The Ethiopian Art Theatre was founded in response to the racial strife of early twentieth-century Chicago. From 1910 to 1920, the migration of Southern blacks to Chicago more than doubled the black population from 44,103 to 109,458. White citizens felt threatened by the influx, fearing unemployment and epidemics in crime and health. Racial tensions increased from 1917 to 1919 as white gangs openly assaulted blacks. So-called “neighborhood improvement societies” bombed black homes and realty offices suspected of attempting to break up white residential areas. The Chicago Association of Commerce and the Chicago Tribune encouraged blacks to return to the South.

This paper has two principal, though interrelated, objectives: to survey issues concerning the status of the texts of Greek Tragedy, particularly with respect to specific distinctions between a play as text-based and as audience experienced, between the “eye” of the reader of a play text and the eye of the theatrical spectator; and to consider some implications of these distinctions for Euripidean drama, above all with respect to The Bacchae, since its procedures, albeit more developed or extravagant than elsewhere, may be construed as characteristic for this drama. Much of what I shall say has reference also to the other—Aeschylean, Sophoclean—texts that we have of Greek Tragedy. But it is with Euripides that the terms of the relationship of text and play are most explicit, and controversial, and, it seems to me, most dislocated. We have “read’ Euripides sometimes very wrongly because we have been reading Euripidean texts.

Charleston will be celebrating another bicentennial in 1993, the restoration of its theatre. Several illustrations of the Charleston Theatre of 1793, its scenery, costumes, and performers have recently surfaced, enabling us to celebrate its bicentennial more vividly. An oil painting of the theatre under construction reappeared in a private estate in 1989 and was purchased by the Gibbes Art Gallery, Charleston, the following year. In addition, watercolors and pencil sketches of the interior of the theatre, its scenery, and costumes have recently been deposited at the South Carolina Historical Society.

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.

While earlier dramatists treated Medea as a dramatic character, it was Euripides who gave her enduring theatrical prominence. Beyond crafting a timely attack upon a treacherous Corinth to appeal to Athens at the start of the Peloponnesian War, Euripides developed Medea to question the social role of women within a proudly patriarchal society. And he may have been the first to make Medea a non-Greek, a Colchian, a “barbarian”—a term that had become more derisive in the fifth century. In the Golden Age, a female foreigner was marginalized by gender and by heritage/race/ethnicity; a justified or sympathetic Medea challenged Athenian prejudices about both. Yet this Medea is problematic: a seriously aggrieved wife is driven to horrible acts against Greeks—Jason, his sons, the king of Corinth, and as a complicating fillip of multi-gender vengeance, the female rival. Our sympathies are subverted: a wronged Medea could also be a bloody figure of feminine and alien power, fatal to men and women, public and domestic order.

It has long been known that details of the design of John Rich's Covent Garden theatre of 1732 are contained in the Chancery bill of complaint that he entered against the builder, Edward Shepherd, in Shepherd's lengthy answer, and his counter-complaint. These documents, written on the usual great membranes and now rather scuffed and rubbed, are difficult to work with because of their physical characteristics and their interminable repetitiveness.

To view street actions of the American colonial period as theatrical events is nothing new. As Jeffrey Richards has shown in his much-admired book of 1991, writers of the colonial period—even in towns where “official” theatre performances were strictly prohibited—preferred the metaphors of theatre over any others in describing the actions of individuals and crowds upon what these writers saw as the “world stage.”

In recent critical theory, the word performance has undergone a significant expansion, some would say an inflation. As the Editor's Note to the May issue of PMLA (“Special Topic: Performance”) observes, “What once was an event has become a critical category, now applied to everything from a play to a war to a meal. The performative … is a cultural act, a critical perspective, a political intervention.” Theatre historians will perhaps greet such pronouncements with mixed emotions. On one hand, they may welcome the acknowledgment by the principal organ of the Modern Language Association that performance (as opposed to drama merely) can count for so much. On the other hand, they may wonder what exactly is intended by the conceptual leap that takes performance beyond the established theatrical genres to encompass armed conflict and comestibles.

In many studies of South African theatre, critical scholarship has elucidated the ways in which playwrights have dramatized their views of oppression and struggle under apartheid. As political change in the country in the 1990s determines new developments in cultural expression, theatre in many quarters finds itself no longer thematically bound to the unambiguous morality which characterized anti-apartheid theatre in the 1970s and 1980s. The issues, and the forms and methods used to construct interpretations of the issues in the theatre, appear increasingly more complex in the 1990s. In academic commentary on South African theatre, a moral outrage shared with theatre practitioners against a repugnant social system has frequently blunted critical faculties. Gayatri Spivak warns us that in the writing of history we need to “look at [our] own subjective investment in the narrative that is being produced.“ There is, in South African theatre studies, a great deal of room for critical vigilance when considering “theatre against apartheid.”

In order to recuperate from the rigors of the first production of The Ring at Bayreuth, Richard and Cosima Wagner took an Italian vacation. During their travels they visited the Sistine Chapel. After he had observed the interior, Richard pronounced, “This is like my theatre, one feels it is no place for jokes.” Cosima, never one to contradict her husband, reserved comment. In fact, there can be little doubt that she agreed with him, for in her Diaries she consistently invests the Festspielhaus with an aura of sanctity.

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.

Western scholarship on Russian theatre has been so dominated by a few prominent figures that the casual student of theatre history might justifiably be left with the impression that Russian theatre began in 1898 with the founding of the Moscow Art Theatre and ended in the 1930s with Stalin's “purification” of Soviet art and literature and the untimely disappearance of Meierhold. The absence of a significant body of research further reinforces the notion that a small gaggle of men—most notably, those associated with the MAT—were solitary beacons of progress in the otherwise barren landscape of nineteenth-century popular theatre.