Staging Stigma is a captivating excursion into the bizarre world of the American freak show. Chemers critically examines several key moments of a performance tradition in which the truth is often stranger than the fiction. Grounded in meticulous historical research and cultural criticism, Chemers analysis reveals untold stories of freaks that will change the way we understand both performance and disability in America. This book is a must-have for serious students of freakery or anyone who is curious about the hidden side of American theatrical history.

This book maps the intriguing story about how the tycoons of the two most powerful circuits, Keith-Albee in the East and the Orpheum in the West, conspired to control the big time. Despite the battles between the performers and the circuit moguls, the vaudeville wars forged an electrifying entertainment that at its zenith brought joy to millions.

Theatre and Religion on Krishna s Stage examines the history and form of India's ras lila folk theatre, and discusses how this theatre functions as a mechanism of worship and spirituality among Krishna devotees in India. From analyses of performances and conversations with performers, audience, and local scholars, Mason argues that ras lila actors and audience alike actively assume roles that locate them together in the spiritual reality that the play represents. Correlating Krishna devotion and theories of religious experience, this book suggests that the emotional experience of theatrical...

Mendel's Theatre uncovers the rich convergence of scientific theories of heredity, the American eugenics movement, and innovative modern drama from the 1890s to 1930. Obsessions with heredity played out in very different kinds of theatre in the modern period, from fairground exhibits to the plays of prominent European modern dramatists like Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, and George Bernard Shaw. The rise of vital American dramatists like Susan Glaspell and Eugene O'Neill took place against this backdrop and alongside the now forgotten but extremely popular eugenics movement in America at...

Broadway and Corporate Capitalism examines two overlapping and, in many ways, symbiotic phenomena of early 20th century America-the emergence of the Professional-Managerial Class within American corporate capitalism and the evolution of Broadway. Michael Schwartz shows how the class movements moved-literally and figuratively-to the rhythm of noisy, frenetic farces, highly charged business and sports melodramas, and exuberant musicals. This book brings to life the representative plays, playwrights, actors, critics, and audiences from one of the liveliest periods of Broadway.

This text analyzes the cultural work of spectacular suffering in contemporary discourse and late-medieval France, reading recent dramatizations of torture and performances of self-mutilating conceptual art against late-medieval saint plays.

Frontier dramas were among the most popular and successful of early-twentieth-century Broadway type plays. The long runs of dramas such as Augustus Thomas's Arizona (1900), Owen Wister and Kirke La Shelle's The Virginian (1904), Edwin Milton Royle's The Squaw Man (1905), David Belasco's The Girl of the Golden West (1905), William Vaughn Moody's The Great Divide (1906), and Rachel Crothers's The Three of Us (1906) not only indicate the popularity of these plays but also tell us that these plays offered views about the frontier that original audiences could and did embrace. By focusing on how...

Between the 1890s and the 1930s, advancements in communication and travel encouraged widespread international cultural exchange, and Americans increasingly came into contact with Russian culture and theatrical performance. A number of factors, including emigration from Russia, world war, revolutionary activities in both Russia and the United States, and developments in modernism in the American theatre influenced the way those performances were received by American artists and audiences. Examining the work of impresarios, financiers, and the press as well as the artists themselves, Hohman...

Baggy Pants Comedy takes readers inside the burlesque houses of Depression-era America to explore the role of comedy in a show remembered mostly for strip-tease. It examines how burlesque comics, straightmen, and talking women approached the craft of comedy, working in a genre that relied not on scripts but on a remembered tradition of comedy bits that circulated orally. The book opens a long-neglected area of American folklore, presenting dozens of fondly-remembered routines like "Who's On First" and "Niagara Falls (Slowly I Turned)," as well as long-forgotten classics in print for the first...

The Federal Theatre Project stands alone as the only national theatre in the history of the United States. This study re-imagines this vital moment in American history, considering the Federal Theatre Project on its own terms - as a "federation of theatres" designed to stimulate new audiences and create locally-relevant theatre during the turbulent 1930s. It integrates a wealth of previously undiscovered archival materials with cultural history, delving into regional activities in Chicago, Boston, Portland, Atlanta, and Birmingham, as well as tours of refugee camps and Civilian Conservation...