Stage naturalism made its first appearance in Denmark—and, for that matter, in Scandinavia as a whole—unaccompanied by the fanfare or enthusiastic manifestoes which heralded its arrival in many other countries. The breakthrough of this new style of theatrical production did not coincide with the founding of small, independent art theatres like André Antoine's Théâtre Libre (1887), Otto Brahm's Freie Bühne (1889), J. T. Grein's Independent Theatre (1891), or, somewhat later, Stanislavski's Moscow Art Theatre (1898). Nor was it acclaimed from the outset as a pioneering realization of a novel aesthetic program. On the contrary, the methods and techniques of the new naturalism were introduced, and proceeded to take root inconspicuously, when the Danish Royal Theatre in Copenhagen engaged the 36-year-old playwright William Bloch as a stage director in 1881, having been impressed with an “unusual eye for scenic requirements” in his plays. Two years later, Bloch's epoch-making production of Ibsen's An Enemy of the People firmly implanted the new ideas.

In order to lay the groundwork for the link I mean to make between ashes and the theatre archive, let me start by recollecting a few disasters.

In his introduction to the excellent Revels edition of The Duchess of Malfi John Russell Brown provides a brief, updated stage history of John Webster's best known tragedy. Although Brown does much to correct the impression that Samuel Phelps' nineteenth-century revival was unsuccessful, even he does not fully indicate the Duchess' popularity during the twenty-five years following the Sadler's Wells performance of November 20, 1850. Nor does the statement of Don D. Moore in John Webster and His Critics 1617–1964 that “only in the mid-twentieth century—and then infrequently— has Webster on the stage been acceptable” help to correct the traditional misconception.

Triumphalist accounts of the spread of “the Method” in post-World War II America generally explain its success as the victory of natural truths over benighted illusions about acting. In Method Actors: Three Generations of An American Acting Style, for instance, Steve Vineberg follows his summary of the primary attributes of “method” acting with the comment: “These concerns weren't invented by Stanislavski or his American successors; they emerged naturally out of the two thousand-year history of Western acting.” Hence, the final triumph of “the Method” was natural, even inevitable. Vineberg's statement, however, raises more questions than it answers. Why did it take two thousand years for actors and theorists of acting to get it right? Or, to localize the explanation to the United States, why did more American actors, directors, and playwrights not jump on the Stanislavski bandwagon and reform the American theatre after the appearance of the Moscow Art Theatre in New York in 1923 and the subsequent lectures and classes from Boleslavski and others? The Group Theatre demonstrated the power of Stanislavski-derived acting techniques in the 1930s, but their substantial successes barely dented the conventional wisdom about acting theory and technique in the professional theatre. Yet, in the late 1940s and early fifties, “method” acting, substantially unchanged from its years in the American Laboratory and Group theatres, took Broadway and Hollywood by storm.

I don't remember the very first time I watched The Wiz (1978). Growing up in a black household during the 1980s, the film was as much a part of my upbringing as the countless hours I spent removing my Jheri curl activator from the sofa, practicing the moonwalk, or listening to my mother and sister's annual Thanksgiving argument about how much salt should go into the collard greens. What I do remember is how much I enjoyed watching The Wiz. Each Thanksgiving Day my six sisters and I would gather around the television set and watch our heroine Dorothy (Diana Ross) travel from her aunt's Harlem apartment to the magical land of Oz. We celebrated the fact that Dorothy ultimately vanquishes her seemingly more powerful foe Evillene, the Wicked Witch of the West (Mabel King). As young black girls, we identified with Dorothy's plight. While we were not battling powerful witches, we were constantly resisting our mother's attempts to socialize us into “respectable” young women. As such, we were fascinated by Evillene, the most oppressive force within Dorothy's life. The gargantuan size of Evillene's body, the hideousness of her face, and the force of her supernatural powers both excited and repulsed us. We eagerly anticipated her first appearance in the film, bursting through the doors of her sweatshop belting, “Don't Nobody Bring Me No Bad News.” We reveled in drawing comparisons between Evillene and our mother, hoping that one day we too could defeat her.

