This book asks how philosophy makes use of the theater and how the theater in turn stages ideas. I examine playwrights such as Wilde, Shaw, Sartre, and Stoppard who construct theaters of ideas, and conversely philosophers such as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Kenneth Burke, and Gilles Deleuze whose philosophy is infused with the theater. The project takes its point of departure from a reading of Plato as a playwright, and a history of stage adaptations of Plato's plays constitutes its backbone.

Winner, Joe A. Callaway Prize for best book in drama or theater, 2012.

Winner, Walter Channing Cabot Fellowship prize, 2011.

Forum on The Drama of Ideas, with Martin Harries, Tom Stern, Laura Cull, and David Kornhaber, edited by Claudio Rozzoni.

Translation into Chinese forthcoming.

Reviewed in Comparative Drama, 45:4 (Winter 2011); New Theater Quarterly 27:2 (2011); The Drama Review 57:3 (2013); Modern Drama 45 (2011); Theater Survey 53 (2012); Bryn Mawr Classical Review (2011); Etudes Platoniciennes VIII (2011); Modern Philology 111:1 (2013).;Philosophy in Review XXXII (2012) no. 4; European Journal of Philosophy 21:1 (2013).

For a review essays describing the book as having inaugurated a new turn in theater studies, click here.