The Theatre History Podcast

What was it like to be a working actor in the United States in the nineteenth century? The diary of Harry Watkins—who made a living acting, playwriting, and stage managing in the antebellum era—provides us with some insight into the way in which life in the theatre has and hasn't changed over the last century and a half. Dr. Amy Hughes, Dr. Naomi Stubbs, and Dr. Scott D. Dexter are our guests this...

Since the 1870s, a mysterious play manuscript has sat in the Boston Public Library, largely ignored except by the library's dedicated staff. Dr. Joe Stephenson of Abilene Christian University aims to change that. He's reevaluated the anonymous play, entitled  The Dutch Lady  and written sometime in the late 1660s or early 1670s, and is preparing to release a scholarly edition in 2018 of this surpr...

Many medieval convents were major centers of dramatic activity, with nuns and other members of their communities frequently participating in plays and other performances. However, because much of the evidence of this activity in the British Isles was destroyed during the Reformation, English-speaking scholars tend to ignore the crucial role played by women in medieval drama. The Medieval Convent D...

Did you know that novelist Edith Wharton was also a playwright? Dr. Mary Chinery and Dr. Laura Rattray join us this week to talk about her work for the theatre, in particular her play  The Shadow of a Doubt , which had languished in obscurity after it failed to make it to Broadway at the turn of the twentieth century. Thanks to Laura and Mary's work, it's now back in the public consciousness.

When it opened in the 1870s, the Alexandra Palace, or "Ally Pally," was a massive entertainment complex, meant to serve as "the People's Palace." Over the course of its lifetime, it's seen multiple fires, served as an internment camp during the First World War, and been the site of one of the first television broadcasts. It's also home to a spectacular and historically-significant Victorian theatr...

The Free Southern Theater was one of the most important activist theatres in the United States, bringing politically- and socially-engaged theatre to poor African American communities in the South throughout the 1960s and 1970s. One of the performers who joined the Theater was Seret Scott, who went on to play key roles on Broadway in  My Sister, My Sister  and  for colored girls who have considere...

Few, if any, stage designers have had the impact of Jo Mielziner, who designed the sets for the original productions of  Death of a Salesman ,  A Streetcar Named Desire ,  Carousel , and  South Pacific , among many others.  The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts  recently added two private collections of Mielziner's work to their already-extensive holdings, and the newly-acquired work...

For over forty years, artists and scholars have gathered at Chamizal National Memorial to perform, study, and celebrate works from the Siglo de Oro, the Spanish golden age that brought us the work of Calderon, Lope de Vega, and Cervantes, among many others. Dr. Esther Fernandez of Rice University joins us to talk about the festival, as well as Siglo de Oro's place in American theatre.

Monte Cristo Cottage has gone down in theatrical history as the setting for Eugene O'Neill's masterpiece,  Long Day's Journey Into Night , as well as his comedy  Ah, Wilderness!  Once the family's summer residence—and the closest thing to a real home for peripatetic actor James O'Neill and his wife and sons—it's now part of the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center. This week, we're joined by Anne G. Morg...

For over twenty years, teams from the University of Sydney have been excavating Nea Paphos, a splendid ancient theatre on the southwestern coast of Cyprus. Built in the year after Alexander the Great's conquest, the theatre entertained audiences for over six centuries. At its height, it could hold over 8,000 spectators. Dr. Craig Barker is a co-director of the excavation and Manager of Education a...

Long before Western-style theatre came to what is now Iran, a unique performance tradition had already developed that fused song, movement, and religion. Known as "ta'ziyeh," it has since spread among Shiite communities in Iraq and Lebanon, as well as even farther afield. William O. Beeman, chair of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota, introduces us to the fascinating wor...

The New Yorkers , a risqué collaboration between  New Yorker  cartoonist Peter Arno, Cole Porter, and Herbert Fields, hasn't been seen onstage since it debuted in 1930. In fact, it hasn't really  existed , at least not in the sense of there being a definitive script of the show.  The New Yorkers  provides us with a fascinating snapshot of the Broadway musical at a time when it was still as much re...

