A Difficult Birth: Bringing Staging Studies to the Pages of Modern Drama

Abstract

Within American theatre scholarship there is a long-standing tradition of a distinction between drama, which considers the play primarily as a literary text, and theatre, which focuses upon the play's realization on stage. The very title of the journal Modern Drama seemingly places it on the literary side of this division, and that has indeed been its primary orientation. From the very beginning, however, most notably in the including of regular reports on theatrical activity abroad, the journal showed an interest in performance as well as literary text. A much more distinct interest in performance appeared in the journal from the early 1980s onward, with a series of special issues on contemporary experimental work in the theatre. Oddly enough, however, despite a wide-ranging interest in the staging of such experimental theatre, the journal only very rarely offered essays discussing the staging of such canonical authors as Ibsen, Chekhov, Williams, and Strindberg, whose plays had been from the beginning the center of the journal's concerns. This rather odd disjuncture may in part be due to the fact that the professional theatre in the United States offers far fewer major revivals of such authors for study than do the world's other major theatre-producing countries or it may owe something to the long-standing assumption that “drama” refers only to plays as literature. Nevertheless, a number of recent essays in the journal, most notably one by the leading German theatre scholar, Erika Fischer-Lichte, suggest how the journal might more fully fulfill its mission by presenting more work in this important area, hitherto surprisingly unrepresented in its pages.

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