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.

Although the then-called Negro Units of the Federal Theatre Project arguably played a pivotal role in the development of African-American theatre, Rose McClendon (1884–1936) is unarguably one of the most overlooked contributors to its history. This oversight is extremely puzzling, in view of the fact that McClendon co-directed the Harlem Unit with John Houseman when it opened in 1935. Five years later Federal Theatre Project director Hallie Flanagan attributed much of the initial success of the unit, as well as the very idea of creating separate black units, to McClendon. Yet, except for a paragraph in Flanagan's Arena, little else has been recorded about McClendon's participation in the Project. Even the official history of the Negro Units written by the Federal Theatre Project's Department of Information claims that “guiding the destinations of the Negro Theatre at its inception were John Houseman and Orson Welles.” The history makes no reference to McClendon.

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.

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.

A Victorian actress who undertook the part of Shakespeare's Juliet was faced with a paradoxical situation typical of her age: the role offered her a chance to create two effects that had tremendous appeal to her audience — ecstatic love and gothic horror — yet she could not take full advantage of her opportunities without risking some critical condemnation. Among the actresses who successfully exploited the possibilities without being caught in the pitfalls was Helen Faucit, who chose Juliet for her “first appearance on any stage” in 1833 and continued to act it until her last professional engagement in 1871. Because Miss Faucit was particularly skillful in resolving the problems I have mentioned, her Juliet offers an interesting study in technique. I propose, first, to discuss the problems themselves, then to describe two closely-related methods by which Helen Faucit dealt with them, and, finally, to illustrate her use of these methods in several major scenes.

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.

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.

Though it has been almost completely overlooked, the arbitrary cancellation of the Seattle Negro Repertory Company's 1936 Lysistrata provides a remarkable opportunity to explore the connections between a single, seemingly localized action and a network of socially, politically, and racially repressive forces. Lysistrata's closure on ostensibly moral grounds reveals the operation of a set of cultural and social controls masked as standards of decency. An array of racist assumptions as rigid as those anywhere in the country, though somewhat more subtle, obscured the generally repressive ends that the control system served, both in Seattle and nationwide. The incident thus provides clues to the institutionalized antireform mechanisms that soon coalesced in a successful congressional attack on the Works Project Administration's Federal Theatre Project (FTP), of which the Negro Repertory Company (NRC) was a major unit. The Lysistrata cancellation's connection with that broader offensive also demonstrates the manner in which Hallie Flanagan's “free, adult, uncensored” national theatre threatened the nation's essentially conservative political power structure and drew the decisive backlash that eventually overturned efforts at social change during the Depression Era.

An inquiry into eighteenth-century American scene painting must draw upon sources other than painter's renderings, since few are known to survive. The most promising source other than printed descriptions, barren at best, are the non-theatrical landscape and topographical (view) paintings of America's early scenic artists. No employment of these materials is possible, however, until the parameters of the relationship between easel and scene painting have been established.

The love-hate nature of the relations between England and Italy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is well known. Ever since Henry VIII broke with Rome after Pope Clement VII refused to allow his divorce, things Italian were a popular object of satire and general disdain. An ever-increasing British nationalism founded on political, religious, and aesthetic principles during the seventeenth century fanned the flames of anti-Italian sentiment. This nationalism, newly consolidated in the seventeenth century by the ambitions of the Stuart monarchs to destroy Parliament, was intimately connected with English Protestantism. As Samuel Kliger has argued, the triumph of the Goths—Protestant Englishmen's Germanic ancestors—over Roman tyranny in antiquity became for seventeenth-century England a symbol of democratic success. Moreover, observes Kliger, an influential theory rooted in the Reformation, the “translatio imperii ad Teutonicos,” emphasized traditional German racial qualities—youth, vigor, manliness, and moral purity—over those of Latin culture—torpor, decadence, effeminacy, and immorality—and contributed to the modern constitution of the supreme role of the Goths in history. The German translatio implied an analogy between the conquest of the Roman Empire by the Goths (under Charlemagne) and the rallying of the humanist-reformers of northern Europe (e.g., Luther) for religious freedom, understood as liberation from Roman priestcraft; that is, “the translatio crystallized the idea that humanity was twice ransomed from Roman tyranny and depravity—in antiquity by the Goths, in modern times by their descendants, the German reformers…the epithet ‘Gothic’ became not only a polar term in political discussion, a trope for the ‘free,’ but also in religious discussion a trope for all those spiritual, moral, and cultural values contained for the eighteenth century in the single word ‘enlightenment.’”

When Constantin Stanislavski's An Actor Prepares first appeared in English translation in 1936, the Moscow Art Theater had already made a great impact on American theatre. Particularly influential in the Soviet director's theories of acting was his concept of emotion memory. In An Actor Prepares, the young actor, Kostya, tries to understand how to access the “memory of life” rather than the “theatrical archives of his mind” and has an epiphany at the moment when he recalls and relives the violence of an isolated vehicular accident that had dismembered its victim:

My subject this afternoon is “Early American Professional Acting.” To those who have not dipped into the beginnings of theatre history in this country, it may come as a surprise to learn that it's a vast subject, with a huge cast of characters, more scenes than the fourth act of Anthony and Cleopatra, and that liberal use of time which so offended Sir Philip Sidney.

