Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst where he served from 1971 to 2005, he was a happy advocate for the discipline of theatre history and for ASTR. Joe was a scrupulous, prodigious author devoted to nineteenth century British theatre. He served ASTR in many capacities for over fifty years. He was ASTR’s President for two terms, 1979-1985. Joe was a convivial presence at our annual meetings, a scholar and a gentleman.

He represented our professional interests in many ways. He was our Delegate to the American Council of Learned Societies, Vice-President of the Advisory Board of the International Federation for Theatre Research, Editor of Nineteenth Century Theatre (1987-95), consultant for Theatre Journal, a member of ASTR’s Publ-ications Committee, an evaluator of book-length manuscripts for nine university presses, and outside referee on tenure and promotion cases for many in our field. His undergraduate and graduate courses at the University of Massachusetts, Princeton, Columbia, Dunbarton College, and the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität, Freiburg, always included a component on the performance history of plays, on stage or in films.

He was much-published author, specializing with great pleasure in nineteenth century British, Irish, and American theatre. (You knew the Irish would be in there.) He won ASTR’s Barnard Hewitt book award twice--in 1977 for his Theatre in the Age of Kean and in 1996 for Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, A Reconstructive Critical Edition of the Text of the First Production. That book also won the Modern Language Association’s 1996 award for a critical edition. For the body of his publications and his service to ASTR, Donohue was given ASTR’s Distinguished Scholar Award that year. Going into his retirement with his customary energy, he produced three of Oxford University Press’s multivolume edition of Wilde’s plays, was Editor and contributor to The Cambridge History of British Theatre, and published Fantasies of Empire: The Empire Theatre and the Licensing Controversy of 1894 (University of Iowa Press, Theatre and Cultural Studies series).

Professor Donohue earned his B.A. in English at Johns Hopkins University and his M.A. at Georgetown University, writing his thesis on Sean O’Casey. He earned his doctorate at Princeton under Alan S. Downer, one of the founders of ASTR. His dissertation evolved into his Theatre in the Age of Kean (Oxford, 1975), which sought to marry the traditional literary framework of Romanticism with performance analysis. His always prodigious research and teaching were supported by two Fulbright awards, grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Folger and Huntington libraries, and from of his own university, among others. He was the first to use a computer in the Folger Shakespeare Library’s Reading Room, crawling under a weighty Elizabethan table to plug it in and add to his catalogue of nineteenth century playbills. He gave me my first lesson in “floppy disks” as we drove to a theatre conference in the mid-1970s.

Performance was an important part of his personal life. He sang with a fulsome bass baritone voice in local Valley Light Opera productions of Gilbert and Sullivan, notably as Dick Deadeye in HMS Pinafore, which he directed. Twenty-eight cartons of programs attesting to his lifetime of theatregoing are now under the care of the Special Collections of the University of Massachusetts Library.

ASTR extends its sympathy to his beloved wife, Judith Wightman, and to his first wife, Therese, their daughters, Sheila and Sharon, and to the two of his four siblings who survive, John and James. A memorial service will be held in Amherst on April 6th. Judith may be reached at 170 Stonybrook Way, South Hadley, MA 01075.

Gary Jay Williams, Professor Emeritus, Drama
The Catholic University of America.
Washington, D.C

In 1969 Harvard University Press published an ingeniously researched and elegantly written book on an early popular entertainment, Harlequin in His Element: The English Pantomime, 1806-1836. Previous writing on British pantomime had been anecdotal and nostalgic; this study, supported by a Guggenheim grant and issued by a prestigious academic publisher, certified that such an amusement was an important component of a culture. It heralded a decade of ground-breaking research into the popular theatre of bygone eras. Such pioneering scholars as Brooks McNamara, Rob Erenstein, Virginia Scott, Michael Booth, Victor Emeljanow, Clive Barker and Don Wilmeth are gone from us. The author of Harlequin in His Element, David Mayer, now joins their number.

David was born in Chicago and, despite decades as an expatriate in England, never lost his Midwestern twang. His first teaching was in the Middle West, at Lawrence and Denison Universities; but his start in academe had come late, for, during the Korean War, from 1951 to 1953, he served in the U.S. Signal Corps. Working in the film-making unit may have sparked his abiding interest in cinema. David became a visiting professor of English at the University of Warwick, then of Drama at Bristol, before settling in at the University of Manchester. There he was to spend the rest of his career as Professor of Drama and Honorary Research Professor.

David regularly proselytized for the serious study of popular entertainment, eagerly embracing the rising discipline of “leisure studies.” In 1976, he and Kenneth Richards organized an international symposium on popular theatre, inviting colleagues from all over the Western hemisphere to help define the contours of the subject. When the papers were published a year later, he and Richards declared that the distinction between “theatre” and “popular theatre” was specious; Like social scientists, they urged attention to the nature of audiences, but also to the locale of the performance, the meaning of ideas of art, and the purpose of theatre for the multitude.

Meanwhile, David’s interests had moved from the Regency to the Victorian era and he soon was seen as the “go-to guy” for anyone interested in the visual and auditory aspects of popular performance during what he considered “the long nineteenth century.” Over the course of sixty years, he published well over a hundred articles, delivered nearly as many conference papers and lectures, and served as consultant to the Theatre Museum of the Victoria & Albert Museum, as well as to stage, film and television productions.

David had always winced at the clichés about silent film: that it sprang into being without antecedents, that its acting was crude, that it superseded its forerunner, the living theatre. His work began to center on the links between the late Victorian stage and early film. He became a contributing scholar and researcher to the annual Pordenone Silent Film Festival (le Giornte del Cinema Muto) and its related festival il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna. He changed the name of the journal Nineteenth Century Theatre Research, which he edited from 2002 to 2008, to the startling Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film. He personally undertook restoration of such forgotten silents as The Whip, based on a stage melodrama.

One of David’s great virtues as a scholar was his exemplary generosity. He was always willing to share his discoveries, his enthusiasms and his influence with colleagues and students, his own and those of others. Many of the latter became the former. I experienced this generosity in many ways. As fellow collectors and scholars, we exchanged our finds, our questions and those of our postgraduate tutees. David was a great collaborator, and several of his publications were written in partnership. With Eric Jones-Evans, he edited Henry Irving and The Bells (1980); with Katherine Preston, Playing Out the Empire: Ben Hur and Other Toga Plays and Films (1994); and with Bryony Dixon of the British Film Institute Bandits! Or The Collapsing Bridge (2015). He helped his second wife Helen Day-Mayer bring to fruition her history of the play and film ‘Way Down East. In later years, he collaborated with his daughters on conference papers, especially those involving performing horses. (Catherine was founder of the UK Women’s Equality Party and Lise co-created the iconoclastic British sitcom The Young Ones.)

David was an active member of ASTR, although never an officer. He often crossed the Atlantic to attend the annual meetings. In 1987, at the joint conference with IFTR in New York, he read the closing address; in 1995, in St Louis, he offered a plenary paper on theatrical photography, another of his explorative innovations. He was invited to give a paper in Dallas in 2002, and in 2012 in Nashville he was honored with ASTR’s Distinguished Scholar award. His acceptance speech was highly emotional because he recognized the award also honored his particular areas of theatre history.

