Regional Theatre Research Articles

The Motion of Herstory: Three Plays by Pearl Cleage

Pearl Cleage, highly regarded poet and essayist, first gained widespread recognition as playwright with the production of puppetplay by the Negro Ensemble Company in 1983. The chronicle of failed marriage, puppetplay expressed the divided consciousness and ambivalent emotions of the wife through the use of two female actors to portray her, while expressing the perceptual gulf between marital partners by representing the husband as seven-foot marionette. Though puppetplay was moderately successful, and though several of her other works(1) have been produced outside of the Just Us Theater and Club Zebra, performance venues which she helped to found in her home city, Atlanta, Georgia, it is through an artistic partnership forged with Atlanta's Alliance Theatre and its Artistic Director, Kenny Leon, who commissioned Cleage to write Flyin' West (1992), Blues for an Alabama Sky (1995), and Bourbon at the Border (1997) that Cleage has realized rare achievement for African-American playwrights: consistent professional production in regional theatres. Each production has further distilled her exploration of essential thematic elements which fuel her dramatic vision. Through these three plays, Cleage seeks to bring us to grips with our American past and to help us understand and acknowledge its impact on present conditions, especially with regard to issues of race and gender. She examines great historical events and movements not through the eyes of leaders and celebrities but through the experiences of the ordinary people who lived them. The issue at hand and its relationship to our actions remains the focus, rather than the impersonation of an iconic figure. Cleage's interest is in helping us face our responsibility for being part of the flow of history (interview). Describing herself as a third [-]generation black nationalist and radical feminist, Cleage defines her task as dramatist as creation of dialectic and political/social action: My response to the oppression I face is to name it, describe it, analyze it, protest it, and propose solutions to it as loud[ly] as I possibly can every time I get the chance. I purposely people my plays with fast-talking, quick-thinking black women since the theater is, for me, one of the few places where we have chance to get an uninterrupted word in edgewise. (Perkins and Uno 46) Cleage has turned to the familiar structure of the well-made play, subtly subverting what appear to be stock situations and characters to invoke new ideas. She is resistant reader of history, turning her audience toward interrogation of standard interpretations, be they from black or white perspectives, and is not hesitant to force the audience into the uncomfortable psychological and emotional areas into which an honest dialogue on race and gender relations must venture. Flyin' West, for example, turns domestic melodrama into polemic against domestic violence while it addresses the issues of what constitutes and defines family and whether black nationalism will hold together the community of Nicodemus, Kansas, founded by the Exodusters who flew West to escape racist oppression during the late nineteenth century. A family of homesteading sisters--Fannie, Minnie, and adopted sister Sophie--augmented by Miss Leah, survivor of slavery who has passed the long winter on their farm, not only persevere but thrive on the products of their labors. As Minnie approaches her twenty-first birthday, they prepare to turn over her portion of the homestead to her. However, her new husband, Frank, through his verbally and physically abusive behavior, threatens not only Minnie's life, but the homestead itself, since he plans to sell Minnie's share to white land speculators who are attempting to buy out Nicodemus and the surrounding area. Empowered by his legal position as male and husband, Frank feels he can act with impunity, and can only be stopped by family conspiracy which leads to his death. …

