Hot Pursuit: Researching Across the Theatre/Film Border

The value of interdisciplinary inquiry in the study of American drama and theatre has been persuasively established, so much so that it is virtually a commonplace. Scholars working in the field today routinely draw on work from the humanities, from the social sciences, from ecobiology and cognitive science and any number of other disciplines. Yet just as globalization has not eliminated the nation state, the disciplines themselves persist. For all that scholars work to position our projects and ourselves “at the intersection between,” disciplinary assumptions linger, ghostly revenants haunting our curricula, our journals, our professional societies. Most surprisingly, perhaps, the disciplinary boundaries seem most impermeable between two fields that would seem to have the most common ground: theatre/performance studies and film/media studies. Consider inter alia the American Theatre and Drama Society, whose website lists 125 member publications since 2009, of which fewer than 10% give serious consideration to film and/or digital media.1 Over the same period, Theatre Journal has published 101 articles, 15 of which address film or television (5 in a single special issue on digital media), while the journal you are reading now, JADT, has published 51 articles with none crossing that disciplinary boundary.2

Conversely, since 2009, Cinema Journal, the publication of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, has published no articles that address the live stage.3 Hence, a disconnect: despite our overt recognition that the story of American drama in history, theory, and practice is a story of theatre and film—not to mention radio, television, and, increasingly, videogames and the internet—we generally ignore this recognition in shaping our research projects.

This essay argues that the study of American drama and theatre not only allows, but also often requires the scholar to research and write across the disciplinary divide between theatre and film (as well as other related arts: radio, television, music, new media). Readers are forewarned that the overall tone is less scholarly than polemical, reflecting the sense of urgency that I feel is needed at this moment in the history of both disciplines: theatre and performance studies on the one hand, and film/media studies on the other.

The title “Hot Pursuit” is drawn from the legal doctrine that allows law enforcement personnel to cross municipal, state, and (subject to certain treaty obligations) national boundaries if failing to do so would allow a suspect to escape apprehension. Too often in academia, scholars allow disciplinary boundaries to impede if not halt their pursuit of ideas. Though we claim to value interdisciplinary inquiry, we have many incentives (hiring committees, tenure and promotion, outcomes assessment, etc.) to reify disciplinary norms. Though we may desire to know everything about everything, we have to draw fences around our arguments or the book never gets finished. Hence the project that begins as “ethnicity in performance” may eventually become “Jewish memory on the US stage, 1989-1997.” The use of “principles of exclusion” such as identity, nation, genre and period is an accepted fact of academic life. It doesn’t make us bad people, or even bad scholars.

Yet if we are to go after the big ideas, the ones that speak to the circulation of meaning and power within the global culture, we must work to overcome our reluctance to intrude on someone else’s turf. Constructions of identity and nation, for example, don’t just exist in the theatre. They don’t just come from the television screen. If we want to prevent such constructs from eluding our grasp, we must cast a broad net. More importantly, we must be willing to follow our subjects wherever they may lead. Toward that end, this essay considers five “myths” that must be overcome in order to facilitate such boundary-crossing scholarship. By myth, I mean an idea once held as sacred truth but now considered fictional. Though they are generally recognized as false-to-fact, myths nevertheless continue to exert influence on contemporary thought. The first three of the myths I consider have their genealogy in European modernist ideas about art; therefore resistance to these myths may be understood as a way to embrace an understanding of American drama that is “more American” (more populist, more postmodern, more problematic). The last two myths are ones that I see as more pervasive in American scholarship and popular discourse; thus pushing back against them is of particular urgency to scholars of American drama.

