Regional Theatre Research Articles

Feminist Performance Criticism and the Popular: Reviewing Wendy Wasserstein

This essay suggests that the taxonomy of feminisms—liberal, cultural, and materialist—while usefully lending precision to our analysis, has inadvertently become hierarchical, privileging materialist feminist projects at the expense of more popular or mainstream plays and productions by liberal feminist playwrights. By returning to the oeuvre of Wendy Wasserstein, the author argues that although some of her initial critical misgivings about the playwright’s relationship to the feminist movement maintain, Wasserstein’s liberal feminist success on Broadway and in regional theatres needs careful consideration for what it accomplished for women. The essay analyzes two recent productions of Wasserstein’s final play, Third , written just before her death from cancer in 2006. Although the Geffen theatre production in Los Angeles panders to anti-or post-feminist perspectives, the Philadelphia theatre company production explores the tensions and contradictions between second-and third-wave feminists in ways both illuminating and useful to contemporary academics and activists.

Shakespeare Popular and Populist

Shakespeare Popular and Populist Douglas E. Green A Midsummer Night’s Dream Presented by the Guthrie Theater on the Wurtele Thrust Stage, Guthrie Theater, Minneapolis, Minnesota. April 12–June 22, 2008. Directed by Joe Dowling. Set by Frank Hallinan Flood. Costumes by Paul Tazewell. Lighting by Jane Cox. Music composed and directed by Keith Thomas. Sound by Scott W. Edwards. Dramaturgy by Michael Lupu. Voice and language consulting by Andrew Wade. Fight and aerial effects directed by John Stead. Movement coaching by Marcela Lorca. Stage management by Russell W. Johnson. With Nic Few (Theseus, Oberon), Emily Swallow (Hippolyta, Titania), Kathryn Lawrey (Hermia), Valeri Mudek (Helena), William Sturdivant (Lysander), Jonas Goslow (Demetrius), Namir Smallwood [Sherwin F. Resurreccion, understudy] (Puck, Philostrate), Stephen Pelinski (Bottom), Randy Reyes (Francis Flute), Jim Lichtscheidl (Peter Quince), Richard S. Iglewski (Snout), Sally Wingert (Starveling), Stephen Yoakam (Snug), Nathaniel Fuller (Egeus), Erin Cherry (First Fairy), and others. Richard III Presented by Ten Thousand Things Theater Company at Open Book and the Minnesota Opera Company (pay performances), as well as at Dorothy Day Center, Ramsey County and Hennepin County Men’s and Women’s Corrections, and other venues (free), Twin Cities area, Minnesota. October 18–November 18, 2007. Directed by Michelle Hensley. Percussion by Heather Barringer and Erik Barsness. Sets by Stephen Mohring. Costumes by Kathy Kohl. Assistant direction by Nancy Waldoch. Puppets by Julian McFaul. Stage combat by Don Preston. With Bob Davis (Richard), Shawn Hamilton (Buckingham, Richmond, Second Murderer), Craig Johnson (Hastings, Duchess of York, Oxford), Jim Lichtscheidl (Lady Anne, Tyrrel, Edward IV, Prince Edward), Luverne Seifert (Queen Elizabeth, Brakenbury, Ely, Lord Mayor), Richard Ooms (Margaret, Clarence, Lord Stanley), and Darien Johnson (Rivers, Young York, Catesby). A distinction between popular and populist theatre was evident this season in two Minneapolis Shakespeare productions: the Guthrie Theater’s [End Page 68] remounting of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, originally produced in 1997, and Ten Thousand Things’ all-male Richard III. Both were directed by their respective companies’ artistic directors. Joe Dowling’s recent productions of Hamlet, As You Like It, and, in their new venue designed by Jean Nouvel, The Merchant of Venice, have evinced his guiding principle as artistic director of the Guthrie: accessibility. As head of arguably the most prominent regional theatre in the upper Midwest, Dowling has an understandable penchant for producing popular Shakespeare: most people here admit that his ability to draw audiences has helped to secure the Guthrie’s new digs overlooking the Mississippi, with three stages under the same roof as opposed to one. But lots of Shakespeare aficionados, amateur and professional, myself among them, have been carping at or at least privately lamenting Dowling’s tendency to oversimplify Shakespeare, to avoid risks in developing Shakespeare productions. We keep asking, What about nuance? What about “art”? The latest production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream offered Dowling’s retort: popular Shakespeare makes good Shakespeare; the two are not at odds. The Guthrie Dream engaged the audience through spectacle, music, and movement; lively young actors; and lightness of touch. As in its original mounting, Oberon and other fairies made various entrances on wires; movement, often to music, was lively yet graceful. Keith Thomas’s music was eclectic, ranging from Goth and industrial to R & B and even Disney-style showstoppers, all based on verses from the text. At one point Stephen Pelinski’s Bottom mimicked Elvis. Puck and the Fairies alternated between punk and R & B; First Fairy Erin Cherry did a knockout job with some Shakespearean verses in the latter style, which Puck found very appealing (2.1). Except for Bottom and the mechanicals, as well as Egeus, the cast appeared exceptionally youthful—even, at least comparatively, in the cases of Oberon and Titania, who doubled as the more strait-laced Theseus and Hippolyta. The “rude mechanicals” were most reminiscent of the original 1997 production—homespun “Minnesotan” community wannabes determined to play before the Duke. There were some very witty touches here, most notably the awkward, middle-aged flirtation between Sally Wingert’s Starveling and Jim Lichtscheidl’s Quince, and the latter’s frustration and futile attempts to control Bottom. But the truly novel and crowd-pleasing business was provided by Randy Reyes...

