Theatre Education

THEATRE EDUCATION Alice M. Robinson one who has studied theatre in five different graduate schools and taught theatre in universities for over thirty years, I should like to speak out on what seems to me to be the precarious state of my field. Ever since George Pierce Baker left the English department at Harvard to form the Yale Drama School, we teachers of theatre have been fighting to make our Theatre departments accepted as legitimate academic disciplines within the universities. We have now achieved that in most of our American universities, though we sometimes are forced to prove ourselves again to deans or to boards of regents. However, now we seem to be more seriously threatened from within. New theories of "deconstruction," "post-modernism ," "post-structuralism," and new areas of women's studies, performance studies, cultural studies, popular entertainment, African-American studies, Asian studies, gay and lesbian studies have all affected our field of theatre studies. Some of us, in true American democratic style, have tried to incorporate all of these new theories and new studies into our own theatre studies. These various new fields are certainly worthy areas for study and research, but should theatre departments try to absorb them? I think not. As I have attended recent national theatre conferences, I have been increasingly concerned about the broadening definition of theatre. At the 1992 Association for Theatre in Higher Education conference in Atlanta and at the 1993 American Society for Theatre Research conference in New Orleans many of the scholarly papers were devoted to "popular entertainment." We might excuse a paper on the Mardi Gras at a meeting in New Orleans, but must we have papers on Disneyland, on the circus, and on the corporate environment? Do we need articles in our theatre magazines and journals on the AIDS quilt as performance? At the ATHE conference in Atlanta, Richard Schechner, in his usual radical way, argued that professional theatre training programs should be dismantled so that theatre can return to the humanities (and social sciences) through performance studies, in all of its cultural variety. A reviewer of a panel at this conference quoted Schechner as saying, "Get out of the phony training business and into the culture business" (see Jill Dolan, "Geographies of Learning" in TheatreJournal,December 90 U 1993). Performance studies, "the culture business," and popular theatre are beginning to take over our university Theatre Arts departments. At the risk of being called "old-fashioned," I wish to come to the defense of university theatre or Theatre Arts departments that continue to teach dramatic literature, performance, and production, all well grounded on a solid base of theatre history and criticism. I would urge us not to abandon what is, I believe, our primary mission. A university theatre does not depend entirely upon box office receipts or upon the opinion of the play-goer who wants only the lightest of entertainment. The university theatre owes it to itself, its students, and its audience to try to discover and present through the drama universal human experiences, emotions, and ideas. We owe it to our students and our audiences to acquaint them with the great canon of drama that we have inherited from the Greeks on down through the ages. We owe it to them to present, not just the most recent Broadway success, but old plays perhaps seen in a new light or well-written new plays that delve into the problems of our society today. We should not deprive our audiences of dramas with strong characters and literate language. This does not exclude comedy or the fascinating, often poetic and mysterious dialogue of the Absurdists like Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter. The University of Maryland Baltimore County in Baltimore, where I have taught for twenty-eight years, is a relatively young university, and our Theatre department is a small one. However, we have achieved an excellent reputation and national recognition through our productions for the American College Theatre Festival, our traveling Shakespeare-on-Wheels program, and our resident company, The Maryland Stage Company. In our Theatre department the major productions are the proving-ground for the students knowledge of theatre history, their analytical skills, and their physical, emotional...