In the late 1990s, the endlessly reinvented Shakespeare has apparently become a popular and successful screenwriter. The recent release of Richard III, William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet, Twelfth Night and Hamlet have brought an enthusiastic movie-going public to see, among other things, the Capulets and the Montagues on the beach and Hamlet striding through a cast of thousands at Elsinore. But this is not to suggest that this particular genre success is either new or inappropriate; the collection of artifacts known as Shakespeare (including but not limited to the plays themselves) has long signified as high art dedicated to the education of not just a theatre-going elite nor the mass audiences of popular media, but everyone. On a global scale, Shakespeare means culture or, as Michael Bristol would more wittily have it, Shakespeare is “big time.” This history of the cultural capital that is Shakespeare continues to have a fascination for, and a usefulness to the producers and distributors of films. Thus, to turn Shakespeare from playwright to screenwriter is, culturally speaking, both a pragmatic and predictable strategy. And it is a strategy that has more or less existed as long as film itself.

In the “last analysis” the concern must always be for insight. Saul Bellow made it a demand: “Now I want insight.” So, too, should the reader of theatre history. Unfortunately, in the vast majority of recently published material on American theatre history that demand is not being met. Among the many young scholars researching and writing on this subject, few appear even to aspire to that mastery of the material which will produce major scholarship. The old guard persists, but today's youthful historians of American theatre tend toward an annual birth and death pattern rather than perennial growth. Obviously, such an observation should not be construed as an adverse criticism of all existing scholarship; yet, it does describe a general condition of research in American theatre history. There are surveys, general observations, memoirs, descriptions, expository and critical essays on various topics, studies of theatres and playwrights, essays on popular entertainment and ethnic or racial theatre. Some of these publications contribute meaningfully to an understanding of American theatre; few, however, suggest insight into the history of that theatre.

The Baltimore Company of Comedians which had performed openly and successfully in Maryland since 1782 attempted to gain a foothold in the traditionally hostile state of Pennsylvania in November, 1783. The troupe's manager, Dennis Ryan, petitioned the Pennsylvania legislature to rescind its statute prohibiting plays. When his petition was denied, he produced three evenings' entertainment through the use of a clever subterfuge: The Temple of Apollo, a play and pantomime disguised as a concert, reading, and dance. Although Ryan's ruse was clever, it was not wholly successful: he and his actors had to take precipitous leave of Philadelphia when a riot swept through the house during the last of their three scheduled performances and alerted the sheriff to their activities. Nevertheless, Ryan was the first actor-manager to attempt to evade post-revolutionary legislative opposition to theatre by making plays appear non-theatrical.

In ‘“You Are Here’: H.I.J.O.S. and the DNA of Performance,” a chapter in The Archive and the Repertoire, Diana Taylor locates the intergenerational transfer of traumatic memory relating to Argentina's Dirty War geographically with a map—identifying, for example, where tens of thousands opposed to the country's military dictatorship (one-third of them women) were made to disappear—but she also locates this transfer genealogically and even genetically, in terms of the bodies of surviving relatives who remain as visible evidence (quite literally, through family photographs) of the material existence of their missing parents and children. Like Taylor, I attend to both the physical geography and the embodied genealogy of cultural memory in this article, which is concerned with making connections between the hemispheric traffic in missing and murdered Indigenous women of the Americas. I want to begin by acknowledging some of the sites of individual trauma and various sights of collective protest and witnessing related to this topic.

Although Langston Hughes's Mulatto holds the record as the second longest Broadway production of a play by an African American playwright (surpassed only by Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun), the reasons behind its commercial success have been virtually ignored. This oversight in part reflects a tendency among theatre scholars to treat the dramatic text as the primary (if not the only) source of a play's meaning. In the case of Mulatto, academic critics have debated its literary merit according to questions of form and genre. Webster Smalley, in his introduction to the collected plays of Langston Hughes, for instance, defends Mulatto as a tragedy, arguing that the play avoids the tendency of social dramas of the 1930s “to oversimplify moral issues as in melodrama” because of the recognition of Bert's “tragic situation” (he must kill himself or be killed by an angry lynch mob). For those critics who insist that Mulatto is melodramatic, Smalley advises, “let [them] look to the racial situation in the deep South as it is even today [i.e., 1963]: it is melodramatic.” Smalley presupposes a dichotomous relationship between fiction and reality, advancing a mimetic theory in which representation directly corresponds to the real. Rather than answering specific charges, he defines contemporary race relations as melodrama, implying that Mulatto, even if melodramatic, is “natural” and “accurate.”