A focus on theater as conflict.The most extreme human conflict is war. War itself is spoken of as being conducted in theaters and is now fully dramatized on television, the ultimate reality program and spectator sport for armchair combatants. Selected from papers presented at the April 2005 Southeastern Theatre Conference s annual symposium, these essays probe the relationships between theater, war, and propaganda by examining theatrical responses to World War II, Vietnam, and the aftermath of 9/11.In the collection s first section, Bruce A. McConachie deconstructs standard notions...

The essays gathered together in Volume 15 of the annual journal Theatre Symposium investigate how, historically, the theatre has been perceived both as a source of moral anxiety and as an instrument of moral and social reform.Essays consider, among other subjects, ethnographic depictions of the savage other in Buffalo Bill s engagement at the Columbian Exposition of 1893; the so-called Moral Reform Melodrama in the nineteenth century; charity theatricals and the ways they negotiated standards of middle-class respectability; the figure of the courtesan as a barometer of late nineteenth...