David had a contrarian streak, which led him to take an anti-establishment stand on certain social and political issues. A member of the Garrick Club, he opposed its restrictions on women and took every opportunity to facilitate female scholars’ access to the picture collections, library and dining rooms. He supported the campaign to save Harker’s Studio, one of the last theatre scenery workshops in the UK. David did not suffer fools gladly and he was to need all his bemused outrage as he approached 90. In 2016 he discovered he had been placed on a US security no-fly list because a one-armed Chechen militant, allegedly behind the Istanbul airport attack, had used the name as an alias. Thick-witted bureaucracy prevented David from visiting his homeland or receiving mail from it. It took years to clear this up.

Retirement had come in 1996 but it in no way reduced his activity. His second magnum opus Stagestruck Filmmaker: D. W. Griffith and the American Theatre appeared in 2009. When I last saw him, in 2016, he was attending a conference in Venice on the Victorian Theatre and the City; despite equipped with a hearing aid and a cane, he was as mentally alert and acerbic as ever.

David's loss is, to use cinema’s favorite adjective, colossal—for his field of study, for his circle of acquaintance, for those, like me, who knew him as both a friend and a colleague. I keep getting messages from my former students about how much he helped them with their research. We believed that David was indestructible—he had always been here and always would be. His achievements remain a monument to an honorable and influential life.

Anyone who worked in the Harvard Theatre Collection during the tenure of Jeanne Newlin as curator (1972-1995) will be grieved to hear of her recent death. Jeanne came to the HTC in 1968, after earning a Ph.D. from City University of New York with a dissertation on the stage history of Troilus and Cressida. For four years she served as assistant to the then curator Helen Willard, and on Miss Willard’s retirement was appointed to the post.

Jeanne was wholly devoted to the HTC and sought to increase its holdings, its reputation and its utility to scholars. She oversaw its move from a dark basement under Houghton Library to its dedicated space in the new Pusey Library. She created a board of friends of the HTC, which included such movers and shakers as the newspaper publisher Barry Bingham, the film director Dan Freudenberger, the theatre manager Richard Bader and the eminent professor Harry Levin, among others. Through gifts and grants, she managed to enlarge the Collection’s acquisition fund and was tireless in persuading collectors to leave their acquisitions to Harvard.

During her time as curator, she managed to secure the Howard Rothschild Ballets Russes collection, the Edward Binney collection of dance prints, the John Ward collection of musical theatre, the Marian Hannah Winter collection of popular entertainment ephemera, the Jacobs Pillow Dance Archive and many others. She lobbied long and hard and with success to have the archives of the Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., deposited at the HTC. She expanded the meaning of theatre to encompass all the performing arts and, with the acquisition of optical toys and screenplays, opened up a pathway to film studies.

When the American Society for Theatre Research met in Cambridge in the bicentennial year of 1976, Jeanne masterminded an excursion to a 19th-century private theatre in Brookline, where a performance took place of John Brougham’s Little Nell and the Marchioness, the MS. of which had just been discovered. Her educational mission was strong: she regularly taught seminars on theatre history for Harvard undergraduates and for many years took on the graduate pro-seminar in research methods and materials in the Tufts Drama Department. Her final project required the use of the new invention: e-mail.

In 1989 Jeanne was a member of a delegation of American scholars that attended a conference of their Soviet counterparts in Moscow. Her growing interest in Russia led to her hosting an international conference on Russian émigré theatre at the HTC and to organizing exhibitions on Theodore Komisarjevsky and George Balanchine. In collaboration with her husband, the Shakespearean scholar Joseph Price, she was part of the team that organized the 2-year, NEH-funded project “Shakespeare and the Worlds of Communism.” Her own scholarship included several articles and an anthology of essays on Richard II.

Because Harvard had no theatre studies program, Jeanne often had difficulty persuading her superiors at Houghton Library of the importance of the HTC to higher education and to the culture at large. This led to a parting of the ways in 1995. With Jeanne’s retirement to private life, where she was equally active in the historic preservation movement, the Theatre Collection lost a loyal, able and enterprising leader.

I suppose that most lives are unfinished, in the sense that few of us will ever complete the many goals we set for ourselves in the foolish – but very human – expectation of finding enough time and energy to complete them all. 

Among Tom’s unfinished goals near the end of his life was a plan for the McConachies and Postlewaits to share a long-distance Zoom conversation together.  Last summer, Stephanie and I had been looking forward to Tom and Marilyn’s welcome hospitality again at their home outside of Seattle.  Tom’s failing health and our recent drive through Covid country, however, made our in-person visit too risky.  So the four of us decided to do a Zoom call later that year.  But life (and death) intervened and the four of us never put that conversation together.

In another sense, though, Tom’s unfinished business – if he had ever stopped to make such a To Do list for himself – would have easily exceeded the length of the many lists he did make (and mostly follow) during his life.  In retrospect, I should have realized that Tom was destined for an incomplete scholarly life when we first met at an ASTR meeting sometime in the mid-1980s to discuss plans for the book of essays that eventually became Interpreting the Theatrical Past in 1989. Having studied historiography and recently published a piece in TJ urging our discipline to move beyond positivism, I was beginning to craft a few new goals that I believed theatre historians might better pursue.  For every one of my proposals, however, Tom had ten ideas for new approaches that historians in other fields were already attempting and urged that we should, too.  I could barely keep up with his suggestions and left our meeting both exhausted and exhilarated by the prospects he had outlined. 

Tom eventually followed up on many of these ideas with two more significant studies, The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Historiography (2009) and Representing the Past: Essays in Performance Historiography (2011), co-edited with Charlotte Canning.  The 2009 book focused on the theatrical event and its context and the 2011 collection gathered essays from several prominent historians to examine a single theme from among the archive, time, space, identity, and narrative.  Both books, however, especially Representing the Past, intentionally posed as many questions as they answered.  It was as if Tom’s driving curiosity reduced all historiographical goals, once achieved, to temporary positions that required more certainty.

That curiosity and quest for a more perfect theatre history were especially evident in his book editing practices.  Tom edited two of my books for his University of Iowa series, Studies in Theatre History and Culture, and both benefitted immensely from his efforts.  The joke about Tom’s editing, shared among many of us authors in his series, was that the careful notes he invariably sent back to you were nearly as long as the manuscript you had submitted.  Again, his curiosity and perfectionism drove him to it.  But to be fair, Tom never insisted that his authors share all of the same goals that his notes and queries implicitly urged.  From Tom’s perspective, though, the unanswered questions he had posed as an editor probably helped to shape his ongoing drive for more certainty.

Our last series of emails about a manuscript of mine demonstrated the continuing reach of his questioning mind.  I realized that my book made unusual demands on many of those I hoped were potential readers by asking them to consider recent evolutionary theory and statistical model-building as valid means of explaining historical causation.  Knowing that Tom was also curious about these areas of historiography, I asked him if he would consider writing a back-of-the-book blurb for me.  Despite his illness, he took up the task with his usual thoroughness and insight.    

I miss him already.  May we all reach such unfinished lives near the end of our days.

Thanks, Tom. 

 ~ Bruce McConachie

by EJ Westlake

ASTR mourns the passing of Phillip Barry Zarrilli, an internationally known scholar and teacher. Zarrilli was born in 1947 in Covington, Kentucky, outside of Cincinnati, and grew up in Akron, Ohio. He attended Buchtel High School and began his studies in philosophy at Ohio University. Phillip was deeply interested in religion and spirituality and even earned a Master of Divinity degree from McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago. He was not destined to be a minister, but his love of philosophy and religion fueled his activism against the war and for social justice. He saw theatre as a way to communicate ideas and to put his ideas into practice.