Myth #1: Theatre is High Culture. Film is Low Culture

We know, of course, that theatre has never been the exclusive province of the wealthy, nor has film ever been confined to the lower class. Yet the notion that theatre is culturally superior to film continues to permeate theatre and performance studies in any number of ways, even if the terms “high” and “low” remain unvoiced. We see it in theatre people’s characterization of film and television as sites of “selling out.” Village Voice theatre critic Michael Feingold epitomizes this point of view: “a disheartening number of theater folk share the tourist audience's preoccupation with mass culture, to the point where I sometimes feel like the hero of Ionesco's Rhinoceros, watching his friends turn into stampeding animals. But I'm not capitulating, even if the popularity of a show like Glee proves that an impulse from the theater can sometimes stir up TV's currents.”4   We see it in the patronizing tone of surprise that theatre critics use to praise a Hollywood star who performs well in a live theatre role, as well as the gleeful malice with which those same critics eviscerate the film star who acts poorly on stage. As Patrick Healy writes, “Hollywood stars often come to Broadway to prove something to themselves or to audiences, though they rarely admit it.”5

We also see it, interestingly enough, in performance studies’ valorization of the live as superior to the mediated, epitomized by Peggy Phelan’s oft-quoted formulation, “performance’s only life is in the present.”6 It is all very well to celebrate performance as that which disappears, to highlight theatre’s capacity to surprise, to point to a tradition that stretches (in the West) back to Thespis. Yet in so doing, do we not also implicitly and explicitly devalue those theatrical innovations and interventions that seem to smack too much of film? Why, as Jessica Sternfeld writes, do “theater scholars develop an arrogant, even disgusted tone when mentioning the megamusical, if they mention it at all”?7 Why, when we have rejected—or at least challenged—the (neo-)Aristotelian approach to drama in so many other quarters, does Spectacle remain the most abject element of theatre studies? For the same reason, perhaps, that Ibsen, Strindberg, and Chekhov still abound on U.S. stages, despite a quarter century or more of attempts to de-canonize Dead White Guys: European modernism, with its attendant anti-theatricality, still lurks as the American art world’s unindicted co-conspirator.8

Film studies is haunted by the high-low myth in a different way. Concerned with establishing its legitimacy as a discipline, cinema studies for many years adopted many of the aesthetic prejudices of theatre, considering only certain types of film to be worthy of serious scholarly investigation. Films that proved too popular with the masses were suspect as art, unless and until they achieved canonical status. Most especially, film studies has tended, like theatre, to eschew sentiment, lavishing greater praise and attention on films marked by reflexive irony or existential dread, another sign of European influence.9 Hence film and media studies finds itself with a catch-22: having argued for disciplinary legitimacy (and even superiority) on the grounds that their object of study reaches more spectators than any other art form, the field for many years focused on those objects more likely to be enjoyed by a self-selected few. Only in the last twenty years has the scholarly study of popular film and television become widespread. Lee Grievson notes that the 2003 renaming of the Society of Cinema Studies’s as the Society of Cinema and Media Studies “marked a newly expansionist sense of what the discipline would cover.”10

So where are we? Theatre scholars, rapidly losing ground to film in the academy (as measured in majors, facilities, and teaching lines), gravitate toward performances that demonstrate theatre is a “higher” art form than film. Film scholars, battling to win ground from theatre (and literature), have until recently aimed their sights at work that establishes film as a “higher” art form than the general public might think. What falls out of this equation are the popular performances, including those most likely to span both disciplines: the filmic adaptations of Broadway hits, the musicals based on movies, the televised plays, the live-to-movie-theatre broadcast, and so on.

The most likely site for discussions of such “crossover” performances is popular culture studies, which since the 1990s has begun to immigrate into nearly all academic domains. But popular culture studies in general, whether concerned with the live, the mediated, or the material, is further bounded by a generalized distrust of the so-called Culture Industry, a view that rests on the Marxian assumption that artworks generated for profit are (by definition) exploitative of the masses who consume them. While such a view has value as a diagnostic, challenging us to think critically about the entertainment we consume, it is ultimately self-negating. Combined with assumptions of high and low culture, such critique leads us to the absurd conclusion that the audience (the People) are always right, except for the many times that they are wrong, hoodwinked by hegemonic capitalist (and later neoliberal) structures of power.

