This paper explores the relationship between Goethe's theater praxis and his early experiments on light and color throughout the 1790s. The paper first describes the inception of each endeavor: (1) Goethe's debut as stage director of Weimar's court theater on May 7, 1791-  a role that would last a quarter of a century, and (2) the defining moment occurring just ten days later, as he stood by his window alone, looked through a glass prism and suddenly saw the "true law" of color.  This moment not only instigated innumerable experiments but also required Goethe to define, and later revise, his own experimental method of observation.  
The paper illustrates a decisive shift in Goethe's judgment of German theater from something "mechanical" and "frivolous" in the early 1790s into something with "an inner life," worthy of epistemic value after 1796.  The swing parallels two aspects of his experimental work on optics.  First, it reflects the language used in his polemic against "mechanical" explanations for light and color.  But more significantly, it corresponds to a significant modification of his experimental method of observation between 1792 and 1798, when he began to relax the boundaries between scientific objects and artistic efforts.  This paper traces how Goethe unbolted his experimental method from scientific observation and began to apply it to theater, validating the stage as a site for knowledge production.  Finally, it discusses the significance of both rules and riddles as intrinsic to performing an experiment both

The play “Watts” in a Home, written by Britain’s Electrical Association for Women (EAW) and first performed in 1930, stages a history of domestic electrical lighting in Britain between 1880 and 1930. The play bears similarities to other triumphalist “electrical propaganda” produced in a range of media during the same period. However, analysis of the play’s script, performances, and reception highlight the crucial dramaturgical role played by the physical presence of audiences of “Watts” in a Home. This paper accordingly situates the play in the history of electrical performances which focuses on the role of the sensing human body and its capacity to feel (via touch) and to see. In doing so, it argues that “Watts” in a Home is best understood not merely as a play, but rather as a hybrid play and demonstration, which presented its audiences with a history of domestic electrical lighting in order in instruct, amuse, and – most significantly – engage them in the act of visual sensing to convince them of the merits of electrical lighting. Investigating how “Watts” in a Home straddled the form of play and demonstration unites the histories of electrical spectacles with later electrical showroom demonstrations. It also complicates histories of interwar electrical popularization by attending more directly to the relationship between the form, content, and audience of interwar "electrical propaganda."

The arrival of electricity as an everyday scientific and technological phenomenon into colonial Calcutta from the late-1870s onwards coincided with the emergence of the Bengali theatre as a physical and metaphorical stage to publicly portray, discuss and debate the contemporary social, cultural and nationalist issues of the emerging Bengali middle classes. This paper examines the place of electricity in Bengali theatre - not just in the physical spaces, but also in its plays and language - as an explanatory and metaphorical tool in literary and dramatic responses to the complexities of contemporary Bengali middle classes. It will study how electricity and electrical technologies served as tropes signalling wider Bengali middle-class anxieties over colonialism, identity, autonomy, nationalism and technological modernity, especially in the perception and portrayal of domestic electrification as a harbinger of radical change that could disrupt long-established 'Indian' cultural values within the Bengali household. Bengali dramatists, it will be shown, added their own interpretations of electricity, as well as their hopes and fears of its influence on the Bengali individual, family and society. While the works of Bengali dramatists and satirists are the main focus of this paper, I also use other forms of nationalist writings and imagery to explore how allusions to electricity in Bengali drama reflected not only anticolonial resistance to Western technologies in the Bengali domestic sphere, but also revealed ideological contestations within sections of the Bengali middle class on notions of modernity, tradition and the nation.