US theatre history

Collective Creation in Contemporary Performance examines collective and devised theatre practices internationally--with emphasis on Russia, Europe, and North America--from the late 20th century, into the present. Building upon the authors’ previous work, A History of Collective Creation, this volume situates contemporary collective creation in a tradition which emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century, and traces the aesthetic, social and political shifts that have marked this mode of theatre making, from mid-century manifestations as a theatrical expression of the New Left, to present-day devising practices.

Theatre critics and historians have done valuable work to canonize the scripts of Depression-era Living Newspapers, but little scholarly attention has been paid to the modes of contingent and affective labor that structured daily life for the Federal Theatre employees responsible for writing and staging those texts. This study examines a unique moment in American theatre history in which discursive tropes of uncertainty helped to frame the dramatic arts as symbols of a patriotic work ethic and the American democratic ideal. An investigation of the classed and gendered labor discourses of New Deal Federal Theatre Project administrators from 1935-39 reveals the creative strategies that they used to cope with their own professional and economic precarity. Although Federal Theatre employees encountered these demands within the framework of government sponsorship, their responses to such pressures resonate with patterns in industry, non-profit, and academic settings in the twenty-first century. Producing affect, reviewing performance, re-framing goals, and justifying expenses are all part of today’s late capitalist rubric of professional contingency, just as they were under the Works Progress Administration.

The fame great actors enjoy is more ephemeral than that of great poets and writers. Desley Deacon, a specialist in gender history, revives in this biography the fame and repute of a great star of US stage, film, television and radio, the now largely forgotten Judith Anderson. Born in Adelaide in 1897, Anderson migrated to the US shortly after the First World War and soon established herself as a premier performer of the stage, lauded as the equal and even superior of Olivier and Laughton. She was thought to have brought an Australian physicality to her roles but is now best remembered for her star turn as Mrs Danvers in Alfred Hitchcock's 1939 film "Rebecca". This biography charts a remarkable career in diverse media, studded with triumphs and inevitable lows. Valuable cultural history of the US, Australia and cross-cultural relations features.