There has been a good deal of speculation by theatre scholars concerning when realistic interior stage settings, or to be more specific, the box-set was first used on the English stage. Waitzkin contends that the box-set made its first appearance in England at the Olympic Theatre in a production of The Conquering Game by W. B. Bernard given on November 3, 1832. Armstrong agrees with Waitzkin's contention except he dates the performance as given on November 28, 1832. Rowell believes that the etched frontispiece to The Conquering Game“…is insufficient to confirm that this ‘more perfect enclosure’ involved flats entirely surrounding the scene and a ceiling cloth as well.” Hunter agrees with Rowell and can find “No positive indication” in the etching for the claim that this was the first box-set used on the English stage (l).

Although the Spanish Inquisition ceased to function formally in 1834, the spirit that made this institution a metaphor for oppression continues to exist, even if in less dramatic fashion. In the broad sense, “inquisition” may mean any strict or arbitrary suppression of persons and ideas considered unorthodox—and consequently dangerous—to the ruling powers. Spain maintains an active force for its current brand of orthodoxy and, to paraphrase George Bernard Shaw, pays dearly for that luxury by being a fourth-rate power politically and no power at all intellectually. Even sympathetic but somewhat condescending Hispanists wonder if contemporary Spanish writers can produce anything of merit in this doctrinaire and puritanical atmosphere. Others, myself among them, believe that several Spanish writers active today would enjoy international prestige were not Spain ignored or shunned due to its present form of government. Despite discrimination from abroad and the lingering shadow of Torquemada at home, a tough breed of Spanish writers, hardened by adversity, manages to write, publish, and even perform. Since theatre is the art form that relies most heavily on the cultural condition of the people, the development of postwar drama particularly has been hampered. Moreover, theatre is the only form still under the yoke of prior censorship.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century the major American theatre companies in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston relied little on the use of traveling stars. The theatres played a nightly change of bill, three or four nights each week; and the plays were performed almost entirely by the resident stock company. However, by the 1830's the regular use of traveling stars was firmly established. In later years the stars and the starring system were often blamed for the decline of the stock companies, the failure of theatrical managements, and a general deterioration of the theatre.

Considerations of developing realistic acting styles on the English stage between the debut of Macready in 1817 and the triumph of Fechter in 1860 usually focus their attention on Macready, Charles Kean, and Phelps. Although these three men differed significantly in their approaches to acting, their styles shared in common a romantic goal that René Wellek attributes to Coleridge: “to domesticate the wonderful.” The means of attaining this goal varied. Macready relied on developing the audience's appreciation of his conscious artifice at playing domesticated points. He was, consequently, less realistic than Phelps and Kean, who were primarily concerned with trying to make an audience feel what they believed their characters felt. This concern with transmitting character feeling is compatible with Kean's excellence at gentlemanly melodrama and Phelps' ability at playing the pathetic elements in comic characters.

Vera; or, The Nihilist was Oscar Wilde's first performed play, a work, as Wilde described it, “not of politics but of passion,” expressing the “cry of the peoples for Liberty.” Liberty as subject — and the rhetoric of republicanism that made liberty a catchword — came naturally to Wilde, as son of the Irish patriot Speranza and as a concerned and compassionate individual. But Wilde was also professionally ambitious. By writing a wordy tragedy of self-sacrifice with Russia and the Nihilist movement as background, Wilde hoped to appeal to popular taste in the theatre and to capitalize on public interest in current affairs. He may well have drawn his dramatic characters and the events of his play directly from a contemporary newspaper, The Era.

The English actress Fanny Kemble, whose 1832–1834 tour left her unrivaled among female performers in this country and who has been touted by historians as a sterling example of antebellum womanhood, emerges as a far more equivocal figure than previous histories suggest. Indeed, for someone who disdained the spurious histrionics of public life, she routinely exposed her own paradoxical nature: she hated the stage, yet recovered her family's fortunes through a luminous albeit brief acting career; she yearned for the simple pleasures of domesticity, yet castigated American women as “drudges” in her published controversial journal of 1835; she made a fortune performing Juliet and yet was described as “unfemininely masculine” by Herman Melville who, in a letter to a friend in 1849, went on to exclaim, “had she not, on impeccable authority, borne children, I should be curious to learn the result of a surgical examination of her person in private.” Kemble was a woman whose identity was in constant flux throughout the 1830s and 40s, which makes her American career an excellent site for materialist investigations of gender.

Alfred Radok, who died of a heart attack in 1976 in Vienna at the age of 61, was perhaps the outstanding Czech theatre artist of the post-war era. An assistant to E. F. Burian in the late 1930s, Radok in his subsequent work reflected not only that major artist's influence but also that of K. H. Hilar, the earlier towering directorial presence of Czech theatre. All three possessed an innate, intuitive sense of theatre as an autonomous art; all three were noted for their reworking of scripts for maximum theatrical impact; all three rejected the theatre of realistic illusion and were responsible for major innovations in total staging, in which all elements of production are exploited to serve the director's vision rather than to maintain fidelity to the surfaces of life.

