Kyle A. Thomas, Ph.D. (he/him)

YouTube video by The Theatre History Professor To Beer Or Not To Beer - Cheers & Booze, Episode 2

Cheers & Booze is my series on the intersections of drama/theatre and alcohol. For obvious reasons it’s a lot of fun to work on this content.

To Beer or Not To Beer is out! Check out where and when beer/brewing shows up on stage.

If you like #drunkhistory, you’ll love this silliness!

Curious about this whole York Mystery Plays in Toronto thing?? Well, you should be!

Listen to me talk about the plays and our approach to performing medieval drama.

Listen to me get nerdy about early #medieval #drama and #theatre!

Many thanks to @thoetp.bsky.social for having me on

The Development of Roman Theatre with Dr Elodie Paillard Episode 30 An interview with Dr Elodie Paillard discussing the development of Roman theatre and the extent to which it developed out of Greek theatre. Dr Paillard i…

www.thehistoryofeuropeantheatre.com/s2e6
Ep 30: In my first podcast interview Dr Elodie Paillard kindly agreed to discuss the development of Roman theatre and the extent to which it developed out of Greek theatre. Still out there on the podcast feed. #theatre #theatrehistory #greektheatre #podcast

#archaeology #history #ritual #theatre #theater #performance #peru #moche

YouTube video by The Theatre History Professor Ritual • Theatre • Archaeology: Digging Up Performance with Dr. Luis Muro Ynoñán (Field Museum)

Back in July, I posted about an archaeological find of a possible theatre/performance site from Peru that could be ~4000 yrs old.

Well, here’s the follow-up video w/ pics, videos, & the lead archaeologist himself, Dr. Ynoñán, talking about performance rituals in the Americas!

youtu.be/GanjFWqnsJQ

I so hope there’s a huge cache of Greek and Roman plays that are amongst these scrolls 🤞🏻

www.thetimes.com/uk/science/a...

Jordan Harrison’s Emotional Sci-Fi His new play ‘The Antiquities’ offers a kind of history of our post-human future, while a new collection of his plays suggests some common themes.

"I’ve had a whole lifetime of being told that computers are the future, and sort of stubbornly being like, 'Well, I still care about my dying art form, theatre'...I have an ambivalence about technology I can’t escape entirely and it drives me to write." www.americantheatre.org/2025/02/03/j...

Oh duhhh….well now I’m disappointed

As long as the story is original!

Thanks nonetheless! I’m struck by how scholarship is framed according to assumptions of performance-specific architecture based upon readings of documentary drama. In some cases—like the Vedic texts—there’s enough to suggest the likelihood of them. But that’s rare in ancient documentation of space.

I would agree. I WANT to agree.

But division, marginalization, isolation, competition, and fracturing have all proven to be money-making models for business in recent years. We’re no longer in the age of “ethical capitalism.” Growth is about revenue. And, today, revenue depends on hate-branding

It’s perfect! As if Bosch were alive today to paint a commentary on our modern world

Ah! You’ve stumbled upon a common misconception. Though the Pope must maintain a gendered bodily faculty, the cathedra Facebooki allows Pope Zuck to shit freely on everything of human concern. Though his manhood be small, his shits are mighty and violent.

Money. Money is the reason.

Just as it is for those corporations which have fully jettisoned any facade of caring about LGBTQIA+ people and their struggles.

Theatre in a capitalist society is never about art.

Thanks Doug! Yes, I’ve found that scholars largely agree that ancient Egyptian ritual performance was confined to a select group (i.e. non-public). I’m aware of the Vedic documentary history suggesting public performance, but not of Zhou China. Are we *assuming* that wooden stages were utilized?

What I love about the Pope Joan legacy is that it was borne of an imaginative answer to why the ‘cathedra Petri’ has a hole in it. Surely, it was to ensure that a celibate man held all the…faculties of masculinity.

Why must the body be gendered in the performance of Papal obligations?

As a theatre artist who grew up, and got their start in Little Rock, I had to check if Murry’s Dinner Theatre had completely sold out to the HuckSans

Ummmmmm……no

‘Cringe’ is an affective designation. How it’s applied is about larger social perspectives on individual emotions. In other words, it’s deployed to shift society away from empathy and toward marginalization.

“Don’t share in a feeling of embarrassment for someone, see them as a target for bullying.”

Guide to the classics: Aristotle’s Poetics is a bible for screenwriters – but it’s often misread

No other classic text has left such a mark on how we tell stories, create theatre, and structure film. But what does it actually say?

I’ve got a video in the works on archaeological sites that appear to be associated with performance. But I need a little help…

Anyone here know of any ancient sites (earlier than 500 BCE) that clearly have spaces reserved for public performance?

Thanks in advance!

What do you get when you punch a fascist in the face?

Justice.

I’m excited to be a part of it! And yes, PLS deserves a lot of love and attention

I’ll add this context: conditioning against doing such a gesture (or any gesture, really) is about embodied learning, not a re-programming.

Musk has never learned not to do that salute, never suppressed the impulse, and everything in his body told him that was the right thing to do at that moment.

tying theatre to property limits the imagination

The gestures we use in a performative setting are formed of our natural habits.

If you don’t regularly do a Nazi salute, or if you’ve conditioned yourself to avoid doing it in normal circumstances, you wouldn’t do one while speaking to a crowd of people.

Just saying…

The York Corpus Christi Plays Return to Toronto After 27 Years On Saturday, June 7, 2025, PLS will host York Plays 2025. It promises to be a rare and historically significant theatrical event: a full production of the medieval York Corpus Christi Plays. This m…

The medieval York Mystery Plays will once again make for an exciting 24 hours of theatre this June in Toronto!

I’m honored to be one of the directors associated with this production.

Come be part of a nearly 700 year-old theatre tradition!

#medievalsky #theatresky

plsplayers.com/2025/01/14/t...

“Shucked, like every good corn maze, is a couple hours of corny fun.”

My review of the Chicago stop for the National Tour of the musical, Shucked, is out!

www.chicagoonstage.com/the-musical-...

The play is called Rossum's Universal Robots and the word “robot” in Czech is connected to feelings & ideas of forced labor. The robots are forced to work for a wealthy, ruling class which they attempt to overthrow.

Maybe we should be mounting more productions of Čapek’s play! 🤔