In Algeria, as across different parts of the Muslim and Mediterranean worlds, the early twentieth century witnessed the coming to the fore of robust conversations surrounding gender and the “nation.” Historians like Sara Rahnama have retraced debates regarding nationalism and gender in Algeria during this period. Yet how these debates played out in artistic venues has been under- analyzed. Furthermore, scholars such as Rachid Bencheneb (1977) and Joshua Cole (2014) have elucidated the importance of theater in the interwar period as a space that political actors embracing a wide range of ideologies utilized for the construction of Algerian nationalism. While theater produced by Algerians, here Muslims and Jews, during this period has been labeled “Algerian,” foreign troupes passing through Algeria inspired Algerian artists, and Algerian performers put on plays around the Mediterranean. Drawing on playbills, scripts, song sheets, memoirs of actors and playwrights, and French intelligence archives related to theater, this paper will explore how various Algerian communities promoted or represented ideas concerning expressions of gender and nationalism through theater. Using methods such as critical discourse analysis, I will also reconstruct how different agents may have used theatrical spectacles, both as performers and audience members, as occasions for engaging with questions of masculinity that social, cultural, and political changes in the interwar period made more pressing. This work will also be one of the first to use a script of an entire play preserved in French police archives to analyze the social implications of a piece of theatrical art from this period. Connections between Algerian performers and organizations from around the Mediterranean will also be examined to identify whether conversations about Algerian gender reflected or influenced conversations about gender elsewhere in the region. Above all, this work will demonstrate the significance of theater as a site for the generation of gendered notions of nationalism and the nation in interwar Algeria, with an emphasis on consequences for local forms of masculinity and ideas of manhood. As such, it promises to contribute to broader conversations in Middle East Studies on gender and nationalism in the theater fostered by scholars such as Adam Mestyan and Raphael Cormack.