This article reflects my current research, exploring the complex interactions between the discursive practices of theatre and performance on the one hand and philosophy on the other. Instead of beginning by trying to formulate the general principles for such an interaction, I examine actual encounters: direct face-to-face meetings and actual dialogues between philosophers and representatives of the Thespian professions. The earliest recorded encounter of this kind is in Plato's Symposium depicting the banquet in Agathon's house, celebrating his victory at the Lenaean theatre festival in 416 b.c., during which the celebrants spent the whole night eulogizing Eros. On this occasion Socrates and the two playwrights, Agathon and Aristophanes, interacted directly on several occasions.

Quiara Alegría Hudes (Fig. 1) won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Water by the Spoonful, the second play in her “Elliot” trilogy. She is a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist for Elliot, A Soldier's Fugue, the first play in the trilogy, and the musical In the Heights. Her plays include The Happiest Song Plays Last (which ends the trilogy), 26 Miles, Yemaya's Belly, and Daphne's Dive. In 2012, the Los Angeles Times praised Hudes as “one of the most poetic, socially clued-in young voices in the American theater.” In this engaging interview with Editor Harvey Young, Quiara Alegría Hudes talks about the role of music in her plays, socioeconomic isolation in cities, the inspiration for some of her plays, and the importance of asking the deep question.

My understanding of the avant-garde—and the state of avant-garde studies—was cast in stark relief by the social, political, military, and legal events that coincided with the period during which I was revising the manuscript of my first book. What those events were is no surprise: 9/11 and its various aftermaths. Many of this journal's readers have experienced a similar shift in perspective on their work—be it ethical, epistemological, or archival—leading them to reassess both their scholarly subjects and their methods in the face of what may well be a profound reconfiguration of power and knowledge.

David Krasner: In surveying contemporary London theatre, New York Times critic Ben Brantley reported that the Tricycle Theatre had

inaugurated a season of African-American plays with the commandingly titled but obscure Walk Hard, Talk Loud, a play by Abram Hill from the early1940's. Abram who? The name meant nothing to me, but Abram Hill (1910–1986) was a founder and director of the American Negro Theater in New York (1940–1951) and a playwright, it seems, of considerable verve.3

That Abram Hill and the American Negro Theatre—the most important black theatre company during the mid-twentieth century—has flown below the radar is indicative of how much work still needs to be accomplished.

How much is a theatrical design idea worth? Alternatively, how much should a professional theatre designer be paid? For many working today, standard minimum contract scales and “industry standards” help guide fee negotiations. In the United States, United Scenic Artists (USA) Local 829 was among the first bodies to align theatrical design with organized labor activism, and as such, its standard minimum contract for design is an object lesson in the value of artistic labor. These scales were developed nearly a century ago, and were the product of hard negotiation and legal action taken by US-American designers in the interwar period. Lee Simonson and Jo Mielziner are best remembered for their revolutionary use of space, scenery, and lighting, yet their professional advocacy within USA Local 829 provided the basis for today's standard design fees. Further, their defense of fair payment during the Depression and war years preserved scenic design as a form of labor analogous to other backstage crafts and trades.

One of the commonly propagated and accepted myths in 19th century theatre history relates to the origin of the box set. The impulse to name Madame Vestris and the first production of Dion Boucicault's London Assurance originates from broadly disseminated misinformation. Two contemporary American theatre historians have written extensively and with seeming authority on the origins of the box set: John H. McDowell and Orville K. Larson. McDowell in his article, “Historical Development of the Box Set,” established the basis for the wide acceptance of the Madame Vestris myth and is commonly quoted in support of that argument.

As a victim of “Garrick fever” for all of my adult life I admit to having accepted most modern-day criticism which avers that Garrick's supremacy in his age was due to his superior acting, strict management, rigourous attention to rehearsals, and consequent superiority over his Covent Garden and Haymarket rivals. All this is surely valid, but I remain curious about the “quality” of his casting and ensembles. Could it be that our critics today prefer romanticism to the practical truths of everyday operation of a repertory company in eighteenth-century London? Let us explore the situation once again.

This history of the American Society for Theatre Research is written on the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary and focuses chiefly on the years from 1981 to 2006, but with an overview of ASTR's first twenty-five years as a necessary prologue. A scholarly organization changing in response to complex cultural dynamics, ASTR is very different today from the society of 1956 and the society of 1981.

As a theatre practitioner I am interested in how the conventions and jurisdictions which determine what I can do and cannot do, under the sign of theatre, came to be. The most intriguing of these determinations are, of course, the silent ones, those about which least is said but on which most is predicated. These are what I call theatre taboos, a complex of shadowy restraints and controls, from prompting to possession, that transgress the theatre's limit, informs us politely what theatre is not and in so doing inadvertently tells us something about what theatre is.

Performing Democracy sets out to explain the energetic growth of diverse community-based theatre, to explore its various approaches and challenges, and to promote its sustainability. The impressive range and sheer number of projects discussed in these twenty-three essays make the book a valuable introduction to what editors Susan C. Haedicke and Tobin Nellhaus see as an international movement to “involve, mobilize, and politicize” audiences (1).

The Union of the Companies that had brought the theatre of London under the one roof of Drury Lane in 1682 degenerated under the mis-management of Christopher Rich into open rebellion in 1695. In that year Betterton and a group of followers abandoned the Theatre Royal to set up a rival company in the old theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields. This new group managed quite successfully for several seasons, but a decline soon set in, partly due to the shabby old theatre itself, but mainly due to internal bickering and poor management. By the first years of the eighteenth century the company was in such straits that a revitalization was understood to be necessary if the players were to survive.