These essays explore the points at which theater and propaganda meet, beginning by defining propaganda as a form of activated ideology in order to understand the distortion of information that occurs in dramatic literature in its stage, film and television forms.

The study analyzes the nature of, in the terms of Jacques Ellul, the nature of "integration propaganda," designed to render an audience passive and to encourage the acceptance of any given status quo, as opposed to "agitation propaganda," which aims to inspire an audience to action. Most popular western theater is saturated, though usually not intentionally, with integration propaganda.

The overall purpose of this book is twofold: to analyze the nature of integration propaganda so that it becomes visible to western readers as a tool of their dominant society, and to examine the manner by which unselfconscious propagandistic methods have saturated dramatic performance.