The Colonization of Black Theatre

August Wilson's keynote address to the 1996 biennial conference of the Theatre Communications Group spawned a significant body of critical discourse and contention within the theatrical community and beyond. Among other sharp criticisms, he admonished the funding community concerning the continual lack of support for black theatres and cited the principle of colorblind casting as a denial of both black identity and historical and cultural truths. Mr. Wilson is a company member here at Penumbra Theatre Company and this long-standing relationship has many ways shaped the aesthetic that Penumbra has developed. I have consistently been philosophical agreement with him and have, public arenas, already stated my feelings (albeit not so eloquently as has Mr. Wilson). In this essay, I will indicate my thoughts regard to many of the issues raised by Mr. Wilson and how Penumbra seeks to theatrically address them. I am often, as Mr. Wilson is now, cast as the spoiler, for the efforts of major regional theatrical endeavors the multi-cultural arena. I have been quite critical of many of those efforts. Perhaps this is an opportunity to make a clear statement without argument. Since the Guthrie is our regional, here the Midwest, many of my comments refer to its efforts. In my view, the attempts by the Guthrie are indicative of a national milieu (or malaise) and not particular to the artistic directorship at that particular institution. The greatest travesty American theatre today is that, spite of the voluminous amounts of talent and craft evident at every level the black theatrical, musical, and artistic communities, we--as a nation--have not found it necessary to institute and support a major regional black theatre. Furthermore, I view the efforts of the major regional theatres (translation: white, since those are the only ones existence) to be antithetical to that end. Perhaps the following will help you to understand my position. By examining these specifics, I should be able to shed light upon a national condition which, as August Wilson is advocating, must be rectified. Both Mr. Wilson and Penumbra have, because of the tremendous resources the major regional theatres possess, allowed our craft to be exhibited those venues. Some of those closest to me, and whose opinions I hold high regard, counsel me to find ways to work with these major institutions. They argue quite persuasively that by sharing precious resources we could mount projects that could be to our mutual benefit. After all, these organizations have taken up the multi-cultural mandate and, like it or not, they are now in the business. I am advised to assume a position which would lessen many of my negative comments concerning the recent efforts of these organizations and the effects of these efforts upon my organization. I should, I am told, offer constructive criticism and partnership rather than polemical arguments which only serve to widen the chasm between our organizations. Penumbra, a recent collaboration, performed our production of Fences at the Guthrie Theatre Minneapolis. This collaborative venture was regarded by all as an example of two organizations coming together a respectful manner to produce great art. The result was a production that played to large numbers of people and retained the cultural truth for which Penumbra has been known. What will be the fruits of this endeavor? Will major regional theatres across the U.S. respect the expertise of black organizations that understand and maintain art and culture their communities, or will they understand an endeavor like the Penumbra /Guthrie collaboration to be a license to produce and do what they will regardless of the effects upon organizations like Penumbra and the communities they represent? What strikes me as very interesting is why Mr. Wilson's voice is audible now? Both he and I are saying essentially what we have said all along. …

Alan Bennett: Political Playwright

Alan Bennett is one of the most popular mainstream dramatists working in Britain today, his canon now a mainstay of regional and amateur theatre companies. Yet for a writer who was once compared to John Osborne as taking ‘the moral temperature of the nation’, his output is widely regarded as apolitical and, at worst, ‘safe’. In the following article, Richard Scarr suggests that this viewpoint is misleading, and argues that Bennett is not only one of the most politically contentious playwrights in dominant theatre, but that the ideological viewpoints he has supported have changed as his career has progressed. Richard Scarr is an English graduate of the University of North London, and has recently completed an MA in Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary and Westfield College. He is currently researching a PhD on the rhetoric of Renaissance comedy, with particular emphasis on the double-entendre.