Anselm Heinrich Entertainment, Propaganda, Education: Regional Theatre in Germany and Britain between 1918 and 1945Hertfordshire: University of Hertfordshire Press/Society for Theatre Research, 2007. 271 p. £14.99. ISBN: 978-1-902806-75-4.

Anselm Heinrich Entertainment, Propaganda, Education: Regional Theatre in Germany and Britain between 1918 and 1945Hertfordshire: University of Hertfordshire Press/Society for Theatre Research, 2007. 271 p. £14.99. ISBN: 978-1-902806-75-4.

Thinking Marginally: Ethno-Historical Notes on the Nature of Smuggling in Human Societies

This essay examines a range of issues at stake in the transgression of political boundaries across a spectrum of human societies. The aim of the article is not to catalogue a vast series of boundary-crossing actions, but rather to suggest what some of the main characteristics and variables are of contrabanding across frontiers. An attempt will be made to briefly define the problem of illicit facilitation across borders, as different theorists have delineated this issue in different ways. A brief discussion will ensue on the nature of border space itself, as such spaces have been conceptualized by a range of scholars who have thought about this issue for quite some time. The nature of sources on this problem will be quickly interrogated, as the sources of reporting on illicit facilitation vary widely, and different sources impart divergent kinds of information on this topic. A brief foray into a few historical examples of cross-border facilitation will be provided, to show how contemporary contexts of this issue are connected (or sometimes disjointed) from similar notions in the past. I will then give some sense of the broad variety of global experiences of illicit facilitation, as this act is undertaken across the width and breadth of the planet on an everyday basis. I will conclude with a discussion of two interesting regional theatres – Africa and Southeast Asia – where some of these processes can be seen in more detail. I argue in this essay that it is only by looking at smuggling through a number of different vantages that we have any chance of describing this practice as a crucial component of the global political economy.

Willingness to Pay for Local Public Goods: Some Evidence From the Nonprofit Theatre Sector

It is clearly the case that many people may derive option benefits from the embodiment of creativity in cultural products. This article describes a method that can be used to offer more support for a local public good—namely local theatre. This is the application of willingness to pay (WTP) pricing. Survey evidence from two nonprofit regional theatres in the UK were used to examine determinants of the WTP function for local theatre. A WTP equation was estimated and showed the following: Female respondents offered much lower prices; there was a positive influence of income on willingness to pay with a small elasticity; loyalty to the theatre contributed to higher price offers and perceived characteristics poverty of the theatre productions was so strong that it would cancel this out where a person has such feelings. The price terms show that the offered price is linked positively to perceptions of the normal price at the theatre and reasonable prices for other events.

