Reconstructing Theatre/History

Joseph Roach (bio)

Some men see things the way they are and say, “Why?” I dream of things that
never were and say, “Why not?”
—Robert F. Kennedy quoting George Bernard Shaw, 1968

How do we as theatre scholars define our objects of study? In terms of the discipline
of theatre research in the United States, that very question has a history—and it
continues to make history. To begin to answer it, one might look to several of our
myths of origin: Brander Matthews’s then unprecedented teaching of drama at
Columbia University, George Pierce Baker’s “47 Workshop” at Harvard, Baker’s
move to Yale and the founding of the School of Drama, the inauguration of
conservatory-technical training within the academy at Carnegie Mellon, or the
granting of the first doctorates in theatre by the University of Iowa in 1929 and then
Cornell University and Northwestern University in 1940. What is striking at first
glance is how very different these pioneers’ objects of study were: Matthews’s
enthusiastic antiquarianism, Baker’s how-to-make-a-play dramaturgy, Carnegie
Mellon’s trade-school pragmatism, the PhD’s literary-historical professionalism—all
seem to pull in very different directions. Different, yes, but they are all in some way
focused on performance.

Performance in each case provides a place where theory and practice enter into a
potentially troubled yet deeply symbiotic relationship. Etymologically as well as
ontologically, theatre is a practice of theory, as Jane Harrison, the great classicist,
reminds us: “Our word theory,” she noted, “which we use in connexion with
reasoning and which comes from the same Greek word as theatre, means really
looking fixedly at, contemplation; it is very near in meaning to our imagination.”
(Bentley 19). If theory has become passé, as the provocative questions posed by the
hosts of Constructing Theatre/History suggest, then imagination has also outlived its
importance to scholars in the field. And in some ways, alas, that is exactly what has
been happening in theatre departments for the last thirty years. [End Page 3]

The moment I want to examine—the moment when the field, organized around
performance as the object of study, took a decisive and, I believe, unfortunate turn—
also happens to coincide with the auspiciously happy moment we are celebrating on
the occasion of this conference: the completion of Oscar Brockett’s History of the
Theatre in 1967 and its publication in 1968. Let me hasten to add that these events,
though simultaneous, were not causally linked. In fact, their autonomy as
phenomena is conspicuous and part of the story I want to tell. My account takes the
form of a memoir of a moment, not of when paradigms shifted but of when they
stripped their gears, as told through the rise and fall of some of the theatre
departments I have known, and loved, and lost.

“In this book,” Brockett begins the preface to the first edition of the History, “I have
attempted to trace the development of the theatre from primitive times until 1967”
(v). Looking back from the perspective of students today, I guess one could say that
1967 and 1968 wereprimitive times. Even as Brockett’s History recorded the
particulars of the construction of the Comédie Française, for instance, the then
extant “House of Molière” was being occupied and deconstructed by rebellious
students, who, like the barbarians of yore, decked themselves out in the stage
costumes while they held the company director hostage in his office. As eighteen-
year-old theatre majors, we took note.

There was so much else to take note of in 1967–68. There were Happenings and
Catastrophes: Guerilla Theatre (on campus, fake) and guerilla theatre (Tet
Offensive, real), My Lai, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert
Kennedy. There were Neil Simon’s Plaza Suite, Richard Schechner’s Dionysus in
‘69 (a year early), Hair, Arthur Hailey’s Airport, and Arthur Kopit’s Indians. There
were Blau’s Impossible Theatre and Grotowski’s Poor Theatre. The Tulane Drama
Review moved from New Orleans to Greenwich Village. There were riots in most
major cities and Jacques Derrida announced that structuralism was dead and that
the era of poststructuralism had begun. (His deeply puzzled American audience
asked: What was structuralism?) Allyn and Bacon published Brockett’s History of the
Theatre, the last words of which are these: “The future of the theatre cannot be
predicted. As in the past, it probably will assimilate the recent trends, which in their
turn will soon appear outmoded. The theatre will survive so long as it continues to
welcome the new and preserve the best of the old” (690).

There is a powerful interpretive and pedagogical agenda operating within these

only apparently innocent summary phrases, and it discloses the centrality of
performance as the object of study of theatre history. We heard, but we did not fully
listen. Performance, which is defined as “repetition with revision,” is the human
behavior in which the old and the new, or what Raymond Williams calls the
“residual” and the “emergent,” contend. They do so recursively—as continuing
mutual interactions between two entities such that each is involved in constituting
the other. Without the study of history, it follows, performance surrenders at least
half of its content. (Without the study of history, in other [End Page 4] words, we
can’t truly entertain new ideas because we can’t recognize them as such.) At the
same time, without the stimulus of performance, we lose touch with the new
methods of staging that disclose previously unimagined possibilities about the
stagecraft of the past. As a test of this proposition, we might ask: Who among us has
been better prepared to entertain new ideas than Oscar Brockett, author of
this History, which, paradoxically, has remained at once definitive and open-ended?

