What we Shoulda Did...or, a glimpse at Recent U.S. Theatre History

Some Recent U.S. Theatre History

I have always thought that theatre history (according to Dr Jack, which is what students got – like it or not – for 20-plus years) should be a three-semester course, one to approximately 1600, another to 1900, a third the twentieth (and now a bit of the twenty-first) century. But alas, the department gave me only two semesters in which to teach many students the entire gamut. This means we left out large chunks of world theatre, and some important and very recent events in U.S, theatre. This small and incomplete addendum attempts to address the latter, which I spoke about in a more comprehensive manner in another course I taught, Contemporary Developments in Theatre.

A lifetime ago - or more!

One day a long long time ago, when I still used to look under the hood of my car, I opened it one day at a gas station because steam was coming out. I almost immediately took a cloth and opened the radiator, from which a huge hot waterspout gushed. I jumped back, very lucky not to have got scalded or worse. Then an old guy who had been watching all of this sauntered over very slowly and said to me, “What you shoulda did...” Thanks a lot!

Here’s some of what we “shoulda did,” in recent U.S. Theatre history, but never got to:

An Increasingly Diverse Theatrical Culture

In the 1960s, with the introduction of important Civil Rights legislation, several groups that had struggled to maintain 

themselves in the world of theatre began to come into their own. The beginnings of African American theatre had been marred by caricatures of Blacks in minstrel shows, but it grew gradually into a theatre performed by, for, and about Blacks.  In the 1940s the American Negro Theatre lasted for ten years, and in the 1950s a few African American writers rose to some prominence. It was not until 1959, however, when Lorraine Hansberry (1930-1965) wrote the Tony Award-winning A Raisin in the Sun, that Black theatre had its first truly major success. 

African American Theatre in the 1960s and 70s

After Hansberry’s play an black theatre almost literally exploded onto the scene.  In the 1960s, it was frequently angry theatre, best 

personified in the work of writer Leroi Jones, later Amiri Baraka (1934-  ) whose 1964 play Dutchman featured a violent confrontation on a subway train between a black man and a white woman, and whose later play Slave Ship (1969) inventively presented the brutal treatment of blacks by their white overlords on a voyage from Africa to America.  In addition to his writing, Baraka opened the Harlem’s Black Arts 

Theatre/School in 1964, which was responsible for training many black theatre artists.  Ed Bullins (1935-  ) wrote several plays focused on black pride, winning an Obie Award and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for The Taking of Miss Janie (1975).  He served as playwright-in-residence at the New Lafayette Theatre in Harlem, one of several African American theatres to spring up in the 1960s. The longest-lived of these was the Negro Ensemble Company, founded in 1967 by Robert Hooks and Douglas Turner Ward.  The group was able to maintain itself well into the 1990s, winning a Tony Award for Joseph Walker’s The River Niger in 1973 and the Pulitzer Prize for Charles Fuller’s A Soldier’s Play in 1981.

Alice Childress (1920-1994) wrote several plays, including Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black and White, which was produced by Joe Papp at the Public Theatre, and Wine in the 

Wilderness (1969), about an underestimated but powerful young black woman.  More recently Ntozake Shange (1948-  ) wrote a series of poems, for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf (1975), which she performed at bars in New York’s Lower East Side, and called it a “choreopoem,” a very apt term for it. This unique piece of work was produced at the New Lafayette Theatre, then at the Public, after which it transferred to the Booth Theatre for a Broadway run. 

Shange’s successful choreopoem was unusual.  Most black theatre, on the other hand, never moved beyond small performing spaces.  

The greatest exception to this rule was the work of August Wilson (1945-2005), whose plays received critical praise as well as commercial success. Wilson’s usual director was Lloyd Richards (1923-2006), who had directed A Raisin in the Sun and who went on to head the prestigious Yale School of Drama.  Wilson’s plays were work-shopped, frequently at the Eugene O’Neill Center in 

Connecticut, then produced regionally, often at Yale Rep, and most made their way to lengthy runs on Broadway.  Wilson received two Pulitzer Prizes, for Fences (1985) and for The Piano Lesson (1988), but several of his other plays are equally as fine.  He completed a ten-play series that depicts a slice of African American life (frequently located in the Hill district of Pittsburgh PA, where Wilson grew up) for each decade of the twentieth century. 

Recent African American Playwrights

Other vitally important African American theatre practitioners include George C. Wolfe (1954-  ), who wrote plays and musicals. 

