On 5 January 1813, an anonymous London theatre critic, reviewing Covent Garden's Harlequin and the Red Dwarf; or, The Adamantine Rock for The Times, enthused over the pantomime's oriental (i.e., Middle Eastern) subject matter, insisting that:

Elaine Aston begins Feminist Views on the English Stage by pondering why, given the optimism for English feminist theatre at the close of the 1980s, the 1990s saw a diminishing interest in women's voices. She asks, “If ‘masculinity and its discontents’ culturally and theatrically moved centre stage in the 1990s, what happened to women and to feminism?”(5) In order to counteract the prevailing view of the 1990s as a decade dominated by the overarching theme of “masculinity in crisis,” she focuses her book on women playwrights. Aston detects a theatrical backlash against the partial advances made by women playwrights during the 1980s, mirroring a backlash against feminism within popular culture in general. In contrast to the “shock fests” of the reemergent “angry young men,” who have often been charged with nihilism, she argues that the works she examines remain politically engaged. Aston explains that Feminist Views is motivated by her desire to prevent women playwrights from being “written out” of the theatrical record.

As the first published collection of early blackface-performance texts, W. T. Lhamon's Jump Jim Crow: Lost Plays, Lyrics, and Street Prose of the First Atlantic Popular Culture provides scholars of American popular entertainment with a much-needed sourcebook. These texts are collected in service of the book's larger purpose of evaluating the career of Thomas Dartmouth “Daddy” Rice, the first superstar of blackface performance, who became synonymous with his most popular character, Jim Crow. All the songs and plays gathered in Jump Jim Crow were performed by Rice (with the exception of the “street prose” section, which includes two contemporary, pamphlet biographies of Rice). The texts work with Lhamon's introduction to tell the story of Rice's career, which is a case study of the larger topic: the history of blackface performance before the rise of the minstrel show in the mid-1840s. As the plays collected here reveal, Rice's performance of blackface was fundamentally different from minstrel-show performance on many levels. The most important difference, Lhamon argues in his introduction, is that Rice's performances encouraged the white audience to identify with his blackface character, to laugh with him rather than at him.

Dancers, dance theorists, and dance historians have long confronted a double marginality—a life in dance is fragile not simply because dance is ephemeral, but its professional opportunities are scarce. Within the academy, dance is notoriously treated as a minor literature, and dance studies seldom enjoy influence outside their specialized readerships. These predicaments for dance studies can attach to more general concerns about contemporary culture. A consumer society is oriented to mass media with little value for interpersonal encounter that live performance offers. The body has been eclipsed by the machine, and the drive for speed has rendered audiences intolerant of dance's gestural nuance and impatient with its kinesthetic detail. Accordingly, the persistence of dance would seem almost perverse, a nostalgic longing for lost innocence that winds up being self-marginalizing. Against this narrative, one that can be found among dance scholars who favor more restrictive aesthetic conceptions of dance art within Western concert conventions, Felicia McCarren offers a counter-Edenic tale, one that locates dance as central to modernism's own origins, that offers a rethinking of the one-dimensionally woeful account of mechanization, and ultimately provides a reason for those outside of dance to adopt its conceptual efficacy.

One of the seven titles in Southern Illinois University Press's Theatre in the Americas series, David Rinear's book elevates the early nineteenth-century actor-manager William E. Burton to the front ranks of American theatre in the period of transition from stock companies to touring stars. As Rinear writes, “no one in the theatrical or literary world of pre–Civil War America left a mark so thoroughly on his age as William E. Burton. He was lauded as the greatest comic actor of his age, and his managerial acumen provided him with a tremendous fortune” (xii). Perhaps because Burton specialized in such little-studied areas as low comedy and management, this is the first thorough study to give due attention to his career.

Wagner has proved more fortunate than other opera composers in the liveliness, variety, and intellectual enterprise of his critical interpreters during the past decade or two. One need only cite Thomas Grey's study of the composer's aesthetics in Wagner's Musical Prose (1995); Carolyn Abbate's deconstruction of his narrative passages in Unsung Voices (1991); and Marc Weiner's analysis of how nineteenth-century racial codes shape the operas in Richard Wagner and the Anti-Semitic Imagination (1995) to note the range of approaches that have been applied to him.

