1779 (245 years ago)
Preparations for the fourth season of the British military drama began with advertisements for the actresses of the James Rivington film. Royal Gazettea royalist magazine published in British-occupied New York City. Despite the law prohibiting any form of role-playing passed by the Massachusetts General Court in 1750, British officers pushed to produce a series of plays for the British army and its supporters. At the time, play scripts circulated via pamphlets and plays were a popular form of propaganda among revolutionaries and loyalists. Americans also attempted to stage revolutionary plays, but the theater scene was largely dominated by British loyalists. Some of the most popular revolutionary playwrights, including Mercy Otis Warren, never saw one of their plays performed.
1864 (160 years ago)
On November 26, Edwin Booth began a series of 100 performances in the role of Hamlet which ended on March 22, 1865. This is the longest series of Hamlet until then. Shortly after the play ended, Edwin Booth took a break when he learned that his brother had assassinated President Abraham Lincoln. After his return to the stage, Edwin Booth would play Hamlet several times during his career and, in a letter to his friend William Winter, he wrote: “I have always tried to emphasize the femininity of the character of Hamlet, and therein lies the reason. secret of my success, I think. I doubt that a robust, masculine treatment of the character will ever be as generally accepted as the more feminine and refined interpretation. I know I often fall into softness, but we don’t always manage to find the right tone.
1924 (100 years ago)
The Yale School of Drama was founded. Ten years after Carnegie Mellon University became the first degree-granting theater program in the United States, Yale University added the Department of Drama to the School of Fine Arts. With a million-dollar gift from benefactor and alumnus Edward S. Harkness, the University Theater was constructed and became the school’s main building. Before that, the Yale Dramatic Association, or “Yale Dramats,” was a student-run organization as old as the university itself, and still operating today. In the Yale Daily News published on November 26, several Yale professors thanked the Dramats for their advocacy for the new building.
1964 (60 years ago)
Playwright Lynn Nottage was born on November 2 in Brooklyn. The two-time Pulitzer winner and MacArthur “Genius” Fellow writes about working class, women’s issues, and experiences of the African diaspora, often taking a global perspective informed by her experience as national press secretary for Amnesty International. His notable works include Ruin, Sweat, ClydeAnd Crumbs from the table of joy. She holds a Bachelor of Arts from Brown University and an MFA from the Yale School of Drama. She is currently a professor of playwriting at Columbia University. By accepting the MacArthur Fellowship, Noting shared memories of his mother conversing with friends at the kitchen table, adding, “I realized as I got older that the stories I heard around that table weren’t being told on the American stage, and overall, it is on the American scene that our mythology is located. woven, and I thought what would happen to the mythology of African American women if we didn’t have a form for ourselves?
1994 (30 years ago)
Suzan-Lori Parks publishes “Elements of Style,” the first articulation of her approach to playwriting, in her book The America Play and other works. She urges readers to ask themselves: “Why is what I write to have be a play? Parks explains how she borrows from jazz performance to create a dramatic text. She calls this practice “Rep & Rev,” meaning repetition and revision. Parks departs from traditional narrative structures, creating something closer to a musical score. “Elements of Style” has had a significant influence on playwriting theory and dramatic criticism.
2009 (15 years ago)
On November 8, Tennessee Williams was posthumously inducted into the Poets’ Corner at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York. Williams was the first poet-playwright to be inducted into Poets’ Corner, established to commemorate American writers. A stone was unveiled in the alcove of the cathedral, on which is inscribed Williams’ phrase: “For time is the longest distance between two places”, taken from his play. The Glass Menagerie.
