Editors on Theater Publishing

This issue of Theater is basically all reviews, mostly of books. While working on it, I realized how little I knew about the ideas and circumstances of those editors who still assign, edit, and find a readership for these books. The one thing I did know was that while a lot of specialized studies are being published for the academic audience, very little theater writing was entering the general stream of American literary culture or reaching a wide public. Yet the health of any intelligent American theater and the continued existence of nonconformist alternatives to the regional-Broadway monolith depend on the active circulation of criticism, contemporary plays, new theories, revisions of theater history, and translations. Given the antitheatrical prejudice always lurking in this country, and the mass-market mentality creeping over the publishing industry, editors who still advocate theater books seem downright heroic. I wrote to a number of them to find out how they viewed their work and what changes they had noted. Those who replied represented wildly diverse book lists and, of course, equally diverse points of view. Only one responded point by point, saving me the hassle of printing the questionnaire, so this section begins with him.

--Erika Munk

Jonathan Brent
Yale University Press

Are books about theater a significant presence on your press's list? Are there more or fewer than five, ten, or twenty years ago?

Certainly there are more than in the past. Almost none has been hugely successful so far; however, I expect that over time we will find a way to publish theater books successfully. Theater is as important as any of the other arts, and in my view YUP should publish it to the same degree, let's say, as we publish in music. [In 2001 YUP published six music books and two theater books, one of which is on music-theater. In 2000 YUP published eleven music books and one theater book.]

Do you publish primarily criticism, history, theory, biography, works by directors and other theater professionals, or playscripts? What's your emphasis and why? Has it changed over the years?

We'll publish anything--scripts, criticism, biography, primary texts. We're publishing what I hope will be a major illustrated work on the Moscow Yiddish Theater. We also published George Izenour's books of architectural reconstruction. To date, the scripts have been the least successful--if you don't count Long Day's Journey; hard to beat that one.

If your emphasis has changed, does this reflect changes in the subjects and styles of the submissions you get? Or in your readership, in your publisher's demands, in theater itself?

The scripts of plays that are not widely performed or widely taught are almost impossible to sell because theater people generally are not great readers. We probably will stop publishing these. In the past we've published Kleist, Handke, a collection of French plays, one-act O'Neill plays, and a few others. However, our edition of Goethe's Faust (more a poem than a play, I suppose) has become a staple in courses. I'm interested in translations, but the market is tiny. Biographies have been successful for us, critical works less so.

Do you think theater is as interesting to the general educated public as it was thirty years ago? To the young?

No. But it ought to be--consequently, I'm not giving up on it and am delighted when the work of a critic like Gordon Rogoff comes along. Kids don't go to theater today. Virtually all entertainment comes mediated in some electronic form. But people will come around again to the power of the immediate encounter theater offers. God knows when, though.

When you publish plays, do you concentrate on mainstream or experimental work?

I'm much more interested in innovative, formally interesting work. I think the general public wants realism but is actually deeply bored by it. I've...