In twenty-four chapters David Kaplan offers ideas, opinions, theories, and facts for someone who wants to be a theater artist today in hopes of creating their own vision of theater-making, one informed by, and in the context of, theater history. This book explores what theater artists have done before and what they, inspired by history, might do next.

A non-lineal theater history, Shakespeare Shamans, and Show Biz explores theater as a shaman's vision, as a storyteller's heritage, as religious propaganda, as a mirror of life, as a critique of society, as a prompt for hard laughter, as fantasy, and as national epic, with plays as different (and the same) as the writings of August Wilson, Gertrude Stein, Shakespeare, and people who never made it into history.

Each chapter explores a particular theme: "The Middle Ages as a State of Mind," "Commedia dell'arte and Molière," "Shakespeare-To Begin," "Euripides-Forever Modern," "Aeschylus-Writing in an Age of Certainty," "Sophocles and Aristotle-Defining Tragedy," "Greek Comedy," "Roman Theater," "Asian Classics and Rules" (Bunrakuken, Chikamatsu, Zeami), China-The Pear Garden and the Red Pear Garden," "Neoclassic Theater and Why There is Such a Thing," "Shakespeare's Classic," "Bad Boys Breaking the Rules" (Brecht, Ibsen, and Jarry), "Inside Outside" (Ibsen, Strindberg, Turgenev, Stanislavsky, Chekhov, Antoine), "Beyond Illusion" (Appia, Craig, Poel), "Melodrama and Popular Theater in America" (Aiken, Brice, Cohan, Stone, Tyler, Bert Williams), "American Classic: Eugene O'Neill and Martha Graham," "Expressionism to Epic" (Brecht, Meyerhold, O'Neill, Piscator, Treadwell), "American Agitprop: Overt and Disguised" (Adler, Clurman, Flanagan, Kazan, Le Gallienne, Miller, Odets, Robeson, Strasberg, Wilder), "Poetry of the Theater" (Artaud, Breton, Cocteau, Ionesco, Kharms, Stein), "Personal Mythology" (Genet, Lorca, Mishima, Strindberg), "Two Masters: Samuel Becket and Tennessee Williams," "Theater of Identity" (Baraka, Ensler, Kramer, Wilson), and "Missing from History" (Bonner, Fornés, Kennedy, Maeterlinck).