Television as theatre text in the austere academy: a curricular exploration

ABSTRACT

The theatre classroom is necessarily a space in dialogue with myths about the marginalisation of theatre as an art and theatre audiences as a public. It is precisely because theatre is a marginalised discipline that curricula should incorporate the processes by which the labour of theatre artists changes value and joins the mainstream; playwrights employed in television offer a relevant study of just that. How do we revise undergraduate curricula in order to substantially address this intermediality in a way that is legible for students? And where do television and theatre meet in existing theatre courses and objectives?

KEYWORDS:

• Playwrights
• pedagogy
• television
• neoliberal
• university

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Hillary Miller is Assistant Professor of English at Queens College, City University of New York. She is the author of Playwrights on Television: Dramatic Writing & Dramatic Mobilities (forthcoming), and Drop Dead: Performance in Crisis, 1970s New York (Northwestern University Press, 2016).

ORCID

Hillary Miller http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7887-9671

Notes

1. This includes studies of theatricality and methods (Vardac 1968), reception (Butsch 2000), the documentation of theatre on film (Melzer 1995; Bay-Cheng 2007), adaptation (Brietzke 2007), reality television and melodrama (Schuyler 2015), and intermediality (Harries 2012, 2016; Bay-Cheng, Parker-Starbuck, and Saltz 2015). Most recently, Nicholas Ridout contextualises postdramatic theatre within the age of video’s cultural hegemony and responses to late capitalism (2019).

2. These questions arise in specific contexts. Because much of my own teaching has occurred at large public institutions in the U.S., my thinking skews toward the situational constraints endemic to many such universities. For similar reasons of specificity, I restrict this inquiry to undergraduate curricula, and do not take on the separate and vexed issue of MFA playwriting programmes (Ybarra 2018). The sense of precarity that I describe as a facet of professional life in many universities is of course not universally shared; additionally, the play development landscape and professional opportunities for playwrights in the U.S. have been shaped by historical circumstances. More generous state broadcast funding is found in other parts of the world, and that is just one factor that has curtailed (or, in some cases, propelled) the movement of playwrights between media.

3. Williams deploys ‘dramatic mobility’ to describe the relationship between Strindberg’s A Dream Play and German experimental films of the 1920s, but it was the transformation of television drama as a ‘majority form’ that led him to marvel at the scale and intensity of new dramatic forms ‘without any precedent in the history of human culture’ (1974, 55).

4. Live television dramas were a staple of the 1950s ‘Golden Era’ of television. Examples include NBC’s Kraft Television Theatre (1948–58) and CBS’s Studio One (1948–1958). They presented different stories and characters in each weekly episode, and included revivals of classical plays and adaptations of novels.

5. While some educators may find refreshing potential in different media – video games, for example – playwrights offer a window into the precarity of the theatre industry. The labour of playwrights within the late-capitalist economy encapsulates a predicament not (yet) as easily discernible in the video game industry. Theatre scholars are interested in its narrative and performative potential (Homan and Homan 2014; Sell 2018), but dramatic writers have not (yet) staked a discernible claim in the gaming industry.

6. Hazard also recommended academics collaborate to close the gaps between the accessibility of materials and their use in curriculum.