The Long Revolution
Writings from the Frontlines of a New American Theatre
This volume gathers sixty years of essays, speeches, and manifestos by the founding mother of the resident professional theatre movement. As a founder and artistic director of the flagship Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., and chair of New York University's Graduate Acting program, the late Zelda Fichandler changed the where and how of the American theatre. The Long Revolution gathers Fichandler's most prescient writing about that movement, ranging over such topics as The Institution as Art-Work, the Profit in NonProfit, Race and a Deepening Aesthetic, and Creativity and the Public Mind. It also includes intimate portraits of artists with whom she frequently collaborated and director's notes from the major productions that defined her vision. Celebrated as the defining architect and builder of the most sweeping transformation of twentieth-century American theatre, her brilliant writing reestablishes Fichandler as one of its most expansive and provocative thinkers.
Zelda Fichandler was a seminal figure in the regional theater movement, and led Arena Stage in Washington, DC, for forty-one years, producing more than four hundred shows and directing more than fifty for a company that helped spur the growth of professional theater around the country. She spent another twenty-five years training hundreds of actors as chair of NYU’s Graduate Acting Program. She was a titan in the theater world, a visionary producer and teacher who was instrumental in seeding the American continent with the work of playwrights, directors, actors, and designers.
Todd London has been a leading figure in the U.S. nonprofit theater for more than thirty-five years. The first recipient of TCG’s Visionary Leadership Award, his service has taken many forms: artistic director, educator, arts journalist and essayist, public speaker, theater historian, and advocate for artists. He is also an award-winning novelist.
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