BiblioVault - Books about Johnson, Odai

London in a Box: Englishness and Theatre in Revolutionary America
Odai Johnson
University of Iowa Press, 2017
Library of Congress PN2287.D543J64 2017 | Dewey Decimal 792.0233092

2017 Theatre Library Association Freedley Award Finalist

If one went looking for the tipping point in the prelude to the American Revolution, it would not be the destruction of the tea in Boston Harbor, or the blockade of Boston by British warships, or even the gathering of the first Continental Congress; rather, it was the Congress’s decision in late October of 1774 to close the theatres. In this remarkable feat of historical research, Odai Johnson pieces together the surviving fragments of the story of the first professional theatre troupe based in the British North American colonies. In doing so, he tells the story of how colonial elites came to decide they would no longer style themselves British gentlemen, but instead American citizens.

London in a Box chronicles the enterprise of David Douglass, founder and manager of the American Theatre, from the 1750s to the climactic 1770s. The ambitious Scotsman’s business was teaching provincial colonials to dress and behave as genteel British subjects. Through the plays he staged, the scenery and costumes, and the bearing of his actors, he displayed London fashion and London manners. He counted among his patrons the most influential men in America, from British generals and governors to local leaders, including the avid theatre-goers George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. By 1774, Douglass operated a monopoly of theatres in six colonies and the Anglophone Caribbean, from Jamaica to Charleston and northward to New York City. (Boston remained an impregnable redoubt against theatre.)

How he built this network of patrons and theatres and how it all went up in flames as the revolution began is the subject of this witty history. A treat for anyone interested in the world of the American Revolution and an important study for historians of the period.

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Ruins: Classical Theater and Broken Memory
Odai Johnson
University of Michigan Press, 2018
Library of Congress PA3201 | Dewey Decimal 792.0938

Much of the theater of antiquity is marked by erasures: missing origins, broken genres, fragments of plays, ruins of architecture, absented gods, remains of older practices imperfectly buried and ghosting through the civic productions that replaced them. Ruins: Classical Theater and Broken Memory traces the remains, the remembering, and the forgetting of performance traditions of classical theater. The book argues that it is only when we look back over the accumulation of small evidence over a thousand-year sweep of classical theater that the remarkable and unequaled endurance of the tradition emerges. In the absence of more evidence, Odai Johnson turns instead to the absence itself, pressing its most legible gaps into a narrative about scars, vanishings, erasures, and silence: all the breakages that constitute the ruins of antiquity.

In ten wide-ranging case studies, theater history and performance theory are brought together to examine the texts, artifacts, and icons left behind, reading them in fresh ways to offer an elegantly written, extended meditation on “how the aesthetic of ruins offered a model for an ideal that dislodged and ultimately stood in for the historic.”

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Theatre History Studies 2009, Vol. 29
Edited by Rhona Justice-Malloy, with contributions from Christin Essin, Carolyn D. Roark, Meredith Lowe, Valleri J. Hohman, Fonzie D. Geary II, Robert B. Shimko, Robert B. Theatre History Studies, Elizabeth Osborne, Paul Cornwell, Harry J. Elam Jr., etc.
University of Alabama Press, 2009

Theatre History Studies is a peer-reviewed journal of theatre history and scholarship published annually since 1981 by the Mid-American Theatre Conference (MATC), a regional body devoted to theatre scholarship and practice. The purpose of MATC is to unite people and organizations in their region with an interest in theatre and to promote the growth and development of all forms of theatre.

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Theatre History Studies 2021, Vol 40
Edited by Lisa Jackson-Schebetta
University of Alabama Press, 2021

A peer-reviewed journal of theatre history and scholarship published annually since 1981 by the Mid-America Theatre Conference

Introduction
—LISA JACKSON-SCHEBETTA, WITH ODAI JOHNSON, CHRYSTYNA DAIL, AND JONATHAN SHANDELL

PART I
STUDIES IN THEATRE HISTORY

Un-Reading Voltaire: The Ghost in the Cupboard of the House of Reason
—ODAI JOHNSON

Caricatured, Marginalized,
and Erased: African American Artists and Philadelphia’s Negro Unit of the FTP, 1936–1939
—JONATHAN SHANDELL

Stop Your Sobbing: White Fragility, Slippery Empathy, and Historical Consciousness in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Appropriate
—SCOTT PROUDFIT

Asia and Alwin Nikolais: Interdisciplinarity, Orientalist Tendencies, and Midcentury American Dance
—ANGELA K. AHLGREN

PART II
WITCH CHARACTERS AND WITCHY PERFORMANCE

Editor’s Introduction to the Special Section
Shifting Shapes: Witch Characters and Witchy Performances
—CHRYSTYNA DAIL

To Wright the Witch: The Case of Joanna Baillie’s Witchcraft
—JANE BARNETTE

Nothing Wicked This Way Comes: Shakespeare’s Subversion of Archetypal Witches in The Winter’s Tale
—JESSICA HOLT

Of Women and Witches: Performing the Female Body in Caryl Churchill’s Vinegar Tom
—MAMATA SENGUPTA

(Un)Limited: The Influence of Mentorship and Father-Daughter Relationships on Elphaba’s Heroine Journey in Wicked
—REBECCA K. HAMMONDS

Immersive Witches: New York City under the Spell of Sleep No More and Then She Fell
—DAVID BISAHA

PART III
Essay from the Conference

The Robert A. Schanke Award-Winning Essay, MATC 2020
New Conventions for a New Generation: High School Musicals and Broadway in the 2010s
—LINDSEY MANTOAN

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