He then began to direct, most prestigiously Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, after which he ran the Public Theatre for ten years.  Anna Deavere Smith (1950-  ) examined violent racial confrontations by interviewing a cross-section of those involved, then performing all of the roles in tour-de-force one woman shows, such as Fires in the Mirror and Twilight: Los Angeles 1992.  More 

recently, writers Kia Corthron, Lynn Nottage (Ruined) and Susan Lori Parks have been frequently produced, in fact Parks won the Pulitzer in 2002 for Topdog/Underdog. The same year, Dael Orlandersmith’s Yellowman was nominated for the same prize. A play on the difficult subject of “internal” racism, Yellowman tells the story of a relationship between a light-skinned black male and a darker-skinned black female, unfolded in monologues by the two actors.

Hispanic American Theatre

Hispanic American theatre also grew beginning in the 1960s, though it has had less sustained success than African American theatre.  The title “Hispanic American” is not satisfactory, as there is a world of difference between, for example, the Chicano experience and the Cuban American experience, but within this 

widely diverse culture several writers, directors and theatre groups have flourished, if not usually in mainstream commercial theatre venues.  Luis Valdez (1940-  ) founded El Teatro Campesino in Southern California, to bring theatre to the migrant workers struggling in the fields.  His most important play, Zoot Suit (1976), was a powerful piece written in a style reminiscent of the Federal Theatre Project’s living 

newspapers, which depicted the trial of several young Chicanos after race riots in Los Angeles during World War II.  The company has recently reorganized, but is still very much alive, and every year at Christmas they present a medieval-style cycle play, La Pastorella, at an old mission.  Across the country, several Hispanic American troupes perform in New York, including Repertorio Español,  INTAR and the Puerto Rican Traveling Theatre. At the Nuyorican Poets’ Café in the 

Lower East Side plays as well as poetry readings have been presented, perhaps most famously Miguel Pinero’s Short Eyes, a bleak prison drama.  Important women in the movement include Maria Irene Fornes (1930-  ), who has written Mud (1983) and the Conduct of Life, and Milcha Sanchez Scott, whose play Roosters (1987) imagines Chicano men as roosters in a cock fight.  Jose Rivera and Eduardo Machado have been produced in regional theatres and in Off-Broadway venues. More recently, Stephen Adley Guirgis writes darkly comic plays such as Jesus Hopped the A-Train and Our Lady of 121^st Street for the LAByrinth Theatre Company in Manhattan. An impressive moment for Hispanic American theatre came when Anna in the Tropics by Nilo Cruz, with a complex plot about workers at cigar factories and a tangled love affair between one of them and a “reader” at such a factory, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2003.

Asian American Theatre

Asian American theatre began to proliferate in the mid-1960s and has been produced frequently on both coasts.  The East-West Players was the first major company to form, in Los Angeles in 

1965. It featured plays by Philip Kan Gotanda and Frank Chin among many others, about the Asian American experience. In 1977 New York’s Pan Asian Repertory Theatre opened to celebrate the talents of Asian American artists. Run by actor/dancer Tisa Chang, some of its most interesting work crosses cultures, and includes intercultural presentations of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Shogun Macbeth.  While several Asian American writers have been regularly produced, none has achieved the stature of David Henry Hwang (1957-  ).  He has written many plays before and 

since, but his reputation rests on his Tony and Pulitzer Prize-winning play M. Butterfly (1988), which inverts the stereotype of the strong western male dominating a weak Asian woman. This highly theatrical piece is based on the true story of a French diplomat in China who fell in love with a male portrayer of females in a Beijing Opera troupe.  In 2002 Hwang substantially re-wrote the libretto of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, Flower Drum Song, which was produced on Broadway.  Since 1972, performance artist Ping Chong (1946- ) has combined visual arts, video and dance into award-winning productions that explore theatre on national and intercultural levels at New York City venues such as La Mama, The Joyce Theatre and the Brooklyn Academy of Music, as well as embarking on frequent international tours.\

Native American Theatre

Native American culture was rich in ritualistic dance dramas, such as the Plains Sun Dances and the Iroquois False Face Dramas, since long before Europeans settled the Americas. In mainstream 

Native American Theatre Ensemble in a performance
of Foghorn in Berlin, 1973)

theatre in the United States, however, they were portrayed as cultural stereotypes, ranging from the “noble savage” to the “no-good lyin’ Injun.” In the early 1970s, however, writer Hanay Geiogamah (1945-  ) formed the Native American Theatre Ensemble, and one of the first feminist theatres in America, Spiderwoman, was founded in 1975 by three American Indian sisters. In spite of these efforts, few Native American plays have been featured in commercial or major non-profit theatre venues in the United States. 

