The Theatre History Podcast

How did African American theatre and the struggle for civil rights intersect? For many critics in the 1950s and '60s, they didn't, at least not in a meaningful way. But, as Dr. Julie Burrell points out in a recent essay for  Black Perspectives , the blog of the African American Intellectual History Society, some of the works produced in the 1940s and '50s are far more radical than we might expect....

Back in 2016, playwright Chantal Bilodeau announced that she was breaking up with Aristotle. In addition to her work writing plays, Chantal is also a translator and the Artistic Director of the Arctic Cycle, which aims to create theatre that engages with the ongoing climate crisis. That latter role, in particular, has led her to rethink how we write plays and how we approach the legacy of the famo...

When we think of operetta, words like "edgy" and "sexy" rarely come to mind. Dr. Kevin Clarke is hoping to change that through his work with the Operetta Research Center, which focuses on studying and reevaluating works from the first half of the twentieth century. These had long been denigrated as "silver operetta," as opposed to the supposed Golden Age of the late nineteenth century, when compos...

Shakespeare's  Measure for Measure  has long had a reputation as a "problem play." Structurally, it's a comedy, but because its plot goes to some dark places, some of its characters' actions are utterly repugnant, and its thematic concerns are so serious, its ostensibly happy ending doesn't leave audiences feeling satisfied. Rather than shy away from  Measure for Measure  and its uncomfortable ele...

Theatre nerds spend a lot of time obsessing over casting choices: who's going to play this classic role in the latest revival of a Broadway musical? How might an unconventional casting choice up-end our assumptions about who a character is and what they look like? Dr. Amy Cook of Stony Brook University looks at what's going on in our heads when we ask these questions. Her forthcoming book,  Buildi...

Tolpavakoothu is a traditional form of shadow puppetry from Kerala, in southern India. Like many similar performance traditions, tolpavakoothu faces an uncertain future because of social and cultural changes. However, it's facing up to those challenges in some unique ways. Dr. Claudia Orenstein of Hunter College joins us to explain what tolpavakoothu is, and to introduce us to the Pulavars, the fa...

What was the business of theatre like in Shakespeare's time? We don't have many records, but one fascinating document has survived: a book of accounts and memoranda (often inaccurately referred to as a diary) from Philip Henslowe, a businessman in 1590s London. Henslowe helped build the Rose Theatre, where a number of plays by Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, and their contemporaries received the...

We know that the history of theatre and performance contains plenty of insensitive, even offensive, tropes and stereotypes. We also tend to think of ourselves as having left those stereotypes in the past, where they belong. However, as this week's guest reveals, our popular culture still contains plenty of uncomfortable reminders of those types, and they're often woven into the fabric of beloved c...

Lorraine Hansberry's reputation will always be inextricably bound up with her best-known work,  A Raisin in the Sun . But who was the woman behind this landmark play? Filmmaker Tracy Heather Strain explores Hansberry's life in her new documentary  Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart , which premieres on PBS on 19 January 2018. Tracy's film brings a new perspective to Hansberry, showing us not just the play...

We know Richard Brinsley Sheridan as the comic playwright responsible for  The Rivals  and  The School for Scandal . However, one of his most important plays is a major departure from those works. His play  Pizarro , an adaptation of an early melodrama by the German playwright August von Kotzebue about the Spanish invasion of Peru, became a smash hit on the London stage in 1799.

History can be a contentious subject, especially when it comes to determining how and what we remember. That's especially true in Argentina, which is still trying to come to terms with the legacy of its period of military rule in the 1970s and 80s, which resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of citizens. Theatre has been an especially important way for Argentinians to remember and reflect up...

Would you watch a pregnant woman attempt to walk a tightrope without a safety net? Many people in London decided to do just that in 1863, and their curiosity turned to horror when the tightrope walker, Selina Powell, fell to her death. The accident prompted an outcry that even drew in Queen Victoria herself. Amy Meyer joins us this week to talk about accidents like the one that befell Powell. What...

