The Theatre History Podcast

How did "Method" acting come to be? Isaac Butler joins us to talk about the history of this acting style and his book The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act .

Stand-up comedy has long been associated with White men. But, as Dr. Rachel Blackburn explains in this episode, there's a long history of women of color performing stand-up. Today, BIPOC comedians are challenging boundaries and raising new issues in ways that are changing the nature of live comedy.

The Yiddish theatre has a long and rich history. But all too often that history focuses on the prominent men who found success on the stage. Now two scholars of Yiddish theatre have launched a new project to correct that historiographical imbalance. It's called "Women on the Yiddish Stage: Primary Sources," and it's part of the Digital Yiddish Theatre Project, which chronicles the history of the Y...

Playwright August Wilson's legacy has loomed ever larger over American theatre in the years since his death in 2005. In 2020, the University of Pittsburgh announced that it had acquired his archive and would make it accessible to the public. We're joined by Dr. Sandra Shannon and Bil Daw to discuss the new archive and how Wilson continues to influence us today

The so-called "Negro Units" of the Federal Theatre Project are often remembered for productions involving White artists such as Orson Welles. But, as Dr. Kate Dossett reveals in her book "Radical Black Theatre in the New Deal," the story of Black artists and audiences in the FTP was a much more complicated one, in which Black actors and writers fought to ensure that they could tell their own stori...

The devastation wrought by the covid-19 pandemic has left us all questioning what we should be working towards as we pick up the pieces and try to build a theatre that reflects our changed world, One possible model comes from the past: the Federal Theatre Project, which for a few years in the 1930s offered a national theatre that brought performances to every corner of the country. How might we re...

The Federal Theatre Project was a landmark of American theatre history whose influence has far outlived its brief existence in the 1930s. There's probably no bigger trove of information about and material pertaining to the FTP than at the Library of Congress, which holds thousands of the programs and fliers printed to accompany its theatrical productions. Archivist Morgen Stevens-Garmon joins us t...

The connection between theatre and the law is a deep one that goes back thousands of years. Dr. Luke McDonagh has been tracing this connection in the context of British authors such as Shakespeare, and his new book Performing Copyright: Law, Theatre and Authorship looks at how copyright law affects dramatic works in the United Kingdom.

If you've been to a Broadway show, you've probably seen the merchandise booth. You may even have bought a t-shirt, or a magnet for your fridge. But where did the Broadway merchandise industry come from? Margaret Hall joins us to talk about her recent Theatermania articles chronicling the rise and development of this unique theatrical industry.

We know that over half of the plays produced during Shakespeare's time have since been lost. What might we discover about that era if we knew what those lost plays were about? Dr. Davis McInnis's book "Shakespeare and Lost Plays" explores what we can figure out from the fragmentary evidence that remains.

There are many theatrical movements and institutions that have been marginalized in histories of the American theatre. But there are also individuals and groups who are further marginalized within those movements, such as the role played by women in the development of Nuyorican performance. Dr. Patricia Herrera joins us to talk about these women and her book, "Nuyorican Feminist Performance."

How do we recover and retell the stories of theatrical performance from ages past? That's a question that Peter Schmitz is exploring with his podcast Adventures in Theater History: Philadelphia , which delves into the theatrical past of one of America's most important centers of performance. 

"Imitation" is often a dirty word in the arts, but dancer and performer Gertrude Hoffmann was a genius at borrowing and recreating elements of other artists' acts, and in doing so she exposed early 20th-century American audiences to important developments in Modernist art. Dr. Sunn Stalter-Pace joins us to talk about "Imitation Artist," her biography of Hoffman.

Learn how Peter Michael Marino is drawing on the Victorian-era tradition of toy theatre to create a new theatrical epic based on the classic sci-fi movie  Planet of the Apes .

Our Town is one of the classics of the American stage, but how well do we really know this play? Howard Sherman joins us to discuss his new book,  Another Day's Begun: Thornton Wilder's  Our Town in the 21st Century.

Teresa Deevy was one of the most frequently-produced Irish playwrights of the 1930s, bringing her unique experience as a Deaf woman playwright in a patriarchal society together with her dramatic skill to create fascinating works such as  Katie Roche . But she's been relatively neglected by subsequent generations. Drs. Kate McCarthy and Una Kealy are working to change that, and they join us for thi...

Learn how Dr. Eric Colleary and his colleagues at the Harry Ransom Center are documenting how the tumultuous events of 2020 affected theatre.

Who can forget the timeless moments in Shakespeare's plays, such as Hamlet's encounter with the Ghost, Beatrice and Benedick's playful sparring, or the happy ending to  King Lear ? If that last example doesn't ring a bell, it's because it's from a different version of the famous tragedy, one that comes from the era known as the Restoration. Coming after a period of civil war, during which English...

Popular culture has largely forgotten about the freak show – or has it? The display of so-called "freaks," human beings with bodies that were perceived as drastically different from what was considered "normal," was once an incredibly popular form of public entertainment, but one which we now look back on with embarrassment. However, as Dr. Matt DiCintio explains in this episode, the origins of th...

Mary Ann Yates is the best actress whom you've never heard of. That's how Dr. Elaine McGirr characterizes this fascinating woman, who rose to stardom on the eighteenth-century British stage and later went on to become the first female manager of a major London theatre. As Elaine explains in this episode, Yates's time as the reigning queen of the stage, as well as her subsequent obscurity, reveal a...

If you've ever tried to get permission to perform a play, you've probably encountered some issues having to do with theatrical copyright. But where did the concept of copyrighting theatrical works come from? What do the legal wrangles over who owns the rights to a performance say about the nature of theatre?

How do you depict pregnancy onstage when your cast is all-male? That was one of a number of problems that English playwrights and performers faced in the Stuart era, when plays like  The Winter's Tale  frequently began to feature pregnancies as major plot points. Dr. Sara BT Thiel has been exploring this subject, and it's resulted in a chapter entitled "'Cushion Come Forth': Materializing Pregnanc...

Dr. Robert Davis has been studying the world of nineteenth-century theatre in New York City for much of his career, but he's recently engaged with that world in a new and unconventional way. Robert is the author of  Broadway: 1849 , an online game and app that takes the form of a multiple-choice novel. Players can explore what it was like to manage a theatre in the 1840s and navigate the outsized...

When people think of Indonesia's performing arts, traditions such as the shadow puppets of  wayang kulit  and the dance-drama of Bali often come to mind. However, as our guest for this episode teaches us, there's a vibrant modern theatre scene that developed over the course of the twentieth century and continues to produce new and exciting work today. Dr. Cobina Gillitt introduces us to the work o...

The classic circus, featuring performing animals in three rings under the big top, has passed away. What's taken its place? That's the question that CarlosAlexis Cruz is exploring with his studies in the rise of acrobatics and the modern circus. He joins us for this episode to explain how the circus has increasingly become a place where performers use their bodies to tell stories and invite the au...