Gay and Lesbian Theatre

Gay and lesbian theatre has increased rapidly, with lesbian troupes springing up in Minneapolis, Atlanta and Pittsburgh throughout the 1970s. Much of the energy in this direction was focused in New 

York’s Greenwich Village, at the WOW Café, where Peggy Shaw, Lois Weaver and Deborah Margolins founded Split Britches, a feminist and lesbian troupe, in 1981 as an offshoot of the Spiderwoman Theatre.  They produced political comedies such as Little Women (1988) and Belle Reprieve (1991), their satire on Streetcar Named Desire, using Brechtian methods to confront and critique the heterosexual mainstream.  Gay theatre “came out” in 1968, when Mart Crowley's The Boys in the 

Band was produced on Broadway.  The play was somewhat stereotypical, but placed a group of gay characters at center stage in commercial theatre.  After that, other plays, usually beginning off Broadway, began to take the stage, notably Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy (1983).  Martin Sherman’s Bent  (1978) told the story of gays in Nazi concentration camps, and the Tony Award-winning musical La Cage Aux Folles in 1983 depicted two flamboyantly gay men playing straight for the sake of an impending marriage. The AIDS 

epidemic prompted angry plays about society’s failure to act, beginning in 1985 when Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart and William Hoffman’s As Is were produced. Charles Ludlam (1943-

1987) excelled at female impersonation in his Ridiculous Theatrical Company, where he usually played the heroines, such as Camille, in 1973, and The Mystery of Irma Vep in 1984.  While these pieces were hilarious romps, they moved beyond mere camp into a unique theatrical experience that has been much examined and praised since Ludlam’s premature death from AIDS.

Terrence McNally and Tony Kushner

While some gay writers focus solely on gay issues, playwrights such as Terrence McNally (1939-  ) and Tony Kushner (1956-  ) 

Terrence McNally

deal with other themes as well in their work. Terrence McNally’s 
The Ritz (1975) and Love! Valour! Compassion! (1994) are plays about the gay experience, but McNally is also quite comfortable writing about heterosexual relationships in both caustic and touching ways, for example in Lips Together, Teeth Apart (1991) which examines two married couples, and in Frankie and Johnny in the Claire de Lune (1982), about a lonely middle-aged man and woman trying to create a relationship.  McNally’s Master Class (1995) reveals his love for and knowledge of opera, as he imagines 

the great opera diva Maria Callas revealing much about her own life while teaching three different students how to sing. In the early 1990s Tony Kusher wrote a towering two-play series called Angels in America (1991-1993) that brilliantly mixed issues of AIDS, repression, politics and religion in a tour-de-force “fantasia” on American values. In Homebody/Kabul he attempts to come to terms with western ways of thinking and militant Islam in Afghanistan, and Kushner’s musical Caroline or Change, for which he wrote the words and Jeanine Tesori the music in 2004, deals with race issues and coming of age. In it a young teenage Jewish boy living in the deep South attempts to befriend the African American maid, Caroline, which leads to disturbing results.

Other Important Recent Playwrights

      

While it would be difficult to argue that writing for the stage in the United States has been as incisive and theatrically excellent as recent British playwriting, a number of fine American writers have 

emerged since the 70s. Sam Shepard (1943-  ) started in the Off-Off Broadway movement with surreal and absurdist one-acts written in a language structured like a jazz or rock and roll instrumental solo. He began to make major contributions in the late 1970s with The Curse of the Starving Class (1977) and Buried Child (1978), both of which depicted completely dysfunctional 

families symbolizing an American dream turned nightmare.  The plays were critically acclaimed, Curse of the Starving Class winning an Obie and Buried Child winning the Pulitzer Prize. Shepard continued his study of the exploded American family in plays such as True West (1980) and Fool for Love (1983), portraying a half brother and sister as passionate lovers. More recently he has written fewer plays, concentrating instead on acting in film, but the war in Iraq prompted him to write a savage farce, God of Hell, in 2004, in which a terrifying official invades an American home in the name of security.

David Mamet (1947-  ) has also investigated the decline of American society in his plays, but from a slightly different 

perspective than Shepard’s. Mamet is interested in the world of corrupt business transactions, enacted by incompetent small-time thieves, as in American Buffalo (1975, Obie Award), or by fraudulent real estate salesmen vying for the best contacts in Glengarry Glen Ross (1983, Pulitzer Prize), or by Hollywood executives hustling scripts in Speed-the-Plow (1988). In Oleanna (1992) he dissected the politically correct world on college campuses in his depiction of a female student who claims sexual harassment against a professor. Mamet has continued to write plays, but is equally comfortable in film, as both writer and director, and his recent writing for the stage has not been seen the critical successes of his work in the 1980s.