Margaret Webster's struggles and triumphs as a professional director in New York and London are not cited by theatre historians—especially feminist theatre historians—as often as they should be. Before her death in 1972, she had become the first woman director ever to work on Broadway, founded the American Repertory Theatre with her lifelong partner and colleague Eva Le Gallienne, directed a groundbreaking production of Othello with Paul Robeson in 1942, faced Joe McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee, and she had published several wonderful books about theatre (the best known are Shakespeare Without Tears, The Same Only Different, and Don't Put Your Daughter on the Stage).

Death by Drama is revisionist theatre history at its invigorating best. Taking her cue from modern studies of urban legends, Jody Enders treats theatrical apocrypha—such as the well-known account of a convicted heretic who was supposedly executed on stage during a performance of the drama of Judith and Holofernes in 1549 in Tournai—not as fact, as such stories have often unquestioningly been taken, but as medieval urban legends that reveal spectators' attitudes toward the theatre as a place of potential threat where the true and the false dangerously mix. Looking at such legends as expressions of a culture's specific hopes, fears, and anxieties, Enders examines the “ways in which early France told, retold, invented, and reinvented stories of the tenuous boundaries between theatre and real life, thereby helping audiences to confront the nature of artistic representation” (xxiv). Although Enders's focus is medieval French theatre, her reach extends to modern theatre, film, and media, and her impeccable historical scholarship is enriched by savvy recourse to contemporary critical theory and performance studies. The resulting book shakes up settled assumptions about “what really happened” on the medieval stage, while raising profound questions about theatre's social functions then and now.

Many theatre scholars are familiar with the name Mercedes de Acosta but do not know the nature of her connection to the theatre—her close ties to notable actresses and the plays that she wrote. Robert A. Schanke has published two books that hope to clarify de Acosta's place in theatre history. The first is a biography that takes the reader from her exotic background of Spanish ancestry and her stolen inheritance through her innumerable affairs with such figures as Maude Adams, Eva Le Gallienne, Nazimova, Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, and Isadora Duncan. The biography concludes with de Acosta's last years, impoverished, nearly forgotten, and lonely.

R. A. Foakes's latest book, Shakespeare and Violence, addresses an area of significant interest in Shakespeare studies. Foakes begins with a general discussion of the prevalence and persistence of violence in both life and literature. He then focuses on the evolution of Shakespeare's use of violence in his histories, tragedies, and romances. The result is a thought-provoking, well-written, and often genuinely interesting study of this subject and its manifestations in Shakespeare's plays.

From 1947 to 1962, Broadway audiences enjoyed major works by Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller as well as plays ranging from A Thousand Clowns to Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and a string of durable musical comedies offering light and dark visions of the urban streets (Guys and Dolls and West Side Story), inspirational fables (The Music Man and The Sound of Music), and war in legend and in recent memory (Camelot and South Pacific). Meanwhile, Judith Malina and Julian Beck founded the Living Theatre, José Quintero and Theodore Mann established the Circle in the Square, Joe Papp offered his first free Shakespeare productions in New York City parks, and Joe Cino and Ellen Stewart led the development of Off-Off Broadway. This heterogeneous theatre scene comprised diverse and even competing representations of a complex but interconnected culture, and Bruce A. McConachie has undertaken the task of elucidating the workings of such art not in isolation but as cultural and social production.

These three books consider, in different ways, the interrelatedness of modern directing, stage directions, and Shakespeare's texts. All three focus on Shakespeare, although two focus more on the single text of Hamlet, and all three consider how the plays are both text and performance, and how Shakespeare on the stage and Shakespeare on the page are interrelated but distinct.