To cross this boundary, to properly apprehend the subjects of popular entertainment, we need to move past the high-low distinction, to “Americanize” the study of American drama. This is not to say that concepts such as class and taste are no longer relevant, but rather to admit that studying cultural aspects of performance need not entail rejection of all aesthetic criteria. Conversely, the study of aesthetics cannot be fully extricated from cultural considerations. Blur this border, and the theatre/film border will become significantly more permeable.

Myth #2: In both theatre and film, the discrete work of art should be the primary object of study

Traditional scholarship in both theatre and film (as well as most other arts) is an object-driven discipline. Or to put it another way, both theatre studies and film studies are tautologically defined by their objects of study. A theatre scholar studies plays and other theatrical events; a film scholar studies films, and perhaps other “screen” media such as television shows or websites. A work that does not fit within the boundaries of the scholar’s genre is considered at best terra incognita, at worst Out Of Bounds.

Such object-driven disciplinary formations echo nineteenth century definitions of the nation-state, which has always existed more as an ideal than as a reality. They hang on a concept of the work of art that all parties recognize to be limited, if not actually false. For it is not simply the genre of study that we regard as a fixed object, but also the site. The theatre scholar routinely speaks of a play or production as if it could be contained within two hours traffic upon the stage. The film scholar speaks or writes of a film as if it were a unitary object, beginning at the opening credits and ending when the lights come back on. Yet our own experiences of both media demonstrate that, in the words of the 1935 stage production, 1959 film, 1983 radio broadcast, 1993 television broadcast, and 2002 live-to-movie theatre telecast opera Porgy and Bess, “It ain’t necessarily so.” A theatrical production changes nightly. A long-running play changes casts, venues, and (frequently) dialogue. Cabaret with Natasha Richardson as Sally Bowles is not the same performance with Michelle Williams in the role (nor is either the same as a production whose performers are not recognizable from film and television). A film is comparatively more stable, but may include multiple cuts for different markets, as well as second-order viewing opportunities on television, DVD, airplanes, computers, and iPads. Moreover, as both disciplines place greater emphasis on cultural (rather than purely aesthetic) considerations, on audience reception, and on the post-performance circulation of meaning, the myth of the discretely bounded unitary artwork becomes increasingly unsustainable.11

This problem multiplies exponentially when, taking a page from performance studies, we begin to look not just at the artistic product but also at the process. What is the ontological status, for example, of a film script, of a rehearsal on a film set, of “deleted scenes?” What can theatre learn from studying auditions, replacement casts, or out of town tryouts? In practice, theatre and film scholars tend to consider process opportunistically. This is to say that we consider it only when a) access to such material is possible, and b) such material is sufficiently provocative as to enhance or illuminate our assessment of the final product. Perhaps it must be this way. Mustn’t all scholars balance the impossibility of knowing everything against the need to know something? And yet, if we expand our definition of the artwork, we might begin to blur the genre boundaries in productive ways. Should a revival of a play, for example, be treated differently from a remake of a film? What conditions determine whether a work of art is considered de novo or as a reiteration of a prior work? Can theories of adaptation applied to studies of what John Tibbetts and James Welsh call “stage plays into film”12 be readily applied to films adapted for the stage? Why has hardly any discipline taken notice of (much less theorized) the phenomenon of live television or movie-theatre broadcasts of stage performances?13 When we can properly articulate such ontological distinctions, we may begin to better understand the challenges ahead.

Myth #3: Theatre is a Writer’s Medium. Film is a Director’s Medium.