Paula Vogel (1951-  ) is among the finest female playwrights in America. She began her career with an Obie-winning play, Baltimore Waltz in 1982, about a sister whose brother is dying of 

Paula Vogel

AIDS. Her finest play to date is How I Learned to Drive (1997). This highly sensitive treatment of a teenaged girl’s coming of age and her uncle’s unnatural attraction to her won Vogel the Pulitzer Prize. In 2004-2005 New York’s Signature Theatre, which devotes an entire season to the work of one American playwright, chose Vogel as its focus. Other notable women writers include Marsha Norman, Beth Henley and Wendy Wasserstein (1950-2006).

Mary Louise Parker and David Morse in How I Learned to Drive

Postmodern Performance in America

Richard Schechner (1934-  ) founded The Performance Group in 1967 at a decidedly non-traditional space on Wooster Street in the Soho area of New York City called the Performing Garage.  Schechner and his company created what he called 

The Performance Group in Commune

“environmental” theatre, engaging in activities comparable to those of the Living Theatre and the Open Theatre, and based largely on Jerzy Grotowski’s experiments.  One of their most famous performances was Dionysus in 69, a company-created piece based very loosely on Euripides’ The Bacchae, which was concerned more with recreating a bacchanal of communal and religious ecstasy than with faithfully enacting the ancient Greek tragedy.  The action unfolded not on a stage, but in an environment where actors and audience moved among each other and interacted in song, dance and chants.   The Performance Group continued these experiments into the mid-1970s, frequently using well-known texts by Sam Shepard, Jean Genet, and Bertolt Brecht for environmental staging and interactive performance.

The Wooster Group

      

In 1975 a unit of the Performance Group was created under the leadership of Elizabeth LeCompte (1944-  ) and with the help of 

others including Spalding Gray, which gradually superseded the old company, and in 1980 was re-named The Wooster Group.   Like its predecessor, The Wooster Group makes use of traditional texts, but in often radical “deconstructions,” drastically altering plot, character and theme to its own artistic, political and cultural ends.  Thornton Wilder’s Our Town was thus deconstructed into a work called Routes 1 & 9 (1981) that examined what was lacking in Wilder’s vision of a “typical” American town, such as racial 

minorities.  Arthur Miller would not allow his play The Crucible to be used by the Group’s L.S.D. (1983).  Brace Up! is an outrageous re-thinking of Chekhov’s Three Sisters, and To You, the Birdie (2002) sends up Racine’s famous seventeenth century tragedy Phédre.  The Wooster Group does not work environmentally, but faces its audience and features multi-media, particularly video, in its unique performances.  The group’s finest performer is the versatile Kate Valk, and it has attracted other fine actors including Willem Dafoe and Frances McDormand. It is one of the most lauded avant-garde troupes in the United States, in 1991 receiving an Obie for sustained excellence, and touring nationally and internationally.

Richard Foreman

Another artist devoted to reshaping the theatre to his own vision is Richard Foreman (1937-  ) a director/designer/playwright who 

founded the Ontological-Hysteric Theatre in 1968, where he presents his own avant-garde works.  Like many other postmodern theatre artists, Foreman is less interested in telling a story with beginning, middle and end than in setting up images in a space and discovering different ways of looking at them.  He frequently uses untrained actors as he uses other props or set pieces, and in plays such as Total Recall (1970) he can be seen in his productions running the show like a puppet master, stopping 

and starting the action as he chooses.  He produces theatre pieces such as Rhoda in Potatoland and Now that Communism is Dead my Life Feels Empty, expressing his unique vision once a year at his base, St. Mark’s Church in Greenwich Village. In 2005 he produced The Gods are Pounding my Head (Lumberjack Messiahs), which he announced as his last work for the stage. As of 2007 he was still producing plays, but they now feature a good bit of video as well. One of his most recent works, Wake Up Mr Sleepy: Your Unconscious Mind is Dead, includes two very large screens on which a good bit of the action is displayed. Foreman has also often been invited to direct internationally, and has done so with plays by Georg Buchner, Vaclav Havel, Bertolt Brecht and others. 

Mabou Mines

Mabou Mines, a collaborative experimental theatre company, was founded in 1970. Its original members were Lee Breuer (1937-  ), JoAnne Akalaitis (1937-  ), Ruth Maleczech (1939-2013), and David Warrilow (1934-  ).  As a group they feature multi-media and 

frequently work with painters and sculptors as well as important composers such as Philip Glass to create a form that reaches beyond theatre to span the performing and visual arts.  Breuer’s 1970 production The Red Horse Animation set the style for much American avant-garde theatre, featuring a disjointed story line, relying heavily on visual imagery.  In form it is as much a poem as a play.  The piece premiered at the Guggenheim Museum, and featured Akalaitis, Malaczech and Warrilow.  Company members have often created works independent of Mabou Mines. Breuer for example conceived, adapted and directed The Gospel at Colonus in 1983, for the Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, setting the ancient tale in an African American gospel church. In 1984 Akalaitis directed a controversial Endgame at the 

