Passionate Amateurs tells a new story about modern theater: the story of a romantic attachment to theater's potential to produce surprising experiences of human community. It begins with one of the first great plays of modern European theater--Chekhov's Uncle Vanya in Moscow--and then crosses the 20th and 21st centuries to look at how its story plays out in Weimar Republic Berlin, in the Paris of the 1960s, and in a spectrum of contemporary...