Zarrilli entered the PhD program at the University of Minnesota and began directing in the Twin Cities. Inspired by Grotowski’s visit to Kerala, Phil obtained a Fulbright to study kalarippayattu with Govindankutty Nair in 1976. In Psychophysical Acting, he wrote of his experience as someone who, initially, attempted to attack the training with the kind of aggression he had learned as a young man in Ohio playing football: “this willful, aggressive, assertive approach to one’s body-in-training . . . Many males undergoing training suffer the same problem with the same result — unnecessary tension.” Over years of training, he said, he learned to be present:

I found myself able more consistently to enter a state of readiness and awareness . . . my body and mind were being positively integrated and cultivated for engagement in what I was doing in the present moment. My tensions and inattentions gradually gave way to sensing myself simultaneously as flowing yet power-full, centered yet free, released yet controlled. . . . I was learning how to ‘stand still.’” (23-4)

During his studies, Phil met A.C. Scott, the founder of the Asian/Experimental Theatre program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He became Scott’s protégé and took over the program after Scott’s retirement in 1979. Zarrilli quickly established his reputation as a teacher and theatre maker, teaching at Northwestern and at NYU, while continuing to train regularly in Kerala. His interest in new philosophy and performance theory made him one of the driving forces in establishing performance studies as a discipline.

I met Phil when I took my first PhD seminar from him in 1992. The reading load was heavy. I had no idea what “performance theory” was, yet somehow I thought I could take an advanced seminar in it. Phil did not coddle or hold your hand through anything, but he believed in your ability to rise to the level of the seminar. He graciously took time to discuss the material, always. He supplemented reading on cultural studies with his own research and work in Kerala. He made us keenly aware of the politics of intercultural work, an approach that had a tremendous influence on my own research and writing.

Phillip moved to the UK to teach at Exeter in 2000. I continued to see him at conferences. It was at one such meeting that I saw him after having survived his first encounter with the cancer that would later take him. He seemed resilient. He and his long-time partner Kaite O’Reilly had established The LLanarth Group and had begun an innovating and rewarding period of collaboration that would last the rest of his life. He became an Emeritus Professor in 2013, but remained an active teacher and artist. During the last two decades, Phil worked with The Llanarth Group, Theatre P'Yut (Korea) and GaitKrash (Ireland) on playing ‘The Maids’ (2015). He directed The Water Station (2004, 2008, and 2015) as well as several Beckett plays. He directed several of O’Reilly’s plays, including Cosy (2015), And Suddenly I Disappear (2018) and co-directed and co-wrote with O’Reilly richard iii redux [or] Sara Beer is not Richard III (2018).

Phillip will be remembered by the international community of scholars for his revolutionary texts on acting: Acting (Re)considered (1994), When the Body Becomes All Eyes (1998), Psychophysical Acting (2009), and his final work (Toward) a Phenomenology of Acting (2019). He wrote extensively on training the breath as a way into self-awareness. In Psychophysical Acting, he writes:

Sense the space between this moment of completion of the in-breath and the moment of initiation of the out-breath. This space between is that place where the potential for impulse and action reside: therefore, it is the space where acting begins. (26)

Phillip Zarrilli and Jo Shapland performing in Told by the Wind, The Llanarth Group, last performed at the International Theatre Festival in Kerala, January 2020. Photo by Kaite O’Reilly.

Phil died on the afternoon of April 28 with his partner Kaite O’Reilly at his side. She wrote of his passing on her webpage:

He rode out on a breath – like so many times in his teaching he spoke of riding the breath to that moment of completion at the end of exhalation – the space in-between at the end of one cycle before the impulse of the next inhalation begins. This time came no inhalation.

It was the ‘good death’ he wanted, I think – calm, pain-free, unsentimental – me holding his hand. . .

I believe Phillip inhabited every second of his life until he departed, soaring, on a breath.

In the renown that Banes achieved for her dance scholarship, her own work as a performer and creator in the 1970s has tended to be forgotten. But it was fascinating. After graduating the University of Chicago in 1972, she started her own collaborative group called the Community Discount Players. In 1974, she was one of seven co-founders of MoMing Collection, which presented both local and out of town avant-garde artists in Chicago. She performed there with the avant-garde choreographer Kenneth King. It was at MoMing, after a 1975 performance of the improvisational group Grand Union, that she met then-fellow critic Carroll. Banes and Carroll often collaborated, first as critics in New York, and later as professors at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. 

In January 1974, Banes joined a group of Oberlin students taking a three-week workshop with Meredith Monk. She was chosen to work with Monk and her core group to collaborate on the making of Chacon (1974). She was doing double duty, simultaneously writing about the experience for Dance Chronicle. Monk led the dancers through breathing exercises, imagining a landscape, transmitting your landscape silently to a partner, then amplifying it to the rest of the cast. After the first day, Banes wrote a letter to her friend and Community Discount Player collaborator Ellen Mazer: “All this communication about visual image and thoughts and processes of learning and teaching, all of it without speaking one word.” When Monk broke the silence, Sally wrote in her Dance Chronicle essay, it was to “sit and talk about stereotypes and archetypes, how they differ, when to use them, how to transcend them, how to avoid them.” Banes was inspired by the organic nature of the process. “It’s amazing how naturally all this flows,” she enthused. “MM directs the currents of our material, rather than telling us precisely what to do.”

After the first day, Banes decided to produce her own “mammoth performance event” that spring. Excited, she wrote to Mazer about her ideas. It was to take the form of a three-day treasure hunt sprawling throughout the University of Chicago. The audience would be given clue sheets to help them find where and when the performances were. A Day in the Life of the Mind, Part 2, subtitled “a series of performance exhibits,” turned out to be a single six-hour event. (Part 1 was an unrelated photography exhibit.) Rather Monkian in its dreamlike images, it also suggested influences from Anna Halprin (in its mingling of performers and audience) and Deborah Hay (in its circle dances).

Many of the elements that characterized Banes’s prolific scholarship were foreshadowed in the performances she made in her 20s: her attraction to the avant-garde, her simultaneous attention to small details and big-picture contexts, her tongue-in-cheek sense of humor, her nonconformist spirit. A Day in the Life of the Mind, Part 2 started with Banes and Mazer emerging from the campus lagoon, arms around each other’s waists, wearing white dresses adorned with long strands of seaweed. Other characters included a man chirping on a tree branch, another doing tai chi, surfer girls in short shorts, a couple whispering salaciously to each other under an umbrella, and a visit to Banes’s apartment with her grandmother seated in a roped off area like a museum display. The day ended with dancers in separate windows on five stories of the Regenstein Library, multi-level figures in motion while someone was singing “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” as the sun set. In a review in the Chicago Reader, Meredith Anthony called it “Chicago’s greatest theatrical event.” After describing the last scene, she wrote, “There was something indescribably ravishing about the sight. The monumental nature, the audacity of the entire concept, was nearly overwhelming” (June 14, 1974).

Banes and Mazer’s next collaboration, in February 1975, was Sophie, also called A Day in the Life of the Mind, Part 3, in which the audience sipped mint tea and lounged on pillows. Mazer, who had a dance background but majored in philosophical psychology, told me (Wendy) they were focusing on collaborative process, ordinary movements like walking, and women’s friendships. In one section Banes and Mazer recited Kant’s “Antinomies of Pure Reason” to each other. In another, they appeared nude with four-inch glittery platform heels, moving slowly. It’s possible that Sally had heard about Anna Halprin’s ritualistic slow-motion dressing and undressing in Parades and Changes (1965). After they slowly bent down and smashed glasses underfoot, Banes and Mazer, along with other “Sophies,” joined in a circle dance that was attributed to Deborah Hay.

