This volume explores the impact of printing on the European theatre in the period 1480-1880 and shows that the printing press played a major part in the birth of modern theatre.

"Contains the informal history of forty theatres that were built, as either legitimate houses or movie palaces and that are currently operating as legitimate theatres"--p. xiii.

(Applause Books). Theatregoers' favorite history of Broadway is back in an updated and expanded 2010 edition including more than 500 color production photos, vintage archival photos, and Playbill covers from all forty currently operating Broadway theatres. Thirty-eight of the original chapters have been expanded to cover all the shows that have opened in the ten years since the popular 2000 edition, with two new chapters added to include Broadway theatres recently refurbished and returned to life. This unique chronicle is the first work to present a detailed theatre-by-theatre roundup of players and productions that have enchanted audiences at Broadway's great playhouses from 1900 to 2010. The work is an expanded treatment of "At This Theatre," the popular feature in Playbill's Broadway theatre programs. "At This Theatre" offers playgoers instant nostalgia by listing notable hits (and some famed fiascos) that have played through the years in the theatre that they are attending. The book also pays tribute to the distinguished impresarios who built and managed these houses, and the brilliant architects and interior designers who created them. The original 1984 edition was created by Playbill senior editor Louis Botto. Botto worked with editor Robert Viagas on the 2000 update. With the third edition, Botto has passed the author torch to Viagas, who founded Playbill.com and the acclaimed Playbill Broadway Yearbook series, and who has written the updates in Botto's style.

Between 1935 and 1939, the United States government paid out-of-work artists to write, act, and stage theatre as part of the Federal Theatre Project (FTP), a New Deal job relief program. In segregated "Negro Units" set up under the FTP, African American artists took on theatre work usually reserved for whites, staged black versions of "white" classics, and developed radical new dramas. In this fresh history of the FTP Negro Units, Kate Dossett examines what she calls the black performance community—a broad network of actors, dramatists, audiences, critics, and community activists—who made and remade black theatre manuscripts for the Negro Units and other theatre companies from New York to Seattle. Tracing how African American playwrights and troupes developed these manuscripts and how they were then contested, revised, and reinterpreted, Dossett argues that these texts constitute an archive of black agency, and understanding their history allows us to consider black dramas on their own terms. The cultural and intellectual labor of black theatre artists was at the heart of radical politics in 1930s America, and their work became an important battleground in a turbulent decade.

Meyerhold on Theatre brings together in one volume Vsevolod Meyerhold's most significant writings and utterances, and covers his entire career as a director from 1902 to 1939. It contains a comprehensive selection from all published material, unabridged and translated from the original Russian, updated and supplemented with a critical commentary relating Meyerhold to his period and eye-witness accounts describing all his productions. The book is illustrated with photographs of Meyerhold's designs and productions. Within this diverse collection of sometimes dense, sometimes lyrical, and always fascinating writings, Meyerhold emerges from this book as a forerunner of such directors as Brecht, Piscator, Planchon and Brook, a relentless enemy of naturalism and a supreme exponent of total theatre whose influence continues to be felt throughout the theatre of today. This fourth edition features a new introduction by Prof. Jonathan Pitches, which helps to demystify some of the terminology Meyerhold and his associates used, and indicates the fundamental connection between culture and politics represented in his life and art.

Newly adapted for the Anglophone reader, this is an excellent translation of Hans-Thies Lehmann’s groundbreaking study of the new theatre forms that have developed since the late 1960s, which has become a key reference point in international discussions of contemporary theatre. In looking at the developments since the late 1960s, Lehmann considers them in relation to dramatic theory and theatre history, as an inventive response to the emergence of new technologies, and as an historical shift from a text-based culture to a new media age of image and sound. Engaging with theoreticians of 'drama' from Aristotle and Brecht, to Barthes and Schechner, the book analyzes the work of recent experimental theatre practitioners such as Robert Wilson, Tadeusz Kantor, Heiner Müller, the Wooster Group, Needcompany and Societas Raffaello Sanzio. Illustrated by a wealth of practical examples, and with an introduction by Karen Jürs-Munby providing useful theoretical and artistic contexts for the book, Postdramatic Theatre is an historical survey expertly combined with a unique theoretical approach which guides the reader through this new theatre landscape.

Devising Theatre is a practical handbook that combines a critical analysis of contemporary devised theatre practice with descriptions of selected companies, and suggestions for any group devising theatre from scratch. It is the first book to propose a general theory of devised theatre. After identifying the unique nature of this type of performance, the author examines how devised theatre is perceived by professional practitioners, and provides an historical overview illustrating how it has evolved since the 1960s. Alison Oddey examines the particular working practices and products of a number of professional companies, including a Reminiscence theatre for the elderly and a theatre-in-education group, and offers ideas and exercises for exploration and experimentation.