2017 Theatre Library Association Freedley Award Finalist

If one went looking for the tipping point in the prelude to the American Revolution, it would not be the destruction of the tea in Boston Harbor, or the blockade of Boston by British warships, or even the gathering of the first Continental Congress; rather, it was the Congress’s decision in late October of 1774 to close the theatres. In this remarkable feat of historical research, Odai Johnson pieces together the surviving fragments of the story of the first professional theatre troupe based in the British North American colonies. In doing so, he tells the story of how colonial elites came to decide they would no longer style themselves British gentlemen, but instead American citizens.

London in a Box chronicles the enterprise of David Douglass, founder and manager of the American Theatre, from the 1750s to the climactic 1770s. The ambitious Scotsman’s business was teaching provincial colonials to dress and behave as genteel British subjects. Through the plays he staged, the scenery and costumes, and the bearing of his actors, he displayed London fashion and London manners. He counted among his patrons the most influential men in America, from British generals and governors to local leaders, including the avid theatre-goers George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. By 1774, Douglass operated a monopoly of theatres in six colonies and the Anglophone Caribbean, from Jamaica to Charleston and northward to New York City. (Boston remained an impregnable redoubt against theatre.)

How he built this network of patrons and theatres and how it all went up in flames as the revolution began is the subject of this witty history. A treat for anyone interested in the world of the American Revolution and an important study for historians of the period.

An examination of neoliberal ideology’s ascendance in 1990s and 2000s British politics and society through its effect on state-supported performance practices

Post-Thatcher, British cultural politics were shaped by the government’s use of the arts in service of its own social and economic agenda. Restaging the Future: Neoliberalization, Theater, and Performance in Britain interrogates how arts practices and cultural institutions were enmeshed with the particular processes of neoliberalization mobilized at the end of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first.

Louise Owen traces the uneasy entanglement of performance with neoliberalism's marketization of social life. Focusing on this political moment, Owen guides readers through a wide range of performance works crossing multiple forms, genres, and spaces—from European dance tours, to Brazilian favelas, to the streets of Liverpool—attending to their distinct implications for the reenvisioned future in whose wake we now live.

Analyzing this array of participatory dance, film, music, public art, and theater projects, Owen uncovers unexpected affinities between community-based, experimental, and avant-garde movements. Restaging the Future provides key historical context for these performances, their negotiations of their political moment, and their themes of insecurity, identity, and inequality, created in a period of profound ideological and socioeconomic change.

Shortly after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the PRC launched a reform campaign that targeted traditional song and dance theater encompassing more than a hundred genres, collectively known as xiqu. Reformers censored or revised xiqu plays and techniques; reorganized star-based private troupes; reassigned the power to create plays from star actors to the newly created functions of playwright, director, and composer; and eliminated market-oriented functionaries such as agents. While the repertoire censorship ended in the 1980s, major reform elements have remained: many traditional scripts (or parts of them) are no longer in performance; actors whose physical memory of repertoire and acting techniques had been the center of play creation, have been superseded by directors, playwrights, and composers. The net result is significantly diminished repertoires and performance techniques, and the absence of star actors capable of creating their own performance styles through new signature plays that had traditionally been one of the hallmarks of a performance school. Transforming Tradition offers a systematic study of the effects of the comprehensive reform of traditional theater conducted in the 1950s and ’60s, and is based on a decade’s worth of exhaustive research of official archival documents, wide-ranging interviews, and contemporaneous publications, most of which have never previously been referenced in scholarly research.