Before the big red book was published—and this was also before Internet and
even word processing—I already had gotten the notes the old-fashioned way, but
not necessarily the hard way, through oral transmission. My professor at the
University of Kansas, in a very good (albeit unabashedly ethnocentric) course called
Theatre in Western Civilization to 1642 (second half: the same “from 1642”) was
Robert Findlay, who had come from the University of Iowa, having finished his PhD
under Oscar Brockett’s direction. Along with the facts, he brought plenty of
imagination-inspiring theory. What a bewildering vocabulary of arcane terms the
young student encountered in that first course in theatre
history: thronoi, choregoi, periaktoi, proscenium doors, loci, foci, carros, wings and
grooves, chariots and poles, lazzi, “heavens,” free plantation, denouement, magic if,
through-line, Eidophusikon, ekkyklema, Eurythmics, Platea,
biomechanics, gesamtkunstwerk, and verfremdungseffekt. Even though my spell-
checker is rejecting most of them as I write, the reader will find these and many
more elucidated in History of the Theatre. When Professor Findlay first introduced
them in Theater in Western Civ, however, I can remember my classmates asking
(before anyone had learned to describe terms they didn’t care to understand by
resorting to the j-word): “Why can’t theatre historians just write plain English?” The
answer was then, as it remains today, that the history of the theatre is too rich in
ideas to be comprehended by the lexicon of one language, even one as prolific and
flexible as standard English.

After completing my MA in England, I returned to study theatre history at Cornell

with Marvin Carlson, who had preceded me at Kansas University, but whose lexicon
in at least five languages was even more deeply threatening. So back to Brock
before comprehensive exams, which then simply consisted of a single sheet with
fifty identifications, scary words and proper names chosen “at random” by Professor
Carlson from the entire scope of theatre history and dramatic theory. The presence
of Bert States on the theatre faculty at Cornell also reminded the doctoral student
that our field was offering courses in theory when English professors were still
having to look up “signifier.”

A lot of the vocabulary stays with me, but more important was the method, the
habit of mind that came from the struggle of trying to understand the often
contradictory meanings of complex terms, a struggle which gave rise to first-hand
experience of a truth Brock records in that first edition of the History, in a passage
not quoted often enough in postpositivist accounts of his work: “While history aims at
recreating the past, it is seldom a purely factual study. The evidence, whether slight
or copious, must always be interpreted” (v). The lesson [End Page 5] here is clear.
If there is a soul to be requickened from the theatre of the past, the difficult words
must be its body, which is a body of knowledge. Although performance itself is an
act of interpretation (hence the singer’s “interpretation” of a song), interpretation is
also a performance, and as in any performance, degree of difficulty may often
dictate level of interest. The hard words must now and then do the work that easier
words fail to do, and in the history of the theatre it has been ever thus: think, for
example, of classical cruxes such as “catharsis” and “irony” or neologisms such as
“subtext” and “defamiliarization.”

In 1967–68 politics and theatre both took a lot of time, the kind of time you had
when you were twenty and didn’t need much in the way of sleep or reflection. Now it
is possible to look back—to look fixedly at, to contemplate—and to see how it was,
how it came to pass that we stopped the war and then lost the peace; how we stood
up to the FBI and the CIA, only to capitulate cravenly to the MFA.

We were a blessed generation of theatre students, changing the world. Part of that
boundless revolution, of course, which we confidently aspired both to bring about
and to build our careers on, would be the total decentralization of the American
theatre from New York into the vast network of regional repertory theatres, many of
them located on university campuses. Of course, every city of 50,000 or so would
want to support at least one—the new kind of professional but non-commercial
company for which we were training. Such a company would need artists who could
read plays and scholars who could help produce them, and as we saw physicians
moving between their practices in the community and their lecterns in the medical
school, so we imagined the artists and scholars of the university-resident theatres
expanding and sharing their knowledge as they shuttled between the theatre and the
classroom. At far less than the cost of big-time athletics, we reasoned, the
repertory—fresh interpretations of the classics and new plays by our
contemporaries—would entertain the culture-hungry masses while making the stage
look like America: Margo Jones meets Robert Edmond Jones meets Ernest Jones
meets LeRoi Jones (as Amiri Baraka was then known).