Another escapade, called Sophie Eats Shrimp, was more of a work dance. Mazer, who took the lead on this event, rounded up fruit crates that the performers stacked up and knocked down during the performance. Her mode was “giving instructions to dancers and letting them make their own decisions.” It took place in a vacant lot where, as dancer Carter Frank remembered, most of the audience was homeless men.

In 1983, after she had been living in New York City for seven years, Banes revived the Sophie idea by writing a script of historical fiction called Sophie Heightens the Contradictions. Sophie was a 17-year old “red virgin” of Paris Opera Ballet who fought on the side of the Communards. She helped Marx write the Communist Manifesto, organized the ballet dancers to be pro-commune, and got killed during the Paris uprising. And then—Sophie was casually reincarnated as an anti-war activist in the 1980s. I (Wendy) played Sophie. The six-page script was chock-full of historical information—for instance, in one scene, the Paris Opera dancers snuck in some steps from the Can-Can, violating their contract. My role involved executing a standard ballet barre and throwing party snaps at the floor. We performed it only once as a work in progress.


In the course of her career, Banes taught at Florida State University, the State University of New York at Purchase, Wesleyan, and Cornell. She joined the dance faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1991, serving as chair from 1992-1996. When her excellent record at UW-Madison was rewarded with the honor of a named professorship of her choosing, Banes named her position after Marian Hannah Winter, the dance historian known for her pioneering work on Black American minstrelsy. Banes later moved to the Department of Theatre and Drama at UW-Madison, where she chaired the doctoral program in Dance Studies. From 2001-2002, she was the Director of the UW-Madison Institute for Research in the Humanities. In 2020, Professor Li Chiao-Ping named her own position after Banes, becoming the Sally Banes Professor of Dance in the UW-Madison Dance Department.

Banes is lovingly remembered by those who worked with her as a remarkable colleague with an infectious energy, a sparkling sense of humor, and a gracious intelligence. “She had a way of making everyone in the room smarter, without for a moment trying to be the smartest one in the room,” said Michael Vanden Heuvel, her colleague at UW-Madison. No matter how busy she was with her own research, she always had time to mentor students, and never took that responsibility casually. Her students recall her enthusiasm for learning new things and the delight she so obviously took in her teaching, research, and advising. Kristen Hunt, her former graduate student at UW-Madison and now associate professor of theatre at Arizona State University, said, “I could tell her a project idea that I thought might be stupid and she would get excited about it and help me make it better, which I now try to do with my students.”

We have all been missing Sally for eighteen years, since her stroke. She is memorialized in her indelible influence embedded in the research, writing, and teaching of the generation of scholars she mentored, the many dedications and acknowledgments to her in the books written by her students, and in her remarkable and groundbreaking body of dance literature.

---

Andrea Harris is Associate Professor and Chair of the Dance Department at UW-Madison; a former graduate student of Banes’, she is the editor of Before, Between, Beyond: Three Decades of Dance Writing, and the author of Making Ballet American: Modernism Before and Beyond Balanchine (OUP, 2017). 

Wendy Perron, a former dancer/choreographer and Dance Magazine editor in chief, is author of Through the Eyes of a Dancer: Selected Writings; she is now an adjunct professor at Juilliard and NYU Tisch School of the Arts.

(1) Susan Manning, “Review: Modernist Dogma and Post-Modern Rhetoric: A Response to Sally Banes’ ‘Terpsichore in Sneakers’,” TDR 32, no. 4 (Winter, 1988): 32-39. Also Sally Banes and Susan Manning, “Terpsichore in Combat Boots,” TDR 33, no. 1 (Spring, 1989): 13-16.

(2) Lynn Garafola, “Voice of the Zeitgeist: Sally Banes and Her Times,” introduction to Before, Between, and Beyond: Three Decades of Dance Writing (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007), xii.

(3) Sally Banes and John F. Szwed, “From ‘Messin’ Arount’ to ‘Funky Western Civilization,” New Formations 27 (Winter 1995-96): 59-79, reprinted in Before, Between, and Beyond: Three Decades of Dance Writing, 119-147.

(4) Sally Banes, “Our Hybrid Tradition,” in Chantal Pontbriand, ed., Danse: langage propre et métissage culturel/Dance: Distinct Language and Cross-Cultural Influences (Montreal: Parachute, 2000), reprinted in Before, Between, and Beyond, 257.

(5) For example: Sally Banes, “Kasyan Goleizovsky’s Ballet Manifestos,” Ballet Review 11, no. 3 (1983): 64-75; Banes, “Gulliver’s Hamburger: Defamiliarization and the Ordinary in the 1960s Avant-Garde,” in Banes and Harris, eds., Reinventing Dance in the 1960s: Everything Was Possible (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), 3-23; Noël Carroll and Sally Banes, “Cinematic Nation-Building: Eisenstein’s The Old and the New,” in Mette Hjort and Scott Mackenzie, eds., Cinema Nation (London: Routledge, 2000), 121-138; and Elizabeth Souritz, Lynn Visson, and Sally Banes, “Fedor Lopukhov: A Soviet Choreographer,” Dance Research Journal 17, no. 2 (Autumn 1985): 3-20.

(6) Banes, “Olfactory Performances,” TDR 45, no. 1 (Spring, 2001): 68-76, reprinted in Before, Between, and Beyond, 244. Also see “The Scent of a Dance,” a paper given by Banes to the Society of Dance History Scholars in 2001, in Before, Between, and Beyond, 269-280.

(7) Joan Acocella, “Electrification,” introduction to Before, Between, and Beyond, xix.

(8) Banes, “Elephants in Tutus,” paper planned for the Society of Dance History Scholars conference in 2002, printed in Before, Between, and Beyond, 356.

Photo credit: Camille Billops and James V. Hatch Archives in the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library at Emory University

“Mining the Past to Forge the Future”
Shane Breaux, Resident Dramaturg, NY Shakespeare Exchange

When I first met Jim Hatch, he had been coaxed out of retirement from the classroom by Dr. Mira Felner to teach one last class on African American theatre history to undergraduate and Masters students at Hunter College in 2009. On the first day of class, with his infectious wide grin and wearing one of his signature kerchiefs tied around his neck, he asked if any of us thought it would ever be possible to write an integrated history of the American theatre. That, to me, seemed a most preposterous question. Why wouldn’t that be possible? Isn’t that the goal? Shouldn’t this professor expect us to believe in this possibility?

This was only my first year of graduate school, so I didn’t know yet that, of course, Jim started the semester with this query specifically to point out the absurdity of the lack of such a history and inspire us to go on to write them ourselves. Indeed, he followed the question by making eye contact with each of us in the room and directly charging us to use what we were going to learn in his class to advocate, and agitate, for racial equality and other social changes in the United States. He repeated this charge to us on the last day of class, and by that time, he had fully inspired me to devote my graduate studies and future career to black theatre. After the semester ended, I was fortunate enough that Jim offered to continue to mentor me. He hired me to work with him for two years at the archive of black art he started in 1968 with the artist Camille Billops, his longest and closest collaborator as the couple was married for nearly thirty-two years until her death in 2019. That experience not only afforded me close access to much of the collection’s holdings, which ignited my passion for archival research, it also allowed me to get to know Jim and Camille more personally and to enjoy their wonderfully wicked senses of humor. Those experiences remain integral to my professional career and my deep love and appreciation for black theatre.

