Ten Thousand Nights

Esteemed scholar and theater aficionado Marvin Carlson has seen an unsurpassed number of theatrical productions in his long and distinguished career. Ten Thousand Nights is a lively chronicle of a half-century of theatre-going, in which Carlson recalls one memorable production for each year from 1960 to 2010. These are not conventional reviews, but essays using each theatre experience to provide an insight into the theatre and theatre-going at a particular time. The range of performances covered is broad, from edgy experimental fare to mainstream musicals, most of them based in New York but with stops at major theatre events in Paris, Berlin, Moscow, Milan, and elsewhere. The engagingly written pieces convey a vivid sense not only of each production but also of the particular venue, neighborhood, and cultural context, covering nearly all significant movements, theatre artists, and groups of the late twentieth century.

Marvin Carlson is Sidney E. Cohn Distinguished Professor of Theatre, Comparative Literature and Middle Eastern Studies, City University of New York and director of the Marvin Carlson Theatre Center at the Shanghai Theatre Academy. His many influential books have been translated into fifteen languages.