Regional Theatre: the Revolutionary Stage

Regional Theatre: The Revolutionary Stage is a 1977 book by Joseph Wesley Zeigler.

Zeigler presents the history of how it came to be that there are professional theatres throughout the country that constitute "an alternative to the theatre on Broadway." The focus of his book is the Regional Theatre Movement ("Movement"), which took place from the 1940s through the late 1960s. While local theatres, most of them amateur, existed in American towns and cities prior to the Movement, it was this development that laid the foundation for today's network of regional theatres of comparable (and often superior) professional quality and artistic vision to that found in New York City.

During the Movement's formative years, Zeigler worked at two of its founding theatres, Arena Stage in Washington DC and the Actor's Workshop in San Francisco. He also worked at the Theatre Communications Group, an outgrowth of the Ford Foundation – two institutions he credits as having powerful influence on both the growth and the decline of the Movement.

The story of the Regional Theatre Movement begins with a small number of directors, actors and producers who had the desire to develop a new expression of professional theatre as an alternative to Broadway. "The early regional theatres ... started as reactions to the theatrical Establishment of their time – Broadway … They were the new, anti-Establishment revolution."

While Zeigler also covers regional theatre activity which predates the Movement – the "little theatres" of the 1920s, the Depression era Federal Theatre Project and the American National Theatre and Academy (ANTA), local theatres with rich histories such as the Cleveland Play House (1916) and the Pasadena Playhouse (1920), and early pioneers like Margo Jones in Dallas – he documents the Regional Theatre Movement as a unique period in which the status quo of American theatre arts was challenged and invigorated.

Zeigler identifies six theatres which were what he calls the "acorns" of the Movement. These founding theatres were the Alley Theatre, Houston (1947), the Mummers Theatre, Oklahoma City (1949), Arena Stage, Washington DC (1950), the Actor's Workshop, San Francisco (1952), the Milwaukee Repertory Company (1954), the Front Theatre, Memphis (1954), and the Charles Playhouse, Boston (1957).

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