Among the consequences of our focus on the discrete artistic product is the attempt to attribute authorship of that product to the playwright (in theatre) or the director (in film). The assertion that the primary creator of a theatrical work is the playwright is not simply a convenient fiction nor a reflection of professional norms. Rather, we attribute authorship to the playwright because it is primarily as texts that theatrical creations circulate through time and space. Productions of, say, Oedipus separated by hundreds or thousands of years and/or hundreds or thousands of miles are nevertheless recognized as The Same Play on the basis of a shared written text. This despite the fact that the text may have been translated, emended, or otherwise transformed in the journey. We validate the playtext through its attribution to its “original creator,” the playwright. This is the Jew that Shakespeare drew. Yet the logic is circular, because the playwright is defined by the creation of the text. I believe that the plays attributed to William Shakespeare are actually the work of another Englishman, coincidentally also named William Shakespeare. This emphasis on the text/playwright dyad persists despite the fact that biographical criticism (the so-called “intentional fallacy”) has been deeply destabilized by New Criticism, poststructuralism, and reader-response theory. Driven perhaps by an imperative to “represent,” we routinely talk about our scholarship, our syllabi, and our production seasons as if the text were the play, and the playwright its only creator. The instability of the text, like the multiplicity of creative partners (actors, designers, stage managers, directors) and other vagaries of the artistic process, is treated as an occasionally illuminating curiosity. In other words, even though we know that the playscript is not the end product of the theatrical enterprise, we often behave as if it were.

By contrast, the film script most often comes before the artistic process reaches fruition, and rarely circulates with the promiscuity of a theatre script. The objet d’art that is distributed, studied, and archived is the film itself. Because of this, it is the director’s contribution to the process that is most readily visible to scholars and cineastes. Hence the frisson of finality that emanates from the phrase “Director’s Cut.” It is a marketing term, of course, but an instructive one for a number of reasons. First, it reveals the desire to cling to the popular and scholarly notion of the auteur director. Second, the phrase “Director’s Cut” nearly always refers to a re-release and/or DVD “special edition,” tying it to the multiple media (film, broadcast television, video recording, online or on-demand video, etc.) through which this apparently unitary artwork is distributed. Third, the very necessity of the term “Director’s Cut” belies its own claim: if the director were truly the Author of the film, the so-called “Director’s Cut” would require no special labeling.

Moreover, to the degree that film as a medium tends to emphasize (in comparison to theatre) the visual over dialogue, we can easily forget that theatre is not radio, that film is no longer silent. Yet the impossibility of archiving live performance and the seductive visuality of film are not likely to be overcome. What then, is the trans-genre scholar to do? Some significant interventions have been made through attention to filmic adaptations of plays and mixed media performances, as well as through experiments in multidimensional archiving of theatre events. Nevertheless, unless and until we move beyond the need to study a bounded Artistic Product, we will continue to be haunted by the need to identify a singular Artistic Producer. We will continue with scholarship that tacitly ignores the essentially collaborative nature of both art forms.

Hot pursuit, then, means directing greater attention to process, both before and after the performance. When we consider the training, pre-production, rehearsal and rewrite processes, we see that theatre and film are fluid and multiple creations, arising from the joint inspiration and efforts of many artists, not just the one to whom authorship is formally and imperfectly attributed. When we consider the role of the audience in constructing the meaning of the artwork—let us stipulate for the moment that the audience does play such a role—we see as well that the concern with authorship is something of an academic fiction. Scholars and critics tend to consider the Artist retrospectively, not unlike juries consider a criminal defendant. What did this person do? The audience, for the most part, considers the Artist subjunctively, as police consider a fleeing suspect. Of what acts might this person be capable? Are they acting alone or in conspiracy with others? What can be learned about this person from studying the scene of the crime?

Myth #4: East is East and West is West and Never the Twain Shall Meet

For scholars of American drama and theatre, “New York” is a synecdoche for live performance and “Hollywood” a metonym for the film industry. Perhaps because of the continent that separates these metropoles, U.S. scholars rarely focus on the fact that many playwrights work as screenwriters (and vice versa), that many film directors also work on the stage, and that actors and designers often cross the theatre/film boundary routinely. One reason, of course, is the aforementioned emphasis on the finished work of art, and the definition of that art as the product of a playwright or director’s imagination. An artist-driven approach to scholarship would go a long way toward remedying this problem.

