Restaging the Sixties: Radical Theaters and their Legacies

by James M. Harding (Editor), Cindy Rosenthal (Editor)

In the volatile period of the late sixties and early seventies, several theater groups came to prominence in the United States, informing and shaping activist theater as we know it today. Restaging the Sixties examines the artistry, politics, and legacies of eight radical collectives: the Living Theatre, the Open Theatre, the Performance Group, the San Francisco Mime Troupe, El Teatro Campesino, At the Foot of the Mountain, the Free Southern Theater, and Bread and Puppet Theater. Each of the specially commissioned essays is from a leading theater artist, critic, or scholar. The essays follow a three-part structure that first provides a historical overview of each group’s work, then an exploration of the group’s significant contributions to political theater, and finally, the legacy of those contributions.
 
The volume explores how creations such as the Living Theatre's Paradise Now and the Performance Group’s Dionysus in 69 overlapped with political interests that, in the late 1960s, highlighted the notion of social collectives as a radical alternative to mainstream society.  Situating theatrical practice within this socio-political context, the book considers how radical theaters sought to redefine the relationship between theater and political activism, and how, as a result, they challenged the foundations of theater itself.
 
James M. Harding is Associate Professor of English at Mary Washington University. His other books include Not the Other Avant-Garde: The Transnational Foundations of Avant-Garde Performance. 
 
Cindy Rosenthal is Associate Professor of Theatre Studies, Hofstra University.
 
“A useful introduction to an eclectic period of experimental theater, providing portraits of the major political theaters and engaging with new vigor many of the era’s familiar aesthetic and ideological concerns. The writers offer a provocative history of theater’s attraction to (and occasional anxiety over) activism.”
            --Marc Robinson, Yale University

464 pages, Hardcover

First published December 19, 2006

About the author

James M. Harding is the author of The Ghosts of the Avant-Garde(s): Exorcising Experimental Theatre and Performance (Michigan, 2013), Cutting Performances: Collage Events, Feminist Artists and the American Avant-Garde (Michigan, 2010), and Adorno and "A Writing of the Ruins": Essays on Modern Aesthetics and Anglo-American Literature and Culture (SUNY, 1997). He is an internationally known scholar whose work focuses on the history of experimental theatre, on post 9/11 theatre and performance, on the intersection of surveillance and performance, and on performance studies more generally. His articles have appeared in TDR, Performance International, Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey, Modern Drama, and PMLA. He is currently finishing a new monograph tentatively entitled Performance, Transparency and the Cultures of Surveillance and a co-edited anthology entitled Center-Staging the Sixties: Mainstream and Popular Performance in a Turbulent Decade.

Harding is proud to be a Maryland alumnus, having completed his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature in 1991 at College Park. Before joining the faculty at Maryland, he was Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Warwick, UK, was twice a Visiting Professor at the Insitut für Theaterwissenschaft at the Freie Universität, Berlin, and was Professor of English at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, VA.