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An Ideal Theater: Founding Visions for a New American Art Todd London, ed. New York: TCG, 2013. 600 pp $24 paper
Forthose of us made cynical, not to say despairing, by the results of today's homogeneous institutional theatre production, Todd London's anthology is inspiring. Encountering these foundational documents from a wide variety of theatres reawakens the memory of why many of us were drawn to theatre in the first place. Todd London, author of Outrageous Fortune: The Life and Times of the New American Play, and until recently the artistic director of New Dramatists, leads off his introduction with a clarion call from Herbert Blau's The Impossible Theater, whose purpose was "to talk up revolution. Where there are rumblings already, I want to cheer them on. I intend to be incendiary and subversive, maybe even un-American. I shall probably hurt some people unintentionally; there are some I want to hurt. I may as well confess right now the full extent of my animus: there are times when, confronted with the despicable behavior of people in the American theater, I feel like the lunatic Lear on the heath, wanting to 'kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill'" (xv). This sets the tone boldly for many of the impassioned statements from our founding theatremakers, from Jane Addams's first "art theatre" at Hull House in Chicago in the 1890s, to manifestos from current companies, including major institutional regional theatres...