The last chapter of Brockett’s History captures the sense of momentum following
the Ford Foundation’s initial infusion of funds for this purpose in 1959 and the
subsequent founding of the Guthrie in Minneapolis in 1963:
The example of a major director seeking a home removed from New York theatre
gave the movement much-needed prestige. The favorable publicity received by
Minneapolis motivated many other cities to build art centers and to establish
resident theatre companies. . . . By 1967, there were 35 resident companies
outside New York.
(666)

Discussing the resident-repertory movement in connection with university theatre

programs, the History shifts, for the first time in 665 pages, to the present tense. (For
a prose stylist as laconic as Oscar Brockett, that amounts to a [End Page
6] rhetorical fireworks display.) Brock records that the Guthrie works closely with the
University of Minnesota, the APA [Association of Producing Artists] works closely
with Michigan University, that Yale is founding its own repertory company, that New
York University is founding a professional training program, and that the National
Endowment for the Arts has recently been established to “encourage worthwhile
projects and to stimulate local support for the arts” (667).

We now know that this was not to be the thin end of the wedge, but only the thin
edge. Even in 1967, while the first edition of the History was in press, the Tulane
theatre department and The Drama Review, which had the largest circulation of any
journal in the field (or of any scholarly journal in a specialized field of the arts and
humanities, excepting PMLA), left New Orleans, reversing the supposed flow of
decentralization by moving the Mohammed of the academic theatre to the Mountain
of New York City. This move established what was then called “Graduate Drama”
and later Performance Studies as a theatre department without a theatre. Ironically,
the immediate cause of the countermarch from the provinces was Tulane’s failure to
honor a longstanding commitment to build a new theatre. This was unusual at a time
when other universities scrambled to keep up with the building boom. Even at
relatively poor campuses like Kansas University, we almost always got the toys we
asked for: black boxes, double-purchase systems, paint frames, cherry-pickers,
leikos, big marble lobbies. Build it and they will come. But who were “they”?

In the mid-sixties, Harold Clurman started calling this huge construction project
“the Edifice Complex,” by which he was telling us, though we couldn’t hear him at
the time, that we had very little idea about what to put into these massive shells of
pre-stressed concrete, the ones that still architecturally dominate most of our
campuses, like mausolea, empty monuments to their still-born purpose.

What happened is easy to describe, painful to remember. Into the vacuum created
by the non-appearance of the cultural revolution in regional repertory theatre rushed
thousands of would-be teachers whose theory was that their practice was self-
justifying. Increasingly, they held the MFA degree, which did turn out to be terminal
in more ways than were originally intended, and increasingly they felt compelled to
create other MFAs, not for perilous careers in the professional theatre (at least not
for the most part) but to teach in even newer, even less distinguished MFA
programs.

Not wanting to overgeneralize, I am willing to concede that some MFA programs

turned out to be wonderful investments. At a certain point, however, which varied
from campus to campus, the MFAs, wonderful or not, got the majority of tenured
votes, and at that point programs of theatre research found themselves fighting a
rearguard action against dwindling resources and a double marginalization on their
own campuses: they did not fit among the[End Page 7] community of scholars
because they were appointed in theatre; they did not fit among the MFAs because
they read books. Now too few in number in any one department, they struggled to
cover the subjects of theatre history, literature, and theory and to direct the
increasingly specialized research necessary to compete. Too few in number in any
one department, they discovered that a single resignation or a death might throw
their entire program into turmoil.

And so in place of professional regional repertory companies working side-by-side

and even overlapping with scholars who were expanding the literature, history, and
theory of the theatre, what we got was a faculty generally isolated from both the
professional theatre and scholarship, ultimately justifying their anti-intellectualism as
creative expression and their artistic failure as experimentation or “process.” In the
apparently limitless expansion of American higher education from the 1960s,
anything seemed possible. Give academic credit for ushering at shows? Sure—and
then only years later wonder why theatre curricula have become national campus
jokes. Let stage-struck teenagers borrow against their own futures or their parents’
retirements for four years of pseudo-training (seven with the MFA)? Absolutely—and
then only later let them find out for themselves what it means that they have invested
the better part of their twenties learning how to turn on one foot and where to go to
get their teeth bleached. But before the final tenuring in of the acting gurus and arc-
welders, it seemed possible to have it all, to do it all, for everyone: departments one-
upped each other announcing the BA, BFA, MA, MFA (in acting, directing, design),
and PhDs, too—departments that ended up being staffed by a handful of full-time
faculty, few of whom could either conduct scholarly research or have professional
careers as artists outside of their colleges’ gates. It was not possible. It is not
possible. It’s history.