A Cornerstone for Rethinking Community Theatre

A Cornerstone for Rethinking Community Theatre Sonja Kuftinec (bio) Theatre scholars and professional practitioners tend to refer to “community theatre” in pejorative terms, conjuring images of Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland rummaging through Granny’s trunk in the barn, puttin’ on a show. This idea of community theatre may now be as clichéd as the genre itself is perceived to be. Recent collaborations between experienced theatre artists and a wide variety of communities have generated renewed appreciation for the social and aesthetic possibilities of community theatre. This field of performance, termed “community-based theatre,” or “grassroots theatre,” has begun to enter our consciousness in descriptive, practical terms but has yet to be clearly situated in a theoretical context. Some practitioners may fear that, perhaps, critique amounts to criticism, endangering the fragile foundations of nascent projects. In order to legitimize the field and investigate its potential for making meaning, however, it is essential to scrutinize community-based theatre and the ways in which the collaborative process helps to build, perform, and destabilize community. Analysis of Cornerstone Theatre’s production process is an appropriate site for this critical exploration of community-based work. Founded in 1986, Cornerstone has worked in collaboration with rural and urban communities across the country. In the fall of 1994, I served as dramaturg for two productions with Cornerstone, as part of the company’s yearlong residency in Watts, Los Angeles. This experience complemented dissertation research conducted through newsletters, a company oral history, formal and informal interviews, and observations on process. My research and production experience have led me to propose that Cornerstone’s community-based work generates complex, aesthetically intriguing and engaging productions and contributes to a growing discourse on the nature of community and identity. “Community” has been a problematic term for sociologists since at least the 1950s when, to the consternation of the field, George A. Hillery, Jr. described ninety-four use-definitions of community with very little in common among them (qtd. in Bell and Newby 27). The term serves as a convenient symbol encapsulating a number of contradictory ideas. As Raymond Williams notes in Keywords, references to “community” suggest positive connotations without clear meaning (66). This ambivalence of meaning is, in fact, an important element [End Page 91] of how “community” functions. In The Symbolic Constructions of Community, sociologist Anthony Cohen suggests that “community” operates as a “God word,” used symbolically to avoid the confrontation of its connotative differences (Introduction). “Community,” like “God,” symbolically unites those who believe in and employ the concept, even though these individuals may have vastly varying ideas as to its connotations. We generally understand community as a function of commonality, whether that commonality is one of location, class, interest, age, or ethnic background. This idea of commonality lends community the positive connotation that Williams cites. However, as sociologists and cultural theorists such as Cohen, Paul Gilroy, and Iris Marion Young point out, commonality also implies boundaries, difference, and exclusion. 1 In order for a community to distinguish itself, its members must differentiate themselves in some way from other communities through boundaries of land, behavior, or background. These are fluid rather than stable boundaries, dependent on individual perceptions and definitions. Cornerstone’s local collaborations ground this discourse of “community,” defined by both commonality and exclusion, in concrete examples. Original company members founded Cornerstone as a way to expand and diversify one particular community: the theatregoing audience. Co-founders Alison Carey and Bill Rauch were frustrated by what they felt to be a limited idea of national identity as defined by the audience of the American Repertory Theatre. Carey and Rauch felt that, despite its titular claims, this theatre’s mainly white, upper-middle-class audience did not represent the full diversity of America. Rauch, Carey, and other founding Cornerstone members decided that if they wanted to engage a truly diverse American theatre audience they needed to travel beyond the geographical and economic confines of East Coast regional theatres. Further discussion led to the insight that engaging an audience required working with them rather than merely performing for them. Carey comments, “if we were sincere in our desire to learn from people what makes good theatre, and whether theatre...

The Making (and Breaking) of a Regional Theatre Critic: Audrey Ashley at the Ottawa Citizen 1961-1985

This article traces the career of Audrey Ashley, who as Drama and Music Editor of The Ottawa Citizen for twenty-five years, wrote reviews of a wide variety of touring and local, professional and amateur theatrical productions. Her work, and her relationship with her editors, is representative of the place of theatre reviewing at regional newspapers. Her length of tenure allows for some reflection on the status and influence of the reviewer in Canada from the 1960s through the 1980s.

Ambivalence, Utopia, and a Queer Sort of Materialism: How "Angels in America" Reconstructs the Nation

Critics, pundits, and producers have placed Tony Kushner's Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes in the unenviable position of having to rescue the American theatre. The latter, by all accounts, is in a sorry state. It has attempted to maintain its elite cultural status despite the fact that the differences between high and low have become precarious. On Broadway, increasingly expensive productions survive more and more by mimicking mass culture, either in the form of mindnumbing spectacles featuring singing cats, falling chandeliers, and dancing dinnerware or plays, like The Heidi Chronicles or Prelude to a Kiss, whose style and themes aspire to quality television. In regional theatres, meanwhile, subscriptions continue to decline, and with them the adventurousness of artistic directors. Given this dismal situation, Angels in America has almost singlehandedly resuscitated a category of play that has become almost extinct: the serious Broadway drama that is neither a British import nor a revival.

