Off-Off-Broadway Explosion: How Provocative Playwrights of the 1960s Ignited a New American Theater. By David A. Crespy. New York: Back Stage Books, 2003; pp. 192; 32 illus. $19.95 paper.

2005 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 349-351
Author(s):  
Christopher Olsen
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Edward Albee ◽  
American Theatre ◽  
Sam Shepard ◽  
American Theater ◽  
Living Theatre ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Back Stage ◽  
Historical Accounts ◽  
American Theatre History

David Crespy's account of Off-Off Broadway's roots in New York City is a welcome addition to a growing body of scholarship on this vibrant period in American theatre history. Many authors writing on this era have limited themselves to focusing on particular theatre groups, such as the Living Theatre, Café Cino, and the Open Theatre, or on the work of specific playwrights, such as Maria Irene Fornés, Sam Shepard, and Edward Albee. More historical accounts are needed to examine a cross section of theatre practitioners in the context of the political and artistic movements of the 1960s. Crespy has managed to do this to some degree, and has even convinced the elusive Edward Albee to write a foreword.

The Achievements of the Douglass Company in North America: 1758–1774

1982 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 141-149 ◽  
Author(s):  
David D. Mays
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
North America ◽  
West Indies ◽  
Theatre History ◽  
The West ◽  
American Theatre ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Theatre History ◽  
A Company

On Monday, October 16, 1758., Hugh Gaine reported a novelty. “Friday last,” he told his readers in the New-York Mercury, “arrived here from the West Indies, a Company of Comedians; some Part of which were here in the Year 1753.” This brief notice, which went on to assure its readers that the company had “an ample Certificate of their Private as well as publick Qualifications,” marks the beginning of the most significant event in American theatre history: the establishment of the professional theatre on this continent. The achievements of the Company of Comedians during its sixteen-year residence in North America are virtually without parallel in the history of the theatre, and have not received sufficient recognition by historians and scholars.

Reading Macro and Micro Trends in Nineteenth-Century Theater History

2018 ◽  
pp. 82-102
Author(s):  
Blair Best ◽  
Madeleine G. Cella ◽  
Rati Choudhary ◽  
Kayla C. Coleman ◽  
Robert Davis ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Spatial Analysis ◽  
Network Visualization ◽  
Reading Practices ◽  
Theater History ◽  
Distant Reading ◽  
New York University ◽  
American Theatre ◽  
American Theater

This essay co-authored by Robert Davis and his students in a theater class at New York University describes the interdependence of close and distant reading practices in their creation and analysis of a representative corpus of nineteenth-century drama. With irregular scholarly and theatrical attention given to nineteenth-century American theatre, the archive of plays and productions is frustratingly fragmented with few playbooks and only limited accounts of their staging. This chapter demonstrates how students used corpus linguistic and spatial analysis tools like Voyant, Antconc, and Tagxedo to recover a neglected century of American theater. Students found that the use of digital tools to perform text analysis, mapping, and network visualization sparked new scholarly ideas about nineteenth-century theatre.

American Theatre in the Culture of the Cold War: Producing and Contesting Containment, 1947–1962. By Bruce A. McConachie. Studies in Theatre History & Culture. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2003; pp. xiv + 347; 15 illus. $49.95 cloth.

2005 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 341-343
Author(s):  
Jeffrey D. Mason
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Social Production ◽  
Arthur Miller ◽  
University Of Iowa ◽  
American Theatre ◽  
Urban Streets ◽  
West Side Story ◽  
Living Theatre ◽  
The Cold War

From 1947 to 1962, Broadway audiences enjoyed major works by Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller as well as plays ranging from A Thousand Clowns to Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and a string of durable musical comedies offering light and dark visions of the urban streets (Guys and Dolls and West Side Story), inspirational fables (The Music Man and The Sound of Music), and war in legend and in recent memory (Camelot and South Pacific). Meanwhile, Judith Malina and Julian Beck founded the Living Theatre, José Quintero and Theodore Mann established the Circle in the Square, Joe Papp offered his first free Shakespeare productions in New York City parks, and Joe Cino and Ellen Stewart led the development of Off-Off Broadway. This heterogeneous theatre scene comprised diverse and even competing representations of a complex but interconnected culture, and Bruce A. McConachie has undertaken the task of elucidating the workings of such art not in isolation but as cultural and social production.

Disputing the Canon of American Dramatic ‘Literature’

1997 ◽  
Vol 13 (49) ◽  
pp. 18-28
Author(s):  
Ronald Tavel
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Museum Of Modern Art ◽  
Dramatic Literature ◽  
American Theatre ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
Jack Smith ◽  
International Distribution ◽  
The Republic ◽  
The 1960S

In this article, Ronald Tavel argues that the commercial American theatre, endorsed by the American educational system and theatrical establishment, has never nurtured a vision of the scripted play as art – and has consequently produced no single example of it. The nation's genuine playwrights who saw their tasks as makers of art have, he claims, been neglected throughout American history, and left to wither in the wings. In the 1960s, Ronald Tavel founded and named the still-extant Theatre of The Ridiculous, and has written forty produced plays, a number of which have been translated into a dozen languages and staged in four continents. He has written and directed thirteen films for Andy Warhol: ten of these have recently been restored for international distribution by the New York Museum of Modern Art, and all are to be collected for publication later this year by Sun and Moon Press, Los Angeles. Ronald Tavel lives in Taipei, but is currently teaching a course on Warhol and the filmmaker-architect Jack Smith at the Art Centre College of Design in California. The American Institute in Taiwan selected the article which follows as the keynote address at the Seventeenth Annual Convention of the American Studies Association of the Republic of China.