The Play—and the Musical—Is the Thing in D.C.

The Play—and the Musical—Is the Thing in D.C.

Consumer behaviour in multi‐channel contexts: the case of a theatre festival

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to complement existing work on multi‐channel environments of shopping experiences and retail channels by exploring the use of different channels in the consumer decision‐making processes associated with ticket purchase for performances in a regional annual theatre festival.Design/methodology/approachAnalysis of the audience questionnaire focuses on the relative use of different channels and specifically the importance of the Internet in the stages leading up to attendance at the festival – awareness, information gathering, decision making and purchase transaction.FindingsThe extent of use of different channels at different stages in the decision‐making process varies, although the Internet is the only channel that can be and is used to support all stages of the process. Throughout the process, with the exception of purchase transaction, the use of word‐of‐mouth is significant. Customers who started using the Internet at the awareness stage often continued to use it. Neither gender nor age has a significant effect on patterns of channel use.Originality/valueThis study contributes to research into the use of multiple channels in consumer decision making, particularly in relation to customer multi‐channel employment, the factors that affect channel use, and the role of word‐of mouth in multi‐channel contexts.

Messiah of the New Technique: John Howard Lawson, Communism, and American Theatre, 1923-1937 (review)

{ 149 } BOOK REV IEWS author herself is an important figure in the Kansas City theatre, and as such is as much a part of its history as the history she presents here.And so, even as one chuckles at the vanity of theatregoers who go to the theatre to be seen rather than to see theatre—the appendix on the campaign to have women remove their “merry widow” hats is particularly amusing—one cannot help but be moved by the connections made here. By the end of the book, the past melds with the present, with the major American theatre performances given by road-show stalwarts like Joseph Jefferson, Bert Williams, George Walker, and the important local repertory companies like the Woodward Stock Company reverberating with the revival in 1964 of professional repertory theatre in Kansas City. It was at this point that Dr. Patricia A. McIlrath of the University of Kansas City founded the Missouri Repertory Theatre, bringing back professional repertory theatre in Kansas after its slow demise in the 1930s. This connection the author makes herself, and in doing so she opens the possibility for other scholars to continue to deepen our understanding of the impact and importance of these early regional theatres on the regional theatre that exists today. —DAVID A. CRESPY University of Missouri, Columbia Messiah of the New Technique: John Howard Lawson, Communism, and American Theatre, 1923–1937. By Jonathan L. Chambers. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2006. xv + 268 pp. $55.00 cloth. Arguably the most notable American playwright of the literary left of the 1920s and 1930s, John Howard Lawson has been omitted from almost all full-length (and period-specific) studies of American theatre. Known merely as a member of the notorious “Hollywood Ten,” as a second-rate playwright, or perhaps for his text Theory and Technique of Playwriting, Lawson has remained ostracized by mainstream critics and historians for decades. When I read Rosemarie K. Bank’s essay“The Doubled Subject and the New Playwrights Theatre, 1927–1929” (1992), I hoped the work of the New Playwrights (Lawson in particular) would be recuperated into American theatre history studies and vigorously reexamined. More than a decade later, Jonathan L. Chambers’s study of Lawson reviews the playwright’s “hybrid,” “mixed form,” or what I call “production-dependent” texts, within an appropriate theoretical framework and from a cultural perspective. Placing Lawson at the center of \ { 150 } BOOK REV IEWS his study, Chambers addresses ways in which dramatic form and style were debated, how theatre in the United States comprised a more intricate maze of theory, practice, and politics than previous studies indicate. More important than his deliberate act of recovery scholarship in Messiah of the New Technique, Chambers employs critical tools that allow the reflexivity and intertextuality of Lawson’s work (and life) to reverberate against and through the sociopolitical energy of the 1920s and 1930s—and beyond. His choice to scrutinize Lawson’s corpus and criticism of the playwright’s work through the lenses of New Historicism, poststructural Marxism, and cultural materialism, under the umbrella of a clearly defined organizing principle that utilizes Tony Bennett’s notion of “reading formations,” frees Chambers from the bonds of biographical study. This narrative pliability allows him to achieve his goal of simultaneously offering “a critical and political biography” and a “cultural and social history” (8). Beyond considering the “originating conditions” (10) under which Lawson matured, Chambers reexamines the ways in which plays and productions were initially misread in print and onstage. He addresses Lawson’s culpability in this interpretative dilemma, suggesting, also, that subsequent readers, critics, and historians are, in turn, inculcated by the dominant reading formations of their lived experiences. By embracing the “variable nature of reading/consumption,” acknowledging the“maneuverability”of texts, and recognizing a“cyclical theory of exchange” (12), Chambers advocates a more open reading of Lawson’s plays (and career). He resists the reductive readings of earlier Lawson scholars, who viewed “text” as fixed and pronounced Lawson a failure for not conforming to traditional content and dramatic form. At crucial junctures in the text his methodologies are systematically interjected into the narrative structure, where Chambers acknowledges indebtedness to Stephen Greenblatt, Frederic Jameson...