One lamentable consequence of the influence of critical theory on both theatre and film studies is that we have, for the most part, stopped writing artist biographies. Out of approximately 300 studies listed in Theatre Journal’s “Doctoral Projects in Progress in Theatre Arts” from 2009-2013, there are fewer than 10 biographical projects, and fewer than 30 single-artist studies.14 The comparable list from 1966 alone has 12 biography projects and 30 single-artist studies out of 104 titles.15 While scholars still undertake the occasional reassessment of the impact of a major figure (e.g. Linda Ben-Zvi’s Susan Glaspell: Her Life and Times) or a thematic analysis focused on a single author (e.g. Harry Elam’s The Past as Present in the Drama of August Wilson), we have generally ceded the field of artists’ life stories to journalists, amateurs, and the artists themselves. When, if at all, scholars read these biographies, it is generally with an eye toward extracting information in support of an object-driven analysis of the artist’s work. While the life of the artist should not, of course, be the determining factor in the interpretation of her artistic work, it is dangerous to lose sight of the human stories that lay within our field of study. Such stories are vital partly because they are human--the human being does not fit neatly into categories of medium or genre—but mostly because they are Stories. Narratives have a remarkable ability to cross disciplinary and generic boundaries. As Michel De Certeau reminds us, “What the map cuts up, the story cuts across.”16 A strong narrative, we know, can compel our involvement in film and theatre, story and song. More importantly, these particular narratives, these “tales from Hollywood” and “Broadway memories” and “my life as a famous person” books often tell us more about the real circulation of artists and ideas across multiple media than we can glean from peer-reviewed “Major Works” studies.

When we shift the focus from the object to the artist, we recognize the limits of genre/media-based boundaries. A study of the film work of, for example, Katharine Hepburn, would be obviously, tragically incomplete without a consideration of her stage career. In Viewing America: Twenty-First Century Television Drama (2013), Christopher Bigsby lists several prominent American playwrights who also write (or have written) extensively for television, including David Mamet, Marsha Norman, Adam Rapp, and Theresa Rebeck.17 Bigsby also identifies many respected television writers who began their careers writing for the stage, most notably Aaron Sorkin.18 Yet just as crimes committed in Mexico may be considered inadmissible in a Texas trial, scholars often make the conscious choice to exclude such extraterritorial evidence in our consideration of an artist’s oeuvre. For example, many if not most readers of the Journal of American Drama and Theatre know that Eric Overmyer wrote On the Verge (1987). How many know that he also wrote five episodes of St. Elsewhere (1986-87) and two episodes of The Wire (2006), amidst a long career in television? How many consider this when teaching or producing On the Verge? Conversely, how many film critics and historians consider the stage beyond their purview? Jonathan Rosenbaum, for example, notes in his introduction to Discovering Orson Welles that most scholars in “Welles studies” ignore Welles’s stage work, suggesting that “they’re more parochial than Welles himself was.”19 The theatre/film boundary is persistent. To demonstrate its permeability, we must be willing to cross it in hot pursuit of those artists whose careers we examine.20

Audience-driven research similarly offers unexploited potential for boundary crossing intervention into the mythical opposition between New York and Hollywood. How many theatre audiences since the 20th century are ignorant of film? How many film audiences are truly innocent vis-à-vis theatre? True, some filmgoers (and television watchers) obviously have limited exposure to professional theatre; nevertheless, amateur, community-based and educational theatres are widely accessible.21 Certainly audiences recognize differences between media, and may indeed be more receptive to one or another form of communication. Yet all media provide cultural input, so to speak, and to ignore this threatens the utility of our research. Hot pursuit, then, means not just following the artist across the theatre/film border, but following the audience as well.

This will not be easy. The audience is frustratingly diverse, and our means of accessing their response to any artwork are sketchy and incomplete. Perhaps this is why, despite the valuable theorizations of spectatorship provided by Susan Bennett, Marvin Carlson, and others, so many scholars find it far simpler to concentrate on what the Artist Intended rather than to hypothesize what the Audience Received. But the dichotomy is a false one. Recall that the unitary Artistic Producer is a fiction, no less so than the unitary Audience. If we cannot analyze either with certainty, perhaps we can—like quantum physicists, political pollsters, and bookmakers—learn to express our conclusions in terms of probability. There is (you should excuse the pun) a good chance this would help.

