb. The Cambridge History of American Theatre, volume 2: 1870 to 1945. Edited by Don B. Wilmeth and Christopher Bigsby. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Pp. xviii + 590

The Cambridge History of American Theatre, volume 1: Beginnings to 1870. Edited by Don B. Wilmeth and Christopher Bigsby. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Pp. xvi + 525 + illus. 95 Hb. The Cambridge History of American Theatre, volume 3: Post World War II to the 1990s. Edited by Don B. Wilmeth and Christopher Bigsby. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. - Volume 27 Issue 1

American Theater History Coming of Age

While coming of age has long been discredited as a metaphor for describing the influence of Eugene O'Neill on American theater history, the trope retains some strategic usefulness when applied to the academic study of the field. As Susan Harris Smith makes clear in American Drama: The Bastard Art (1997), several entrenched suspicions and antagonisms have long retarded the legitimacy of American drama and theater as an academic field. This began to change in the 1990s. As scholars in American studies broadened their discipline to include several genres of popular performance, Americanists in English and history departments deployed varieties of materialist theory to investigate many modes of past performativity, and historians of the American stage in theater departments worked to revise the conventional wisdom of this now burgeoning field. Perhaps the best recent evidence that American theater history has come of age is the award-winning, three-volume Cambridge History of the American Theatre (19982000), a series of comprehensive essays on plays, actors, producers, companies, etc., analyzed within the context of American social and cultural history, from roughly 1600 to 1995. Despite these advances, however, several problems remain. The linguistic turn in humanistic scholarship has not been an unalloyed benefit for scholarship in American theater history. Historians who collapse all theatrical practice into discourse, for example a particularly impossible task in theater history and criticism because of performance's several modes of signification-have difficulty articulating the theater's relations with other fields of practice and hence in explaining historical change. Compounding this problem for scholars who investigate recent or contemporary performances is the cultural politics of the field. Convinced (for good reasons) that theater can help to shape political change, scholars too easily adopt the discourse of apparently progressive theater and performance artists to describe their work, or, as historians, make few adjustments when they read present concerns back into past theatrical events. Where previous generations

The Cambridge History of American Theatre, Vol. III: Post-World War II to the 1990s ed. by Don B. Wilmeth and Christopher Bigsby (review)

The Cambridge History of American Theatre, Vol. III: Post-World War II to the 1990s ed. by Don B. Wilmeth and Christopher Bigsby (review)

Book Reviews

Don B. Wilmeth and Christopher Rigsby, eds., The Cambridge History of American Theatre, Vol. Ill: Post-World War II to the 1990s, reviewed by David Krasner Stephen A. Black, Eugene O'Neill: Beyond Mourning and Tragedy, reviewed by Gary Jay Williams James M. Harding, ed., Contours of the Theatrical Avant-Garde: Performance and Textuality., reviewed by Stephen J. Bottoms Djanet Sears, ed., Testifyin': Contemporary African Canadian Drama: Volume I, reviewed by Diana Brydon Amalia Gladhart, The Leper in Blue: Coercive Performance and the Contemporary Latin American Theater, reviewed by Jean Graham-Jones Elain Aston and Janelle Reinelt, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Modern British Women Playwrights, reviewed by Jen Harvie Patrick M. Horan, The Importance of Being Paradoxical: Maternal Presence in the Works of Oscar Wilde, reviewed by Russell Jackson Joel Kaplan and Sheila Stowell, eds., Look Back in Pleasure: Noel Coward Revisited, reviewed by Brian Parker Peter Wolfe, Understanding Alan Bennett, reviewed by Dominic Shellard Claire Sponsler and Xiaomei Chen, eds., East of West: Cross-Cultural Performance and the Staging of Difference, reviewed by Benzi Zhang

The Cambridge history of American theatre: v.3: Post-World War II to the 1990s

The Cambridge history of American theatre: v.3: Post-World War II to the 1990s

The Cambridge History of American Theatre, Vol. I: Beginnings to 1870 (review)

The Cambridge History of American Theatre, Vol. I: Beginnings to 1870 (review)

The Cambridge History of American Theatre, Vol. II: 1870-1945 ed. by Don B. Wilmeth and Christopher Bigsby (review)

The Cambridge History of American Theatre, Vol. II: 1870-1945 ed. by Don B. Wilmeth and Christopher Bigsby (review)

Passing Performances: Queer Readings of Leading Players in American Theater History. Edited by Robert A. Schanke and Kim Marra. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998; pp. 338, illus.

Passing Performances: Queer Readings of Leading Players in American Theater History. Edited by Robert A. Schanke and Kim Marra. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998; pp. 338, illus.

