"Tracy C. Davis is a leading performance historian, and in "Stages of Emergency "she applies her considerable skills to a kind of 'play' that permeated the consciousness and determined much social reality in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom during the Cold War. The story she tells, and her analysis of it, goes to the very heart of what these societies were and are."--Richard Schechner, author of "Performance Studies: An Introduction"

Acknowledgments ix
Abbreviations xiii
Introduction 1
Part I: Directing Apocalypse
1. Civil Defense Concepts and Planning 9
2. Rehearsals for Nuclear War 58
Part II: Act Your Part: The Private Citizen on the Public Stage
3. The Psychology of Vulnerability 105
4. Sheltering 127
5. Get Out of Town! 158
6. Communications 181
7. Acting Out Injury 198
Part III: Covert Stages: The "Public Sector" Rehearses in Private
8. Crisis Play 223
9. International Play 247
10. Disaster Welfare 261
11. Continuity of Government 287
12. Computer Play 312
Afterword:Dismantling Civil Defense 331
Appendix: Cold War and Civil Defense Time Line 339
Notes 351
Works Cited 401
Index 429

Tracy C. Davis is Barber Professor of Performing Arts and Professor of English and Theatre at Northwestern University. She is the author of The Economics of the British Stage 1800–1914; George Bernard Shaw and the Socialist Theatre; and Actresses as Working Women: Their Social Identity in Victorian Culture.