Mark Evans Bryan is a playwright and historian of theatre and culture in the U.S. eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  His scholarly work includes “‘Slideing into Monarchical

extravagance’: Cato at Valley Forge and the Testimony of William Bradford, Jr.,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3^rd Series, 67.1; “‘Crusade of Conquest’: Orientalist Surrogations in Manifest-Destinarian Theatre,” Journal of American Drama and Theatre 21.1; “The Rhetoric of Race and Slavery in an American Patriot Drama, John Leacock’s The Fall of British Tyranny,” JADT 12.3; “A Femme Fatale of Eighteenth-Century American Theatre Research: Reading William Bradford’s Cato Letter,” Performing Arts Resources 28; “American Drama, 1900-1915,” Companion to Twentieth-Century American Drama (Blackwell 2005); “Yeoman and Barbarians: Popular Outland Caricature and American Identity,” forthcoming in the Journal of Popular Culture; and “Performing ‘Amerikee’: Rural Caricature and the George Washingtons of Percy MacKaye and Jacques Copeau,” forthcoming in “To Have and Have Not”: New Essays on Commerce and Capital in Modernist Theatre (McFarland 2011). “Middle True,” the first part of Dr. Bryan’s play, Mercury Seven with Signs Following, was published in the Kenyon Review 26.1; M7 has been performed in the U.S., Hungary, New Zealand, India, and Taiwan.  His recent work includes a new stand-alone adaptation of the second part of the M7 cycle, Mud Nostalgia, which premiered at the Prague Fringe Festival in Prague, Czech Republic, in May 2011, under the direction of Bruce Hermann and performed by Sue Ott Rowlands; the production subsequently toured Hungary and was performed in Sri Lanka and the U.S.  Dr. Bryan’s one-woman play, fig. 1, premiered at the 2010 Prague Fringe Festival, with designs by the celebrated Czech designer and artist, Jaroslav Malina.  The Prague Post called fig. 1 “a play of romance and resignation, disillusionment and infatuation … intimate, gutsy, and ornately detailed”; Radmila Hrdinová was “enchanted” by the play, awarding it a rating of 9/10 in the Czech daily, Právo.*  As an actor, Dr. Bryan is most proud of his work with his long-time collaborator and friend, filmmaker Andrew M. Hulse; he appeared most recently in Hulse’s short film, Gasoline (2008), which has won multiple awards, including a Screen Actors Guild Audience Choice Award at N.Y.U.’s 2008 Manoogian Screenings at the Directors’ Guild in Los Angeles. Dr. Bryan is currently at work on a book project—on the Bradford family of eighteenth-century Philadelphia and popular culture in the U.S. middle colonies between 1755 and 1795—as well as on a new play, Transmigracíon, a lyrical drama set in mid-century Mexico City, Nixon-era southern Illinois, and in the present at the edge of the solar system.  At Denison, Dr. Bryan teaches FYS 102 (“Humbug! Nineteenth-Century American Popular Entertainment”); THTR 170 (performance practicum); THTR 290-390 (playwriting); THTR 371-372-373-374 (the sequence in the history, literature, and theory of the theatre); and multiple versions of THTR 400 (junior/senior seminars on dramatic literature, theory of the theatre, and the history of theatre and culture), including “Theatre and the Early Republic, 1760-1860,” “Representing the Muslim World in British and American Drama,” “Modernism, Modernity, Theatre,” and seminars on vaudeville, minstrelsy, and popular theatre in the United States before the mid-twentieth century.  Dr. Bryan is both an alumnus company member and the faculty advisor of Denison’s Burpee’s Seedy Theatrical Company, an improvisational performance group, founded in 1979, purportedly the oldest of its kind on American university campuses; B.S.T.C. counts among its alumnae/i numerous theatre, television and film artists, including Steve Carell.  Dr. Bryan earned his Ph.D. in Theatre (history, literature and criticism) at the Ohio State University; his A.M. from the University of Chicago (the interdisciplinary Master of Arts Program in the Humanities); and his B.A. from Denison.