How do you train an actor? The answer to that question has changed over the course of theatrical history, but at least within the last century or so, standards for actor training have largely come from the teachings of theorists such as Constantin Stanislavski. However, we often don't think about how these acting methods arose from specific historical and cultural contexts, and how they might not...

In our previous episode, we spoke with Dr. Erin Mee of New York University about kutiyattam, a style of theatre from southwest India that brings ancient Sanskrit plays to life. But what about the more recent history of Indian theatre? Erin joins us for the second part of our series to talk about how British colonialism, independence, and contemporary debates about gender and sexuality have shaped...

How can a play whose script covers less than ten pages take weeks to perform? That's just one of the many questions we delve into when we explore the world of kutiyattam, which is a particular way of performing Sanskrit drama in the southern Indian region of Kerala. Dr. Erin Mee of New York University introduces us to this fascinating art form, which keeps bringing classical Sanskrit plays back to...

Environmental catastrophe. Political conflict. The ugly breakdown of a society that had previously seemed harmonious and peaceful. Henrik Ibsen's  An Enemy of the People  contains much that speaks to our present-day anxieties. Dr. Paul Walsh of the Yale School of Drama has been thinking about this play a lot recently, because he's the translator for a brand-new version of the play, which recently...

William Shakespeare's plays continue to be some of the most frequently-produced works on our stages. While his dominance allows new generations to enjoy his work, it also poses a difficult question: how do we keep Shakespeare relevant when his plays have often been associated with a patriarchal, Eurocentric point of view? Madeline Sayet is looking for answers to that question, and it's led her to...

Community theatre, school plays, and other examples of performances by non-professional actors don't often don't get a lot of respect or scholarly attention. David Coates, who's in the closing stages of his doctorate at the University of Warwick, is trying to change that. He's one of a growing group of scholars who are reassessing amateur theatre (in his case, specifically in Britain in the long n...

The Harry Ransom Center, a world-renowned research library and museum at the University of Texas at Austin, holds many treasures. Its performing arts collections are particularly fascinating, as Dr. Eric Colleary, the Cline Curator of Theater and Performing Arts at the center, tells us in this episode. Eric shares some of his favorite items in the collections and tells listeners how they can furth...

Nowadays, when someone accuses you of being "melodramatic," it's got a pejorative connotation, and usually means you're acting in an overly emotional and hyperbolic way. But melodrama, which emerged during the French Revolution, was a rich and complicated theatrical genre. Now, the team behind the University of Warwick's Staging Napoleonic Theatre project, which includes Dr. Katherine Astbury, Dr....

Are Broadway musicals feminist? It's a fair question, given that many classic examples of the genre evince their fair share of outdated attitudes regarding gender and the role of women in society. However, as Dr. Stacy Wolf of Princeton University points out, there's a surprising undercurrent of feminism even in the more traditional musicals of the 1950s or major commercial hits of recent years, s...

The characters and events of ancient Greek drama might seem remote from our present-day concerns, but Bryan Doerries and Theater of War Productions don't see it that way. Since 2009, this company has used readings from classical theatre to tackle issues from post-traumatic stress disorder to the community impact of gun violence. Now Bryan's a New York City Public Artist in Residence, working with ...

John Marston was a controversial early modern English playwright and poet with a nose for trouble, but he's relatively obscure in comparison with some of his major contemporaries, such as William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. Now a team of scholars is preparing  The Complete Works of John Marston , which will collect his writings together in a critical edition for the first time. Dr. Matthew Steggle...

The phrase "morality play" often comes off as pejorative today; it's a phrase that we use when we want to dismiss something as dull and didactic. But Dr. Matthew Sergi of the University of Toronto begs to differ. He's been studying and, most importantly, staging these works, and he's come to some unexpected conclusions about how these plays function and what performing them today can tell us about...

Most of us know Oscar Wilde for his sparkling, witty comedy  The Importance of Being Earnest . But he also wrote tragedies, most notably the scandalous  Salomé . He'd intended the play, which dramatizes the biblical episode in which the title character causes the death of John the Baptist, as a star vehicle for the great French actress Sarah Bernhardt, but his plans never came to fruition. Eleanor...