ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with the evolution of theatre more generally, before and outside of Broadway and America. Theatre in modern times has assimilated to the idioms of market economy and competition. Agnew pays little heed to the insides of drama art worlds, which in their intricacies resemble facets of the worlds of industrial markets. Only professional theatre can validate a new play, can install it in the repertoire that is thereafter drawn upon by amateur and professional productions alike. The central problematic for any performance art is the audience, a construct that is shaped by critics and other observers out of myriad concrete audiences. The processes by which arts evolve and an art develops are charged with anxiety. Performance is a celebration of identities and is an accounting of relations between identities. Connections among different arts are matters of history and of mutual social construction, much like any one art world is itself.
