Scope and Content of Collection
The Harry M. Bagdasian Theatre Posters Collection covers the period from 1970 to 1985; the bulk of the materials date from 1972 to 1980. The collection consists solely of 68 posters from the Washington, DC theatre community. The posters are from a variety of theatres, but are predominantly from Arena Stage, Ford's Theatre, and the John F. Kennedy Center. While the vast majority of the posters were mass-produced, some were silk-screened. Many of the posters do not contain years, or in some instances no dates at all. The processors researched the productions at the companies' websites or in the Special Collections in Performing Arts Theatre Program Collection to determine when the productions occurred. When the year is uncertain, it is either left blank or represented in brackets. Even for the instances where the year is not designated, all of the productions occurred between 1970 through 1985. Dates associated with the posters are the productions dates, not the printing dates.