Includes bibliographical references (p. 343-361) and index.

Greek tragedy finds an American audience -- Setting the stage -- American theater makes Greek tragedy its own -- Making total theater in America: choreography and music -- Hellenic influences on the development of American modern dance -- American Gesamtkunste Werke -- Musical theater -- Visual choreography in Robert Wilson's Alcestis -- Democratizing Greek tragedy -- Antigone and politics in the nineteenth century: the Boston 1890 Antigone -- Performance groups in the 1960s-1970s: Brecht's Antigone by the living theatre -- The 1980s and beyond: Peter Sellars' Persians, Ajax and the Children of Heracles compared with other versions of Persians and Ajax -- Aeschylus' Prometheus bound in the U.S.: from the threat of apocalypse to communal reconciliation -- Re-envisioning the hero: American Oedipus -- Oedipus as scapegoat -- Plagues -- Theban cycles -- Deconstructing fatality -- Abandonment -- Re-imagining Medea as American other -- Setting the stage: nineteenth century Medea -- Medea as social critic from the mid-1930s-the late 1940s -- Medea as ethnic other from the 1970s-the present -- Medea's divided self: drag and cross dressed performances.