American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge Massachusetts. She has championed the work of Franz Xaver Kroetz, giving the United States the first taste of that German writer’s play Through the Leaves.  Akalaitis took over artistic direction from Joseph Papp at the Public Theatre in 1991 but proved too controversial in her productions and was replaced.  Maleczech played title role in one of Mabou Mines’ best-known productions, a gender-reversed King Lear set in Georgia in the 1950s, directed by Breuer in 1990.  The company has received praise for its distinctive productions of Beckett, and Warrilow (who passed in 1995) was a Beckett specialist. In 1979 he performed Monologue, a play Beckett wrote specifically for him.

In 1986 Mabou Mines received an Obie for sustained achievement.  Breuer mounted a stunning version of the Peter Pan story, Peter and Wendy, in 1997.  This piece features one actress who narrates and speaks the roles, while a wide variety of puppets enact them.  And in 2003 Mabou Mines received Obie awards for Breuer’s darkly comic adaptation of Ibsen’s Doll House, set in a restrictively tiny doll house, the male characters played by dwarfs.

Robert Wilson

Robert Wilson (1941-  ) is perhaps the most important American figure engaged in recent theatrical experimentation. Ironically, he is 

better known and more admired in Europe than in the United States. Since the 1980s nearly all of his work has opened there, though he has been frequently produced at the Alley Theatre in Houston Texas and at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge Massachusetts.  Wilson is less interested in plot than in powerful visual and aural imagery, presented in extended pieces that unfold in carefully choreographed, sometimes extremely slow motion.  He 

has worked frequently on these unique creations with composer Philip Glass, most notably in Einstein on the Beach (1976) and in CIVIL warS (1983-84), a monumental dream-like collage mixing Abraham Lincoln, Prussian Frederick the Great, Italian revolutionary Garibaldi, Hopi Indian rituals and Seneca’s tragedies.  He worked as well with rock legend Lou Reed in The Black Rider (1990), adapted from Weber’s opera Der Freischutz, and Time Rocker (1996), taken from H.G. Welles’ novel The Time Machine.  In addition to his own inventions he has worked frequently with German director/writer Heiner Muller and has also directed opera and plays from the classical and modern repertoire, including The Magic Flute in Paris (1991), and Georg Buchner’s Woyzeck (2000) with composer/performer Tom Waits. 

And as Porky Pig famously stuttered: Th-th-th-th-at's all, folks!

Theatre in the U.S. after World War II: II - Off and Off-Off Broadway, Regional Theatre, Non-Profits in NYC

The commercial theatre began to produce more musicals than plays beginning in the 1950s, and what plays were offered were those that could be nearly certain of financial success. Many serious theatre artists reacted by moving away from, or “Off“ Broadway, and focused on non-commercial plays including classics, pieces from the modern European repertoire, and new American plays. The theatres they performed in were more intimate and configured differently from the proscenium arch Broadway theatres; either thrust stages, in which the stage literally thrust out into an audience seated three-quarters around it, or arena stages, in which the audience completely surrounded the action.

      

An early example was The American Repertory Theatre of Eva LeGallienne, Margaret Webster, and the ubiquitous Cheryl Crawford. It lasted only one season, 1946-47, but paved the way for other experimental groups.  By 1955-56, more than 90 “off-Broadway” groups had formed in New York City. The most important was The Circle in the Square, founded in 1951.  Located in Greenwich Village at Sheridan Square, it was run by Jose Quintero and Theodore Mann. In the second season, Quintero’s production of Summer and Smoke put the theatre on the map; in 1956 Quintero’s brilliant production of The Iceman Cometh cemented its reputation. Actors included Jason Robards Jr, George C. Scott and Colleen Dewhurst among many others.

Photograph by Jerry Dantzic, ©️Jerry Dantzic Archives, All Rights Reserved

In 1953 T. Edward Hambleton and Norris Houghton formed the Phoenix Theatre, where most of the plays were staged by 

director Stuart Vaughn. This company featured a tremendously diverse repertoire, and a fine permanent acting company.  In the early 60s the Phoenix joined forces with A.P.A. (Association of Producing Artists) led by actor/director Ellis Rabb, and as the APA/Phoenix it presented beautiful and smart productions from the classic and modern European repertoire.

