Books in the Theater: Theory/Text/Performance series

Challenging the widely accepted idea that Broadway was the white-hot creative engine of US theatre during the early 20th century, Katie Johnson reveals a far more complex system of exchanges between the Broadway establishment and a vibrant Black theatre scene in New York and beyond to chart a new history of American and transnational theatre.

Proposes that theatre spectatorship has made a significant contribution to the historical development of a distinctive bourgeois sensibility, characterized by the cultivation of distance. This study of history, class, and spectatorship offers proof of 'why theatre matters', and demonstrates the importance of examining the question historically.

Reveals the international and intercultural connections within contemporary performance from Oceania, focusing on theatre, performance art, art installations, dance, film, and activist performance in sites throughout Oceania and in Australia, Asia, North America, and Europe.

Analyses uses of space, time, media communication, and corporeality in protests such as virtual sit-ins, flash mobs, scarfazos, and hashtag campaigns, arguing that these protests not only challenge hegemonic power but are also socially transformative.

'Sails of the Herring Fleet' traces director and theorist Herbert Blau's encounters with Samuel Beckett. Blau directed Beckett's plays when they were virtually unknown and has remained a leading interpreter of Becket's work over four decades.

Analyzes and synthesizes modern critical acting theories, their historical evolution, and their relationship to one another, enabling students, teachers, and professionals to comprehend the different aesthetic possibilities for actors. This work identifies six categories of twentieth-century acting.

Presents a range of critical and theoretical methods, and applies them to contemporary and historical performance genres - from stage plays, dance-dramas, performance art, cabaret, stand-up comedy, and jazz to circus, street theater, and shamanistic ritual. This edition features sixteen essays, which are organized into nine theoretical categories.

Reimagines the content and continuities of theatre history and exposes underlying dialogues between ""home and homelessness, belonging and exile"" - a century-long struggle with the meaning and power of place, which the author terms ""geopathology"".