ABSTRACT
Informed by the work of the scholars, as well as by the author’s training as a student and teacher of both literature and theatre, he offers his own example of how they might engage with the archive in order to better understand the historical issue of audience expectation and impact. He also offers a close description of his encounter with a particular archive of work over the span of nearly three years, out of which emerges a larger theory about the relationship between textual revision and the theatrical audience. The author details how he first encountered Wallace Thurman and William Jourdan Rapp’s now-forgotten 1929 Broadway hit Harlem: A Melodrama of Negro Life in Harlem in a grad student classroom and was intrigued by the play’s curious deviation from the generic conventions of melodrama.