Western theatre tends to get most of our attention, but practically every culture has its own rich and vibrant performance tradition. Our guest Dr. Steven (Siyuan) Liu, of the University of British Columbia, is an expert in one such tradition: modern Chinese theatre. Developed as a response to the changing cultural and political landscape of twentieth-century China, spoken-word theatre, or  huaju...

Most stereotypes of Ireland have more to do with idyllic rural scenes than busy city life. But, as Beth Mannion points out in her book,  The Urban Plays of the Early Abbey Theatre: Beyond O'Casey , there's an entire sub-genre of plays depicting life in major cities like Dublin in the early 20th century. The most famous of these are the plays in Sean O'Casey's trilogy ( The Shadow of a Gunman ,  Ju...

Sinclair Lewis's 1935 novel  It Can't Happen Here  tells the story of a fictional populist who rises to power and establishes a Fascist regime in the United States. The novel soon became a play, produced by Hallie Flanagan and the Federal Theatre Project. Some eighty years after the play premiered, it's become a topic of conversation again because of its perceived relevance to the current politica...

Spain's New World colonies might be the last place that you'd expect to find a cross-dressing nun. However, a famous memoir from the 17th century, chronicling the life and surprising career of Catalina de Erauso, became wildly popular for its account of her military exploits in what's now South America. The memoir was adapted into a play,  La monja alfèrez , or  The Lieutenant Nun , and it became...

Pedro Calderon de la Barca's  Life Is a Dream  is one of the best-known plays from Spain's "Siglo de Oro," or Golden Age, in the 17th century. However, even many fans of the play don't realize that there's a second version, written late in Calderon's life, that incorporates many of the same speeches and themes but also transforms other aspects of the play. George Drance, co-director Kelly Johnston...

You might think it's virtually impossible to discover new work by a playwright who's been dead for nearly 400 years, but that's just what Alejandro Garcia-Reidy of Syracuse University did in 2014. He talks about his work with Lope de Vega's  Mujeres y Criados  ( Women and Servants ), a play that sheds new light on the important and prolific playwright from Spain's "Golden Age."

Bert Williams was one of the most important African-American performers in the history of the American stage. He became one of the first African-American superstars and starred in what was arguably the first African-American plays on Broadway. Now, actor and playwright Jeremy Morris is sharing Williams's story in a new play,  The Top of Bravery .

We tend to think of the middle of the twentieth century as a litany of horrors, from the trenches of the First World War and the atrocities of the Second to the fear of nuclear annihilation that came with the early decades of the Cold War. However, as Dr. Charlotte Canning of the University of Texas at Austin chronicles in her new book,  On the Performance Front: US Theatre and Internationalism ,...

This podcast keeps returning to the question of how we can reconstruct theatrical performances from bygone days. For the last few years, the website 19thcenturyacts.com has done just that. It was developed by a team led by Anita Gonzalez, of the University of Michigan, as well as Project Manager and Designer Clara McClenon. The site allows visitors to both see and hear what it was like to watch so...

We all know the classic Christmas song "Jingle Bells" —or at least we think that we do. Dr. Kyna Hamill of Boston University has been looking into the origins of this beloved holiday classic, and what she's discovered about its creator and its first known public performance may cause us to look at the song in a rather different light.

When we think of Irish theatre, we tend to think primarily of playwrights and theatre companies from the Republic of Ireland, not northern part of the island. Those Northern Irish playwrights we do know, such as Brian Friel, tend to be men. Fiona Coffey's new book,  Political Acts: Women in Northern Irish Theatre, 1921-2012 , challenges these preconceptions, exploring how female playwrights and th...

Sholem Asch's  God of Vengeance  is a provocative classic of the Yiddish stage, and it's recently come back into the public eye, with an upcoming revival by New Yiddish Rep and a new drama by Paula Vogel, titled  Indecent , that tells the fascinating backstory behind the play's premiere. In this episode, we talk with David Mandelbaum, artistic director of New Yiddish Rep, about Asch's powerful pla...