Title: World Theatre After 1700

Author: Andrew B Harris

ISBN: 978-0-9998294-8-6

About the Author: 

Andrew B. Harris (author) has written two award-winning theatre books: The Performing Set (UNT Press) and Broadway Theatre (Routledge). With Sentia, he has published a two-volume series: World Theatre before and World Theatre after 1700. Dr. Harris’s broad range of experience includes play writing (The Lady Revealed, The Eternal Romeo and Juliet, and Advanced Stages), directing (Antigone, The Misanthrope, The Importance of Being Earnest, The Crucible, Private Lives, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Once Upon A Mattress, and a virtual production of The Diary of Anne Frank) and producing (The Life of Galileo – Time’s Ten Best New York season, Cowboy Mouth, Idol Hill). His plays have been presented in Texas, New York, and London. He collaborated with Edward Albee on Albee Directs Albee and Albee’s Women, and also produced the first Sam Shepard retrospective. Andrew was the Founding Chair of the Hammerstein Center at Columbia University. Later, he chaired the Theatre Departments at Southern Methodist University and Texas Christian University before becoming Professor of Theatre at the University of North Texas. An alumnus of New Dramatists, Dr. Harris earned his doctoral degree from Columbia University and his bachelor’s from the University of Chicago, where he graduated with Special Honors. Together with his wife Ann and their Golden Retriever, Gwinny, the Harrises live in McKinney, Texas.

Reviews:

"I am writing to applaud your production of Dr. Andrew Harris’s World Theatre after 1700.  I write as a professor of English and as an associate dean for research at my university’s Honors College.  I speak as someone who has been an active educator for forty-six years—first at Cornell University (postdoc), then at UT-Austin (fifteen years), and now at the University of North Texas for the past thirty years. I thus know a well-researched and useful book when I see one, and Harris’s World Theatre after 1700 is certainly both.

At the risk of saying the obvious, I wish to affirm that, as an aid to teaching theatre history and specific plays, the volume will be instrumental in the near and distant future, standing to help theatre studies achieve a more central position in humanities-based core curricula. That is so because of the way the time will serve as a primer for both faculty and students in its expansive rendering of historical context and in its mastery of aesthetic achievement across centuries.  

Stated otherwise, the volume has integrity—not just in the modern sense of term, but with regard to the word’s Latin root (integer—i.e. whole or complete) in having achieved coherency and consistency in inviting readers to apprehend the development of theatre over time (via explanation and heart-warming  pictorial illustration). Theatre thus comes to life off the page. I am convinced that the volume will prove foundational for highly personal insights that are destined to follow from readers who initially feel more comfortable approaching several eras and numerous theatrical productions. A wealth of term papers, master's theses, doctoral dissertations, scholarly articles, professorial books, and innovative theatrical productions will eventually boast origin and inspiration in the pages of World Theatre after 1700. Of that I am sure.

I say as much as the author of two scholarly books and nearly seventy journal articles, all of which seek to make original contributions to American intellectual and literary history. Beyond the inspiration of key faculty mentors, I attribute much of my half century of productivity to the seminal texts that I read early on—texts that oriented me, in mesmerizing ways, to my future field of research.  I recall, for instance, Perry Miller’s key works on the American Puritans, Conrad Wright’s and Joseph Haroutunian’s guides to Calvinism and Unitarianism, and Sidney Ahlstrom’s mammoth and insightful account of the religious history of the American people. These provided platforms on which to offer my own contributions, and this is how I see Dr. Harris’s World Theatre after 1700 influencing the quality of American higher education and scholarly enquiry well into the future, for students and faculty alike."

 -James Duban

Professor of English

University of North Texas

"Dr. Andrew Harris’ World Theatre is first-rate, profoundly informative, and delightfully readable history of theater. Having taught world drama for over two decades at the university level, I wish I’d had Dr. Harris’ book in my classroom. Dr. Harris touches on the art and theater of non-European cultures, but his focus is on Western drama, featuring evocative depictions of actors and playwrights, composers and artists, philosophers, and kings. The book features countless paintings and etchings, posters and photos that make theatre history come alive. World Theatre is a perfect introduction for all areas of theatre professionals, from actors and directors, to designers of sets, costumes, lights, sound and props—the whole panoply of theatre production—as well as for anyone with an interest in world culture, and the theatre in particular."

Dr. W. Stuart McDowell

Professor, Chair and Artistic Director, Emeritus

Department of Theatre, Dance & Motion Pictures, Wright State University

Frederick A White Distinguished Professor of Professional Service, Wright State University.