New England Theatre Journal: A fond farewell 1989-2023

How long should a scholarly journal continue?   For how long can it function meaningfully?   It is really a case-by-case question, determined by some combination of opportunity, support, and demand.  This past December New England Theatre Journal lost its funding and was forced to cease publication after a thirty-five-year run. 

In the mid-1980s, years immediately prior to the founding of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE), there was an organizational gap for those interested in publishing scholarly work on theatre in purely theatrical terms.  Theatre Journal continued  but had shifted toward European-based theory, leaving no setting for studies that considered theatrical practice from a historical context.   [A few years later ATHE began Theatre Topics to correct this, though it only focused on practice,  thereby creating a permanent schism between thought and practice between the two.] 

In 1952, legendary Boston theatre critic Elliot Norton helped establish the New England Theatre Conference (NETC) as a regional theatre organization designed to serve mostly local practice:  youth theatre, professional theatre, community theatre, and secondary theatre were its primary focus.  It offered prizes for playwriting, operated annual auditions for summer stock theatres nationally, and hosted a vibrant annual convention.  In time, its board included faculty representatives from Tufts, Emerson, Boston University, Berklee School, Northeastern, Brown, and Boston College, as well as leading professionals and Elhi educators.  Yet it did not offer much by way of opportunities for advanced theatre study.   

The NETC’s then-president, Joyce Devlin of Mt. Holyoke, led efforts to respond to this gap by working to develop a new scholarly publication, under the auspices of NETC,  which would balance advanced theatre scholarship and practice.   She assembled a team entrusted with developing a new publication titled New England Theatre Journal.  It would be open to scholarship from the regional to the international,  would include a Books in Review section, as well as a New England Theatre in Review section.  In keeping with its NETC’s regional mission, efforts were made to ensure NETJ’s leadership would be drawn from the New England states.  The planning team included Charles Combs, Jeffrey Martin, Mort Kaplan, Robert Colby, Arthur Dirks and Jack Welch of Baker’s Plays. A key influential advisor was Don Wilmeth.   

Charles Combs was named the first editor of NETJ with Jeffrey Martin serving as co-editor. I served as a reader on that first issue and then became “the other” co-editor by its third year. It was an annual publication and all submissions were vetted blindly by outside evaluators. We were fortunate in the quality of work submitted by authors such as J. Ellen Gainor, William Grange, Bernard Dukore, Kim Marra and Richard Schechner, to name but a few.   Our pages have featured important work by established scholars such as Laurence Senelick,  Felicia Hardison Londré, Rosemarie Bank, Frank Hildy, John Frick, Barry Witham, Bruce McConachie, Kim Marra, Odai Johnson, James Fisher, Anne Fletcher, Cheryl Black and Arnold Aronson.  They also included young authors just beginning significant careers, like Heather Nathans, Soyica Diggs Colbert, Rob K. Baum, Amy Hughes, Stephen Bottoms, La Donna Forsgren, Michelle Granshaw, Maya Cantu and many more.   Over two hundred full-length articles in all.    

Personally, having had my own articles unceremoniously rejected without explanation by another publications,  I believed that it crucial to provide authors with quality feedback on their submission, whether accepted or not.  This would give authors an explanation for our decisions, but would also provide guidelines on how to improve their work should they wish to submit it elsewhere.  We hoped this would contribute to the health of our field overall, as well as provide realistic encouragement for each author.  

It was never the plan for me to serve so long a term as Editor in Chief of NETJ.  Charles Combs gave way to Jeffrey Martin, causing me to bump up to first co-editor, with another colleague taking over the second co-editor slot.  Then when I, in turn, took over the lead spot from Jeffrey, we lost both of our co-editors: one took over as lead editor for Theatre Topics and the other did not receive tenure.  From then on we kept looking for replacements among the New England region, but were unsuccessful doing so, for one reason or another.  In the meantime, I kept on as lead and was most fortunate that Jeffrey Martin decided to return to a co-editor position, alongside me, for all these many years.  Because most academic journals are directly affiliated with major organizations, ours is not, which has afforded  us a continuity of philosophy as well as core personnel.   We also benefited for many years by the impeccable copy/format work of Tobin Nellhaus as well as a stable of outstanding outside evaluators, most notable for his many years of such assistance, Jonathan Chambers. 

