No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Audiences and Programs: Rare Illustrated Programs from the Théâtre Libre, the Théâtre d'Art, and the Théâtre L'oeuvre
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 October 2010
Extract
Theatre historians have given surprisingly little attention to theatre playbills and programs as documents of material culture. The modern theatre “magazine” program especially, which began to develop in the 1860s, offers more than primary documents for dates, performers, and scenic artists, visual evidence of a performance, or the dramaturg's notes. For the cultural historian, these are open books, symbolically. Programs of the late twentieth century, packed as they are with advertisements, news of the theatre, photo montages, and litanies of benefactors and “friends,” document that larger performance of which the staged event is but a part, the performance of the imagined community to which, and from which the theatrical event ostensibly speaks.
- Type
- Re: Sources
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 1998
References
ENDNOTES
1. A brief, factual, Anglo-centered history of the playbill and program can be found in Enthoven's, Gabrielle essay in the third edition to The Oxford Companion to the Theatre, ed. Hartnoil, Phyllis (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), 742–744Google Scholar, and James Laver provides an essay on theatrical posters in that edition. (Both essays were dropped from the fourth edition.) Marvin Carlson considers the theatre playbill/program in his reader-response analysis of audience-conditioning in his essay, “Theatre Audiences and the Reading of Performance,” m Interpreting the Theatrical Past, Essays in the Historiography ofPerformance, ed. Postlewait, Thomas and McConachie, Bruce (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1989), 82–97.Google Scholar
2. Boyer, Patricia Eckert, Artists and the Avant-garde in Paris 1887–1900, the Martin, and Atlas, Liane W. Collection (Washington, D. C.: National Gallery of Art, 1998), 18–20.Google Scholar For some information on the art context of the theatre programs, my essay is indebted to Boyer. The catalogue contains color reproductions of all sixty-seven programs as well as many black and white photos, essays on all three theatres and their programs, and a bibliography. It is available (paperback, $39.50 + postage) from the National Gallery of Art, 6th Street & Constitution Avenue, NW, Washington, D. C. 20565. See also Aitken, Geneviève and Josefowitz, Samuel, Artistes et théâtres d'avant-garde. Programmes de théâtre illustrés 1890–1900 (Pully, 1991)Google Scholar, and Albright, H. D., ed. André Antoine ‘s “Memories of the Théâtre Libre,” trans. Carlson, Marvin (Coral Gables, Florida, 1964).Google Scholar
3. Boyer, 55–56, discusses the possible allusions to contemporary issues.
4. Antoine, , “Memories of the Théâtre Libre,” 226–227.Google Scholar Boyer points out that Lautrec's print was actually first published the year before and then republished for Antoine's 1894 program (83, note 102 ). Boyer and Carlson, in his “Translators Preface,” suggest some skepticism when reading Antoine's memoirs.
5. Boyer, 104–107.