Teaching Theatre in Precarious Times: Strategies for Survival in the Liberal Arts Curriculum

Over the last several years, I have spearheaded the design of multidisciplinary symposia to coincide with and complement a specific play in the production season of the Theatre Department at Davidson College. This essay offers a critical examination of my work curating these symposia and the strategies I have devised to engage communities, both on campus and beyond, in intellectual and artistic explorations that depend on a theatrical production as inspiration and touchstone. My analysis considers the strategic goals of such work in the context of these economically “precarious times,” which have seen the dissolution of theatre departments and programs across the country, and a more general attack on the relevance of a liberal arts education.¹ I explore the pedagogic and collaborative strategies deployed and how they intersected with institutional priorities to strengthen the artistic work taking place in our rehearsal rooms and theatres. My essay is directed at others who are interested in similar work, and thus I intend to point out strategies that yielded the most successful and rich collaborations, as well as my own missteps and challenges, along the way.

Precipitated in part by a rearticulated, college-wide strategic plan, a changing student body, and a supportive institutional infrastructure, our department began, during the 2008–09 academic year, large-scale collaborations with colleagues from multiple departments and programs, resulting in a series of events around a targeted production. Each of those shows—Melinda Lopez’s Sonia Flew, Suzan-Lori Parks’s In the Blood, Velina Hasu Houston’s Kokoro, and Heather Raffo’s 9 Parts of Desire—has resonated with a particular campus initiative, and all dovetail with two components of the college’s articulated strategic plan: increased emphasis on diversity and inclusion and interdisciplinary collaboration.² Most plays also intersected with a third long-standing priority to offer curricular exposure to international subjects, and thus the symposia were developed in concert with our college’s international studies program.³ We sought to more deeply engage potential spectators in the issues and aesthetics of our performances through event programming that would explore thematic elements of the play from different disciplinary perspectives. We also invited colleagues from across the college to be stakeholders with us in the success of our productions by generating joint programming on topics of interest to them. These symposia also coincided with a reinvigorated departmental effort and commitment to embrace the college’s commitment to diversity and serve the changing composition of the student body by critically examining our production choices. We made a commitment to revamp our play-selection process to pay greater attention to the range of cultural experiences and identities reflected in our season and to the playwrights included.

The broad, publicly articulated intent of the multidisciplinary symposia is to engage students and the community (here meant college community, as well as the larger community of our town, whose residents are regularly participants in our public events) in a thoughtful, interdisciplinary consideration of themes explored in these plays. Such in-depth exploration of the world of the play would enrich the audience’s understanding and appreciation of the performance and better inform the creative team’s artistic choices. The broad, but unarticulated (or at least un-publicized) intent of these symposia has been to demonstrate theatre’s continued vital contributions, as both an academic discipline and artistic pursuit, to the liberal arts curriculum, raise our departmental profile on campus, and sell tickets to our shows. By connecting or linking our work with that of other departments and to the explicit goals of the college’s working strategic plan, we intended to demonstrate—or, if you prefer, “perform”—our significance to the intellectual life of the college.

Part of my “sell” of these symposia to colleagues and the administration was that they would catalyze “community-wide conversations.” My scholarly and pedagogic work, with a focus on community-based performance and feminist criticism, always strives to integrate performance within such broad, relevant social and political conversations. I believe deeply and sincerely in the ability of performance to serve as a nexus for...