Chinese Shadow Theatre, History, Popular Religion, and Women Warriors (review)

Reviewed by: Chinese Shadow Theatre, History, Popular Religion, and Women Warriors Colin Mackerras (bio) Fan Pen Li Chen . Chinese Shadow Theatre, History, Popular Religion, and Women Warriors. Montréal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2007. xii, 343 pp. Cloth $75.00, ISBN 978-0-7735-3197-0. Although there is a substantial and growing literature on Chinese theatre, there is so far very little indeed in English on some allied performing arts forms, including shadow theatre. Fan Pen Li Chen classifies shadow theatre as a subdivision of puppet theatre (p. 62) and acknowledges it as "basically a minor form of performing art" (p. 12). But it is still quite important enough in the overall scheme of the Chinese arts to warrant a detailed study. As it happens, there is a good deal in common between the traditions of theatre as performed by human actors and shadow theatre. The music of the regional theatrical styles tends to be consistent by region, whether played as part of dramas or shadow plays. There is much in common also in the stories and in the characterization. And since shadow theatre and most of the rural styles of regional theatre are popular rather than elitist art, the audiences and performers also have much in common. In terms of translation and definition, Chen uses the English word "opera" to refer the Chinese term xiqu, which includes all those performing arts forms with singing, dialogue, impersonation of a character by an actor, and a story. She uses the term "drama" as a more general term that includes puppetry, acrobatics, song and dance, variety shows, dramatic rituals, and of course xiqu (p. 62). Actually, much of the recent English-language scholarly literature on the Chinese performing arts avoids the term "opera" because it evokes European opera, which is very different in many ways from xiqu. However, Chen has the right to offer a specific definition, as long as she adheres to it consistently. As far as I can see, she has done that admirably. Chen has done us a great service through this major and highly original analysis of shadow theatre. The main content of the book is to analyze the history of the Chinese shadow theatre; to take up two particular themes, religion and women warriors; and to translate several particular plays that illustrate the themes. The book covers virtually all Chinese history, but with the main focus on the Qing dynasty (1644–1911). The documentation, based on field research and extensive printed material, is excellent. Almost all of it is in Chinese or English. The first of the two main themes is that shadow theatre is tightly related to Chinese popular religion, with one of the most important functions of the shadow theatre being to accompany religious rituals. Chen even suggests that the linkage with religion may have been one of the reasons why shadow theatre became so important an art form in the first place: "I would like to suggest that, like the human actor operas that came to be appropriated for the celebration of religious [End Page 209] festivals and private celebratory occasions, shadow theatre was similarly appropriated to serve spiritual functions" (p. 70). I find her reference to the "human actor operas" and their prior role in religion very interesting. In terms of importance, there is little doubt that "human actor operas" outweighed shadow theatre. However, shadow theatre was probably slightly earlier in origin. Although performance and some kind of shadow acting exist from very ancient times, the earliest records of "real shadow shows" (p. 33) do not come until the mid-Northern Song, that is, about the eleventh century. As for the earliest fully fledged drama, that dates from the first half of the twelfth century. The author argues that previous scholars have, in general, not given enough attention to the role of religion, even to the extent of negating it. This is largely because the major urban xiqu styles, such as jingju (sometimes translated Peking Opera), are, indeed, secular in their social functions and content, a factor that leads Chen to excuse both Chinese and Western specialists for overlooking the importance of religion (p. 27). Another very important reason, however, is...