‘Nice Girls’: the Vic Gives a Voice to Women of the Working Class

Since its opening in 1961, the Victoria Theatre in Stoke-on-Trent has arguably been England's most adventurous and inventive repertory theatre, distinguished by the number and range of new plays it has produced – and particularly by the series of local documentaries which has set out to explore and reflect the life of the local community. The first issue ofTheatre Quarterly(1971) covered the early years of the old Victoria Theatre, and included an article by the director, Peter Cheeseman, on the company policy and production style of what was then Britain's only permanent theatre in the round. In addition, a ‘Production Casebook’ followed the creative processes and the techniques involved in rehearsals of one of the early Vic documentaries, TheStaffordshire Rebels. Here, Graham Woodruff looks at developments in the later Vic documentaries and, in the light of current discourses on popular theatre, history, and class politics, examines the implications of a regional theatre giving voice to ‘women of the working class’ in the latest Vic documentary,Nice Girls. Graham Woodruff, who has been Head of Drama at the University of Birmingham and for sixteen years worked for Telford Community Arts, wrote in NTQ28 (1989) on the politics of community plays, and is currently undertaking research on the ways in which the contemporary theatre gives expression to workingclass voices and interests.

Deconstructing the Regional Theater with "Performance Art" Shakespeare

Deconstructing the Regional Theater with "Performance Art" Shakespeare Keith Appier In many cases, staging classics means making the old play new, and many theater-goers seem happy enough to see Shakespeare's dramas transposed to different times and places, cast non-traditionally, or staged with irreverent details or nudity. Many theater-goers understand and even appreciate these anachronisms as ways to give relevance to the archaic roles and circumstances. For reviewer David Richards, successful Shakespeare OffBroadway and in the regional theaters only depends on one thing: "You've got to believe the actors" ("At the Public" 5). Richards suggests that if the actors can perform the play with art and conviction, the updates will do their work and the old drama will still catch fire. What, however, would the reviewers' and audiences' response be if a performance artist directed Shakespeare in the regional theater using a nonrealistic performance idiom to challenge the tastes and expectations prescribed for that institutional space? In late 1991, "performance art" Shakespeare appeared in a major regional theater and, to a large degree, the performers were not working for believability. The British director Neil Bartlett staged Twelfth Night at Chicago's Goodman Theatre in a manner he described as "performance art" (Smith 8). In performing tasks and trying on new roles, the performers produced striking visual and aural effects, with which Bartlett composed a series of surprising and disturbing moments. The production that resulted, judged by the standards for realistic acting, could only have failed. In fact, Bartlett's performance art Twelfth Night intended to deconstruct the realistic acting of institutional Shakespeare within its own institutional space. Bartlett's mise en scène foregrounded the codes of professional Shakespearean performance operating in that space—codes which relate to realistic acting—by violating them, thus suggesting the correlation of realistic acting with cultural and social prescriptions. Elements of Performance Art Xerxes Mehta warns against confusing performance artists, or "performers ," with "actors." "Actors," who engage in realistic representation, 35 The Goodman Theatre's 1992 production of Twelfth Night with (from the left) Lynn Baber as Fabian, Suzanne Petri as Malvolio, Jeanette Schwaba as Sir Andrew Aguecheek, and Lola Pashalinski as Sir Toby Belch. Directed by Neil Bartlett. Photo: Eric Y. Exit. Deconstructing the Regional Theater 37 "impersonate others, exist in stage time, and respond to their characters' inner psychological promptings" (Mehta 189). Performance artists and other practitioners and theorists greatly distrust realistic representation because the imitation of reality that actors create, though a reductive and interested authorial construction, elicits acceptance and emotional commitment from the spectators . Actors, in creating characters, pretend to be real people, but their performances are relatively simple psychologically. As characters, their conflicts, successes, and failures produce a simplified image of life and a facile ethical model. However, persuaded of the truth of the actor's imitation, audience members share an empathetic mass emotion, something performance artists disclaim as "the fascism of the center" (Mehta 190). Their objections resemble Brecht's; however, Brechtian performance stayed closer to realistic conventions than performance art presentations do. The performance pieces, which may range "from highly personal solo monologues to comedy routines, to large multimedia collaborations between artists from different disciplines" (Champagne 183), generally are not unitary. Partly because performance art derives as much from the visual arts as from avant-garde theater, the performer creates a sequence of visual and aural effects with her body, movement, and words that contribute to "an abstract or associative collage structure" instead of to a dramatic action. To broaden selfexpression , the performer, without seeking to represent a character, will adopt a "persona" to explore different genders and sexualities, different ethnicities and social positions. Sometimes, with equal "naive vitality and directness" (Champagne 177-78), performers do tasks, like dancing and singing, for which they are untrained. Often, to compose a larger image, the performer will mix media and make herself both a performer and a formal object of the composition .1 Sometimes a director will use "the performer as a painter uses motifs on a canvas"; the director may ask the performer to go beyond ordinary selfpresentation , to wear a mask, to perform like a puppet, and even to perform with a puppet...

