Offering one of the first scholarly examinations of digital and distanced performance since the global shutdown of theaters in March 2020, Barbara Fuchs provides both a record of the changes and a framework for thinking through theater's transformation. Though born of necessity, recent productions offer a new world of practice, from multi-platform plays on Zoom, WhatsApp, and Instagram, to enhancement via filters and augmented reality, to urban distanced theater that enlivens streetscapes and building courtyards. Based largely outside the commercial theater, these productions transcend geographic and financial barriers to access new audiences, while offering a lifeline to artists. This study charts how virtual theater puts pressure on existing assumptions and definitions, transforming the conditions of both theater-making and viewership. How are participatory, site-specific, or devised theater altered under physical-distancing requirements? How do digital productions blur the line between film and theater? What does liveness mean in a time of pandemic? In its seven chapters, Theater of Lockdown focuses on digital and distanced productions from the Americas, Europe, and Australia, offering scholarly analysis and interviews. Productions examined include Theater in Quarantine's "closet work" in New York; Forced Entertainment's (Sheffield, UK), End Meeting for All, I, II, and III; the work of Madrid-based company Grumelot; and the virtuosic showmanship of EFE Tres in Mexico City.

Lady Susan, a young widow, flees London and arrives at the country home of her obliging brother-in-law and his suspicious wife. Soon to come - uninvited - are an eligible suitor, her willful daughter, her chatty confidante and a dimwitted bachelor. Lady Susan schemes, but all does not go according to plan as she and her daughter become rivals for the same man. "Rob Urbinati's Lady Susan captures the essence of Jane Austen's story, as well as her humor. Today's women can easily understand that Lady Susan 'seduces and schemes' because she has no options - she cannot get a job or own property. The plight of a penniless widow trying to make a life for herself and her daughter is effectively conveyed with sympathy and biting wit. I enjoyed Jane Austen's Lady Susan very much!" - Carolyn Jack, The Jane Austen Society of North America

In eighteenth-century Europe, artistic production was characterised by significant geographical and cultural transfer. For innumerable musicians, composers, singers, actors, authors, dramatists and translators - and the works they produced - state borders were less important than style, genre and canon. Through a series of multinational case studies a team of authors examines the mechanisms and characteristics of cultural and artistic adaptability to demonstrate the complexity and flexibility of theatrical and musical exchanges during this period. By exploring questions of national taste, so-called cultural appropriation and literary preference, contributors examine the influence of the French canon on the European stage - as well as its eventual rejection -, probe how and why musical and dramatic materials became such prized objects of exchange, and analyse the double processes of transmission and literary cross-breeding in translations and adaptations. Examining patterns of circulation in England, France, the Netherlands, Germany, Scandinavia, Russia, Bohemia, Austria, Italy and the United States, authors highlight: the role of migrant musicians in breaching national boundaries and creating a 'musical cosmopolitanism'; the emergence of a specialised market in which theatre agents and local authorities negotiated contracts and productions, and recruited actors and musicians; the translations and rewritings of major plays such as Sheridan's The School for scandal, Schiller's Die Rauber and Kotzebue's Menschenhass und Reue; the refashioning of indigenous and 'national' dramas in Europe under French Revolutionary and imperial rule.