The boys from Syracuse: the Shuberts' theatrical empire

The sons of a religious fanatic, the Shubert brothers from Syracuse - Sam, Lee, and J.J. - seemed unlikely casting for the most ruthless titans in the history of American theatre, notes biographer Foster Hirsch. But since the turn of the century, the Shuberts and their heirs have exercised on unequaled power over Broadway and the road, and not until now has there been a complete account of their lives and the evolution of their business. During their heyday from 1905 to the crash of 1929, the Shuberts presented a dozen or more shows each season in New York and twice that number on tour, featuring the most respected and sought-after stars of the day: Al Jolson, Richard Mansfield, Beatrice Lillie, Carmen Miranda, Lillian Russell, Eddie Cantor, Fanny Brice, Mae West, Fred Astaire, and the Three Stooges, among many others. They also worked with famed vaudeville team Olson and Johnson on Hellzapoppin' and with Sigmund Romberg, their in-house composer, on The Student Prince and Blossom Time, among the biggest financial successes in the history of the American theatre. Nearly illiterate, the Shuberts conquered commercial theatre, in part because rivals saw them as malaprop-spouting yokels from Syracuse who posed no threat. They were excellent businessmen who seldom financed their enterprises with their own money and who instinctively understood star power. The story of the Shuberts is an epic tale of business successes and shenanigans on an enormous scale. Embellished with original interview material, this chronicle is a major contribution to the history of the American theatre and is certain to become an essential reference work.

Passing performances: queer readings of leading players in American theater history

Passing performances: queer readings of leading players in American theater history

"And Yet They Paused" and "A Bill to Be Passed": Newly Recovered Lynching Dramas by Georgia Douglas Johnson

My recent discovery Georgia Douglas Johnson's lost ends a scholarly quest of many years and confirms Johnson's status as the leading playwright of the genre. The typescripts, dating from the 1930s and found among the NAACP papers at the Library of Congress on June 11, 1999, make possible a more thorough study of the six one-acts comprising the body of work Johnson specifically referred to as her lynching or plays on lynching.(1) Since Johnson was the most prolific playwright of drama, such a study can provide a clearer understanding of her contributions to this uniquely American dramatic genre, as well as the conditions of its production and reception. Plays representing the history of in the United States are only beginning to be understood as a distinctly American dramatic genre, a type of theatre that began to appear at least as early as 1905 and continues to evolve on the contemporary stage.(2) As the first anthology to address how the horrors of have been represented in American theatre, Strange Fruit: Plays on Lynching by American Women, edited by Kathy A. Perkins and Judith L. Stephens (Indiana UP, 1998), reveals the historical continuity of the genre and speaks to its prior neglect in theatre history and dramatic criticism. The fact that Johnson is known primarily as one of the leading poets of the Harlem Renaissance but has, until recently, remained invisible as the leading playwright of an unrecognized dramatic genre speaks loudly to the genre's status and critical reception, as well as to the precarious position Johnson occupied as a black woman writer in the 1920s and '30s. In her recent review of Strange Fruit, Eileen Cherry's comment that dramas may not present the picture that America wants to see of itself provides insight into why the genre has been neglected in the recorded history of American theatre (224-25). This note describes the conditions surrounding the production of And Yet They Paused and A Bill to be Passed, provides brief synopses of the plays, and locates the texts in relation to Johnson's more familiar and accessible dramas: Sunday Morning in the South, Safe, and Blue-Eyed Black Boy. I am indebted to the work of scholars such as James V. Hatch, Ted Shine, Winona L. Fletcher, Margaret Wilkerson, Sandra Richards, Kathy Perkins, Bernard L. Peterson, Nellie McKay, Gloria T. Hall, Cheryl Wall, Elizabeth Brown-Guillory, and Claudia Tate, whose writing on Johnson brought the importance of her work to my attention. According to correspondence in the NAACP files, in June of 1936 Johnson sent Walter White, Executive Secretary of the NAACP, several of her on the subject of lynching, but White returned the in January of 1937 on the grounds that they ended in defeat and gave one the feeling that the situation was hopeless despite all the courage which was used by the Negro characters.(3) Johnson graciously replied that she understood the point that White was making but added, Yet, it is true that[,] in life, things do not end usually ideally[;] however, it is a point that I shall keep in mind if I write others or perhaps rewrite these.(4) Today Johnson's words are prophetic, since we know that, despite the NAACP's considerable and sustained efforts, the United States Congress never enacted any federal anti-lynching legislation. In her letter to White, Johnson mentioned that her were under consideration for publication by Samuel French, but since her more recent Catalogue of Writings does not list these dramas among her published plays, it seems clear that French rejected them. Winona Fletcher's valuable 1985 article in Theatre Annual documents Johnson's submisson of her dramas to the Federal Theatre Project between 1935 and 1939, as well as the result that none were accepted for production in any of the producing units of the FTP. These historical records provide a glimpse into the struggle Johnson faced in seeing her dramas published or produced in her lifetime, especially in the 1920s and 1930s when the brutality of was not an uncommon occurrence in society. …