I had actually been thinking about those days and Jim’s lasting influence on me personally and professionally when I learned of his passing. Earlier that very day, I had consulted two of his books—A History of African American Theatre and Black Drama USA—for an essay I was writing about the extraordinary new plays by black playwrights currently enjoying wide attention in U.S. theatre. It was somewhat comforting to realize that he was still helping me in my work through his writing. Since I met him in 2009, I have taken Jim’s charge and inspiration seriously. I wrote an integrated history of early twentieth-century musical variety performers for my doctoral dissertation (under the direction of one of Jim’s earlier students, Dr. James F. Wilson) that relied heavily on archival research. Today, I continue to follow his lead by teaching and writing in the activist mode I learned from him in his class, on those long afternoons discussing black art and culture while sorting through archive boxes, and from his many other contributions to the field made during his long, extraordinary career.

Dr. James Vernon Hatch was born in 1928 in Oelwein, Iowa. He attended graduate school at the University of Iowa while teaching high school English and drama. After earning his PhD in theatre in 1958, he began his career teaching in higher education while also establishing his reputation as one of the foremost historians of black drama in the United States, and as a celebrated playwright, editor, filmmaker, archivist, and social activist. He taught around the world, at the University of California, Los Angeles; the High Cinema Institute in Cairo, Egypt as a Fulbright lecturer; the University of Hamburg; New York University; National Teachers College in Taiwan; the City College of New York; and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, to name several. In 1997, Dr. Hatch was given a Life Achievement Award by the Association for Theatre in Higher Education.

For more than half a century, Hatch was at the forefront of African American theatre history, a position he productively used to perform social activism in every aspect of his work. For instance, as a scholar and historian, he edited and published anthologies of black plays, most of which had never been published or were out of print at the time. Every anthology Hatch edited also includes several plays by women writers. Among those collections, he co-edited The Roots of African American Drama: An Anthology of Early Plays, 1858-1938 (with Leo Hamalian in 1991), which is notable for its inclusion of a rare vaudeville sketch written by the comedy-dancing duo Butterbeans and Susie (Jodie and Susie Edwards); Lost Plays of the Harlem Renaissance, 1920–1940 (again with Hamalian in 1996); and the two-volume collection Black Drama USA (with Ted Shine in 1974 and revised in 1996). The latter anthologies include plays as early as 1847 through 1992.

As an artist in his own right, he cowrote the musical Fly Blackbird with C. Bernard Jackson, which enjoyed successful runs in Los Angeles and New York City where it won the 1962 Obie Award for Best Musical. In collaboration with Billops, he also made several films, notably The KKK Boutique Ain’t Just Rednecks, which was awarded Best Documentary by the Filmmakers Consortium in 1994, and Finding Christa, which was given the Grand Jury Award by the Sundance Film Festival in 1992.

Also a prolific writer, Hatch published Sorrow Is the Only Faithful One: The Life of Owen Dodson, a critical biography of the writer Dodson, in 1993. ASTR honored that book with the Bernard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research in Theatre History and gave the same award to the still-unsurpassed A History of African American Theatre (2003), which Hatch co-wrote with Errol G. Hill and published in the Cambridge Studies in American Theatre and Drama series. He published numerous articles in journals and essay collections. In addition, Hatch and Billops co-founded Artist and Influence: The Journal of Black American Cultural History in 1981. The journal was published annually and included original poetry, essays, photographs, illustrations, drawings, and an oral history archive of transcripts of interviews with more than 400 artists from all creative genres and forms.

Most of those interviews had been conducted in the couple’s SoHo loft in New York City. The loft was a remarkable place where Hatch and Billops lived and worked. Billops worked in a painting and sculpting studio at one end, while the vast holdings of the Hatch/Billops Collection were kept at the other. He and Billops began this staggering collection of rare and primary materials on African American culture and art in 1968 when they noted a frustrating dearth of information and published works. The collection continued to grow through the early 2000s, and now the Hatch/Billops Collection includes thousands of rare and out-of-print books, manuscripts, periodicals, printed artwork and original photographs, and theatrical ephemera such as clippings files, playbills, posters, and pamphlets. This is in addition to more than 1200 plays written by African Americans and an extensive library of published books about literature, painting, photography, music, dance, theatre, and film. Today, this significant collection, renamed The Camille Billops and James V. Hatch Archives, remains accessible at the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library at Emory University. Hatch and Billops attended the opening of its first public exhibition hosted by the university in 2016, appropriately titled “Still Raising Hell: The Art, Activism, and Archives of Camille Billops and James V. Hatch.” The enormous impact Hatch has had on individuals like me and on the field of black theatre more broadly is undeniable, and his work will continue to inspire and “raise hell” through this collection and his published works.

“The Final Curtain”
Laurence Senelick, Professor Emeritus, Tufts University

Don Wilmeth and I have been so closely linked over the years that I have to make an effort to remember when we first met. We probably became acquainted as members of ASTR some time in the mid-1970s, and since we both had long tenures at universities only an hour away from one another, the opportunities for gatherings were many.

Don was my benefactor in many ways. While working on his bibliography of popular entertainment, he asked if I knew of one devoted exclusively to British music hall. This inspired me to fill the gap by undertaking to compile the first. He also sponsored a performance at Brown of my translation of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, directed by John Emigh. This was the beginning of a series of invitations to come to Providence and speak, the very last time for the lecture series he had founded. He put me on the advisory board of the American theatre history series he was editing for Cambridge University Press and recruited me as a contributor to the Cambridge Guide to American Theatre. He was also one of those who recommended me for the College of Fellows of the American Theatre.

Such generosity was characteristic, especially to the profession at large. He was a mover and shaker in ASTR, serving as its president and on its executive board for many years. When in 1992 an annual conference in Cambridge fell through at the last minute, he showed great ingenuity and organizational skill in moving it successfully to Newport. His wife Judy served as unpaid secretary for many years, recording the minutes of meetings. The two of them were among the first in our field to master the laptop, and I can recall many meetings accompanied by the “ping” from Don’s Macintosh.

If it had an acronym, Don was a member: UCTA, TLA, IFTR, ATA, ATHE, ATDS, ANTA, NETC. Don was indefatigable in undertaking projects: encyclopedias, book series, special issues, exhibitions, and benefit performances, as well as editing periodicals or their book review sections. For many years, he served as a judge for book award competitions and rarely refused to sit on doctoral dissertation defenses. When I went on sabbatical, I convinced him to teach a graduate seminar at Tufts on Bernard Shaw, one of his specialties.

Although Don’s first important monograph was on the British tragedian Cooke, his real field was the history of American theatre. In depth and breadth of knowledge, awareness of sources, openness to such phenomena as circus, tent shows and the Wild West, he was without peer. Many of the most durable biographies, reference books and monographs on these subjects are of his devising. No wonder he was often sought after by documentary makers to be an articulate talking head.

He also was one of a group of American theatre scholars invited to Moscow in 1989, as glasnost made itself felt. Unfortunately, he travelled on a different flight from the rest of us. His bags were lost and every morning he had to be driven out to Sheremetevo airport to see if they had turned up. In the meantime we outfitted him from our wardrobes and toilet kits.

