Editorial Comment: Popular Culture and Theatre History

Entertainment has a bad name. Serious people learn to mistrust and even to revile it. The word wears spandex, pasties, a leisure suit studded with blinking lights. It gives off a whiff of Coppertone and dripping Creamsicle, the fake-butter miasma of a movie-house lobby. . . . It engages regions of the brain far from the centers of discernment, critical thinking, ontological speculation. It skirts the black heart of life and drowns life’s lambency in a halogen glare. Intelligent people must keep a certain distance from its productions.

—Michael Chabon¹

In 1974, TDR/The Drama Review published a special issue on “Popular Entertainments,” followed the next year by a special issue of The Educational Theatre Journal (as this journal was then called) on “Popular Theatre,” and two years later, in 1977, by a Conference on the History of American Popular Entertainment—billed as “the first of its kind in the United States”—sponsored by the American Society for Theatre Research and the Theatre Library Association.² These two publications and the conference provided what were then almost unprecedented forums for prominent scholars, including Brooks McNamara, Robert Toll, Laurence Senelick, and Don Wilmeth, to present research on performance genres such as the circus, minstrel shows, burlesque shows, vaudeville, tent repertoire shows, and wild west shows that had up until that time been deemed unworthy of scholarly attention.

Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey, and TDR, along with many other journals, now readily and regularly publish work on popular entertainment genres. Nonetheless, as recently as 2004, David Savran still felt the need to inveigh against the

long-standing, class-based prejudices about the superiority of art to entertainment. . . . Theatre historians looking to have a greater impact both within and without the profession could do worse than to reconsider the kinds of theatrical practice that have held millions spellbound but have been routinely dismissed by scholars.³

The following year, in the pages of this journal, Christopher Balme avered that

[t]heatre historians have long been aware of a glaring dichotomy between theatre’s cultural impact in a given period and its subsequent canonization in texts and productions. . . . Despite acknowledgment of the nonliterary aspects of theatre and the growing body of research into popular theatre and performance, there still remains a lingering suspicion of the long-run hit play and its attendant processes of commodification.⁴

Most recently, in the issue of Theatre Journal just prior to this one, Jill Dolan acknowledged the disparagement that she and other prominent feminist scholars held in the late 1980s and early 1990s for popular liberal-feminist playwrights such as Wendy Wassserstein “by virtue of their appeal to wide audiences.”⁵

As Savran reminds us, “the binary opposition between highbrow and lowbrow . . . in fact was consolidated only at the end of the nineteenth century.”⁶ One could argue that this opposition is rooted in the early nineteenth-century Romantic myth of the creative genius driven to produce art in response to an inner compulsion to create something radically new and original, as opposed to the desire to appease a political patron or to profit in the marketplace. The opposition between low and high art began to break down as deep-rooted Romantic assumptions about art and culture started to give way during the 1960s and ’70s to the sensibility that would be called “postmodern.” Hence, strictly speaking, lowbrow popular entertainment, as defined in opposition to highbrow art theatre, exists only within a historical window extending from the middle of the nineteenth century through the middle of the twentieth century—which is roughly the span covered by the five essays collected in this special issue.

The distinction between lowbrow and highbrow was firmly entrenched by the 1920s when theatre was establishing itself as an academic discipline, and so it is not surprising that theatre historians would construct a resolutely highbrow canon of classics from ancient Greece, Elizabethan England, and seventeenth-century France, along with plays in the tradition of European modernism. By the same token, it is not surprising that the ideas of a scholar who flew in the face of this trend and trumpeted popular...