Improbably located in the heart of the Jewish ghetto on the Lower East side of Manhattan, the Neighborhood Playhouse and its brief yet influential tenure offers a fascinating story in the annals of theater history. From 1915 to 1927, this progressive theater, along with the better-known Provincetown Players and the Theatre Guild, inaugurated the Little Theater Movement in America. In John P. Harrington’s detailed account of the Neighborhood Playhouse’s remarkable history, readers learn not only about its notable productions but also about its gradual shift in mission and the tensions between art and social work. Harrington traces the playhouse’s long-lasting legacy: it fostered The Neighborhood School of Acting made famous by Sanford Meisner, now the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre, and it helped spawn the expansive network of community theaters that thrive throughout America today. Well-researched and detailed, this book provides a vital yet often overlooked piece of theater history and a lost key to understanding the growth of theater arts in New York City.

Chronicles the sweeping history of the storied Henry Street Settlement and its enduring vision of a more just society On a cold March day in 1893, 26-year-old nurse Lillian Wald rushed through the poverty-stricken streets of New York’s Lower East Side to a squalid bedroom where a young mother lay dying—abandoned by her doctor because she could not pay his fee. The misery in the room and the walk to reach it inspired Wald to establish Henry Street Settlement, which would become one of the most influential social welfare organizations in American history. Through personal narratives, vivid images, and previously untold stories, Ellen M. Snyder-Grenier chronicles Henry Street’s sweeping history from 1893 to today. From the fights for public health and immigrants’ rights that fueled its founding, to advocating for relief during the Great Depression, all the way to tackling homelessness and AIDS in the 1980s, and into today—Henry Street has been a champion for social justice. Its powerful narrative illuminates larger stories about poverty, and who is “worthy” of help; immigration and migration, and who is welcomed; human rights, and whose voice is heard. For over 125 years, Henry Street Settlement has survived in a changing city and nation because of its ability to change with the times; because of the ingenuity of its guiding principle—that by bridging divides of class, culture, and race we could create a more equitable world; and because of the persistence of poverty, racism, and income disparity that it has pledged to confront. This makes the story of Henry Street as relevant today as it was more than a century ago. The House on Henry Street is not just about the challenges of overcoming hardship, but about the best possibilities of urban life and the hope and ambition it takes to achieve them.

American actress Aline MacMahon's youth was spent honing her talents while performing at local events in New York City. After popular stage success on Broadway, she headlined a touring company in Los Angeles, where she was discovered by legendary Hollywood director Mervyn LeRoy and put under contract to Warner Brothers. During the 1930s and 1940s, MacMahon starred in countless films and was among the most influential actors of the era, her talent revered as highly as peers Katherine Hepburn, Paul Muni, and Bette Davis. Her pioneering use of a new acting style brought to America from Russia by Konstantin Stanlisavsky—now widely known as the Method—began a revolution on the screen and made her an industry darling. Although popular with audiences and widely lauded for her versatile, naturalistic style, MacMahon's despair at the lack of challenging roles and fallout from her political activism would soon dim her star in the most tragic of ways. Blacklisted during the Communist Red Scare of the 1950's she became the subject of covert FBI surveillance and was denied work for many years. John Stangeland's biography of this unique actress, Aline MacMahon, offers an insightful look into the life and oeuvre of this largely overlooked talent and how the atmosphere of Hollywood's golden age created an inescapable blueprint for a career nearly destroyed by politics and fear.

In this inventive mix of criticism, scholarship, and personal reflection, Carrie J. Preston explores the nature of cross-cultural teaching, learning, and performance. Throughout the twentieth century, Japanese noh was a major creative catalyst for American and European writers, dancers, and composers. The noh theater’s stylized choreography, poetic chant, spectacular costumes and masks, and engagement with history inspired Western artists as they reimagined new approaches to tradition and form. In Learning to Kneel, Preston locates noh’s important influence on such canonical figures as Pound, Yeats, Brecht, Britten, and Beckett. These writers learned about noh from an international cast of collaborators, and Preston traces the ways in which Japanese and Western artists influenced one another. Preston’s critical work was profoundly shaped by her own training in noh performance technique under a professional actor in Tokyo, who taught her to kneel, bow, chant, and submit to the teachings of a conservative tradition. This encounter challenged Preston’s assumptions about effective teaching, particularly her inclinations to emphasize Western ideas of innovation and subversion and to overlook the complex ranges of agency experienced by teachers and students. It also inspired new perspectives regarding the generative relationship between Western writers and Japanese performers. Pound, Yeats, Brecht, and others are often criticized for their orientalist tendencies and misappropriation of noh, but Preston’s analysis and her journey reflect a more nuanced understanding of cultural exchange.

Whether they appeared on Broadway or the Strand, the shows appearing in 1924 epitomized the glamor of popular musical theatre. What made this particular year so distinctive – so special – was the way it brought together the old and the new, the venerated and the innovative, and the traditional and the chic. William Everett, in his compelling new book, reveals this remarkable mid-Roaring Twenties stagecraft to have been truly transnational, with a stellar cast of producers, performers and creators boldly experimenting worldwide. Revues, musical comedies, zarzuelas and operettas formed part of a thriving theatrical ecosystem, with many works – and their leading artists – now unpredictably defying genres. The author demonstrates how fresh approaches became highly successful, with established leads like Marie Tempest and Fred Stone appearing in new productions even as youthful talents such as Florence Mills, Fred and Adele Astaire, Gertrude Lawrence and George Gershwin now started to make their mark.

Bernard Shaw on the American Stage is the first comprehensive study of the production of Bernard Shaw’s plays in America. During his lifetime (1856-1950), Shaw was America’s most popular living playwright; productions of his plays were outnumbered only by Shakespeare. Forty-four of Shaw’s plays were staged in America before his death, eight more posthumously. Eleven of the productions were world premieres. Bernard Shaw on the American Stage tells the story of the fifty-two premieres, which, apart from a few fragments, is his total dramatic oeuvre. The book also includes, again for the first time, production data and concise overviews of dozens of the most notable American revivals of the plays, from the 1890s to the beginning of the 2020 pandemic. Illustrations—production photographs, programmes, theatre buildings, playbills, actors’ studio portraits— inform the study throughout.

Collective creation - the practice of collaboratively devising works of performance - rose to prominence not simply as a performance making method, but as an institutional model. By examining theatre practices in Europe and North America, this book explores collective creation's roots in the theatrical experiments of the early twentieth century.