This is a scholarly journal of the largest regional theatre organization in the U.S. The essays gathered together in Volume 15 of the annual journal
Theatre Symposium
investigate how, historically, the theatre has been perceived both as a source of moral anxiety and as an instrument of moral and social reform. The essays consider, among other subjects, ethnographic depictions of the savage
other
in Buffalo Bill’s engagement at the Columbian Exposition of 1893; the so-called
Moral Reform Melodrama
in the nineteenth century; charity theatricals and the ways they negotiated standards of middle-class respectability; the figure of the courtesan as a barometer of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century moral and sexual discourse; Aphra Behn’s subversion of Restoration patriarchal sexual norms in The Feigned Courtesans; and the controversy surrounding a production of Tony Kushner’s
Angels
in America, during which officials at one of the nation’s more prominent liberal arts colleges attempted to censor the production, a chilling reminder that academic and artistic freedom cannot be taken for granted in today’s polarized moral and political atmosphere.