Glenn M. Loney Bookshop

Glenn Meredith Loney

Contracted to teach English and Communication by the University of Maryland overseas in 1956, Dr. Loney taught and traveled in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle-East. From these vantage points, he began sending reports to the New York Herald Tribune, The Christian Science Monitor, and Theatre Arts.

During this four-year period, he also began regular summer visits to such major European Festivals as Edinburgh, Bayreuth, Munich, Bregenz, and Salzburg. On his return to the United States, he began dual-careers of writing/photography and university lecturing. He has taught Theatre, Speech/Communications, and English at Hofstra, Adelphi, and the City University of New York, Brooklyn College and CUNY Graduate Center.

Dr. Loney earned his PhD in Theatre History and Dramatic Literature at Stanford University, before serving in the US Army - from 1953 to 1955 - during the "Korean Police Action." His BA degree was awarded with "Highest Honors in Speech" at UC/Berkeley in 1950. He completed his MA in Speech and Theatre in 1951, at the University of Wisconsin/Madison.

His reports and interviews - often illustrated by his photos - have appeared in LIFE, The Smithsonian, The Reporter, Commonweal, Commentary, [Andy Warhol's] Interview, Dance Magazine, Ballet News, Musical America, Opera News, Opera Monthly, Theatre Week, After Dark, Ramparts, The Saturday Evening Post, Dramatics, Players, Modern Drama, Theatre Journal, New Theatre Quarterly, Theatre Design and Technology, Western European Stages, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Daily News, Newsday, Other Stages, The Westsider, and Western European Stages. Travel-features have appeared in Recommend and other magazines.

He has been writing and photographing for Theatre Crafts since its debut, and later in its new incarnation as Entertainment Design. During this time, he has engaged in special projects such as touring the United States to report on all the outdoor historical dramas. For a Circus Special, he spent time with the artists and technicians of the Ringling Brothers/Barnum&Bailey Circus. One summer was devoted to studying the North American Shakespeare Festivals. This resulted in a special issue of Theatre Crafts and also a book: The Shakespeare Complex.

Other books include a biography of the director/choreographer/dancer Jack Cole: Unsung Genius, as well as Peter Brook: Oxford to Orghast; California Gold Rush Plays; Your Future in the Performing Arts, Creating Careers in Musical Theatre; Musical Theatre in America [ed]; Staging Shakespeare [ed]; and Briefing and Conference Techniques.

Prof. Loney is Founder/Advisor for www.ModernTheatre.lnfo, currently being developed by NYU Prof. Cynthia Allen, for Lightning New Media, a not-for-profit entity. This includes day-by-day listings of important events and developments in American, Canadian, and British Theatre from 1900 into the future. It will also feature photo-documentation, as well as audio and video-records of theatres, productions, artists, and technology. It is using as a data-base Dr. Loney's 20th Century Theatre [2 vols.], a day-by-day chronology of American and British Theatre activity from 1900 up to 1980.

This was originally published by Facts-on-File, but only about one-fifth of the prepared entries were used, to keep the costs down. The Lightning New Media project will not only make all the entries - published and unpublished - available, but also draw on the historical records of collaborating Canadian and British Theatre Archivists.

Dr. Loney provided Head Notes for each drama in the Houghton-Mifflin series: Tragedy, Comedy, and Form in Drama [ed. Robert Corrigan]. He also created the Official Production Books for the Royal Shakespeare's Peter Brook "Midsummer Night's Dream" and for the Young Vic's Frank Dunlop/Jim Dale "Scapino."

Having grown up in California's Mother Lode Country, he has long been an ardent Historical Preservationist. He is a member of the Municipal Art Society in New York and a nominator for the Society's Brendan Gill Prize.

He created, wrote, and edited Art Deco News and its successor, The Modernist, for fourteen years. This led to the creation of the website, www.NYMuseums.com, for which he is the Principal Correspondent. He is also PC for the companion website, www.NYTheatre-Wire.com.

As a Professor of Theatre Emeritus, at the City University of New York [CUNY] Graduate Center, he remains a member of various professional organizations. He is Historian of the Outer Critics Circle [OCC] and a nominator for the Outer Critics Annual Awards. He is also a member of the Drama Desk, the American Theatre Critics Association, the International Association of Theatre Critics, as well as the Dance Critics Association, and the Music Critics Association of North America. Not to overlook the Theatre Historical Society, the American Society for Theatre Research and its international affiliate. He is also an Honorary Fellow of the American-Scandinavian Foundation.

Having spent the entire first 26 years of his life in his native California, it was Culture-Shock for Dr. Loney to fly off to Europe for the University of Maryland in 1956. Arriving in Frankfurt am Main, he discovered that the historic house of Germany's great poet/playwright/philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was being completely rebuilt. It had been destroyed by a direct hit of Allied Bombs during World War II.

Rushing off to the Frankfurt PX, he bought a Kodak Retina 3C camera to record this historic reconstruction, as well as the areas of bomb damage that could still be seen in Frankfurt and other devastated European cities.

As he has since told interviewers, regarding his creation of the INFOTOGRAPHY ArtsArchive "I thought I should photograph all of what I found in post-war Europe as an archival record. Fifty years from now, they'll start World War III-and all of what has survived, what has been reconstructed, and what is new will be again destroyed! As things now stand, I may have miscalculated by a decade or two, but destruction of cultural monuments - and even historic cities - is unfortunately already well underway."

After more than 50 years of travel and photography, Dr. Loney has organized into album/volumes and computer-indexed his 300,000 color-slides and prints archive of travel destinations, art, architecture, design, historic theatres, landmarks, celebrated sites, graffiti, famous monuments, museums and galleries, exhibitions, world's fairs, performing arts, posters, nature, and special subjects.

Registered in New York City and State as INFOTOGRAPHY [Informational/Archival Photography], Dr. Loney's photos are now in the process of becoming available for research, study, editorial, and promotional use on the Lightning New Media website: www.Infotography.biz.

In the near future, it is hoped that not-for-profit funding can be found to create an ArtsArchive Research Center for Dr. Loney's more than 350 archival volumes of slides and photo-prints. As well as to provide access to his archival-collections of arts posters, performing arts production photos, and audio interviews with major personalities in the performing arts.