ABSTRACT
When in 1979 Roberta Uno founded the Third World Theater (later renamed New WORLD Theater) on the campus of the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, the emphasis on the “world,” was both deliberate and specific. At a time when most of the new theater companies in the US focused on regional identities and repertories, Uno’s group began with an ambitious mission aimed at creating a different, better world. In the context of theater history, there are many examples of using the “world” as an abstract concept to describe a theater company’s mission. Numerous variations of the Latin idea of theatrum mundi (“All the World’s a Stage”) have inspired theater artists throughout history to connect the world to theater. As in the case of the Globe Theater of the English Renaissance, the theater space has often been promoted as a microcosm of the “world.” Stage settings, costumes, props, and actors’ bodies have functioned as tropes to project what the audience might imagine as the “world.”1 In each incidence, however, the specific ways in which “world” was defined and used differed. This chapter examines the New WORLD Theater in comparison to two other theater companies in the US that have also used the framework of the world to explain the main purpose of their artistic mission in the second half of the twentieth century and the early twenty-first century. The two companies are: La MaMa Experimental Theater Club (New York City) and Silk Road Rising (Chicago, IL; originally named Silk Road Theater Project). The three companies serve in this chapter as case studies for examining how the concept of the world has been incorporated and contested in American theater.2
