ABSTRACT
The introduction states the book’s central argument that the Piscatorbühne, Erwin Piscator’s ill-fated venture of 1927–1928 in the late Weimar Republic, has informed a subsequent century of radical and experimental theater practice despite its sudden collapse. This is followed by a survey of extant scholarly literature before turning to a gloss of the relevant social and political developments making the Piscatorbühne possible and also leading to its demise. The introduction is preceded by a preface clarifying the author’s subject position to the material, as an American dramaturg, critic, and theater-maker providing an account of the Piscatorbühne from a cultural outsider’s perspective. Employing a chronological, contextual, and synthetic approach, this book recoups Piscator’s revolutionary innovations at the Theater am Nollendorfplatz and points to the Piscatorbühne as the origin-point for its own multivalent dramaturgical tradition, a second “secret smugglers’ path” of the epic theater, in Walter Benjamin’s resonant phrase.