Stranded on Planet "X"

soap operas, and appearing in movies or the regional theatre is not the same as what scholars need to understand these genres within their specific historical and cultural contexts. Nor is the training needed to produce art the same as what is needed to work in the entertainment industry. Recognizing these differences is not snobbery or a betrayal of democracy, but a step toward mutual respect and diversity. Scholarship can be encompassing or comparative; professional training needs to be specific. The scholar's job is to understand the relationships among a broad range of phenomena; the professional's job is to accomplish specific tasks within specific genres of performance. The work of colleges and universities is to provide suitably varied curriculums to accomplish these very different options.

Christopher Newton: Unsure But Incredibly True

Thirty years ago, in June 1964, a young actor stepped on to a make-shift stage upstairs in the Court House in Niagara-on-the-Lake to play a character auspiciously named “A” in Shaw’s Village Wooing. After a circuitous route through many of the regional theatres in Canada, he returned in 1980 as the Artistic Director destined to set the Shaw Festival on a productive new course. That young man was Christopher Newton, and his career to date spans three of the most interesting decades in Canadian theatre, touching many of the groups that have shaped what Canadian theatre is today — Canadian Players, Manitoba Theatre Centre, Stratford Festival, Theatre Calgary, Vancouver Playhouse. Looking at these thirty years in the life of one actor-director puts a personal face on the recent history of theatre in Canada; listening to his story, frequently told in his own words, we catch some of the great changes that Canadian Theatre Review has documented since 1974.

The performed arts in London and regional theatres

The performed arts in London and regional theatres

The Main Melody Campaign in Chinese Spoken Drama

For many who study Chinese politics and history, June Fourth has become a common point of reference, one marking a new political phase as well as a momentous historical event. ' The aftermath of the crackdown in Beijing also constituted a distinct stage in the arts, a period of renewed efforts at ideological indoctrination and rigid censorship. Though this control has eased significantly with the flood of economic reforms triggered by Deng Xiaoping's tour through southern China early in 1992, a closer look at theatre activities in Shanghai preceding this major shift reveals a fascinating dialectic operating in the artistic community for more than two years during the Main Melody campaign. Through a scholarship from the Harvard-Yenching Institute, I was fortunate to have been living in Shanghai for a sixteen-month period during 1990-1991, when the campaign reached its peak. National in scope, the campaign had distinct ties to Shanghai in regard to its origins and subsequent development; thus, this article's focus on the campaign's dissemination in the Shanghai theatre community serves both as a local case study of a nationwide phenomenon and as an examination of the unique circumstances of theatre activity in Shanghai at the dawn of the current era of rapid economic reform. Sources for this article include interviews with administrators, instructors, playwrights, actors, directors, and designers from the Shanghai Theatre Academy, several regional theatres, and local and national cultural bureaus and publications, in addition to published articles relating to the Main Melody campaign, only some of which are cited here. I am indebted to my colleagues in China who spoke candidly with me about this topic, which was quite sen-

