Environmental catastrophe. Political conflict. The ugly breakdown of a society that had previously seemed harmonious and peaceful. Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People contains much that speaks to our present-day anxieties. Dr. Paul Walsh of the Yale School of Drama has been thinking about this play a lot recently, because he’s the translator for a brand-new version of the play, which recently premiered as the first production of the Yale Repertory Theatre’s 52nd season and runs through October 28, 2017. Paul joined us to talk about Ibsen’s surprisingly comic take on serious issues, as well as the process of translation itself.

William Shakespeare’s plays continue to be some of the most frequently-produced works on our stages. While his dominance allows new generations to enjoy his work, it also poses a difficult question: how do we keep Shakespeare relevant when his plays have often been associated with a patriarchal, Eurocentric point of view? Madeline Sayet is looking for answers to that question, and it’s led her to create productions of Shakespeare’s work that incorporate the perspectives of Native American artists and performers. She joined the Theatre History Podcast to talk about how she’s working to change our perspective on Shakespeare and his legacy.

Community theatre, school plays, and other examples of performances by non-professional actors don’t often don’t get a lot of respect or scholarly attention. David Coates, who’s in the closing stages of his doctorate at the University of Warwick, is trying to change that. He’s one of a growing group of scholars who are reassessing amateur theatre (in his case, specifically in Britain in the long nineteenth century, 1789-1914) and finding that its history is far more complex and interesting than we’d previously assumed.

The Harry Ransom Center, a world-renowned research library and museum at the University of Texas at Austin, holds many treasures. Its performing arts collections are particularly fascinating, as Dr. Eric Colleary, the Cline Curator of Theater and Performing Arts at the center, tells us in this episode. Eric shares some of his favorite items in the collections and tells listeners how they can further explore the Harry Ransom Center.

Nowadays, when someone accuses you of being “melodramatic,” it’s got a pejorative connotation, and usually means you’re acting in an overly emotional and hyperbolic way. But melodrama, which emerged during the French Revolution, was a rich and complicated theatrical genre. Now, the team behind the University of Warwick’s Staging Napoleonic Theatre project, which includes Dr. Katherine Astbury, Dr. Diane Tisdall, and Dr. Sarah Burdett, is working to both study and stage melodramas. They’ve already performed Roseliska, a unique piece written by French prisoners-of-war in England, and they’re preparing to stage La forteresse du Danube, one of the many hits written by Renè-Charles Guilbert de Pixerècourt, who claimed to have invented the genre. They joined us to talk about melodrama’s origins and how it worked onstage, as well as to demonstrate how music was an integral part of these spectacular plays.

Are Broadway musicals feminist? It’s a fair question, given that many classic examples of the genre evince their fair share of outdated attitudes regarding gender and the role of women in society. However, as Dr. Stacy Wolf of Princeton University points out, there’s a surprising undercurrent of feminism even in the more traditional musicals of the 1950s or major commercial hits of recent years, such as Wicked. Stacy’s book Changed for Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical tracks how women’s roles have changed on the stage throughout the post-war period, and she joined us to share some of her insights.

The characters and events of ancient Greek drama might seem remote from our present-day concerns, but Bryan Doerries and Theater of War Productions don’t see it that way. Since 2009, this company has used readings from classical theatre to tackle issues from post-traumatic stress disorder to the community impact of gun violence. Now Bryan’s a New York City Public Artist in Residence, working with city agencies to stage over sixty events all across the city. He joined us to discuss Theater of War’s work and the continuing relevance of ancient drama.

John Marston was a controversial early modern English playwright and poet with a nose for trouble, but he’s relatively obscure in comparison with some of his major contemporaries, such as William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. Now a team of scholars is preparing The Complete Works of John Marston, which will collect his writings together in a critical edition for the first time. Dr. Matthew Steggle of Sheffield Hallam University and Dr. José A. Pérez Díez of the University of Leeds are two members of that team, and they join the show this week to tell us more about Marston and how they’re working to bring his works back into the spotlight.

The phrase “morality play” often comes off as pejorative today; it’s a phrase that we use when we want to dismiss something as dull and didactic. But Dr. Matthew Sergi of the University of Toronto begs to differ. He’s been studying and, most importantly, staging these works, and he’s come to some unexpected conclusions about how these plays function and what performing them today can tell us about our own world.

Most of us know Oscar Wilde for his sparkling, witty comedy The Importance of Being Earnest. But he also wrote tragedies, most notably the scandalous Salomé. He’d intended the play, which dramatizes the biblical episode in which the title character causes the death of John the Baptist, as a star vehicle for the great French actress Sarah Bernhardt, but his plans never came to fruition. Eleanor Fitzsimons, author of Wilde’s Women: How Oscar Wilde Was Shaped by the Women He Knew, joins us the story of this unique play.