Of course it now no longer looks like this, exactly, as a major renovation occurred between 2008-12

In 1963 the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts was formed. This plaza united four buildings that showcased all the performing arts, opera, ballet, classical music, and of course the theatre. Unfortunately the Vivian Beaumont theatre at Lincoln Center, whose backstage could house 

settings for three plays which could run in rotating rep, seemed jinxed.  Several fine artistic directors failed to create successful seasons there until in the mid-80s Gregory Mosher brought life into it with a terrific revival of Anything Goes and ran it for three years. This compromised the mission but saved the theatre.  Since then smart revivals of famous American plays (The Little Foxes, A Delicate Balance), occasional new American plays (Six Degrees of Separation), classics and modern European plays (Twelfth Night with Helen Hunt, Chekhov’s Ivanov, with Kevin Kline, Stoppard’s Arcadia & Coast of Utopia), enjoyed some success and very recently South Pacific and now War Horse have been extremely popular.

      

Outside of New York City, tours of commercial theatre were the rule until intrepid pioneers began to form the first “regional” theatres, which were usually thrust or arena 

stages. Like Off- Broadway, these theatres featured an alternative to safe commercial fare: a mix of modern European and classic plays, and new, often experimental American plays.  Margo Jones (1913-1955) created an arena stage at Dallas in 1947, where she focused on producing new American plays. Her book Theatre-in-the-Round (1951) inspired others to attempt 

alternative theatre in unique and different spaces. Jones’s first disciple was Nina Vance (1914-1980), working in nearby Houston.  She created the Alley Theatre, also in 1947, another theatre in the round.  The Alley Theatre is thriving today, one of the most impressive and long-lived regional theatres in America. Arena Stage in Washington DC was founded by Zelda Fichandler (1924-  ), a graduate student at George Washington University in 1950.  Zelda and her husband Tom became the artistic and managing directors, respectively, and ran Arena Stage for 40 years before placing it in the hands of others. 

Design for an arena stage can be simple, but not necessarily!

Jones, Vance and Fichandler are vitally important in the growth of artistic theatres throughout the U.S.   Shortly after their theatres opened, in 1952 Jules Irving and Herbert Blau opened the San Francisco Actors’ Workshop, and gradually similar spaces were created, operating on a not-for-profit basis, frequently using resident acting companies. Then, in the 1960s, a tremendous boost was given to these regional theatres by financial support from the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations and the newly founded National Endowment of the Arts (1965).  An organization called TCG (The Theatre Communications Group) was formed in 1961 as a national umbrella 

organization for the regional theatre movement. In 1963, as a result, famed British director Tyrone Guthrie opened a theatre in Minneapolis called The Guthrie, modeled on his earlier thrust stage in Stratford, Ontario. The same year, Baltimore Center Stage and the Seattle Repertory Theatre were founded.  The next year Actors Theatre of Louisville and Hartford Stage Company in Connecticut joined them, and in 1965 San Francisco’s A.C.T. and New Haven’s Long Wharf Theatre were created. 

Other distinguished members of this theatrical community include Yale Rep, also in New Haven, the McCarter Theatre in Princeton New Jersey, the American Repertory Theatre (ART) in Cambridge Massachusetts, 

Trinity Rep in Providence Rhode Island, the Goodman (along with many smaller theatres) in Chicago, the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, and South Coast Rep in Costa Mesa California. In spite of constant funding problems, the regional theatre movement has grown to more than 200 theatres.  Among them they offer thousands of productions a year to tens of thousands of people all over America, and have become what some critics have termed our “national” theatre.

By the early 1960s in New York, the Off-Broadway movement had begun, in the eyes of some viewers, to show signs of becoming institutionalized and respectable.  The Off-Off Broadway movement was created in reaction, to provide 

new and more experimental works in non-traditional spaces. This experimentation took many forms. The Caffe Cino is usually thought of as the first important performance space in the movement. Located in Greenwich Village, as were all the early Off-Off Broadway theatres, Caffe Cino was not a theatre, but a coffeehouse opened by Joe Cino in late 1958 in which artists could attempt whatever they wanted. The usual entertainment was music and poetry readings on a tiny, slightly raised stage, until one night someone decided to read a play aloud. From this grew productions of much new and unusual theatrical fare, including some of the first plays by Lanford Wilson, Maria Irene Fornes and John Guare. 

A bit farther east in the Village, at Washington Square Park, the Reverend Al Carmines (1938-  ) opened the Judson Memorial Church to performing artists.  Also renowned for hosting early postmodern dance performance, throughout the 1960s the Church housed the Judson Poets’ Theatre, which produced a series of countercultural plays and musicals supported by its hip congregation.  One of the more successful pieces to come from this theatre was Carmine’s own musical version of the ancient Greek comedy Lysistrata, called Peace, and written in 1968 to coincide with the Paris Peace talks on the Vietnam War.

