Coming soon

A brand-new site featuring a comprehensive search into the digital archives

ACTS Revival 2026!

The Atlantic Canadian Theatre Site (ACTS) features a digital archive of performance material from what is now known as “Atlantic Canada” from 1700 to 1900. The archive, which contains over 64,000 documents, includes production posters, playbills, performance calendars, and original prologues performed at specific productions.

Performance continues to play a crucial role in this area and ACTS aims to foster further research in performance histories. Although this project engages “new” media and performance, often digital archives are a vanguard of the old and remediate an already established canon in projects (Roopika Risam). This archive contains documented performance artifacts and acknowledges the inherited dominance of settler-colonial perspectives.

History

ACTS was founded by UNB English professor Edward Mullaly in the mid-1990s as an “academically-refereed Internet site which publishes a wide range of primary research materials of interest to Canadian theatre scholars, and to social, cultural, and political historians of the Atlantic region.[…] The primary focus of ACTS is to make such research available in a form which takes advantage of the searchability of electronic materials and thus allows for a re-viewing and restructuring of ‘old’ data in new ways” (“General”). ACTS eventually accrued an editorial board consisting of Mullaly, along with John Ball, Bruce Barton, Richard Plant, and Mary Elizabeth Smith. Most of the material on the original ACTS was collected by Ed Mullaly, Patrick O’Neill (MSVU), Anton Wagner, and Richard Plant.

Screenshot of the original ACTS website
Clockwise, from the top: Site Information, Drama Bibliography, 19th Century Theatre Playbills, Performance Calendars, the journal Theatre Research in Canada, Theatrical Chronology, and Drama Texts. In this image, the white text for these section headings appears on a black background with red lines separating them. ACTS is written in the centre in a large red, serif font with “Atlantic Canada Theatre Site” below it in gold.

Original ACTS website

The intention and scope of ACTS in the 1990s was at once noble and practical. By scanning and collecting as many primary source documents that fit its mission, anyone with access to the World Wide Web from the mid-1990s until the late-2000-aughts could search for what eventually amounted to thousands of records and several thousand images—including theatre listings, reviews, original scholarship, and playscripts—pertaining to theatre in the four Atlantic provinces and the three prairie provinces, as well as Ontario. All records were searchable through keywords.

How to cite this Digital Archive

Whittaker, Robin C., and Kailin Wright, eds. Atlantic Canadian Theatre Site (ACTS). Centre for Digital Scholarship, UNB, 2026. https://acts.lib.unb.ca

Credits

Editors

Robin C. Whittaker
Kailin Wright

Website

Jeff Carter
Brian Cassidy
James Mackenzie
Jeremy McDermott

Research Assistants

Maya Gibson
Abby Smith
Isabella Tascona

Contacts

Robin C Whittaker

Kailin Wright

Land Acknowledgements

The University of New Brunswick and St. Thomas University are situated on the traditional territory of the Wolastoqiyik, Wəlastəkewiyik / Maliseet whose ancestors along with the Mi’Kmaq / Mi’kmaw and Passamaquoddy / Peskotomuhkati Tribes / Nations signed Peace and Friendship Treaties with the British Crown in the 1700s.

St. Francis Xavier University stands on the lands of Mi’kma’ki, the ancestral and unceded home of the Mi’kmaw. We express our deep gratitude and appreciation to the generations of Mi’kmaw who, since time immemorial, have loved and stewarded these lands and the beings who call them home.