Peking Opera before the Twentieth Century

Peking Opera before the Twentieth Century Colin Mackerras Peking Opera, which takes its name from having been bom and matured in Beijing (currently the common romanization of the name of the city which was known as Peking)—the capital of China now and also at the time when this art form originated —is a highly comprehensive art, integrating music, singing, gesture, costume, make-up, movement, words, acrobatics, and stagecraft in a way unique in the world. Nevertheless, its form and content have their origin in earlier types of Chinese theater, mainly deriving from other parts of China. As possibly the most highly developed of numerous styles of regional theater which had grown up in China since the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), its development gathered momentum during the succeeding Qing dynasty (1644-1911), the latter a period dominated by the Manchus. In the twentieth century the Peking Opera has become a kind of national Chinese theater, with many both inside and outside the country associating it with "Chinese opera." Yet in fact at the beginning of the twentieth century it was not performed very commonly outside of Beijing and a rather small number of other centers. The early history of the Peking Opera took place in the China ruled by the Qianlong Emperor, whose reign (1735-96) was among the longest in all of the long history of the country —a reign that witnessed the acme of grandeur and power which so impressed the Europeans of his day. By the late years of this great reign, however, decline had begun to set in and accelerated over the next few decades. The Western imperialist invasions of China began in 1839 and grew more numerous and fiercer as the nineteenth century wore on. By the end of the century China had deteriorated to a very sorry state indeed; in the year 1900 the devastating Boxer Rebellion burst right into the capital Bejing itself, with eight foreign powers forming a united military front to invade China and to expel the ragged Boxer peasant army from the city. 19 20Peking Opera The Origins ofPeking Opera. Chinese theater does not share the usual Western categories of tragedy and comedy, but instead is divided between "civilian" or "civil" (wen) and "military" (wu). In the former the concern is focused on such matters as marriage, love, religion, and righted injustice, while the main thrust in the latter is warfare and rebellion. In the course of time, the single most important feature of "military" theater came to be acrobatic or gymnastic displays which represent battles. There were, of course, regional differences affecting both technique and content in the theater of the eighteenth century and thereafter. Nevertheless, in spite of such differences, the main distinctions lay in the music and the orchestras which accompanied them. The minor styles, which were very much folk theater, had extremely small casts with only two or three characters in each item. The larger-scale styles were based on ancient dramas of the Yuan period (1279-1368) and also, later, novels and occasionally local stories. Many of the various dramatic styles belonged to several "musical systems" (shengqiang xitong), which were groups of regional styles with common musical and other features . One of these was the Clapper Opera, which arose in northern China about the sixteenth century and by the eighteenth spread virtually throughout the north and into parts of the south. Another system, derived from the style favored by the aristocracy and characterized by the dominance of its music by the Chinese side-blown flute (dizi), is called Kunqu because of its origin in Kunshan, near Shanghai, in the sixteenth century. In performance and musical terms it is rather slow-moving even when the story is exciting. A third "musical system" is the Pihuang , so named because it represents the amalgam of two melodic systems, Xipi and Erhuang. Xipi originated in western China, initially from a style of Clapper Opera, and Erhuang in Yihuang, located in Jiangxi province in southeast China;1 these came to be heard together, thus forming new styles of drama, during the eighteenth century or possibly earlier in various regions of China, including Hubei, Hunan, and Guangdong provinces in the south...

