Results by title

What does it mean to sustain a creative life over fifty years? Split Britches: Fifty Years On offers an intimate look at the enduring collaboration of Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver, the artists behind the groundbreaking performance troupe Split Britches. The collection highlights Split Britches’ enduring queer and feminist legacies, tracing how their distinctive butch/femme lesbian aesthetic and collaborative performance practice have evolved over five decades and nearly thirty original productions. It foregrounds their shift toward increasingly autobiographical and introspective work, while also situating their later performances within key theatrical, historical, and critical frameworks–paying particular attention to issues of embodiment, aging, the archive, and queer temporality. Bringing together performance scripts, candid interviews, production photos, accessible essays, and video documentation, Split Britches: Fifty Years On demonstrates how Shaw and Weaver pull from the past in order to critique the present. For scholars, artists, and students, the volume's unique combination of primary texts, critical essays, and multimedia resources makes it an essential volume that considers theatre scholarship and practice, queer and feminist discourses, and the evolution of creativity with age and time.

The official journal of the Mid-America Theatre Conference

Theatre History Studies (THS) is a peer-reviewed journal of theatre history and scholarship published annually since 1981 by the Mid-America Theatre Conference (MATC), a regional body devoted to theatre scholarship and practice. The conference is dedicated to the growth and improvement of all forms of theatre throughout a twelve-state region encompassing Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, and Wisconsin. The purposes of the conference are to unite people and organizations within the region and elsewhere who have an interest in theatre and to promote the growth and development of all forms of theatre. THS is a member of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals and is included in the MLA Directory of Periodicals. THS is cataloged in numerous periodical indexes and databases.

Along with sixteen book reviews on the latest publications from established and emerging voices in the field, this issue of Theatre History Studies contains four sections with two introductions and nine essays total. In the general section, three essays consider performance histories and reevaluations of historiographical approaches. The special section on queer historiographies responds to calls for a more expansive and inclusive understanding of trans histories and for centralizing contemporary queer performers. In part III, the Robert A. Schanke Research Award-winning paper from the 2024 MATC conference by Ali-Reza Mirsajadi addresses erasures in the theatrical archive and highlights the long legacy of queer, Southwest Asian, and North African representation in dramatic texts. Taken together, volume 44 captures how this journal serves theatre historians as scholars and laborers as they work to attend and tend to their field.