Still farther east in Greenwich Village, Ellen Stewart (1921- ) started her own café/theatre known by her own nickname: 

La Mama.  Stewart rang a bell at the beginning of each evening’s performance and announced that the cafe was home to playwrights and all other theatre lovers.  Admission was whatever you could afford.  Eventually Stewart settled in a space on East 4th street, where La Mama ETC (Experimental Theatre Club) is still alive and productive.   La Mama introduced the plays of Sam Shepard, Julie Bovasso, and Harvey Fierstein. Directors such as Richard Foreman, Meredith Monk and Ping Chong began their careers here.  International artists such as Jerzy Grotowski and Andrei Serban were also welcomed at this vital venue for experimental theatre and performance art.

The Living Theatre, founded by Julian Beck (1925-1985) and Judith Malina (1926-  ), provided the most radical 

experiments in the Off-Off Broadway movement.  Begun in the early 1950s to produce poetic, avant-garde drama, by late in that decade the group shifted focus and began to use improvisation to create events which stressed total freedom, offering anti-establishment messages and communing and interacting with audiences. In 1968, the 

Living Theatre offered its most famous production, Paradise Now, which broke down all barriers between actors and audience. The actors stripped and some of the audience stripped as well. They danced together naked. Actors and audience often danced out of the performance space and out into the streets, where the company was frequently arrested for indecent exposure. Beck and Malina welcomed the arrests, which, they argued, showed the repressive nature of traditional authority figures who attempt to limit personal freedom.  The Living Theatre was criticized by many, even among the theatrical avant-garde, but in its heyday, the group pioneered the breaking of barriers between actor and audience, art and life, dramatic action and social action. It was revolution as theatre, and theatre as revolution. 

Joseph Chaikin (1935-2003), a former member of the Living Theatre, developed his own explorations of acting style and collaborative creation.  He founded the Open Theatre 

in 1963 as a collective for theatre artists.  Chaikin’s major theories included “presence,” in which the performer, not the character, is the center of focus; and “transformation,” in which the actor changes from one role to another before the audience’s eyes.  One of the most important theatrical creations to evolve from Chaikin’s method was The Serpent (1968), an exploration of Adam, Eve, and the fall from grace. The Open Theatre critiqued American society and the Viet Nam war, in a daring and highly professional theatrical style. It was one of the most honored American experimental groups.

Since the 1960s and 70s, the terms Off-Broadway and Off-Off-Broadway have come to refer more to kinds of Actors Equity contracts than movements for artistic and political change.  It is in these theatres, however, and not in the commercial theatrical scene, that most important new American drama is being nurtured. 

Several non-profit producing organizations that have become vital to the American theatre were formed in Manhattan in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The earliest of these was the Roundabout Theatre, formed by Gene Feist in 1965 to give classic plays from the ancient to modern repertoire smart productions by the finest current directors, designers and actors. The theatre received many awards in its first 20 years, but found itself losing money. In 1989 Gene Feist 

retired and turned over the theatre to Todd Haimes, who has run the Roundabout since then.  Haimes reached out in a number of different directions, offering such diverse writers as Moliére, Eugene O’Neill, Harold Pinter, and Arthur Miller, alongside successful revivals of musicals including She Loves Me, which moved to Broadway, and Cabaret, which moved to Studio 54 and became a huge 

moneymaker for this theatre.  In 2000, the Roundabout added a location on 42^nd Street, their first show there the American classic comedy The Man Who Came to Dinner. In 2004 it revived to critical acclaim Stephen Sondheim’s disturbing musical Assassins. Its location is in the center of the commercial theatre district, and its recent production history reflects a delicate balance between commercial hits, classic plays, and tough new fare from the likes of Irish playwright Martin McDonagh.  

The Manhattan Theatre Club (MTC) has followed somewhat in the footsteps of The Roundabout, although whereas the Roundabout’s prime focus is on established plays and playwrights, MTC favors new writers from the 

United States and abroad. Founded in 1970 by a collective team, it has been run since 1972 by Lynne Meadow. MTC has been much praised and in 1977 received an Obie (Off-Broadway award) for Sustained Excellence.  In 1989 it was given a Drama Desk award for its high standards, its encouragement of new playwrights, and for its importations from abroad. 

Among its many distinguished writers are August Wilson, Beth Henley, Donald Margulies, and its most frequently produced playwright, Terrence McNally. Three of its plays have received Pulitzer Prizes, most recently John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt. MTC has moved several plays to Broadway and now boasts a permanent Broadway theatre, The Biltmore, in addition to its two spaces just off Broadway on 55^th Street. Like the Roundabout, MTC straddles the worlds of commercial and non-profit theatre.