Keynote Speech from the Twenty-eighth Mid-America Theatre Conference, Changing Theatrical Landscapes: Mapping New Directions in History, Pedagogy, and Practice in the Twenty-first Century

{ 1 } \ Keynote Speech from the Twenty-eighth Mid-America Theatre Conference, Changing Theatrical Landscapes Mapping New Directions in History, Pedagogy, and Practice in the Twenty-first Century —LOU BELL AMY I’m inspired by the boldness of the challenge of this conference’s theme. As I thought about it while preparing this talk, I even began to wax creative and found myself becoming excited over the possibilities. “Mapping new directions ”offers the opportunity to reevaluate, to extend the reach and understanding of ourselves as well as those for whom we perform and those whom we mentor and teach; to set new frameworks through which we perceive our history , our pedagogy, our practice; to understand ourselves and our power to change our world more thoroughly. It’s a mandate that has as its basic tenet opening our institutions and our curricula to populations and cultures heretofore only marginally served. Once I began to think in these lofty terms it was only a very short time before the latent “Trekkie” in me took over and I was imagining myself standing at the helm of the Enterprise, facing new frontiers and “boldly go[ing] where no man has gone before.” What did I mean,“no man”? Well, I meant me. Not no man. Me. It was here that I began to feel a bit of dread. Not from fear of the unknown, but something that began to rise from within myself. I repeated the phrase “where no man has { 2 } LOU BELL AMY gone before.” The arrogance that is presupposed in my thesis staggered me. Images of Cecil J. Rhodes, King Leopold II, General George Armstrong Custer, and too many others to count here spring to mind. So I determined that I’d give some time to thinking about respectful ways to engage the heretofore disengaged, the ignored, the misrepresented. And that thinking is what I’d like to share with you today. I’ve spent a good portion of my adult life (the last thirty years) stewarding a cultural institution and interacting with the dominant culture from a marginalized position. So you’ll hear me today speak of myself as sort of an inside-outsider. I hope that by sharing my own trepidation at dealing with cultural nuance, I’ll awaken in you a similar feeling that asks you to interrogate what you bring to the encounter. As we inside the academy, inside the major regional theatre movement, reach out and seek to include the cultural expression that traditionally has not been part of our offerings, in our curricula and our theatrical presentations, we face special challenges. As founder and artistic director of one of the oldest and most influential professional theatrical organizations (in the world, I’m told), whose reason for being is the exploration and distillation of the AfricanAmerican experience and aesthetic, I believe my experiences may be relevant to the reordering that this conference’s title would suggest. I would caution us to be aware that the information we may be seeking to engage is most likely part of a living culture, part of the ethos of live people whose lives and culture are integral to the understanding of our study or the theatre that we seek to perform or present. I would hope that our interaction would be respectful and mindful that we run the risk of misinterpreting, misrepresenting , of morphing the very thing we seek to investigate. The applied anthropological directive comes to mind: “First, do no harm!” From my vantage point, an honest appraisal of our past behavior leads me to again propose extreme caution. Most of our expansion, if even tacitly, has as its basic assumption that before our involvement, the examined cultures either have an unappreciated worth, are simple, unadorned, messy, and/or wasteful. This perspective places us in a position of participating in a “discovery” rather than participating in a meeting or an engagement. One position places us in the role of cultural arbiter. The other makes us a guest. One polemic places the efforts of Ridgely Torrence,Paul Greene,or DuBose Hayward as honest attempts at presenting cultures they knew little about and as interpreters of those cultures, raising folk and folklore...

