Performing Anti-slavery: Activist Women on Antebellum Stages. By Gay Gibson Cima. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Pp. xiii + 298. Gay Gibson Cima’s new book, Performing Anti-Slavery, should become a model for how to combine detailed historical research with activism. In her compelling study, she imaginatively links the struggle to […]
Monthly Archives: March 2016
16 posts
American Tragedian: The Life of Edwin Booth. By Daniel J. Watermeier. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2015; Pp. 464. More has been written on Edwin Booth than any other American actor. Three popular biographies lionize Booth in the late-nineteenth century. Another four in the mid-twentieth century, one of which (Prince […]
Murder Most Queer: The Homicidal Homosexual in the American Theater. By Jordan Schildcrout. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014. Pp. 268. Jordan Schildcrout’s Murder Most Queer: The Homicidal Homosexual in the American Theater should be used in classrooms as a prototypical example of the fundamental yet often disputed and […]
The Captive Stage: Performance and the Proslavery Imagination of the Antebellum North. By Douglas A. Jones, Jr. Theater: Theory/Text/Performance series. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2014. Pp. 218. In common American parlance, the word “slavery” tends to be inseparable from the specific institution of chattel slavery in the […]
The Journal of American Drama and Theatre asked seven leading scholars to comment on how they saw the state of our field today. This is what they wrote. New Directions in Dramatic and Theatrical Theory: The Emerging Discipline of Performance Philosophy Michael Y. Bennett Changes, Constants, Constraints: African American Theatre […]
by Kevin Byrne The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 28, Number 1 (Winter 2016) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2016 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center African American theatre history scholarship has always wanted to commit untold stories to print and it values performance on a rubric which balances artistic impulses […]
by Michael Y. Bennett The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 28, Number 1 (Winter 2016) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2016 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center There has been rising interest in theatre studies in employing and turning to philosophy. Unlike previous trends in literary (and theatrical) studies over the […]
by Jorge Huerta The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 28, Number 1 (Winter 2016) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2016 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Much has happened in the field of Chicano theatre studies, both as praxis and theory since 1965 when the Teatro Campesino (Farmworkers’ Theater) was founded […]
by Esther Kim Lee The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 28, Number 1 (Winter 2016) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2016 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center When I was writing my dissertation in the late 1990s, I would tell anyone who would ask that my topic was Asian American theatre. […]
by Jordan Schildcrout The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 28, Number 1 (Winter 2016) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2016 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center I consider it a sign of the vibrancy of queer theatre scholarship that publications over the past few years contain a greater variety of subjects, […]
by Stacy Wolf The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 28, Number 1 (Winter 2016) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2016 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Musical Theatre Studies, whose presence as a viable academic field is not much more than a decade old, is spreading out in all directions of […]
by Maurya Wickstrom The Journal of American Drama and Theatre Volume 28, Number 1 (Winter 2016) ISNN 2376-4236 ©2016 by Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Over the past couple of years, I have been increasingly taken with the question of temporality. Giorgio Agamben writes in Infancy and History that: Every conception […]
Robert E. Sherwood’s biblical source for the title of his play There Shall Be No Night is useful for establishing context for the contemporary controversy the play was part of, as well as the lack of subsequent commentary it has received. Sherwood dearly wanted to create something profoundly relevant. The […]
Susan Kattwinkel, Editor American Tragedian: The Life of Edwin Booth By Daniel J. Watermeier Reviewed by Karl Kippola The Captive Stage: Performance and the Proslavery Imagination of the Antebellum North By Douglas A. Jones, Jr. Reviewed by Beck Holden Murder Most Queer: The Homicidal Homosexual in the […]
In JADT’s inaugural issue co-editors Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter J. Meserve declared their intentions for launching the fledgling journal, stating: “our aim is to promote research on American playwrights, American plays, and American theatre, and to encourage the thoughtful contemplation that will lead to a more enlightened understanding of […]
During the spring of 2013, Nora Ephron’s play Lucky Guy played to sold out houses recouping its producers’ initial investment of $3.6 million after a mere eight weeks, a remarkable feat for a Broadway drama. Whereas most successes on the Great White Way are splashy musicals with high production values […]