MYTH #5: Theatre is the Past. Film is the Present. Digital Media is the Future

The argument that theatre is a discipline rooted in the past while film and media studies are contemporary and forward-looking serves the need of film and media studies to separate itself from its “parent field,” rebutting those who would argue that film is merely Theatre By Other Means. In so doing, it replaces one fallacy—post hoc ergo propter hoc (after this, therefore because of this)—with another—post hoc ergo excellens ut is (after this, therefore superior to this). The latter form of reasoning is, not coincidentally, a critical pillar supporting the concept of Manifest Destiny as it applies to US domestic and foreign policy, and so we might read it as a particularly (though not exclusively) American phenomenon.

This myth draws support from a mistaken, if understandable, confusion between the study of theatre or film and the industry of entertainment. There is no doubt that film and media have displaced theatre as primary sources of mass entertainment in western culture. This says nothing, however, about the vitality of either medium as an art form or a site of scholarship. Pace Benjamin, a century and a half of photography has eviscerated neither art nor art history. Moreover, the integration of film and video into live performance is potentially a great step forward for the theatre and studies thereof. In fact, a performance studies approach might lead us to reverse the terms in this formulation. The play, after all, belongs to the repertoire, a shifting repository of cultural memory that continues to grow and change in response to local conditions. The film belongs to the archive, remaining fixed into eternity. The Hairy Ape is continually reinvented; Citizen Kane stays the same.22

In order to overcome the false premise of a backward-looking theatre and a forward-looking digital age, scholars must relentlessly historicize our sites of inquiry. We must strive to imagine ourselves into the Now that animated past performances, and we cannot take for granted that we fully grasp the Present. Whatever phenomenon we hope to illuminate, we must range broadly forward and backward across history, avoiding the pitfalls of Grand Narratives while embracing the boundary-crossing potential of detailed local narratives. We must also recognize that our own arguments are bound by time and place. If they are to remain relevant into the future they must continually be re-made.

What is to be done?

Calls for greater interdisciplinarity at the institutional level are by now commonplace. To the degree that consolidation of academic departments, public scholarship, and “strategic clusters” serve the neoliberal agenda in higher education, one might even argue that interdisciplinarity is the New Normal. Yet just as increased global migration has led many people in many countries to insist on tighter border controls, so too has the trend toward interdisciplinary scholarship caused a kind of backlash amongst scholars who fear the dumbing down of traditional disciplines (or, more cynically, the loss of their own discipline’s power in the intellectual marketplace). As this backlash is most common amongst those with the most to lose (department chairs, journal editors, senior faculty), the disciplinary pressures on emerging scholars remain strong. Hence at the level of the individual scholar, or even the individual work of scholarship, disciplinary borders remain difficult and dangerous to cross.

To counter this, scholars of American drama and theater must embrace the doctrine of hot pursuit. We need not and should not give up our recognition of what is distinct about live performance, but we cannot and must not allow our subject to escape across the theatre-film border. Our scholarship must maintain its performativity in both senses of the word: it must remain liminal, processual, and multi-vocal; and it must establish—by its very articulation—that there is more to cultural analysis than can be contained within disciplinary or generic frames. It is no longer a question of being interdisciplinary, but of being post-disciplinary. We must even dare, at times, to be undisciplined.

