William Henry West Betty by John Opie, 1804

A Teen Celebrity in 1804

When thirteen-year-old actor William Henry West Betty arrived in London from Ireland, crowds mobbed theaters and camped outside his home.
An advertisement for a performance by Richard Potter

America’s First Ventriloquist

Richard Potter, the first American-born ventriloquist and stage magician, learned his trade after being kidnapped and abandoned as a child in Great Britain.
Martha Graham

Martha Graham’s Night Journey

Reinterpreting the Greek tragedy, Graham built a choreography of dramatic, angular movements to embody the female experience, past and present.
An illustration of an audience pelting the cast with cats, eggs, onions, turnips, and other vegetables and fruits

Riot! At the Theater

One audience demanded more censorship, another less. Both challenged the reach of anti-obscenity laws in the early twentieth century.
Geraint Lewis by kind permission of the Egypt Exploration Society

Pieces and Bits

What does it take to stage Cresphontes, a lost Euripides tragedy, when all that remains of it are a few fragments of papyrus?
Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting join hands in Romeo and Juliet, 1967

Her Bounty Is Boundless

From the first actor—a man—to play Juliet to the “girl boss” version on Broadway, Shakespeare’s young lover offers something new in every iteration.
An 1879 Poster for Murphy & MacDonough's all-child production of H.M.S. Pinafore featuring a group of children rowing a boat

Topsy-Turvy: Children in Adult Roles

The number of children acting like adults on stage reflects how conflicted nineteenth-century Anglo-Americans were about the definition of childhood.
Daguerre's diorama

Diorama, qu’est-ce que c’est?

Before his daguerreotype, the French inventor Louis Daguerre unveiled a new kind of “virtual reality” on a British stage.
Sarah Bernhardt, 1899

To Be or Not to Be Hamlet

The drama of playing the famous prince. In pictures.
Samuel Beckett

Samuel Beckett and the Theatre of Resistance

The dark, absurdist humor of Samuel Beckett's work was directly informed by his time in the French Resistance during World War II.