The Long Revolution

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.