Playtime: U.S. Publishers, Playwrights, and Amateur Play Production in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries
Item
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Title
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Playtime: U.S. Publishers, Playwrights, and Amateur Play Production in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:e8d6d1eac785:11786
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identifier
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12433
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Creator
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Heinze-Bradshaw, Roxane,
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Contributor
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David Savran
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Date
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2013
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Theater history | Theater | Amateur | Copyright | Performance | Playwright | Publisher | Theatrical
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Abstract
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The role of the theatrical publisher and licensor has long been ignored and/or underexamined within historical studies of theatre in the United States. In this dissertation, I endeavor to bring new light to the relationship between the publishing and theatrical industries in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with a specific eye toward their combined effect on and interaction with the amateur play production market. I argue that the rise of amateur theatrical activity was necessarily tied to the growth and expansion of theatrical publishing, and that this connection greatly influenced the shaping of a new theatrical landscape across the United States, one based on commerce. My investigation is heavily influenced by Pierre Bourdieu's sociological analysis of the role of publisher as cultural middleman, but I also explore the conservative impulses of the burgeoning U.S. middle class, and how those impulses bolstered the unique position of these play publishers, helping to place and maintain companies that masked their economic motives with a message of cultural uplift as cultural arbiters. Throughout the dissertation, I attempt to explicate the role of the amateur theatrical producer, as well as the amateur's relationship to both the playwright and publisher. To this end, I rely heavily on primary resources detailing the decisions and actions of amateur theatrical producers, playwrights, and publishers, including such materials as letters, internal memos, ephemera, contracts and sales information from publishers' archives, as well as case studies of two amateur theatres, the Peoria Players of Peoria, IL, and the Footlight Club of Jamaica Plain, MA.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Theatre
