On 24 April 1767 Thomas Godfrey's The Prince of Parthia received a professional performance at the Southwark Theatre in Philadelphia. It is often treated as the first professionally staged play by an American-born playwright. The event shows colonial theatre developing its own ambitions before independence.

The performance helped create a literary stage in British North America. It gave colonial writers a model for tragedy and public authorship, joining neoclassical form to a society beginning to imagine its own cultural voice.