The Theatre History Podcast

How did "Method" acting come to be? Isaac Butler joins us to talk about the history of this acting style and his book The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act.

Stand-up comedy has long been associated with White men. But, as Dr. Rachel Blackburn explains in this episode, there’s a long history of women of color performing stand-up. Today, BIPOC comedians are challenging boundaries and raising new issues in ways that are changing the nature of live comedy.

The Yiddish theatre has a long and rich history. But all too often that history focuses on the prominent men who found success on the stage. Now two scholars of Yiddish theatre have launched a new project to correct that historiographical imbalance. It’s called “Women on the Yiddish Stage: Primary Sources,” and it’s part of the Digital Yiddish Theatre Project, which chronicles the history of the Yiddish stage. Amanda Seigel and Dr. Alyssa Quint join us to share their work on the project and give us some glimpses into the lives of the underappreciated women who made the Yiddish theatre so vital.

Playwright August Wilson's legacy has loomed ever larger over American theatre in the years since his death in 2005. In 2020, the University of Pittsburgh announced that it had acquired his archive and would make it accessible to the public. We're joined by Dr. Sandra Shannon and Bil Daw to discuss the new archive and how Wilson continues to influence us today

The so-called "Negro Units" of the Federal Theatre Project are often remembered for productions involving White artists such as Orson Welles. But, as Dr. Kate Dossett reveals in her book "Radical Black Theatre in the New Deal," the story of Black artists and audiences in the FTP was a much more complicated one, in which Black actors and writers fought to ensure that they could tell their own stories.

The devastation wrought by the covid-19 pandemic has left us all questioning what we should be working towards as we pick up the pieces and try to build a theatre that reflects our changed world, One possible model comes from the past: the Federal Theatre Project, which for a few years in the 1930s offered a national theatre that brought performances to every corner of the country. How might we revive some of the spirit and substance of that project? To answer that question, we’re joined by Dr. Elizabeth A. Osborne of Florida State University and Corinna Schulenburg, director of communications at the Theatre Communications Group.

The Federal Theatre Project was a landmark of American theatre history whose influence has far outlived its brief existence in the 1930s. There’s probably no bigger trove of information about and material pertaining to the FTP than at the Library of Congress, which holds thousands of the programs and fliers printed to accompany its theatrical productions. Archivist Morgen Stevens-Garmon joins us to talk about an exciting new project that will let you read and transcribe them.

The connection between theatre and the law is a deep one that goes back thousands of years. Dr. Luke McDonagh has been tracing this connection in the context of British authors such as Shakespeare, and his new book Performing Copyright: Law, Theatre and Authorship looks at how copyright law affects dramatic works in the United Kingdom.

If you've been to a Broadway show, you've probably seen the merchandise booth. You may even have bought a t-shirt, or a magnet for your fridge. But where did the Broadway merchandise industry come from? Margaret Hall joins us to talk about her recent Theatermania articles chronicling the rise and development of this unique theatrical industry.

We know that over half of the plays produced during Shakespeare's time have since been lost. What might we discover about that era if we knew what those lost plays were about? Dr. Davis McInnis's book "Shakespeare and Lost Plays" explores what we can figure out from the fragmentary evidence that remains.