In the honor roll of nineteenth-century theatrical producers of Shakespeare, the name Frederick Balsir Chatterton has never been entered. Even in his own time he was often considered more of an entrepreneur or entertainer than a serious advocate of Shakespeare. Since then he has either been ignored or ridiculed by critics and historians, the lone exception being Odell, who gave Chatterton's productions their only serious attention. What historians remember instead is Chatterton's infamous maxim— “Shakespeare spelt ruin and Byron bankruptcy”—a saying he did not invent and did not totally believe.

The 1860s and 1870s are generally considered a hiatus in the history of Shakespearean production on the London stage. Accounts of the period usually move quickly from Charles Kean's retirement in 1859 (or the end of Samuel Phelps' management of suburban Sadler's Wells in 1862) to the beginning of Henry Irving's regime at the Lyceum in 1879—acknowledging the Phelps-Chatterton collaboration at Drury Lane as worthy, but hardly remarkable, and mentioning in passing such isolated events as Fechter's new Hamlet in 1861. Nevertheless, while no management comparable to Kean's or Phelps's, devoted principally to poetic drama, appeared during this time, there were occasional Shakespearean productions of exceptional interest. One such was the Bancrofts' version of The Merchant of Venice, which opened at the Prince of Wales's Theatre in out-of-the-way Tottenham-street on 17 April 1875. It ran for only thirty-six performances and lost the famous actormanager team £3,000. Despite its financial failure, however, the production attracted considerable critical attention at the time, much of it favorable, and it has since gained an honorable place in stage history. Beerbohm-Tree, for example, in an address to the Oxford Union Debating Society in 1900, called it “the first production in which the modern spirit of stage management asserted itself.”

Of particular interest to scholars of the early American theatre is a 1798 water-color by Cotton Milbourne entitled “Saint Paul's Chapel, Broadway Between Fulton and Vesey Streets,” in the possession of the New-York Historical Society. Besides depicting the Chapel, the watercolor shows the Park Theatre as it appeared at the time of its opening in 1798. As such, it replaces the unreliable Elkanah Tisdale engraving, found in David Longworth's 1797 American Almanack, New-York Register and City Directory, as the most accurate view of the theatre prior to its reconstruction in 1820.

More than a century after Edward Gordon Craig published “The Actor and the Über-Marionette” (1908), the core of his conception of acting still poses a hermeneutical challenge to the theatre scholar. Many intriguing interpretations have stemmed from his statements on acting: from Denis Bablet's or Christopher Innes's argument that the Über-marionette is a metaphor for the perfect performer, to Irène Eynat-Confino's thesis that it is a real, oversized puppet; from the idea (Lindsay Mary Newman's or Cesare Molinari's, for instance) that the concept evolved with time along with the details of Craig's acting theory, to Patrick Le Boeuf's recent hypothesis that the Über-marionette is a full-body puppet. Le Boeuf's interpretation is somehow a telling example of the puzzling quality of Craig's acting theory: his studies originally led him to believe that the Über-marionette was a technically perfect gymnast, in perfect control of his own body, but he was induced to reconsider his hypothesis only a couple of years later, in the light of newly recovered documents. The same ineffable quality Jane Goodall detects in “stage presence” seems to be an inherent feature of Craig's ideal performer, and as with presence, the Über-marionette appears to be best definable by approximation.

Why should a country bumpkin, a secondary character in the ballad opera afterpiece Flora, be one of the most frequently illustrated roles in eighteenth-century English theatre? The character was named “Hob” because he was a bumpkin, or “clown,” but even while the name Hob was becoming naturalized this way during the seventeenth century, it still retained echoes of Robin Goodfellow, the native trickster figure (OED) (Fig. 1). Unnoticed by theatre historians, the pictures to which I refer have been granted only passing mention by music and art historians. The images began as illustrations in a songbook, which spawned, among other things, two series of captioned engravings that were reissued periodically. The engravings were also transferred to other media (oil paintings and paintings on glass), and the Hob character turns up in a political cartoon as late as 1793.Anon. [Cruikshank], “Hob in the Well,” published by T. Prattent, 46 Cloth Fair West Smithfield, 4 September 1793 (Lewis Walpole Library, 793.9.4.1). To clarify the relation of these images to one another, we must understand their origins. Although they were undoubtedly inspired by the production of Flora (1729), the extent to which they record its staging is difficult to determine. Their chief purpose was to make money, not for the theatre but for the publishers, a factor that must be kept in mind when considering how the pictures were understood. Over time, the images became detached from the play altogether, and what they meant then is even harder to discern.

