Welcome to my “Book Page.”  This is where you can learn about my book, Performance Activism: Precursors and Contemporary Pioneers, which was published by Palgrave Macmillan at the end of 2021. 

Writing this book was a challenge and it was also a joy.  It allowed me to bring together my training and passion as a theatre historian, which goes back to my graduate studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison in the 1970s, with my decades of experience doing political theatre, community organizing and, as I realize looking back on it, helping to bring performance activism into being. 

The process of writing the book involved poring over decades of scholarship that I was only vaguely aware of during the many years that activism, including building and helping to lead the Castillo Theatre, took most of my time and energy.  It also involved conducting  scores of in-depth interviews with politically progressive, innovative artist-activists around the world, a process that began, in earnest, with a course in Performance Activism that I taught a Harvard University in the fall of 2017. Much of the actual writing took place in 2020 during the initial COVID19 lockdown in our rented house in Montauk, on the eastern tip of Long Island, supported by the Atlantic Ocean, the beautiful beaches of Montauk and old friends and comrades who quarantined with me and my love-and-life partner Lois Holzman. What emerged, I’m proud to say, is the first book on the growing performance activist movement.  

I see Performance Activism: Precursors and Contemporary Pioneers as an attempt to introduce the performance activism movement to itself—and to you.

You can learn more about the book by:

• Clicking on “Chapter Summaries” to read a brief description of each chapter of the book.

• Clicking on “By Way of Introduction” to read a draft of the book’s first chapter, in which I lay out the structure of the book and the questions it explores.

• Clicking on American Theatre (April 17, 2022) to read "Can Theatre Heal Trauma? A Case Study From India," an excerpt from Chapter 14, "Healing Trauma," of Performance Activism.

• Clicking on ImaginAction blog post (July 6, 2022), "Performance Activism."

• Clicking on ImaginAction podcast (July 9, 2022) "In Conversation about Performance Activism with Dan Friedman."

• Clicking on “Performance Activism: Precursors and Contemporary Pioneers” by Dan Friedman, a review by Gwendolyn Alker, Associate Arts Professor at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts in the Department of Drama. Alker was editor of Theatre Topics from 2013-2017.

• You can purchase Performance Activism, either as an e-book or in hard copy, from Palgrave, the publisher, by clicking here.

• You can also, of course, order it from any number of online booksellers, and even ask your local bookstore or library to get it for you. I do want to warn you in advance that academic books are ridiculously expensive.

While I have written only one book, I have edited four others, two of which are still available: 

• Theatre for Working Class Audiences in the United States: 1830-1980, which I co-edited with Bruce McConachie for Greenwood Press back in 1985. In addition to two chapters by me, both of which can be accessed in the “Theatre History and Criticism” section of the “Articles, Chapters and Talks” page on this site, it also includes chapters by: Bruce McConachie, who from 2000 to 2003 served as president of the American Society for Theatre Research; Carol Poore; Mel Gordon; Douglas McDermott and other distinguished American theatre and cultural historians.

• The Cultural Politics of Heiner Müller published by Cambridge Scholars Press in 2007. You can access the entire book by clicking here. In addition to a chapter I co-wrote with Fred Newman, my predecessor as artistic director of the Castillo Theatre, which can be accessed at the “Brecht, Müller and Newman” section of the “Articles, Chapters and Talks” page on this website, the collection includes chapters by: Carl Weber, the first and most influential translator of Heiner Müller’s plays and poems; Eva Brenner, founder and artistic director of Projekt Theater Studio/Fleischerei_mobil in Vienna; and Magda Romanska, chair of the Transmedia Arts Seminar, Mahindra Humanities Center, Harvard University.