Don was a jovial and boisterous companion, replete with anecdotes and theatre gossip, delivered in a booming basso that could reach to the farthest ends of an auditorium. Since we were both avid collectors of theatricalia, we would meet at book and ephemera fairs, occasionally competing for the same item. He, however, limited himself to Anglo-American material, with a special interest in Charles Mathews and caricature. He also was an assiduous promoter of Brown’s magic collection and tried never to miss a performance of Ricky Jay.

When I first joined ASTR back in the early 1970s, the field of theatre history seemed to be populated by giants: Kalman Burnim, Harry Pedicord, Oscar Brockett, Brooks McNamara, William Appleton among them. Don soon joined that pantheon, and I like to think of him gathered with them around some Olympian bar, arguing the finer points of theatre past.

Christopher Bigsby, Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Society of Arts, Professor Emeritus, University of East Anglia

I had the pleasure of knowing Don for many years. We worked together on the History of the American Theatre. There is a reason his name appears before mine as editors. It was because he was smarter than I am, knew more than I did or do, and did more work than I did. Somewhere there is a photograph of us and our CUP editor, wearing cowboy outfits, him staring out like a cold-eyed gunslinger and the CUP editor, Sarah Stanton, wearing the outfit of a bar girl. The actor in him was never far below the surface. I treasure our meetings in England, Canada and the US and for the hospitality and kindness he and Judy showed to me at Brown and Keene. I treasure the memory of their incontinent dog, loved by them, though not for its incontinence and I confess not by me who had evidence of its incontinence as I got up in the middle of the night in their house to pee. Don was a wise man, an inspiration, a serious scholar even as he had an infectious sense of humour. Unlike me he was thoroughly organised, knowing where every book in his study was to be found. I only believe I do. Without his thoroughness and application I would have been lost when we worked together. I would call him up for advice. No calls any more, alas. But he has left his mark as few do. He certainly has on me. I am thinking of Judy who supported him through his illness and will be feeling bereft. There is, though, a time for us all. Arthur Miller spoke of Willy Loman as a man trying to write his name on a block of ice on a summer’s day. Don wrote his name on something far more substantial, and I am not just speaking of his books. He wrote it on the memory of all who knew him.

Joseph Donohue, Professor Emeritus of English, University of Massachusetts Amherst

I first came to know Don Wilmeth in 1974, at a conference on Victorian theatre and drama at the University of Massachusetts Amherst organized by me and a colleague, where he read a paper on the English tragedian George Frederick Cooke. By 1980 his research on the subject had issued in a full-length study, George Frederick Cooke: Machiavel of the Stage, the second volume published in the fledgling series I was editing for Greenwood Press, Contributions in Drama and Theatre Studies. I was all set to join him as a fellow scholar in British theatre history. What did I know? As subsequent events and book titles from his hand would indicate beyond doubt, his uncommon breadth of interest and coverage came to center on American drama and theatre and, beyond that, in an ever-widening circle, on American popular entertainment as well. Prolific as he was, the consistent rigor and extended vision of his approach to this polymorphic subject was what distinguished his work and organized his life. Living hardly more than an hour away from his retirement home in Keene, New Hampshire, I and my wife Judy managed to visit him and his wife Judy twice in just a few years. Now, I have a lot of books, but Don’s library, an oversize presence in that house, dwarfed mine, overflowing bookcases, piled successively step-by-step up the stairs, and making the dining table quite impossible for dining. And he was wonderful to talk to. He had a slightly reticent manner that made you think he was going to hold back the full truth, the complete details, but then he went ahead and came out with them anyway. It was as if we were picking up where we left off, somehow in the middle of our last conversation, the intervening time having caused no apparent loss of continuity or detail. It was sad to see him in decline, and we knew what was ahead, but we had the happy mutual benefit of some fine years of collegial friendship—one of the best of all, in my experience.

Bruce McConachie, Professor Emeritus, University of Pittsburgh

I have a few more images of some personal interactions with Don to add to our store of memories: His advice to me at an ASTR meeting about Edwin Forrest in the context of other antebellum US tragedians, his visit to the College of William and Mary to evaluate the theatre program when I working there in the 1980s (and his follow-up conversations with the chair at the time about the need to pursue more academic rigor), his knowledge of Russian circus clowns and aerialists when several members of IFTR went with us to the Moscow circus, his openness to new ideas for framing the early, pre-Columbian history of the US theatre when I was working on the overarching essay for volume 1 of the Cambridge History of American Theatre, his advice about when and how to pursue new members for ASTR soon after I took office as ASTR president, and a dinner with Don, Judy, and my wife shortly after his retirement from Brown where we discussed the perilous future of ASTR. For 30 years, from the mid-1970s into the mid-2000s, Don as advisor, editor, confidant, and friend was a significant presence in my life. I will miss him.

Jorge Huerta, Professor Emeritus, University of California, San Diego

I will never forget standing next to Don in an elevator around 1998, during one of our (many) meetings somewhere, and he asked me “what are you working on, Jorge?” and I told him about my next book. And that became Chicano Drama: Performance, Society and Myth (2000) under his editorial leadership at Cambridge University Press. I know there are many, many other stories from our colleagues around the world who owe so much to this brilliant, unassuming and generous man.

May this Giant in our field rest in peace.

Thomas E. Postlewait, Affiliate Professor, University of Washington

Don Wilmeth was perhaps the most distinguished scholar on American theatre history during my lifetime. His commitments to the study of popular entertainment provided leadership and mentorship for our discipline. Like so many people, I have followed his guidance on several scholarly projects. For example, I am beholden to him for selecting me to write the overview section of volume two of The Cambridge History of American Theatre that he and Christopher Bigsby co-edited. It was an honor to work with the two of them on this historical study that featured over thirty theatre scholars. In addition to this major accomplishment, Don wrote, edited, and co-edited over a dozen books. He also served as editor of a book series that published a very impressive range of scholarly studies. And because I also edited a book series, Don and I were able to complement one another in our editorial support for many of our contemporaries in the field of theatre history. And our careers had another vital parallel: we both served as Presidents of ASTR. My term in 1994-97 followed after his couple of terms. And yet another benefit was that I worked closed with Don and Judy Wilmeth during my presidency because Judy was serving as treasurer during that period. In many positive ways, my career benefitted from Don Wilmeth's accomplishments. Indeed, I was not alone, for Don guided the scholarship of a whole generation of theatre historians.

Marla Carlson, Professor, University of Georgia, ASTR President

Don Wilmeth published my first book as part of his Palgrave series and did so at a point when I was ready to give up. His encouragement was invaluable to me: without his belief in that project, I doubt that I would have a career in our field.

Kirsten Pullen, Professor of Theatre, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign

Dr. Jessica Claire Berson was born in New York City on May 14, 1972: a true New Yorker and Taurus, she was loyal, resilient, fierce, proud, outspoken, and stubborn. She died of metastatic breast cancer August 11, 2019 at home in Boston, surrounded by friends and family, including her husband Dr. Matthew McDonald and sons Leo and Henry. She is also survived by her mother Robin, father Robert, brother Will and many cousins, nieces and nephews, and other family members.

Dr. Berson received a BA with High Honors in Dance and a BA with Honors in English from Haverford College in 1994. After teaching dance, running a dance troupe, and dancing and choreographing professionally in Seattle, she attended graduate school in Theatre at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, receiving an MA in 1999 and PhD in 2005, completed under the supervision of Dr. Sally Banes. She worked as a Visiting Assistant Professor in Dance at Grinnell College and Wesleyan College, as a Lecturer in Drama at the University of Essex, and as an adjunct professor at Yale, Harvard, and Northeastern Universities.

