The first of the three topics that occupied censors across the regimes was ‘religion’, which predominantly meant Catholicism. This chapter traces examples of self- and bureaucratic censorship under the Ancien Régime, when the king was in power through divine right, through the Revolution, where plays criticizing the Church exploded, and onto the Empire and the Restoration, both of which had an uneasy relationship with biblical and Catholic material for the theatre, especially on secondary stages like the Vaudeville. Generally, the larger the role the Catholic Church played at the time, the more difficult the representation of religious material became. However, when such material did make it to the boards, lateral censorship meant that religion could quickly act as an ersatz vehicle to discuss the ruling regime. Religion was an even tricker subject as reactions were far from homogenous: context was key, and whilst a play might be acceptable to one audience, another could boil over into violence in its quest to promote or silence specific worldviews.

This chapter uses the distinctive element of modern theatre architecture, the proscenium, as a means to consider the distinctive apparatus of the modern theatre, a machine that locates the actors and the spectators within a technically administered representational economy. From the invention and deployment of gas and then electric lighting in Europe – systematized in Richard Wagner’s Festspielhaus – in the 1860s to the pervasive digitization of sound, lighting, and climate in the modern theatre, the structure of the event of theatre is increasingly understood as a place for the quiet, silent, and darkened consumption of images of action. Drawing on plays from Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Fairview to Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author to Thornton Wilder’s Our Town to Samuel Beckett’s Act Without Words I, Play, and Catastrophe, this chapter situates the “black box” of modern theatre alongside the “black box” of modern technologies, as an instrument theatricalizing the human at the interface of input and output.

This chapter raises the principal mode of theatrical production during the global pandemic, usually called “Zoom theatre,” as a way to bring attitudes defining theatre and liveness into focus. For in asserting its distinctive performance form as a way of making theatre, Zoom theatre also represents theatre, and represents it both as dangerous and as passing. Undertaking an overview of the work of Zoom theatre, this chapter concludes with two pendant performances, both anticipating the concerns of Zoom theatre and the “theatreness” it promotes: Anne Washburn’s apocalyptic drama, Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play, and Samuel Beckett’s prefiguration of performing in the box of the screen: Not I.

An account of the making of the Wooster Group’s Rumstick Road, an autobiographical inquiry into the circumstances and legacy of the suicide of Spalding Gray’s mother. (The production, in rehearsal in the fall and winter of 1976, held an open rehearsal in December before opening the following spring.) The chapter considers the Wooster Group’s approach to acting (distinct from the style of its predecessor, the Performance Group), the visual art sources for the production’s imagery and structure, the use of recording technology, the role of the spectator, and the nature of privacy.

This chapter takes the distinctive materiality of the modern stage, the homely table, as a way to place two very different productions into conversation: Forced Entertainment’s Table Top Shakespeare and Annie Dorsen’s Prometheus Firebringer. Although these two productions might trace the arc from the residual (telling a story at a table using small household items) to the emergent (a dialogue between an AI-generated reconstruction of a lost Aeschylus play and a narrative composed of citations), they also dramatize an increasing absorption of the human into the apparatus of performance, a possibly fearsome absorption traced through Dorsen’s work, and touching on a range of other contemporary performances, including Mona Pirnot’s I Love You So Much I Could Die.

A survey of drama and performance in the period 1975-1980, with emphasis on the innovative plays and experimental productions that appeared in New York in 1976, along with consideration of surrounding developments in visual art, literature, film, and music, and attention to the politics of these transitional years.

A comprehensive examination of the plays and prose of Adrienne Kennedy, with particular focus on two works she premiered in 1976: A Rat’ s Mass / Procession in Shout, an operatic adaptation of her early play A Rat’ s Mass, composed and directed by the jazz composer and pianist Cecil Taylor; and A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White, a play derived from Kennedy’s fascination with Hollywood film and her memory of her brother’s devastating car accident. The chapter also explores Kennedy’s experiments in visual art, with particular attention to her own and her mother’s scrapbooks, her assemblage of photographed objects ("Cherished Objects from the Past"), her use of quotation, and the mixed-media nature of her manuscripts.

A reading of the best-known experimental work of 1976, Einstein on the Beach, that traces the sources of its imagery in mass media, popular culture, and art history, and that studies how the kinetics and contingency of live performance complicate the classical decorum associated with Robert Wilson’s theater. The chapter also discusses the performance styles of Lucinda Childs and Sheryl Sutton, the relationship of the opera to mathematics, the value of error and the handmade, and the persistence of emotion despite the production’s apparent coolness.

This chapter introduces the discussion of the ineluctable obsolescing of the technological apparatus of theatre. Opening with a discussion of the representation of technological and human obsolescence in Star Trek, this chapter repositions the work of media archaeology, which typically excludes theatre from its purview. And yet, in its attention to the operational dimension of lost, dead, or passing technological instruments, media archaeology locates a network of inquiry profitably directed toward theatre. In a reading of the work of Thomas Elsaesser, Wolfgang Ernst, Jussi Parikka, Rebecca Schneider, and others, this chapter introduces the ways apparatus, nostalgia, and obsolescence provide a lens for thinking contemporary theatre.