in both America and Europe at the time, "to become an actress was to lose one's reputation" (Hewitt 41).
By the late twentieth century, the social climate had been transformed several times over, with a whole range of attributes influencing the establishment of theatrical companies and performance venues around the country. One key influence in this regard was that by the twentieth century the professional theatre had become an industry. More than this, the industry where major theatrical performance occurred was concentrated in a fairly small area in and around New York City's Times Square, not least because of the power-sharing dynamics of producers, directors, actors, trades unions, investors, and theatre owners who them selves were concentrated in New York. Ironically, this kind of structure meant that the form a production took was "often . . . the accidental product of several conflicting aims, ideas, attitudes, and personalities. Under such conditions everyone could bewail the state of the theatre and everyone could blame everyone but himself" (Hewitt 485).
Limited alternatives to American commercial theatre in the 1920s sprang up in New York in amateur theatricals promoted on the fringe of Broadway by the intelligentsia and would-be professionals, notably in the Theatre Guild, the Washington Square Players, and the Provincetown Playhouse (the first venue for O'Neill's plays). However, Broadway absorbed much of this activity over the next 20 years, which did nothing to loosen the commercial concentration in New York. The first structured response to this commercial concentration came in 1946, with formation of the American National Theatre and Academy (ANTA), which sought to break the stranglehold that "confined professional theatre to a few blocks around Times Square" (Hewitt 486). The results were spotty until some ten years later, by which time the off-Broadway theatre had emerged as a force with a life of its own in New...