So what is possible? Are we training our graduate students for today, or for
tomorrow? Where are we headed? Where do we want to go?

As a point of departure, I propose that we adopt Oscar Brockett’s advice that to

survive we must “welcome the new and preserve the best of the old.” Instead of
emphasizing what’s new, however, I want to return to what is the best of the old.
Academic fields are evaluated by the original research methods that they develop
and the results that they achieve. What have we achieved? The most successful
research methodology developed by the academic study of theatre and drama in the
United States is the hands-on, critical, observer-participant study of performance.
Performance was the unifying principle in the otherwise disparate objectives of the
first generation of founders, and the focus on performance, which, crucially, is both
an object and method of study, is now returning in new and potentially
transformative ways. By reconfiguring the history of the theatre as a history of
performance, for instance, we “redefine our territory in the academy,” in the words of
the charge for this conference. For one thing, in a stroke, we change what had been
an almost exclusive focus on eurobourgeois theatre (“Theatre in Western Civilization
to 1642”) into [End Page 8] research into the world’s great performance traditions.
This strengthens, not weakens, the teaching of canonical works, from The Tempest,
as one of a variety of masterworks, including Trinidadian carnival, which physically
stage intercultural contacts in the Atlantic world, to Meyerhold’s biomechanical
exercises, which engage the problem of alienation of labor in a way that illuminates
the neo-Taylorist “performance paradigm” in contemporary manufacture.

To make what I have in mind work for the next generation of graduate students, it
will be necessary to phase out all but the most viable of MFA programs (probably the
majority) and to use the newly vacated lines to hire scholars—scholars whose
research may in many instances depend on their abilities as performers. The
resources, physical and fiscal, are already in place. Putting them to productive use in
this way would reclaim the heritage of the founders and simultaneously align our
work as theatre historians with what Marvin Carlson identifies as a “major shift in
many cultural fields from the ‘what’ of culture to the ‘how,’ from the accumulation of
social, cultural, psychological, political, or linguistic data to a consideration of how
this material is created, valorized, and changed, to how it lives and operates within
the culture, by its actions. Its real meaning is now sought in its praxis, its
performance” (195). What a deal: by honoring our own history we get to lead the
hottest trends.

No single approach, certainly not mine, will serve the needs of every program, but
all theatre and performance departments should be able to articulate their teaching
and research objectives. The key instrument in the conduct of performance research
is the repertoire, however it is defined, from the all-Shakespearean season to
 observer-participant fieldwork in ethnic cuisines as tourist performance. Since most
programs produce complicated seasons of plays and musicals already, the
possibilities seem to be more limited now by the imaginations of the producers than
by budgets or facilities. In the shift of focus from the “what” of culture to the “how,”
performances galvanize theory and practice in a way that poses the critical question
“why?” At the same time, they pose an even more challenging and inspiring question
that is even more rarely asked these days: “why not?”

There are a number of possibilities to which this question might be put. Why can’t
every season-selection conference, for instance, be an intellectual as well as a
logistical planning event, closely tied to the curriculum and the research mission of
the faculty, graduate students, and advanced majors? Why can’t every department
have the confidence that its collective work in performance is making a contribution
to knowledge? Why can’t every department share its ideas and discoveries with the
whole field? Why can’t every journal in the field encourage papers signed by multiple
authors, in the manner of scientific publications? Why? Because we would thereby
emphasize the distinctive potential of theatre and performance studies for
collaborative [End Page 9] research on the cusp of the arts and human sciences.
We would also give everyone a way of contributing to research and being
recognized for that contribution. So why not?

Finally, but most importantly on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of Oscar
Brockett’s trail-blazing History of the Theatre, why can’t every performance research
program recognize its obligation to the history of the subject by renewing its teaching
of the subject of history? Why? Because the list of difficult words may change from
time to time, but it will never get any shorter. So why not?
Joseph Roach
Joseph Roach is Professor of English and Theatre at Yale University. He has also chaired the
Department of Theatre Arts at Sweet Briar College, the Department of Performing Arts at Washington
University in St. Louis, the Interdisciplinary PhD in Theatre at Northwestern University, and the
Department of Performance Studies at New York University.

Works Cited
Bentley, Eric, ed. The Theory of the Modern Stage: An Introduction to Modern Theatre and Drama. Rev. ed., Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1984.

Google ScholarFind it! at CUNY

Brockett, Oscar. History of the Theatre. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1968.

Google ScholarFind it! at CUNY

Carlson, Marvin. Performance: A Critical Introduction. London: Routledge, 1996.