TDR Comment: Mainstream Theatre and Performance Studies

I've been comparing some ads in the January 2000 American Theatre with those in recent TDR s, Theatre Journal , and the Routledge performance studies catalog. Statistics tell a story. There are 120 ads in American Theatre , 62 from some of the best colleges in the land--ranging from Harvard, Yale, and Columbia, to branches of the University of California, Brandeis, Rutgers, Boston University, the Universities of Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, Texas, Iowa, Indiana, and others offering BA, BFA, MFA, and PhD degrees. Most of the rest of the ads offer non-degree professional training at places like the Actor's Center, AMDA, LMDA, and the Actor's Studio; or apprenticeships at theatres and festivals. Theatre training is so predominant that of the 120 ads, 117 invite prospective students to train in acting, directing, playwriting, design, and theatre management/producing. One of the three non-training ads is to get people to stage a play, another is for a writer's conference, and the third for Mime Journal . There isn't a single ad in AT for scholarly books, or any book about theatre or performance--or any book at all, for that matter, not one!

If a picture speaks a thousand words, then there are tomes shouting from the pages of AT . The training proffered is for a very particular kind of theatre--the production of European and European American dramas done in orthodox ways by overwhelmingly white casts. Of the literally hundreds of faces in the AT ads, 15 are recognizable as people of color. Looking at the ads one might almost forget the presence in the U.S. of millions and millions of African Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Native Americans. Nor do the ads' pictures or texts give any indication that the theatre the students are training for deals with questions of ethnic and religious identity, sexual orientation, homophobia, racism, globalization, postcolonialism, and so on. Instead, the ads reflect the mainstream's profound desire to settle the questions of society's future in favor of the assimilation of everyone into performing the mainstream's most orthodox values. Or, worse, no desire at all to recognize that problems exist. Taken together, what the text and pictures reveal is a thriving "business as usual" mainstream theatre in the U.S.A., a theatre dominated by white people, ideas, projects, histories, and futures. From the ads in AT it would appear that the only thing prospective theatre students ought to be interested in acquiring is virtuosity in orthodox theatre.

It goes without saying that also absent is an awareness of, no less any need for, theory--either performance theory or social theory, or any kind of theory. Theory is relegated to PhD programs, and there are only 11 of these mentioned. The PhD programs are always in small print, never the main feature, of an advertisement. Of the 11, only the University of California at Irvine includes performance studies--in a package with "dramatic literature and critical theory."

In brief, the world represented by the ads in American Theatre is a far cry from the world of performance studies. The rejection is a two-way street. PS scholars mostly ignore the world represented by the ads in AT . What is PS about these days? Taking ads for PS books as the clearest indication, we see titles such as: The Explicit Body in Performance ; Kathakali Dance-Drama ; Mourning Sex ; The Routledge Reader in Gender and Performance ; José, Can You See--Latinos On and Off Broadway ; Liveness ; Virtual Gender ; Dangerous Border Crossers ; Dancing Histories: Heuristic Ethnography with the Ohafia Igbo ; Embodied Memory: The Theatre of George Tabori ; Legislative Theatre ; The Radical in Performance ; A Sourcebook on African-American Performance --and many more. The "broad spectrum approach" I called for in 1988 ( TDR 4, 6 [T119]) is now the norm in PS. PS is an established field of its own--with its closest affinity to cultural studies (itself a vast panoply of subjects), not...