The theatre has long been recognized as a site from which national and social values can be promoted, and this was particularly the case with the Little Theatre and summer stock phenomena. Even when performing non-American plays, these movements addressed the education of the audience, as Dorothy Chansky and Martha Schmoyer LoMonaco make apparent in two rigorously researched studies. Both have chosen to focus on the audience as an integral component of the theatrical event and, eschewing postmodern theories of the spectator's gaze, they bring a sociohistorical perspective to their findings, which are based on in-depth research of theatre documents, memoirs, and reviews. Chansky examines how the Little Theatres constructed and educated their audiences, whereas LoMonaco, in tracing the history of a number of summer-stock theatres, uncovers the hold that the audience has on artistic and financial policies. The two books cover areas and aspects of theatre history not frequently studied; they examine the complex artistic and economic issues involved in founding and running a theatre, while also certifying that American theatre has never been contained by a few streets in the vicinity of Times Square.

Marianne McDonald's book provides a solid introduction to ancient tragedy and theatre. The author examines the works by the three major ancient Greek tragedians, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and supplies for each playwright biographies, synopses of their works, and modern and ancient translations and adaptations of their plays. The listing of the translations and adaptations is selective and spans from the classical period up to the twentieth century.

While few would argue that commercial theatre on Broadway today is the artistic heart of the American theatre, fascination with Broadway and its productions has not diminished, as witnessed by Steven Adler's thorough and thought-provoking study of contemporary producing, On Broadway: Art and Commerce on the Great White Way. Having interviewed sixty-six professionals in the field over a period of five years, Adler is able to cover his subject from many angles as he allows each person to offer opinions on everything from the corporate involvement in Broadway to the absence of scenes from nonmusicals on the annual Tony Awards broadcast.

David Crespy's account of Off-Off Broadway's roots in New York City is a welcome addition to a growing body of scholarship on this vibrant period in American theatre history. Many authors writing on this era have limited themselves to focusing on particular theatre groups, such as the Living Theatre, Café Cino, and the Open Theatre, or on the work of specific playwrights, such as Maria Irene Fornés, Sam Shepard, and Edward Albee. More historical accounts are needed to examine a cross section of theatre practitioners in the context of the political and artistic movements of the 1960s. Crespy has managed to do this to some degree, and has even convinced the elusive Edward Albee to write a foreword.

American Puppetry: Collections, History and Performance, edited by Phyllis T. Dircks, is a valuable collection of essays on the state of puppet theatre in America and useful documentations of extant collections that will serve puppeteers. Dircks identifies the need for this work in her introduction when she, rightly, comments that “[f]ortunately, thousands of puppets from various cultures and many time periods have been collected by scholars, enthusiasts and curators, who wisely realized that these material images can teach us much about the society for which they were crafted” (4). Her careful and thorough collection chronicles the well-known, such as Bread and Puppet, the Muppets, and Howdy Doody, as well as the lesser-known facts in the field of puppetry—for example, Peter Arnott's use of puppets to stage plays from classical dramatic literature. The volume is also up to date; the work of Julie Taymor is discussed for its fusion of human performers with the surreal and for its highly imaginative puppet creations.

Theatre and Empowerment is a collection of essays about theatre projects worldwide that engage local people in addressing their own concerns. Editors Richard Boon and Jane Plastow explain how they selected the essays: All are written from the perspective of writers' experiences in the field; they embrace diverse communities, issues, and practices; and all are “profoundly subversive of established power,” including the authority of the artist-facilitators themselves, “in favor of more open-ended, democratic and meaningful learning processes” (3–4). Paulo Freire's spirit hovers over the collection, which emphasizes both reflection and action. The editors write that the processes described in the collection require “people to think and to analyze . . . [and] question the root causes of their problems and oppressions” (7).

Shannon Jackson's bracing, intelligent new book historicizes the study of performance in American colleges and universities from the advent of the theatre major about a century ago to the present. Using Foucault's notion of genealogy, Jackson is ever mindful that concepts such as theatre, theatre studies, performance, discipline, and so on, cannot be understood outside of their “enabling enunciative conditions” (30)—the contexts and institutions in which they are constituted. Is performance “a vehicle of community formation . . . [or] a site of social transgression”? Is it “an intentional realm of purposive action [or] an unintentional realm of spontaneous or habitual enactment” (14)? Saying “both” is probably correct, but to read Jackson's investigation of the “vagaries of the term ‘performance'” (11) is to appreciate how limited such a facile answer is, absent a nuanced grasp of the territorial battles that defined the terms at key points in our collective past.