Roman Holiday: Bridging Disciplinary Divides through Special Programs

Roman Holiday began during the spring of 1997, when I was doing my annual fretting about how or even whether to include Roman comedy in my theatre history survey course. While the study of Latin is still seen by some as the bedrock of a "serious" education, the comedies of Plautus and Terence are often perceived as frivolous and trivial both by theatre students and scholars. How, I wondered, do we reconcile or at least talk about this paradox? How do we address this seeming disparity between the central position of Roman culture in the western academy and its plays' marginal position in the university theatre world?

Fortunately, I was doing my fretting in the company of Warren Smith, a senior colleague in the Department of Classics. Our discussions of these questions foregrounded for us the general lack of conversation about theatre between our respective colleges, Arts and Sciences and Fine Arts, at the University of New Mexico. The idea that two discrete organizers of knowledge and investigation might share a stake in literature and performance seemed foreign to many of our students and even to some of our colleagues. Warren and I wondered whether an interdisciplinary project bringing together scholarship and performance, tying classroom work to extracurricular programming, might be a way of jumpstarting this conversation and fostering this collaboration. We wondered whether such a project could challenge the assumption that the performance of old plays primarily illustrates history and that history's role in theatre is to undergird a performance with "accuracy." Were there more interesting ways to think of the confluence of the humanities and the arts with regard to theatre?

These questions were the springboard for the project Warren and I developed, Roman Holiday: Classical Comedy/Contemporary Commentary, a weeklong event that took place in October 1998. Roman Holiday featured lectures by four visiting scholars, a student-directed production of Plautus's Braggart Soldier, a screening of a video production of Terence's Brothers, and the presentation of a series of Hollywood films depicting ancient Rome. All performances, guest lectures, and screenings were open to the public, and we also included a matinee for high students. An Elderhostel group also attended all public events. ¹

In the essay that follows, I describe the way Roman Holiday was designed to engage the curriculum of my Introduction to Theatre and Theatre History classes to create a rich experience for my students that, I think, addressed some of the questions vexing Warren and me. I follow this description with reflections about the challenges of mounting such a project. The purpose of this description and interrogation is to advocate for this kind of programming. With collaborative effort, any college or university can create an interdisciplinary event like Roman Holiday, focused around a given era or phenomenon in theatre history. The model is flexible.

Comedy and Questions

As I designed Roman Holiday with Warren, scheduling it to coincide with my Theatre History I class's unit on Roman theatre, I hoped the project would help me investigate a number of questions to be explored in both my Theatre History and Introduction to Theatre courses. How does performance influence dramaturgy? How are playwrights' works shaped not only by previous texts but also by the architecture and setup of playing spaces, and the acting and storytelling styles assumed as normative? The issue is central to Richard Beacham's persuasive The Roman Theatre and Its Audience, a text I decided to assign in Theatre History that shows how Atellan farce and street performance guided Plautus as much as did Greek textual models. Beacham's study would serve as an entrée to another ongoing theatre history topic, namely, the creativity involved in the scholarly interpretation of primary sources. I wanted my students to understand how writing good history depends as much upon inspiration and craft as does writing good plays. I hoped they would recognize during Roman Holiday that the same "factual" evidence can be interpreted...