The University of Houston (UH) Libraries' Special Collections possesses several groups of papers and other items related to theatre and the performing arts, one of which is the Nina Vance Alley Theatre Papers. These items were donated to Special Collections in 2000. What follows is a brief biography of Nina Vance and history of the Alley as well as some highlights of items contained within this collection. Nina Vance was the Alley's first artistic director, from 1947 until her death in 1980. Along with Margo Jones and Zelda Fichandler, she helped shape the American regional-theatre movement in the later twentieth century. During her tenure at the Alley she directed 102 plays, produced 245 shows, and was awarded major grants, including significant funding from the Ford Foundation. Despite Vance's achievements in these areas, as well as in establishing the Alley as a respected theatre in the United States and across the world, few works of scholarship exist on her career. This could be partially due to the fact that many primary sources on the Alley Theatre and its founder, such as those found at the UH Libraries' Special Collections, have not been well publicized.

Geography has been accorded surprisingly little attention in the study of world theatre history. Maps are by no means the sum total of geographic knowledge, but their existence (or the lack thereof) provides a handy indicator of an author's interest in the subject. Oscar G. Brockett and Franklin J. Hildy's History of Theatre has numerous pictures of actors and diagrams of theatres but only one map that directly pertains to theatre. All the rest of its maps (of which there are fewer than two dozen) are standard-issue political maps. Theatre Histories: An Introduction, by Phillip B. Zarrilli and others, is groundbreaking in many ways, but it includes only six maps, and none of these directly concerns theatre. Each of the six volumes of The World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre includes only one map, a basic political one. Other standard reference works on the history of theatre contain no maps; these include The Cambridge Guide to Theatre, The Oxford Companion to the Theatre, and The Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre and Performance. Numerous types of map might be relevant for a study of theatre, but aside from the occasional political map, the basic overviews of theatre history do not include such resources.

Imagine a festival taking place before about five thousand people in a park in Adana, Turkey, in June 1992. In the middle of the park is a stage made of concrete. A touring Kurdish theatre company comprising four men, Hüseyin Kaytan, Kazım Öz, Nihat Öz, and Kemal Orgun, is performing a short play called Du Şivan (Two Shepherds). They enact a village raid and choose the villagers from among the audience. Kemal Orgun plays the commander of the task force raiding the village. The other three carry out the operation, rounding up the villagers. Orgun struts among the villagers, harassing them. All of a sudden, a woman jumps onstage and tries to grab the gun Orgun is carrying. He tries to wrest the gun from her, but she won't let go. A great commotion ensues, and more people clamber onstage to help the woman and attack the actors. When a man tries to strangle Orgun, he yells out in Kurdish, “Bira ma tu çi dikî, te ez kuştim?” (Hey my friend, what are you trying to do, kill me?). When the attacker finally understands Orgun is Kurdish, he releases and embraces him. Recounting this incident in his interview with me, Orgun remarks that they were almost lynched. The Kurdish woman who had jumped onstage and impulsively attacked Orgun had thought this was a real raid, just like those that had been taking place in Kurdish villages in Turkey for years. Her rage and instinctive self-protection is at one level slightly amusing, but this was also a bitter episode that demonstrated the consequences of the oppression of Kurdish people in the country. After the festival, Orgun and the other members named their theatre company Teatra Jiyana Nû (New Life Theatre). This became the foremost Kurdish theatre company and has trained many Kurdish actors, who in turn have further sustained and promoted Kurdish theatre by establishing their own companies.