The Dilemma of Multiculturalism in the Theatre

As an African-American female professor of theatre arts who teaches at San Jose State University in California, a diversely populated university, I find multiculturalism on the surface to be a wonderful concept whose time is long overdue. Terms such as nontraditional and blind casting plaster audition ads and flow easily from the lips of directors. University and regional theaters market the concept in an effort to diversify their audiences and affirm their political correctness. The appearance of diversity permeates the media and the artistic and cultural

It's about transformation

Ten years ago activists in this country committed to both peace and the arts were getting sore throats trying to convince others of the relationship between the two. Many of us felt patronized, marginalized, and ostracized from organizations, political programs, and discussions to which we thought we could offer a lot. We saw—so clearly!—how people's lives could be changed fundamentally through the process of painting a mural about their neighborhood, of writing and performing plays based on their unexplored cultural backgrounds, and of producing electronic artworks (film, video, audio) that presented the viewpoints and ideas of people not imaged in mainstream mass culture. And we saw how the products of such cultural/social change‐oriented energies could be staggeringly beautiful in their aesthetic execution, imaginativeness, and transcendent meaning, equaling the greatest masterpieces. But, to most organizers, it seemed “cultural work” was limited to finding artists to paint banners before demonstrations and singers to prepare the crowd for important speeches; and to most arts people, “political art” was what undergraduates and incompetents made to protest the unfairness of the way the world treated them. Things have changed since then, however. It's now quite common to see museum exhibits and arts periodicals organized around environmental and political themes; local, national, and international film festivals showing and publicly discussing work on urgent socal issues; and regional theaters programming controversial, politically oriented productions and reinterpretations of Shakespeare and other classics as part of their normal seasons. I also see more political organizations incorporating cultural thinking into their campaigns, more foundations accepting grant proposals for arts projects to address social problems, and more activist conferences including artists on their agendas. The struggle is still far from over, but a lot, it seems, has changed in ten years.

Shifting global strategies of US foreign food aid, 1955–1990

Abstract This study examines the use of US food aid as an element of American foreign policy over the course of the post-war era. Seven policy periods are identified within the post-war era, each representing the foreign agenda of successive presidential administrations. The selective geographical allocation of food aid is largely a function of the locus of foreign priorities at any given time, with the result that the shifting global patterns of countries receiving food aid since World War II reflect the spatial dynamics of American foreign policy. Those favored by US food assistance tend to be pivotal states within a regional theater of conflict, regardless of the incidence of hunger or the ability of the local economy to absorb these commodities.

Travails of a Naked Typist: the Plays of C. P. Taylor

The retrospective season of plays by C. P. Taylor at the 1992 Edinburgh Festival marked a welcome revival of interest in the work of this prolific Scottish playwright, who had also put down roots in the North-East. Taylor, who was born in 1929 and died in 1981 still in his early fifties, was a committed socialist who wrote sophisticated working-class plays for working-class people – and this not only made much of what he wrote unacceptable in the West End, but also, for different reasons explored in this article, unsympathetic to such venues as the Royal Court. Thus, while the range of his work reflected certain trends in British post-war theatre – the drive for regional and community theatre, dissatisfaction with bourgeois naturalistic styles, and the growth of the fringe – in other respects Taylor was untypical as a left-wing writer. His work deserves the reappraisal here attempted in part because of previous critical neglect, and in part because the reasons for that neglect themselves merit attention for what they reveal about critical attitudes. The author, Susan Friesner, teaches in the Drama Department at St. Mary's College, Strawberry Hill.

Regional Theatre Comes of Age

Regional Theatre Comes of Age

Notes sobre els autors mallorquins contemporanis

A study of the activity and dramatic production in Majorca from the immediate post-war to the present. Starting from the regional theatre, with its exclusively commercial vocation, the author goes on to analyze the attempts of providing theatrical plays with solid cultural bases, by the dignification of the dramatic text and the synchronization with European theatrical trends, as well as by employing the most experimental formulae.

The Decline and Fall of the Regional Theater

Other| November 01 1992 The Decline and Fall of the Regional Theater The Decline and Fall of the Regional Theater by A. C. Clark (Last Stand Press, 1992). Theater (1992) 23 (3): 95. https://doi.org/10.1215/01610775-23-3-95 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation The Decline and Fall of the Regional Theater. Theater 1 November 1992; 23 (3): 95. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/01610775-23-3-95 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsTheater Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © THEATER 19921992 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Book Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.