John Gronbeck-Tedesco: A Look Back at Twenty Years of the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism

Fall 2007 87 John Gronbeck-Tedesco: A Look Back at Twenty Years of the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism This interview with founding editor John Gronbeck-Tedesco was conducted by Henry Bial on Friday August 24, 2007. Henry Bial: What inspired you to start a journal and the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism in particular? John Gronbeck-Tedesco: My colleague Paul Campbell, who was then a senior faculty member here [at the University of Kansas], thought he saw a need for a journal that would deal with theory. He proposed that many of the articles and much of the thinking that might have something to do with theory were appearing at conferences, but there wasn’t enough room in the journals that were field specific to do justice to the work that was being done. Instead, folks interested in theory had to go to other journals outside of the field. That meant that the essays and articles were hard for people in the field to find. Moreover, it was hard to create a sense of conversation within theatre studies with articles scattered all over. So Paul called on individuals who had an interest in theory in order to make the case that such a journal should be founded here at the University of Kansas, and he of course got a lot of very positive responses from many who were very prominent in the field. Four years later, the Journal was initiated, but Paul was leaving for the University of Minnesota and didn’t want to take anything with him, and so, since I was his office mate and colleague with similar interests, he decided I should do the Journal. I considered it a great gift then, and I still do. HB: So why the name Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism? JGT: Well, the name came about before the days of performance studies. The word drama was derived from a number of different words, all Eastern European or Greek, which had something to do with deeds, or doing, or to do. For us, that seemed to broaden the notion of the kinds of material we could include. We wanted to encourage contributors to find dramatic elements in lots of different kinds of enterprises: not only those related to a script or theatre event, but even those that might be thought of as, in some sense, a particular kind of rhetoric that involved live or recorded presence. In other words we were thinking of the word drama in at least some of the ways performance is now used. I guess we weren’t ingenious enough to think of the word “performance.” Henry Bial isAssistant Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in Theatre and Film at the University of Kansas. He is the author of Acting Jewish: Negotiating Ethnicity on the American Stage and Screen (¨of Michigan 2005) and the editor of The Performance Studies Reader (Routledge, 2004, Second Edition 2007). Bial is also Vice President for Advocacy of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education. 88 Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism HB: But theory was the primary term all along? JGT: Yes, theory was the primary term. What we meant by theory in those days—and maybe it still works—was the explanation of a methodology. So we conceived of a methodology as a system of assumptions that were used in some way to produce any number of kinds of discourse including history, criticism, or related endeavors. We figured, if one wished to explain one’s methodological assumptions, that would be theory. At the time there was something of a corner on the market, when it came to defining theory, exercised by the sciences. “An explanation of a methodology” wasn’t quite what the sciences meant by theory, but it seemed to work for the folks that were doing theory or applying it in the humanities. Understand that at that time the sciences were still using some of Karl Popper’s writings to define what they meant by theory, and that simply wasn’t going to work well for the humanities. HB: And criticism? JGT: Criticism meant applied theory, basically. Typically, the range of...