Over the years that I have taken secondary school students to the theatre, the the digital revolution has moved through schools, classrooms, and even theatres, calling into question my goal of contributing positively to students' identity formation through exposure to live plays. Responding to calls to examine the ways in which young people's…

Recently the author has been including in her undergraduate seminars Jean-Jacques Rousseau's "Letter to d'Alembert on the Theatre" (1758), the most provocative essay on the arts ever written. It is about the unintended effects of theater--which, for Rousseau, stands in for all of the arts--on an audience. The essay is an impassioned rebuttal to…

Personal interviews were conducted with drive-in theatre patrons in an attempt to paint an empirical portrait of a contemporary drive-in movie theatre audience. A total of 607 patrons of one Rochester, New York, drive-in were interviewed by trained college undergraduates using a prepared 33-item questionnaire consisting of open- and close-ended…

This book explores the potential of U.S. movie theaters as an important national asset. Each of the 4,000 movie palaces constructed during Hollywood's Golden Age, as well as the countless smaller theaters modeled after the grander showcases, has a role to play in the life of today's cities. The first section of the book explores the social and…