In 1971 Robert Moss founded Playwrights Horizons as a place to develop and produce new scripts. He located it in a run-down area on far west 42nd that came to be known as 

Theatre Row when a number of other intimate theatres joined it in the 1970s and 80s. This company has produced more than 350 new playwrights, and has work-shopped many more.  Its most successful authors include Christopher Durang, Wendy Wasserstein, and A.R. Gurney. Four plays produced at Playwrights Horizons have won Pulitzer Prizes, including Doug Wright’s I Am My Own Wife 

in 2004. Playwrights Horizons has also launched musicals, including Once on this Island, Falsettos, and Sondheim’s extraordinary Sunday in the Park with George, all of which have transferred to Broadway. Current artistic director Tim Sandford was responsible for moving Playwrights Horizons into a new space in 2003, on a refurbished and gentrified Theatre Row. Current artistic director Tim Sandford was responsible for moving Playwrights Horizons into a new space in 2003.

Director Marshall Mason, playwright Lanford Wilson and others founded the Circle Rep in 1969 to focus on the relationship between actor and playwright. This downtown 

theatre, only a short distance from the original Circle in the Square, established workshops for new American writers. In these workshops a body of actors, directors, designers and dramaturgs supported the plays.  Certainly the most famous playwright to emerge from Circle Rep was Wilson, but new plays by several other increasingly important writers built its reputation. The Circle Rep was honored in 1991 with Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Body of Work.  Ironically, only a few years later the organization shut down for lack of funds, but in its more than 20 years the group built a reputation for staging fine new American plays, smartly acted, directed and designed.

Joseph Papp (1921-91) was the last of the great American producer/ directors.  Papp began a Shakespeare Theatre Workshop in the Lower East Side in 1953, which in 1954 
became the New York Shakespeare Festival.  Papp 

desired a fine professional theatre that would be free to the public, as in his words, a public library was.  He fought City Hall until in 1957 he secured a permanent outdoor summer theatre, the Delacorte, in Central Park. Papp used flatbed trucks to carry Shakespeare to other city parks, presenting free Shakespeare to thousands, many of whom had never seen a play.  In important addition to playing 

Shakespeare, Papp has been responsible for producing minority writers’ works, including Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf in 1976 and George C. Wolfe’s The Colored Museum in 1986.  He has funded and presented visiting artists and foreign works, including American premieres of Czech writer Vaclav Havel and British playwrights Caryl Churchill and David Hare. He has sponsored tiny musicals that became huge successes, for example Hair and A Chorus Line.  Profits from Papp’s hit shows always went to back into his theatre to fund experimental and minority projects. 

In 1967 Papp opened a permanent space at Astor Place, the Public Theatre, which contains several performance spaces in several different configurations.   He made enemies during his career and was criticized at times for the quality of his productions, but as a theatre artist he was bold, daring, unafraid and generous. Papp bequeathed the Public Theatre to Joanne Akalaitis, a director whose avant-garde productions proved so unpopular that she was forced out only a year after Papp’s death.  George C. Wolfe took over in 1993 and successfully ran the theatre until the spring of 2004, when he stepped down. Oskar Eustis is the current director.

Papp was a defender of human rights.  In a 1958 special Tony award he was cited as one who was “driven to create theatre without regard for cost or human interference.”  He refused that year to name names before the House Un-American Activities Committee, and late in his life (1990) he rejected $748,000 from the NEA, though he could certainly have made use of the money, because of an “anti-obscenity” pledge contained in the grant.  Here’s to more theatre artists might be as bold, daring, unafraid and generous as was Joseph Papp...let his story be YOUR story.

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Theatre in the United States and around the world has been frequently been pronounced “dead,” and indeed in an era that values computers and television monitors, live performance can seem like an endangered species.  Postmodernists have blended live performance with video and other media to bring it into the twenty-first century. Makers of musical theatre have adapted movies and have staged songs by pop entertainers in order to hold onto audiences. Directors of Shakespeare and other classics have modernized these works to reach out to youthful spectators.

      

As this brief history has attempted to show, theatre, the “fabulous invalid,” continues to exist, because it is a wonderful way for people to come together in a thoroughly “live” way to reach out to each other and celebrate humanity. Certainly the theatre will continue to change, as it has throughout the centuries, but it will always be informed by its amazing and exciting past, as we have seen this year. The “invalid” can survive and flourish, because it has always been, remains and I hope always will be one of most vital ways for humans to hold a mirror up to nature.

De Nobis, Fabula Narratur

That's the end of the course as I taught it at Ithaca College, but it's not quite the end here. There are a number of events in recent American theatre that I could never get to in Theatre History, but that I did cover in another course I taught, Contemporary Developments in Theatre. Next time, in the last lecture, a brief look at some of them, including multicultural theatre...