The Constitutionality of Involuntary Civil Commitment of Opiate Addicts

1988 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 641-661 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael P. Rosenthal
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Civil Commitment ◽  
The United States ◽  
Involuntary Treatment ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
Narcotic Trafficking ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Opiate Addicts ◽  
The 1960S

This paper deals with the constitutionality of involuntary treatment of opiate addicts. Although the first laws permitting involuntary treatment of opiate addicts were enacted in the second half of the nineteenth century, addicts were not committed in large numbers until California and New York enacted new civil commitment legislation in the 1960s. Inevitably, the courts were called upon to decide if involuntary treatment was constitutional. Both the California and New York courts decided that it was. These decisions were heavily influenced by statements made by the United States Supreme Court in Robinson v. California. The Robinson case did not actually involve the constitutionality of involuntary treatment; it involved the question of whether it was constitutional for a state to make addiction a crime. Nevertheless, the Supreme Court declared (in a dictum) that a state might establish a program of compulsory treatment for opiate addicts either to discourage violation of its criminal laws against narcotic trafficking or to safeguard the general health or welfare of its inhabitants. Presumably because the Robinson case did not involve the constitutionality of involuntary treatment of opiate addicts, the Supreme Court did not go into that question as deeply as it might have. The California and New York courts, in turn, relied too much on this dictum and did not delve deeply into the question. The New York courts did a better job than the California courts, but their work too was not as good as it should have been.

Ciguapas in New York: Transcultural Ethnicity and Transracialization in Dominican American Performance

2012 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 139-153 ◽  
Author(s):  
EMILIA MARÍA DURÁN-ALMARZA
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Dominican Republic ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
The Usa ◽  
And Migration ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Dominican Women ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Dominican American

The Dominican American community in New York is perhaps one of the best examples of how processes of transculturation are affecting traditional definitions of ethnic identification. Given the intense economic, social and cultural transnational exchanges between the island and the USA from the 1960s, Dominicanyorks have been challenging the illusion of homogeneity in the definition of Americanness for decades, creating transnational social networks that transcend traditional national and ethnographic boundaries. The theatrical works of Josefina Báez, a Dominican American performer living in New York, and Sherezada (Chiqui) Vicioso, a Dominican poet and playwright who lived and worked in the US metropolis for decades before moving back to the Dominican Republic, lyrically explore issues of diaspora, identity and migration and the impact these phenomena might have in the lives of migrant Dominican women. Presenting diasporic experiences from two differing but interconnected locales – New York and the Dominican Republic – these plays offer two complementary views on the ways in which ethnicity, race, social class, age and geopolitical location interact in the formation of transcultural identities, thus contributing to develop a hemispheric approach to the study of identity formation in the Americas.

Polymer Electroluminescent Devices

MRS Bulletin ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 22 (6) ◽  
pp. 31-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yang Yang
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Quantum Efficiency ◽  
Operating Voltage ◽  
Organic Crystals ◽  
New York University ◽  
Research Activity ◽  
Information Displays ◽  
Potential Applications ◽  
Bandgap Semiconductors ◽  
The 1960S

Electroluminescence (EL) is the emission of light generated from the radiative recombination of electrons and holes electrically injected into a luminescent semiconductor. Conventional EL devices are made of inorganic direct-bandgap semiconductors, such as GaAs and InGaAs. Recently EL devices based on conjugated organic small molecules and polymers have attracted increasing attention due to easy fabrication of large areas, unlimited choice of colors, and mechanical flexibility. Potential applications of these organic/polymeric EL devices include backlights for displays, alphanumeric displays, and high-density information displays.Electroluminescence from an organic material was first demonstrated in the 1960s on anthracene crystals by Pope et al. at New York University. Subsequently several other groups also observed this phenomenon in organic crystals and thin films. These organic EL devices had high operating voltages and low quantum efficiency. Consequently they did not attract much attention. In 1987 a breakthrough was made by Tang and VanSlyke at Eastman Kodak who found that by using multilayers of sublimated organic molecules, the operating voltage of the organic EL devices was dramatically reduced and the quantum efficiency was significantly enhanced. This discovery touched off a flurry of research activity, especially in Japan. The Japanese researchers, as welt as the group at Kodak, have since improved the device efficiency and lifetime to meet commercial requirements. This progress is reviewed by Tsutsui in this issue.

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