The Back Stage guide to working in regional theater: jobs for actors and other theater professionals

The Back Stage guide to working in regional theater: jobs for actors and other theater professionals

‘Doing the Work of the NFT in Nottingham’ – or How to Use the BFI to Beat the Communist Threat in Your Local Film Society

On 22 September 1966 the Nottingham Film Theatre opened its doors to the public. This was the first in a wave of Regional Film Theatres (RFTs) to be established around the UK in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Modelled after the programming policy of the British Film Institute’s (BFI) flagship London venue, the National Film Theatre (NFT), the RFTs have been generally, if uncritically, regarded as the rolling-out of cinematic enlightenment from the metropolis towards the regions – not least because the most freely available sources on the subject are BFI sanctioned ones such as Butler (1971) or the Institute’s own magazine Sight and Sound. The RFT programme, as executed, was not without controversy. It drew criticism from different directions, and was charged variously with displaying both too much and too little central control. For the new staff within the BFI’s Education Department the roll-out seemed ad hoc, unplanned and at odds with the politically informed, structured film education they were trying to foster. Colin McArthur, who joined the department in 1968, describes the expansion as ‘driven more by money than by cultural policy’ and recounts a departmental joke of the era – that ‘anyone ringing up for a catalogue of BFI Distribution Library holdings would be asked if they would like a regional film theatre at the same time’ (2001: 114): a flippant jibe which tellingly offers no suggestion of what regional demand there might have been for the scheme. A comprehensive history of the RFT programme has yet to be written, but when it is, it will reveal a much more complex picture. RFTs were developed in partnership with a variety of local bodies and in each area those mixtures of governmental, commercial and voluntary interests also need be taken into account. What I want to explore in this article

Exploiting the regional Queensland audience: Birch Carroll and Coyle's Wintergarden theatres, 1925–35

The authors examine the first decade of the Birch Carroll and Coyle consortium, focusing on its regional Wintergarden theatre chain and on its stated objective of bringing metropolitan sophistication to regional centres, in a period of industry optimism which coincided with the construction of its Wintergarden theatres throughout Queensland. The article draws on local print sources and interview material in order to explain and confirm the social appeal of cinema-going across a range of regional sites. The exploitation campaigns organized and coordinated by Birch Carroll and Coyle's regional and state managers in the midst of moral opposition, government regulation and press criticism, both before and after the advent of the talkies, is examined. Drawing extensively from industry journals of the period, the authors argue that press publicity, along with local stunts and staged events, formed an integral part of Birch Carroll and Coyle's concerted strategy to sell its Hollywood product and offset ongoing criticism within government and local communities. In conclusion, they examine the impact of the Depression on the industry in Queensland, including regional audiences, and assess its impact on Birch Carroll and Coyle's subsequent regional theatre publicity campaigns.

Rural cinema audiences in South Australia in the 1930s

Very few South Australian local histories give any account of the ritual screening of films in local community halls and regional picture theatres. Given that the 1930s was a turbulent era for the exhibition industry, the survival of the rural picture show beyond the decade suggests that it played a significant role in local history. This article will discuss the distribution and exhibition of films in rural South Australia during the early 1930s and the impact of legislation on the small operators. It goes on to examine the cinema-going preferences of the mid-north town of Snowtown during two years from July 1933 to June 1935 and considers the factors other than taste that determined the popularity of a screening.

