A Note from the Editor

The phrase devised theatre seems to crop up everywhere: in articles, on websites, in reviews, and especially in the sessions, hallways, and hotel bars at the conferences of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE). Hearing the words devised theatre transports me back to my post-college days, working as a director of a feminist theatre company in Philadelphia called The Women’s Ensemble. At that time, my colleagues and I positioned ourselves antithetically to what we considered to be the patriarchal structure of traditional theatre. We deliberately created our work as a collective, often stringing together pieces in an episodic form that allowed for various, even conflicting authorial voices. It was the early ’90s.

Twenty years later, attending ATHE conferences as a college professor, I began to reframe this previous work under the rubric of devised theatre. But I had questions about what it means to create devised theatre: Is devising a performance an aesthetic choice or a sociopolitical stance? What techniques are best? How much should a director lead the process, and when and in what ways should a director step back? What is the role of the playwright in devising? When I joined the editorial team at Theatre Topics I was therefore compelled to take a deeper dive into exploring this approach to theatre-making.

Clearly, I was not alone in this inquiry. A 2015 issue of The Dramatist featured a roundtable discussion with the indicative title, “What Is Devised Theatre?” Most scholars and practitioners would likely agree with Alison Oddey’s notion that devised theatre is “a response and reaction to the playwright–director relationship, to text-based theatre, and to naturalism, and challenges the prevailing ideology of one person’s text under another’s direction” (4). However, if devised theatre is mostly recognized as an alternative to the predominant form of theatre-making, as Moisés Kaufman articulates, this categorization only describes “what something is not” (qtd. in Groff 18). Comparing devised theatre to a black hole (which is an absence of matter), Kaufman further explicates that “we know how theater is most often made, and devised is everything that is not that” (23). At the same time, even this (negative) description does not always remain within clear boundaries. In an interview with American Theatre, for example, Young Jean Lee describes her playwriting process:

I’ll write a scene and bring it into rehearsal and see if it works. If it’s a total failure, I just throw it out. If it has potential, then I rewrite it with the actors on their feet. I’ll have them making changes in their scripts, then I’ll take it home, rewrite it, and bring it in the next day. And eventually I can see a shape. . . . There is no script [on] day one of rehearsal. There’s just a scene that I bring in.

(qtd. in Jones 75)

Yet, how often is Lee referred to as a deviser?

In the decade plus since Theatre Topics last devoted a special issue to devising (15.1, 2005), its query “Why devise? Why now?” has continued to engage theatre artists and educators. In fact, the popularity and impact of this type of theatre has significantly grown over time. Reflecting on the tremendous critical and commercial success of War House, the New York Times recently noted a shifting of the tide: “Historically, British theater has centered on the playwright, but for the ‘most successful show of the last decade’ to be a devised project is a ‘great provocation,’” with devised shows like London Road and Curious Incident following suit (Trueman C6). At the same time, devised theatre seems to be on the rise on college and university campuses and often serves as the basis for theatre for social justice.

While not wishing to provide a definitive or prescriptive use of the term devised, this special issue attempts to bring the concept into sharper focus. The essays included explore the role of devising as an aesthetic practice, a pedagogic practice, and an applied theatre practice. In addition to the questions of “Why devise? Why now?” the contributors ask...