The Ethiopian Art Theatre was founded in response to the racial strife of early twentieth-century Chicago. From 1910 to 1920, the migration of Southern blacks to Chicago more than doubled the black population from 44,103 to 109,458. White citizens felt threatened by the influx, fearing unemployment and epidemics in crime and health. Racial tensions increased from 1917 to 1919 as white gangs openly assaulted blacks. So-called “neighborhood improvement societies” bombed black homes and realty offices suspected of attempting to break up white residential areas. The Chicago Association of Commerce and the Chicago Tribune encouraged blacks to return to the South.

Although the then-called Negro Units of the Federal Theatre Project arguably played a pivotal role in the development of African-American theatre, Rose McClendon (1884–1936) is unarguably one of the most overlooked contributors to its history. This oversight is extremely puzzling, in view of the fact that McClendon co-directed the Harlem Unit with John Houseman when it opened in 1935. Five years later Federal Theatre Project director Hallie Flanagan attributed much of the initial success of the unit, as well as the very idea of creating separate black units, to McClendon. Yet, except for a paragraph in Flanagan's Arena, little else has been recorded about McClendon's participation in the Project. Even the official history of the Negro Units written by the Federal Theatre Project's Department of Information claims that “guiding the destinations of the Negro Theatre at its inception were John Houseman and Orson Welles.” The history makes no reference to McClendon.

While earlier dramatists treated Medea as a dramatic character, it was Euripides who gave her enduring theatrical prominence. Beyond crafting a timely attack upon a treacherous Corinth to appeal to Athens at the start of the Peloponnesian War, Euripides developed Medea to question the social role of women within a proudly patriarchal society. And he may have been the first to make Medea a non-Greek, a Colchian, a “barbarian”—a term that had become more derisive in the fifth century. In the Golden Age, a female foreigner was marginalized by gender and by heritage/race/ethnicity; a justified or sympathetic Medea challenged Athenian prejudices about both. Yet this Medea is problematic: a seriously aggrieved wife is driven to horrible acts against Greeks—Jason, his sons, the king of Corinth, and as a complicating fillip of multi-gender vengeance, the female rival. Our sympathies are subverted: a wronged Medea could also be a bloody figure of feminine and alien power, fatal to men and women, public and domestic order.

In recent critical theory, the word performance has undergone a significant expansion, some would say an inflation. As the Editor's Note to the May issue of PMLA (“Special Topic: Performance”) observes, “What once was an event has become a critical category, now applied to everything from a play to a war to a meal. The performative … is a cultural act, a critical perspective, a political intervention.” Theatre historians will perhaps greet such pronouncements with mixed emotions. On one hand, they may welcome the acknowledgment by the principal organ of the Modern Language Association that performance (as opposed to drama merely) can count for so much. On the other hand, they may wonder what exactly is intended by the conceptual leap that takes performance beyond the established theatrical genres to encompass armed conflict and comestibles.

In many studies of South African theatre, critical scholarship has elucidated the ways in which playwrights have dramatized their views of oppression and struggle under apartheid. As political change in the country in the 1990s determines new developments in cultural expression, theatre in many quarters finds itself no longer thematically bound to the unambiguous morality which characterized anti-apartheid theatre in the 1970s and 1980s. The issues, and the forms and methods used to construct interpretations of the issues in the theatre, appear increasingly more complex in the 1990s. In academic commentary on South African theatre, a moral outrage shared with theatre practitioners against a repugnant social system has frequently blunted critical faculties. Gayatri Spivak warns us that in the writing of history we need to “look at [our] own subjective investment in the narrative that is being produced.“ There is, in South African theatre studies, a great deal of room for critical vigilance when considering “theatre against apartheid.”