Shakespeare and Kolbenheyer: Regional Theatre During the Third Reich – a Case Study

The importance of regional theatre in the grand scheme of theatre history has long been neglected; this even holds true for an area of research which has aroused more historical interest than any other – Nazi Germany. Addressing this desideratum the article investigates the history of a typical provincial theatre – the Städtische Bühnen in the Westphalian city of Münster – with a special emphasis on the repertoire. The author examines how far the regime was able to implement its demand for a specifically political theatre and relates his findings to other German playhouses. The article argues that the failure of the Nazi administration to turn the Münster playhouse into a propaganda stage does not mean that regional theatres did not fulfil their role for the regime. They did so in other, less obvious ways.

Monitoring managerial efficiency in the performing arts: A regional theatres network perspective

Managerial efficiency within the performing arts programming can be understood as the technical efficiency of transforming the resources cultural managers have available into a determined cultural output. Through this explanation different conceptions on the finished performance product it leads us to select two different output variables (number of performances, and number of attendances). In this way, three different models are considered regarding those conceptual points of view. Data on the Circuit Teatral Valencia, a Spanish regional theatres network, is used to develop empirically the concept of Managerial Efficiency and set up a framework to allow us to monitor it.

Thoughts for the New Alternative: Histories, Boundaries and the Space Apart

In Canada, underground and alte rnat ive th eatres, driven by the strong cur re nts of a newl y vocal and increasingly nationalistic generation, blossomed in the 1960s, matured in the 1970s, and subsequently found a reasonably assured place in the mainstream over the course of the 1980s. At the foreground of this movement were the theatres and companies of Toronto, such household names as Theatre Passe Muraille (emerging from the contro versial and now-defun ct Rochd ale College), Factory Theatre Lab, Toronto Free Theatre and Tarragon Theatre, in addition to some lesser-known companies such as Global Village Theatre, New Theatre and the Phoenix Theatre. The 1990s thinned their ranks Significantly (one notable loss being the Toronto Free Theatre), but the surviving companies were soon to be counted among the same Canadian theatre establishment to which they had once so effectively provided an alternative. It is now a commonplace for these mid-sized companies and their counterparts across the country to coproduce new works with major regional theatres such as the National Arts Cent re (the old status quo). Yesterday’s alternative is today’s mainstream.

“My Vast Country” Russia's Regional Theaters in Transition

Translated by Yana Ross

Theatres, Metaphors, and E-Collaboration

A metaphor methodology was used to understand and interpret the Web presences of 15 nonprofit theatres that comprise the regional theatre of Southern New Jersey that is present on the Web. In addition, findings from our earlier studies of off-Broadway and regional theatre festivals were extended to analyze the Web presence of the theatres in Southern New Jersey. The contribution of the work resides in its systematic and intense consideration of the strategic importance of the Web for nonprofit theatre arts groups in the Southern New Jersey region and in its use of the metaphor methodology in order to facilitate a fully developed picture of the Web and nonprofit organizations. This is intended to help administrators become aware of the need for strategic use of e-collaboration via creation of a regional theatre Web presence for South Jersey that enacts a more evolutionary metaphor, perhaps that of the organism. Theatres are encouraged to practice collaborating on the Web by creating reciprocal links and thus cooperating as a region.

The drama is coming now: the theater criticism of Richard Gilman, 1961-1991

This engrossing book presents the first collection in more than three decades of one of America's finest drama critics. Richard Gilman chronicles a major period in American theatre history, one that witnessed the birth or spread of Off-Broadway, regional theatre, nonprofit companies, and avant-garde performance, as well as growing interest in plays by women and minorities and in world drama. His writing, however, is more than a revealing look at an era. It is criticism for the ages. Insightful, provocative, and impassioned, the articles represent the full range of Gilman's interests. There are essays, profiles, and book reviews dealing with such topics as the new naturalism in theatre, Brecht's collected plays, and the legacy of Stanislavski. There is also a generous sampling of Gilman's comments on plays by O'Neill, Miller, Chekhov, Albee, Ibsen, Anouilh, Beckett, Ionesco, Pinter, Fugard, and many others.