Dr. Berson had a long association with ASTR. She attended her first conference in 2000 and her final conference in 2017, presenting a moving plenary on disability and desire. In her nearly two decades as a member of ASTR, she participated in several working sessions; received the Selma Jean Cohen Conference Presentation Award, the David Keller Travel Grant, and the Brooks McNamara Publishing Subvention; presented a curated panel; and two plenary sessions. She and I co-convened six consecutive working sessions on dance and sex. Over 60 scholars shared their work in those sessions.

An accomplished dancer and choreographer, Dr. Berson was certified in Laban Movement Analysis and Pilates. She wrote nearly a dozen book chapters and peer-reviewed journal articles, and presented over 20 conference papers, primarily at ASTR, the Congress for Research on Dance, and the Society for Dance History Scholars (now Dance Studies Association). She received a Fulbright US Scholar Award to pursue dance and disability research in the UK for a new book and a British Academy Research Grant in support of her first monograph as well as several teaching awards. Her research on disability and performance, popular dance, and of course her brilliant, ASTR-supported and ATHE Best Book-winning The Naked Result: How Stripping Became Big Business, is a significant legacy for dance and performance studies.

Dr. Berson inspired students up and down the Eastern seaboard as the “go-to gal” for dance history, performance theory, and choreographic technique, teaching most regularly at Yale and Harvard. She frequently brought performance artist (and friend) Tim Miller to her students for intensive residencies. At ASTR and in her teaching, she was a fierce and funny mentor, always glad to share a drink or small plate or (in the old days) cigarette along with tough but tender advice on the choices we make.

Despite the awards Dr. Berson won, grants she received, and status as an Ivy League adjunct, she was unable to secure a permanent, full-time academic position after she left England to raise her sons on the same continent as their father. Her academic precarity is another significant legacy for ASTR and for the disciplines of dance and performance studies. That such a brilliant scholar, dedicated teacher, and engaged disciplinary citizen was unable to experience the benefits and security of a tenure-track job is as unfair and illogical as the cancer that took her life. Dr. Jessica Berson loved ASTR, and many of its members loved her back. We’ll be in the plenary halls, in working sessions, receptions, the annual luncheon, and the bar, remembering and missing Jessica for years to come.

Obituary
By Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei, PhD, Professor Emerita of Theatre, UCLA

Richard Hornby, who fought Parkinson’s disease for many years, passed away peacefully just after midnight on Feb. 11, 2018 due to a brain hemorrhage. He had a sweet half-smile on his face to the end. His wife Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei was with him. He was 79.

Richard was born Oct. 25, 1938 in Paterson, New Jersey, to Herbert and Roma Berry Hornby. While a math major at MIT, he discovered his true love and calling: the theatre. His “Damascus Moment” came when he literally turned back enroute to a job interview for the Man in the Moon program. He later said, “Neil Armstrong was going to have to make his giant step for mankind without me.” Richard went on to earn a PhD in Theatre at Tulane, becoming one of a group of young innovators called “The Tulane Mafia” who helped transform American university theatre education. 

Richard was an accomplished actor, director, theatre critic and teacher who taught at universities in Canada and the USA for 50 years, most recently at UC Riverside, where he also served for a time as Chair of the Theatre Department. 

For over 30 years -- not stopping until 2016 -- he wrote four yearly “Theatre Chronicles” for New York’s prestigious Hudson Review. He was the author of 5 books: The End of Acting; Script into Performance; Patterns in Ibsen’s Middle Plays; Drama, Metadrama and Perception (also translated into Korean);and Mad About Theatre.  

If you asked Richard about any play, chances are he’d either acted in it, directed it, or had seen the original production. As a young man, he performed with Faye Dunaway. He loved to tell stories about the theatre, and he loved jokes. Listening to Mozart, Beethoven, Gershwin, jazz and Broadway show tunes was a life-long pleasure. Richard was fascinated by history (especially WWII and American history) and devoured biographies. He was passionate about chess (his online name was “Machiavel”) and loved bridge, crime thrillers (especially Lee Child and Michael Connolly), Downton Abbey, Singin’ in the Rain, Antiques Roadshow, House of Cards, Law and Order: SVU and watching golf.

Richard and Carol were together for 26 years, and married in 2013. They traveled extensively, searching out great theatre, great friends, great food, great art and architecture, and the wonders of the world. Some of their favorite places include New York, London, Edinburgh, Paris, Berlin, Kyoto, Bali, Venice and Santorini. One of their greatest pleasures was hosting dinners for dear friends in their Claremont home.

In addition to his wife Carol, Richard leaves behind (by his first marriage) his son Steven and daughter Sarah, brother David and sister-in-law Mary, niece Christina O’Gara (Terry),  nephew Mark (Brittany), great-niece Leigh and countless students, colleagues and friends.  

A jazz funeral/commemoration of his life was held February 17, 2018. His ashes are interred in Oak Park Cemetery, Claremont, California.

Distinguished Research Professor of English, York University

For York University obituary click here.

A Tribute

Tracy C. Davis, Barber Professor of Performing Arts, Northwestern University

In 1996, ASTR honored Michael R. Booth as its Distinguished Scholar, recognizing a lifetime of work on nineteenth-century British theatre. He was born in Shanghai, where his father was manager of the P&O Bank, and fled with his parents from the chaos of the Sino-Japanese War to Victoria, British Columbia where his precocity flourished. He began his undergraduate studies at Victoria College, aged 16, and matriculated from the University of British Columbia, BA Hon (English) in 1951. He was a great raconteur, and told many stories at his own expense, for example that he gone away to university to study English with the conviction that Gone with the Wind was the ultimate in literary achievement. No wonder, we might conclude, that he would later champion things so outré as melodrama, burlesque, pantomime, and extravaganza.

Michael took his MA at the University of London, then returned briefly to UBC to teach English. In this period, he discovered that a succession of gold rushes resulted in theatres being built throughout the interior of British Columbia, many of which remained amid the abandoned flumes and bars of ghost towns. Leading stars of the British theatre had ventured to these theatres, and Michael wanted to know what this was all about. When he returned to London to take his PhD, the very idea that one could make a scholarly career out of Victorian drama was so counter-intuitive that he was obliged to write his dissertation on the eighteenth century; still, he pushed the topic as close to the nineteenth century and as relevant to performance criticism as he could get away with.

During this period he met his first wife, Jenifer, a librarian at the British Library. They resettled in Canada. While on faculty of the English Department at Royal Military College (1960-66), he found Kingston, Ontario to be a nice town but lacking in extramural activity. Opportunity came knocking. At this time, an enormous corpus of nineteenth-century plays was being brought out by Readex: printed plays, manuscript plays, and prompt books were comprehensively photographed and the texts miniaturized on card paper that required a special machine for enlargement. RMC bought a subscription and Michael systematically read each installment as it was issued.