In 1599–1600, after a lapse of almost ten years, the children's acting companies reappeared in London. The Paul's Children seem to have been the first to resume playing, quietly and modestly, no doubt testing the waters. After all, the boys' companies had one after another been officially suppressed between 1584 and 1590 because of their penchant for controversial material and the continual litigation among investors in the various earlier companies. Seeing the growing success of Paul's Boys, one of these earlier investors, Henry Evans, a Welsh scrivener, worked to reconstitute a company of boy actors at Blackfriars, seeking to make good on his aborted first attempt as a theatrical entrepreneur.

In September 1776, General Sir William Howe's troops took possession of New York City, having badly defeated Washington's forces in the Battle of Long Island. Howe, who had accepted his assignment in America with the greatest reluctance, set about making life as pleasant as possible for himself and for those around him. He had grown greatly concerned about the morale and comfort of his troops in a city that, compared to London, was little more than a backwater. Howe wrote to Lord George Germain, Secretary of State for the American Colonies, in England: “The troops had been so much harassed in the course of the last campaign, that I could not but wish that no manoeuvre of the enemy might hinder them from enjoying that repose, in their winter quarters, which their late fatigues rendered necessary, and their services entitled them to expect.”

On June 15, 1763, Jean Nicholas Servandoni was hired for one year at a salary of 15,000 marks (7,500 gulden), travel expenses, free lodging, and a carriage to work at the court of Herzog Karl Eugen in Württemberg. Thanks to the industry of Joseph Uriot, the Duke's librarian, we have brief but invaluable descriptions of the fifteen decorations which he produced for the spectacles of February 11, 1764, the magnificent festival in honor of the Duke's birthday.

Not at the opera, nor at any time in his career, was Servandoni's genius challenged as it was here, for he was in the company of Europe's most celebrated theatre personalities and perhaps its most sophisticated audience. His colleague for the occasion was Innocenz Colomba (1717–1793), an Italian designer of wide reputation, who had worked for the Duke since 1761. The operas were in the charge of Niccolo Jommelli, the chapel master there, and the ballets of Jean-Georges Noverre and his company of one hundred dancers, not including twenty principal performers each of whom had been first, dancer at one of Italy's chief theatres. The costumes were designed by Louis Boquet who spent a month each year at Württemberg.

Almost nothing survives of contractual arrangements between actors and managers in eighteenth-century America. The earliest known theatre contracts appear to be two documents, “Articles to be strictly observ'd, by the Managers and Performers belonging to the Maryland Company of Comedians” and “Rules to be Observ'd in the Baltimore Theatre, respecting Benefits.” They are undated but almost certainly from 1782, during the single year the company was managed by Thomas Wall and Adam Lindsay, whom the contracts name. The only other eighteenth-century documents of the kind, to my knowledge, are the well known “Articles of Agreement” between Hallam, Hodgkinson, and Dunlap of May 1796; “Regulations for the Old American Company at the Ensuing Benefits,” dated 24 March, 1797; and a briefly written contract of 1798 between Dunlap and the actress Mrs. Oldmixon.

The general outlines of Vanbrugh's Haymarket theatre project are well known. Since 1695 two companies had been playing in London: Christopher Rich's, with rights to Drury Lane and Dorset Garden; and Thomas Betterton's rebels, making shift in the cramped old Lincoln's Inn Fields theatre. The Queen's Theatre in the Haymarket was the first new theatre in London since “Wren's” “plain built” Drury Lane (1674), and the first lavish one since Dorset Garden (1671)—which had fallen into disrepair, and by the turn of the century was barely usable. The standard account of Vanbrugh's project is Colley Cibber's.

Regency toy Theatre flourished in England in the years between 1811 and 1830. At the height of its popularity thousands of middle and working class youths, together with their upper class “betters,” escaped the grim realities of industrial London for the joys of staging — and playing all the parts of — The Fairy of the Oak, or Harlequin's Regatta (1811), Ferdinand of Spain, or Ancient Chivalry (1813), Bluebeard (1824), or even more exotic pieces such as “The Grand New Spectacle called Korastikan, Prince of Assassins” (1824).