Furthermore, while we have occasionally published work that reflects our New England roots, there have otherwise been no geographical restrictions on authors or topics.  In fact, we welcomed being a site for work that often bucked current trends, where authors with new ideas or perspectives could find a home for non-mainstream work of still-meaningful value.  A quick glance at past issues reveals that we published the last interview with Spalding Gray and an interview with Kenny Leon on directing August Wilson; theatre performed on American military bases and an article on theatre in Japanese internment camps;  theatre in China, theatre in Nigeria, even though most articles centered on theatre in the Americas,  there is much concerning race and gender to be found among them.   Cultural trends have shifted and turned over the years of our existence and we have tried to navigate them as best we could, trying to maintain our commitment to ideas (rather than theory) in application (on stage for a live audience).  Sympathetic to historical dynamics, it was always fascinating to find work where authors found parallels between the past and the present,  noting how the fundamental dynamic of performance/audience tended to remain constant even as societal concerns might shift.   For example, I loved how a recent issue of NETJ included a piece on new (!) discoveries of the original staging of the ancient Egyptian Abydos Passion plays, another on  the “echoes of Cervantes” as found in Othello, alongside an article on Thornton Wilder’s cycles of history as well as another about a most recent feminist adaptation/production of Macbeth.  A small journal such as ours is subject to chance when it comes to submissions;  we usually cannot insist on a particular topic or approach, instead are dependent upon the vagaries of whomever happens to submit their work in any given year.   And yet we were occasionally able to feature such more specialized sections over the years, rather than the usual eclectic mix:   for example, our 2009 issue featured a subsection on Theatre and Undergraduate Education, edited by Nancy Kindelan;  in 2013 Arvid Sponberg edited a subsection on the roots of contemporary Chicago theatre;  Heather Nathans’ 2005 article on diasporic imagination led to her offer to support and edit an entire extra issue of NETJ in 2008, which focused entirely on the work of August Wilson.  Still, we always celebrated the eclectic because it tended to reflect the variety of work being done in our academic and professional theatre world;  hence our final 2023 issue of NETJ was composed of articles on Samuel Beckett,  Bertolt Brecht, on the historical shifts in China’s classic play, The White-haired Girl, an essay on using theatre to combat AIDS in New York, and a study of feminist violence in a recent adaptation of Jekyll and Hyde. Add to this a subsection on musical theatre that included a piece on the use of traditional Fado performance in Bahai, another on how the Spiderwoman Theatre in New York remixed a performative treatise  towards a queer politics of Indigenous femme existence,  while our last article offered guidelines for introducing anti-Racist strategies when teaching a college-level musical theatre course.  I wonder what subsequent issues of NETJ might have offered readers.  It’s been a fascinating, informative journey!  However, sad to say,  in late 2023 New England Theatre Conference notified us that they no longer could afford to support NETJ, forcing us to close shop. It was a sad day, but perhaps inevitable. Hopefully our legacy will remain on paper and online. To all who contributed, past and present, I offer a mighty word of thanks. 

A key component of NETJ was our Theatre in Performance section.  Rather than just offer a setting where reviewers could simply send in reviews of live performances,  we hoped  to establish an archive of professional, non-profit theatre work as done in the New England region during the course of each past year.   Ideally, we hoped to make NETJ into an assemblage of the best regional work over a period of several decades, a source for future students,researchers, as well as fans. 

This section’s success relied upon whoever happened to be reviewing a given production, as well as whoever happened to be the Editor of this section;  some years were better than others.  While some Editors viewed this as a setting to promote those theatres uncritically,  it was tougher to find those equipped to evaluate according to higher standards.  While some Editors proved perhaps more effective than others, in recent years, this section of NETJ thrived under the stewardship and supervision of Martha Schmoyer LoMonaco, who built up a string of reviewers, expanded the number of theatres covered, and established high and consistent standards by which to assess their work. 

When we learned of the demise of NETJ this past December,  Marti and her reviewers were already in the middle of reviewing the 2023-2024 New England theatre season.  While the rest of the journal had not yet begun to process work, and hence not really impacted by the sudden and unexpected halt, it seemed a shame that the work of this arm of NETJ should not find readership.    

I made some inquiries of peer journals and was delighted when the editors of The Journal of American Drama and Theatre stepped forward, offering to publish this last remnant of NETJ’s work. Rather than being downcast, we were thrilled to find supportive colleagues willing to give us a more celebratory send-off.  I think I speak for all the editors and authors of New England Theatre Journal when I say thank you to JADT for this generous gesture.  Thanks also to our many contributors and readers who have enabled us to survive, grow and flourish.  Your support has been more than appreciated.  Below please find our NETJ 2023-2024 theatre in review section.        

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