Furthermore: Where the Headlines Take You

Tony, Tony, Tony!

Nominees for this year's Tony Awards were announced today, making this an ideal time to highlight some great books about the theater!

One could easily argue that the entire English-speaking world traces some of its lineage back to the London stage. Of course most theaters now have a myriad of influences, but London's pull is strong, and no place in the western tradition has a longer history of such a wide array of aspects of the dramatic craft: performance, playwriting, dramatic instruction, theater management or, on the other hand, of the drama's influence on society. But if you're curious about London's theater history, it's hard to know what to put at the top of your reading list. Search no longer, friends, I have the book for you! It's London Theatre: From the Globe to the National, in which James Roose-Evans hits the highlights of London stage history: Shakespeare and the Elizabethans, the suppression of the theater during the Commonwealth period, the Old Price Riots of 1809, the patent theaters that had monopolies on performing “serious” plays, and many other fascinating subjects.

The Works Progress Administration's Federal Theatre Project was intended partly to employ actors, playwrights, and other theater professionals during the Great Depression, but it also aimed to bring the diversion and inspiration of the theater to regular people across America. As Susan Quinn explains in her history Furious Improvisation, the FTP brought dozens of new and experimental plays to diverse audiences all over the country, tackled social and political issues of the day, and presented pioneering reinventions of classics like Macbeth with all-Black casts. But this vital project in the development of the American theater ended when the House Un-American Activities Committee shut the Federal Theatre Project down in 1939.

However, the 1930s wasn't the last period of innovation on the American stage. In the late 1950s, the New York City neighborhood of Greenwich Village was host to a new development in theater when Café Cino, a small coffeehouse, opened and began featuring poetry readings and actors performing scenes. This fertile ground for experimental dramatic work eventually led to a movement of edgy new theater that came to be known as Off-Off-Broadway. David A. Crespy's Off-Off-Broadway Explosion explains how this revolution took off, and introduces the visionary young playwrights (Edward Albee, Sam Shepard, Amiri Baraka, and many others) who were the creative force behind the movement. And, in a concluding chapter, Crespy gives advice to aspiring playwrights, actors, and others who want to create their own space for experimental theater work – hopefully facilitating new artistic revolutions in our near future!