Teaching Theatre as Diplomacy: A US Hamlet in the European Court

Theatre historians who wish to include cultural diplomacy in their syllabuses as a fundamental and recurring activity of theatre throughout its history would be hard-pressed to use the standard history texts currently available. Almost none of the most commonly used texts even include the word "diplomacy." In what is almost certainly the best-known and most widely assigned text for theatre history survey courses, Oscar Brockett and Franklin Hildy's History of the Theatre (2011), the word appears only twice, once in reference to Italian theatre of the eighteenth century (159) and again as the eponymous title of an 1878 play by Victorien Sardou (342). The 1993 A Cultural History of the Theatre references diplomacy briefly and then only in connection to Italian theatre and Machiavelli's The Prince (Watson and McKernie 88). Similarly, Glynne Wickham's 1994 text touches on diplomacy cursorily as part of a discussion of medieval society (65).

Three other standard texts—Felicia Hardison Londré and Margot Berthold's The History of World Theatre (1991), John Russell Brown's Oxford Illustrated History of the Theatre (2001), and Phillip Zarrilli, Bruce McConachie, Gary Williams, and Carol Sorgenfrei's Theatre Histories: An Introduction (2010)—make no reference to diplomacy at all. A notable exception to this situation is the introductory essay by Arnold Aronson to the third volume of Don B. Wilmeth and Christopher Bigsby's The Cambridge History of American Theatre (2006), which covers the years 1945 through the 1990s. Aronson notes that "culture was a significant tool in international diplomacy" following World War II (93). From this promising lead he discusses not theatre, but instead examines abstract expressionist painting. Of course, Wilmeth and Bigsby's text covers only US theatre and was not intended to serve as a text for a basic survey course.

What this brief and partial review of the literature demonstrates is that for the most part, the consideration of how theatre and other forms of live performance have participated in state-to-state geopolitics has not been typically understood as diplomacy. Instead, that participation has been positioned as a mode of statecraft unique to an era, rather than as trajectory that could be followed through a range of historical moments. A potential explanation of the value and importance of the performing arts—one that could connect the performance of democracy's power and might in the City Dionysia of Athens to Armand Jean du Plessis de Richelieu, Cardinal-Duc de Richelieu's exercise of national and international power through the arts, to the establishment of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA)—is thus lost, or, if not lost, then left to the individual instructor to define, document, and explain. This is a lot of work to add to the already demanding schedule of those teaching in today's universities.

I want to suggest, however, that such pedagogical labor is not only worthwhile, but, in some cases, essential to understanding theatre's growth and even its survival. This is nowhere more true than for twentieth-century US theatre history. The relationship between theatre and the US government's foreign policy as expressed through cultural diplomacy was definitional, as theatre fought throughout the twentieth century to preserve a place for itself in the national landscape, while radio, film, and television increasingly displaced theatre as a popular entertainment medium. The inclusion of cultural diplomacy as a standard narrative of postwar US theatre would make it easier for students to understand how and why the regional theatre movement, the NEA, and alternative/ experimental theatres (to name only a few of the significant trajectories of the twentieth century) emerged and intersected with one another. I want to suggest that those of us who teach such courses should consider how theatre was used after World War II, along with dance, music, and visual arts, to represent the United States abroad under the government aegis. Such an orientation would allow students to understand more fully and with greater nuance how the theatre developed the way it did in the United States, as well as the role it played and plays...