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Henry Bial is Chair of the Department of American Studies at the University of Kansas where he holds a joint appointment in American Studies and Theatre. He is the author of Acting Jewish: Negotiating Ethnicity on the American Stage and Screen (2005), the editor of The Performance Studies Reader (2004; Second Edition, 2007), and the co-editor of Theater Historiography: Critical Interventions (with Scott Magelssen, 2010) and Brecht Sourcebook (with Carol Martin, 2000). He currently serves as President of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE).
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Endnote:
[1] See: http://www.atds.org/publications/year/—numerical calculations based on the list as retrieved 25 January 2014.
[2] Theatre Journal, volumes 61-65; Journal of American Drama and Theatre, volumes 22-25.
[3] Cinema Journal, volumes 49-52.
[4] Michael Feingold, “The Response to the Tony Awards Shows That Show Business Is No Longer Business As Usual,” 2010 blog post at VillageVoice.com, http://www.villagevoice.com/2010-06-22/theater/response-to-tony-awards-shows-business-is-not-business-as-usual/ Retrieved 1 March 2014.
[5] Patrick Healy, “Broadway’s New Kid.” New York Times (24 February 2013), AR1.
[6] Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London: Routledge, 1993),146.
[7] Jessica Sternfeld, The Megamusical (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 5. It should be noted that Sternfeld’s book, along with recent work by Stacy Wolf, David Savran, Elizabeth Wollman and others have begun to counter this phenomenon.
[8] See Martin Puchner, Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality, and Drama (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011).
[9] For an extended discussion of this phenomenon, see Lee Grievson, “Discipline and Publish: The Birth of Cinematology,” Cinema Journal 49, no. 1 (Fall 2009): 168-176.
[10] Ibid., 175.
[11] This is not to dismiss the widespread use of intertextual reading strategies, but to point out that even these strategies tend to focus on a singular discrete work to be interpreted in light of other singular works.
[12] John Tibbets and James Welsh, eds. The Encyclopedia of Stage Plays Into Film (New York: Facts on File, 2001).
[13] Cf. Brian Herrera and Henry Bial, eds. “As Seen on TV,” a special section of the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 24, no. 2 (Spring 2010): 91-168.
[14] See Theatre Journal 61, no. 2 (May 2009): 359-362; 62, no. 2 (May 2010): 329-332; 63, no. 2 (May 2011): 305-309; 64, no. 2 (May 2012): 317-322; 65, no. 2 (May 2013): 315-319. Numbers are approximate because several projects appear in more than one year.
[15] See Educational Theatre Journal 18, no.2 (May 1966): 122-125.
[16] Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 181.
[17] Christopher Bigsby. Viewing America: Twenty-First Century Television Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), x-xi.
[18] Ibid.
[19] Jonathan Rosenbaum, Discovering Orson Welles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 9.
[20] Notable examples of artist-driven studies include Leslie Kane’s Weasels and Wisemen: Ethics and Ethnicity in the Work of David Mamet (Palgrave, 2001), Christopher Bigsby’s Arthur Miller (Harvard University Press, 2010), and David Luhrssen’s Mamoulian: Life on Stage and Screen (University Press of Kentucky, 2012).
[21] Though studies by the National Endowment for the Arts suggest that less than 20% of the U.S. population regularly attends live theater, their polling methodology explicitly excludes amateur performances such as elementary and high school plays. SeeNEA brochure, All America’s A Stage: Growth and Challenges in Nonprofit Theater (2008). http://arts.gov/publications/all-americas-stage-0 (accessed 1 March 2014).
[22] Such a reformulation, however, takes us back to the limits of object-driven analyses.



The Journal of American Drama and Theatre
Volume 26, Number 2 (Spring 2014)

Co-Editors: Naomi J. Stubbs and James F. Wilson
Advisory Editor: David Savran
Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve

Guest Editor: Cheryl Black
(University of Missouri)

With the ATDS Editorial Board:
Noreen C. Barnes (Virginia Commonwealth University), Nicole Berkin (CUNY Graduate Center), Johan Callens (Vrije Universiteit Brussel), Jonathan Chambers (Bowling Green State University), Dorothy Chansky (Texas Tech University), James Fisher (University of North Carolina at Greensboro), Anne Fletcher (Southern Illinois University), Felicia Londré (University of Missouri-Kansas City), Kim Marra (University of Iowa ), Judith A. Sebesta (The College for All Texans Foundation), Jonathan Shandell (Arcadia University), LaRonika Thomas (University of Maryland), Harvey Young (Northwestern University)

Managing Editor: Ugoran Prasad
Editorial Assistant: Andrew Goldberg
Circulation Manager: Janet Werther

Martin E. Segal Theatre Center

Frank Hentschker, Executive Director
Marvin Carlson, Director of Publications
Rebecca Sheahan, Managing Director