"1900 - 1999" . . "Performing arts Dissertations, Academic 1997." . . "American Studies." . . "In the 1910s a small number of Americans in various regions began to found theatre groups, ostensibly in a spirit of anti-commercialism. Collectively referred to as the Little Theatre Movement, these efforts by amateurs included the first nationwide attempt to develop an American audience for serious theatre. This revisionist idea of theatregoing, so important to bohemians, socially prominent amateurs, and a handful of academics, generated journals, buildings, position statements, canons, revised university curriculums, and high school programs. All were designed to inculcate Americans with the intellectual, spiritual, and social advantages of theatregoing."@en . "American little theatre movement and the construction of a new audience, 1912-1925"@en . . . "Dissertations, Academic"@en . . . . "History"@en . . "Composing ourseles : the American little theatre movement and the construction of a new audience, 1912-1925"@en . . "In ten chapters, this dissertation considers the rhetorical and organizational tools that reformers, educators, and artists deployed to make theatre seem valuable to Americans. Magazines and clubs that attracted elite readers and women of leisure are considered in depth. Theatre Arts Monthly, America's first serious theatre journal, is the subject of a chapter, as is the Drama League of America, which depended on women's labor even as it supported projects--male-directed and socially recuperative, realistic drama--that undercut women's status. A chapter on education examines how theatre in 1920s high schools worked as means of conservative social construction, although it was served up in the name of \"expression.\" Finally, chapters on Harvard's George Pierce Baker and on the Dallas Little Theatre's 1925 blackface production of the serious, lyrical \"The No 'Count Boy,\" show how white, upper-middle class Protestant values were scripted into the position statements that came to stand for inclusiveness and \"universalism\" in American theatre. The epilogue points out the crucial ways in which Americans entering the twenty-first century remain heirs to the values and institutions pioneered in the Little Theatre Movement."@en . . . "Composing ourselves: The American Little Theatre Movement and the construction of a new audience, 1912-1925"@en . . . . "Composing ourselves the American little theatre movement and the construction of a new audience, 1912 - 1925" . "Composing ourselves the American little theatre movement and the construction of a new audience, 1912-1925"@en . "Prior to the Little Theatre Movement, theatre was not seen in the United States as art. It was not deemed worthy of university study nor valuable as a pedagogical tool at the secondary level. It certainly was not considered worthy of government funding. After the Little Theatre Movement it was all of those things. What happened between 1912 and 1925 to revise mainstream Americans' attitudes towards theatre, whether they were theatregoers or not?"@en . . . . . . . . "Composing ourselves : the American little theatre movement and the construction of a new audience 1912-1925"@en . . "Theater." . . . .