CRISIS: The Theatre Responds

by Carol Rocamora

An essential guide to the playwrights who used the stage to confront
the defining crises of the modern world

What can theatre do in a time of crisis?

In CRISIS: The Theatre Responds, theatre scholar, critic and educator Carol Rocamora explores the playwrights who have turned moments of political, social and human emergency into urgent, lasting drama.

From war, fascism and apartheid to AIDS, racial violence, immigration, authoritarianism, environmental peril and the pandemic, this wide-ranging and highly readable study traces how theatre has responded to the great pressures of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries — and how playwrights have found new forms for new crises.

Written with clarity, passion and deep knowledge of dramatic literature, CRISIS is an invaluable resource for students of theatre history, creative writing, playwriting, dramatic literature and contemporary performance. It asks not only what playwrights have written about, but how they have written: how form, structure, voice, testimony, satire, documentary practice and theatrical imagination can turn public emergency into powerful stage work.

A book for students, writers and theatre-makers

For students studying theatre history, CRISIS offers a compelling route through modern drama by focusing on plays shaped by moments of upheaval. It connects landmark playwrights and productions to the events that made them necessary, showing theatre not as an isolated art form but as a living response to history.

For creative writing and playwriting students, the book is especially useful. Rocamora examines how writers respond when conventional dramatic forms are no longer enough. From Brecht’s epic theatre and Anna Deavere Smith’s verbatim work to Caryl Churchill’s radical experimentation and pandemic-era digital performance, CRISIS shows how playwrights reinvent structure, language and theatrical form in order to meet the urgency of their subject.

For theatre-makers, critics and engaged readers, it is a powerful reminder of the stage’s capacity to witness, provoke, console, disturb and inspire change.

Playwrights and theatre-makers discussed include:

Bertolt Brecht, Athol Fugard, Václav Havel, Tony Kushner, Anna Deavere Smith, Moisés Kaufman and Tectonic Theater Project, Caryl Churchill, David Hare, Gregory Burke, Lynn Nottage, Danai Gurira, Belarus Free Theatre, Suzan-Lori Parks, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Jeremy O. Harris, Jordan E. Cooper, Winsome Pinnock, Clint Dyer, Roy Williams, David Henry Hwang, Ayad Akhtar, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Stefano Massini, Ben Power, Joe Murphy, Joe Robertson, Robert Icke, Duncan Macmillan, Tina Satter, Lucy Kirkwood, Richard Nelson, Simon Stephens and many others.

Plays discussed include:

Mother Courage and Her Children, Blood Knot, Master Harold… and the boys, Angels in America, Fires in the Mirror, Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, The Laramie Project, Far Away, A Number, Escaped Alone, Stuff Happens, Black Watch, Grounded, Ruined, Eclipsed, Fairview, Slave Play, Ain’t No Mo’, Death of England, An Ordinary Muslim, The Jungle, The Lehman Trilogy, The Children, Is This A Room, Notes from the Field, Beat the Devil: A Covid Monologue and many more.

This is a book about theatre’s power to respond.

It shows how playwrights have faced war, tyranny, racism, persecution, environmental danger and global uncertainty not by turning away, but by creating bold, necessary work. Many of the writers discussed have taken artistic, political and personal risks. Many have helped shape public understanding of the crises they confronted. Many have changed the language of theatre itself.

For anyone studying how plays are made, why theatre matters, or how writers transform history into dramatic action, CRISIS: The Theatre Responds is a rich, accessible and inspiring guide.

“Rocamora’s amazing compendium vividly evokes and celebrates a whole world of theatre that is deeply engaged with reality and a big part of what makes it a liveable place. It will be a great reassurance to theatre people that the dreams and desires of an earlier age live on.”
— David Lan, Producer, The Walk

“This is a book that needed to be written.”
— Ben Brantley

Longlisted for the STR 2024 Theatre Book Prize.