Theatre of War: a witness to love, tragedy, and parody

Central to American nineteenth century life was the theater. As the fratricidal fighting of the American Civil War broke out and divided the nation, this centrality remained, and audiences crowded into the theaters. For both north and south, the theater provided an outlet through which Americans could enjoy plays, performances, music, and variety shows that appealed to all social classes of American society. However, in order to understand the operations of theater companies during the war itself, it is first essential to examine the state of the theater as a concept during the mid-nineteenth century, and in the pre-war years. [excerpt

Towards a theory of experimental music theatre: 'showing doing', 'non-matrixed performance' and 'metaxis'

Although recent years have seen the emergence of sustained research on experimental music theater, most of this is of a largely descriptive nature. To address the shortcomings of such approaches, this essay outlines a theory of experimental music theater based on a clear definition and a number of constitutive features. A number of theoretical terms from the fields of performance theory and theater practice are introduced, namely “showing doing” (Richard Schechner), “non-matrixed performance” and “non-matrixed representation” (Michael Kirby), and “metaxis” (Augusto Boal). The analytical effectiveness of this theoretical framework is demonstrated by discussion of case studies drawn both from the “classics” of experimental music theater (John Cage, Mauricio Kagel) and from recent work (Christopher Fox, David Bithell, Trond Reinholdtsen)

Chicago Newspaper Theater Critics of the Early 20th Century

In the early years of the twentieth century, when live theater dominated the entertainment world and print media led public discourse, each without competition from electronic forms, the daily newspaper theater critic mediated ideas and values quite differently than today’s critics, whose main function has been reduced to that of a consumer guide. This article examines the corps of theater critics who served ten Chicago newspapers about 100 years ago. At a time when news editors were reluctant to cover new ideas and social movements, such as the push for women’s suffrage, theater critics were encountering radical new social ideas from European playwrights. Whether they approved or disapproved—and they did both, vehemently—their open debate with each other provided a level of public conversation of incalculable value in their own time, and largely missing today