As baby boomers matured, Canadian universities expanded and in this process qualified Canadians who could fill new posts were cherished. The University of Guelph headhunted Michael to become its founding chair of theatre (1967-75). When the University of Warwick, just twelve years old, created its Department of Theatre Studies in 1975, Michael moved to England to become its first head and professor. The designation Theatre Studies recognized a less literary, more comprehensive approach to the discipline and this was reflected in the curriculum that Michael and his earliest colleagues, including Clive Barker, championed. Despite his scholarly specialty, Michael relished theatre of all kinds, particularly the avant-garde, and so built an undergraduate curriculum that emphasized political theatre and social engagement as well as theatre history. During this period, he served the Society for Theatre Research in various ways, including as editor of Theatre Notebook. In 1984, Michael responded to two more calls: the Thatcher government’s incentives to trim the payroll by giving professors early retirement packages and the invitation to return to British Columbia to chair the theatre department at the University of Victoria. This was a happy homecoming, and he remained in the department until 1996.

Michael never learned to type, let alone use a computer. His prodigious output was accomplished the old fashioned way, in an era when academics and typists had symbiotic occupations. He became my doctoral supervisor just after he finished his groundbreaking book Victorian Spectacular Theatre. Since, in those days, dissertators drowned in index cards and other scraps of paper, I asked him how he went about his work. “The first day of my sabbatical I sat down without a thought in my head. My desk had nothing on it but a pad of paper and a pen. Then I just started writing.” This only slightly disingenuous marvel was accomplished by dint of a prodigious memory and capacity to organize masses of detail. Indeed, he knew his argument and put his hand on each corroborating snippet as the need arose, drawing upon his personal library and collections of Victorian paintings, especially watercolors, and promotional materials that he had painstakingly amassed. But, to round out this reminiscence, I will add that he also halted work punctually for morning coffee (never tea) and afternoon tea (never coffee) even if this meant stopping mid-sentence, heedless of remoteness from the desired provisions. For him, academic work was a matter of routine, and long before slogans about work/life balance came to the fore it was clear to everyone that he would get on with the job, but only after a morning swim, and carry on with the job as long as necessary, but that these breaks were sacrosanct.

Though a dedicated undergraduate teacher, Michael had a laissez-faire approach to postgraduate supervision. He told me that he had seen his doctoral advisor precisely four times: first at the mixer welcoming new students, once when sent on an errand to purchase pipe tobacco, another time through the glass panel of his advisor’s door, and finally at his viva voce when he defended his dissertation. He was determined to be approachable, and we talked far more often during intervals at the theatre than in his office. He was much in demand and invitations took him to Australia and to a visiting professorship at Columbia University, where he stepped in for Martin Meisel in 1984, offering a course on farce. Those who knew him chiefly through conferences might describe him as avuncular, and decidedly idiosyncratic. The finer points of political correctness eluded him, but so too did sartorial vanity. What mattered was advocacy for his field, and he carried this out by directing as well as editing and writing about nineteenth-century plays. Determined that both Victorian melodrama and Victorian acting be better understood, he could recite Henry Irving’s repertoire of dramatic monologues with the intensity of one possessed, and defy any spectator’s skepticism until the passion and the pathos were grasped in equal measure.

In retirement, Michael enjoyed the sunshine of Greece where he and his second wife, Judy, settled in Afissos. He died peacefully in Victoria on 2 October 2017 following a short illness. His desire to present one more paper, in spring 2018 at the Palazzo Pesaro-Papafava, the conference site maintained in Venice by the University of Warwick, shall not be fulfilled. Instead, this meeting will be dedicated to his memory.

Special thanks to both Judy Booth and Jenifer Booth for their generous assistance

Appreciation

David Mayer, Professor Emeritus, University of Manchester

I’m not going to claim that my friend and colleague Michael Booth single-handedly created nineteenth-century theatre studies, but he was—assuredly and undoubtedly—one of the pioneers who championed research into Victorian theatre and the examination of Victorian play texts, the theatrical mise-en-scène, and nineteenth-century audiences and theatres and dragged these subjects into the academy where their study became—at first—permissible and—ultimately—respectable. Before Michael, there was George Rowell in Britain and Alan Downer in America who argued for the importance of this period of theatrical effort and who offered plays and biographies as more-than-reliable proof of their claims. But Michael was something altogether distinct. Where Rowell and Downer glowed, Michael exploded: a dozen essential books in less than two decades, beginning in 1964 with Hiss the Villain, then continuing with Eighteenth Century Tragedy and English Melodrama in 1965, following these with his five-volume English Plays of the Nineteenth Century between 1969 and 1976, and then going on to produce Victorian Spectacular Theatre and Prefaces to English Nineteenth Century Theatre and Victorian Theatrical Trades before the 1980s had ended. He had put nineteenth-century theatre onto the academic map.

But Michael was more than the author of brilliantly researched seminal books. Keynoting at conferences, he spoke to and encouraged more timid scholars to follow his example, if not always with his remarkable success. He knew how performers worked and how theatres functioned. He taught undergraduates the value of nineteenth-century theatre study and lured from me the best doctoral student I never had, turning her into an acknowledged and venerated leader in our field. Other scholars who, when postgraduate students, experienced his teaching, speak warmly of him.

Michael was generous. He answered queries. He was generous with data he had mined at great effort. He provided leads into topics which we had never or barely considered. He had a store of theatrical anecdotes which engagingly bolstered his points.

I always knew that Michael would out-distance me in the field, that where I lumbered, he walked gracefully and assuredly. I am immensely grateful for how much Michael has given my chosen field of study, for its breadth and for some of its depths. I am delighted to be able to acknowledge my great debt to Michael and pleased, as well, to stand in his shade. We will miss him.

A Personal Valediction

Victor Emeljanow, Emeritus Professor of Drama, University of Newcastle (NSW)

I was in London in 1974 on leave from the University of New South Wales. My academic trajectory had hit an impasse. I had been employed by the university on the grounds of my knowledge about Greek and Roman theatre, but by 1974, partially affected by the Australian involvement in the Vietnam War, my sense of security was being challenged and indeed my scholarly interest in Classical theatre was waning. I decided to go to a meeting of the Society for Theatre Research held in the rather austere rooms of the Art Workers’ Guild in Bloomsbury – I think it was an annual general meeting. I can’t remember the details of the meeting but I was introduced to a microbiologist and to his friend who possessed some of the qualities of a leprechaun with glasses that emphasized a penetrating glint, and what I took to be a shamrock pinned to the lapel of his jacket. On closer inspection I discovered that I was mistaken – it wasn’t a shamrock but a Mickey Mouse pin. The microbiologist was Terence Rees and his friend was a Canadian academic called Michael Booth.

The three of us got on famously and we ended the evening at a riotous Italian dinner in a restaurant around the corner. I don’t think I had the opportunity to meet Terence again although his book on theatre lighting, finished in 1978, remained a source of invaluable information for me. My contact with Michael, however, would prove to be enduring. Our subsequent discussions gave me a sense of direction which I lacked at the time. His first book, English Melodrama, together with the early collection of British and American melodramas, Hiss the Villain, which I read immediately, were eye-openers to a theatrical world far removed from the certainties of an established literary canon, let alone the well-trodden paths of Classical tragedy and comedy. Michael pointed me towards the beginning of a new journey.

That journey was strengthened by the opportunities to talk about Victorian theatre when he visited Australia or when I was able to spend time with him at the University of Warwick and the University of Victoria. (I remember with clarity an occasion on one of his Australian visits when he delivered a scintillating version of the monologue “The Green Eye of the Little Yellow God.” He looked his audience directly in the eye and challenged anyone to laugh. Nobody did.) The last time I saw Michael, sixteen years ago, was in Afissos. He and I strolled down to the water’s edge, where I remained while he swam his twenty laps.