The essays gathered together in Volume 15 of the annual journal Theatre Symposium investigate how, historically, the theatre has been perceived both as a source of moral anxiety and as an instrument of moral and social reform. Essays consider, among other subjects, ethnographic depictions of the savage other in Buffalo Bill s engagement at the Columbian Exposition of 1893; the so-called Moral Reform Melodrama in the nineteenth century; charity theatricals and the ways they negotiated standards of middle-class respectability; the figure of the courtesan as a barometer of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century moral and sexual discourse; Aphra Behn s subversion of Restoration patriarchal sexual norms in The Feigned Courtesans; and the controversy surrounding one production of Tony Kushner Angels in America, during which officials at one of the nation s more prominent liberal arts colleges attempted to censor the production, a chilling reminder that academic and artistic freedom cannot be taken for granted in today s polarized moral and political atmosphere.
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