Ancient Greek and Roman drama has influenced theatre for millennia, and playwrights and other artists from around the world continue to draw inspiration from these works. Professor Fiona Macintosh joins us to talk about the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama at Oxford University and how it's been a resource for those who want to learn…

Lorraine Hansberry's play "The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window" is often forgotten, or dismissed as an inferior play that fell victim to the playwright's declining health at the end of her life. But as our guest, Elise Harris, tells us, it's a fascinating work in its own right, and one with a rich and complicated history.…

It's a special guest episode, featuring Peter Schmitz and his podcast "Adventures in Theatre History: Philadelphia." Peter tells the story of Jasper Deeter, whose pioneering work had an impact on not only Philadelphia theatre, but the American stage as a whole.

The eighteenth century was obsessed with celebrities, and, like our own time, the fans of the 1700s were fascinated by famous actress' pregnancies. Dr. Chelsea Phillips joins us to talk about how she explores the emergence of this aspect of 18th-century fan culture in her new book, Carrying All Before Her: Celebrity Pregnancy and the London Stage, …

Broadway has a long and complex history, and in November of 2022 a new museum is opening that will allow visitors to explore that history. Curator Ben West joins us to introduce the Museum of Broadway and explain how it's bringing the theatrical past to life.

For anyone who's been following the news in 2022, a play about an Eastern European country's heroic resistance in the face of Russian invasion might sound timely. But as Dr. Thomas F. Connolly shows in this week's discussion of Robert E. Sherwood's "There Shall Be No Night," timeliness can be a tricky subject, perhaps especially in the context of l…

The Classix project is working to, as they put it, “explode the classical canon through an exploration of Black performance history and dramatic works by Black writers.” Two members of the Classix team – director Dominique Rider and dramaturg Arminda Thomas – join us to talk about their work and how they’re sharing essential works from Black theatr…

It was the biggest hit on Broadway one hundred years ago – and yet it’s largely forgotten today. Eric Grode joins us to talk about his recent New York Times article marking the centenary of Abie’s Irish Rose, the hit comedy that, though it was riddled with stereotypes and reviled by critics, seemed like it just might be popular enough to run foreve…

Kunqu is one of the cultural treasures of Chinese theatre. Today we're fortunate to be joined by Dr. Dongshin Chang, an expert on the art form. Dongshin will introduce us to the fascinating and musical world of kunqu.

The recent Tony-nominated Broadway revival of Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf reflects a growing appreciation for a Black writer whose work gives voice to those who have been oppressed and marginalized because of their race and gender. But who was Shange, and what more do her theatrical works …

Shakespeare looms large over both the American and British theatre scenes. But his outsize influence means that we’ve long neglected a dizzying array of fascinating and brilliant theatre written by other early modern England dramatists. Rob Crighton and the Beyond Shakespeare Company are working to remedy this, and Rob joins us for this episode to …

The ancient Roman comedies of Plautus have inspired playwrights from Shakespeare to Sondheim. But they've also been seen as grim reminders of the oftentimes horrifying world of ancient Rome, where violence and slavery were commonplace. Dr. Amy Richlin joins us to talk about her book Slave Theater in the Roman Republic, which explores how Plautus's …

The roles played by women in theatre in the United States have been varied, from playwrights and performers to critics and members of the audience. Now the Beinecke Library at Yale University is sharing some of the stories of these women in an exhibit called Brava! Women Make American Theater, which runs through July 3, 2022. Today we’re joined by …

Charlotte Cushman was a fascinating figure in 19th-century American theatre: in addition to being the first female celebrity actress on the American stage, she was also a trailblazer who embraced her identity as a lesbian and made a name for herself in a male-dominated industry. Tana Wojczuk joins us to talk about Cushman, who's the subject of her …

Performance has always been a key part of the spiritual life of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. One of the most notable Mormon theatrical events of the last few decades have been the pageants that depict stories from the Bible and the Book of Mormon. However, as Dr. Megan Sanborn Jones discusses in this 2018 interview, the era of p…

Developing approaches to theatre that fit the needs and experiences of performers of color, particularly Black artists, has long been a pressing concern for the American stage. Actor training has been dominated by Eurocentric approaches based on theorists such as Stanislavsky, which are geared towards a repertoire that’s heavy with White authors su…

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 Thea…

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 influe…

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 fou…

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 performanc…

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 produ…

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 an…

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 biograp…

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 …

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 af…

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 Di…

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 st…

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 entitl…

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…

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…

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 …

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…

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 writ…

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 Gold…

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…

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 …

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 tolpavakoot…

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, Christop…

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, an…

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 perspect…