1st Edition
Stages of Engagement U.S. Theatre and Performance 1898-1949
Introduction 1. “Setting the Stage: War and Empire” 2. “The Pan-American Exposition and Tragedy Onstage” U.S. Immigration, Ethnic Theatres, and Vaudeville, by Stuart Hecht 3. “Gendered Spaces: Law and Justice in Susan Glaspell’s Trifles” The Sexual Revolution and Broadway, by Sue Abbotson 4. A New Approach to Revolution: Artef and Hirsch Leckert in the Third Period The Theatre of War: The Rise of Fascism, Anti-War and Interventionist Theatre, by Jim Fisher 5. Salesman and the 1930s Theatres of Social Protest
Biography
Joshua E. Polster is Associate Professor of Theatre at Emerson College. His publications include Reinterpreting the Plays of Arthur Miller, a critical edition of Miller’s A Memory of Two Mondays, and The Routledge Anthology of US Drama 1898–1949.
Stages of Engagement and its companion text, The Routledge Anthology of Drama 1898 – 1949 would serve as excellent text resources for courses in American Drama or for continued exploration of this topic by researchers.
- Steve Earnest, The Journal of American Drama and Theatre
‘This useful, aptly titled compilation of essays is engaging reading for those seeking to better understand the forces that contributed to early-20th-century performance—among them colonialism; religion, race, and ethnicity; gender and sexuality; and economic and government systems…Polster includes contributions of other authors to give readers a different valence on allied subjects. For example, his excellent account of how Susan Glaspell’s Trifles utilized the testimony of an actual criminal trial is paralleled by Susan Abbotson's fascinating study of Mae West’s legal imbroglios with her own playwriting. Polster's examination is most welcome…Summing Up: Recommended.’
- M. K. Hunter, University of Portland, October 2016, CHOICE
"Stages of Engagement is ambitious, claiming to incorporate major thematic approaches including colonialism, religion, race, gender, and economics, among others, over a fifty-year period in U.S. theatre [...] it lives up to this goal."
- Elizabeth A. Osborne, Florida State University, A Journal of Theatre and Performance of the Americas
