Preface

About this OER

In the fall of 2020, my home institution, Northern Illinois University (NIU), marshalled its resources to confront the twin crises of a global pandemic and an ongoing racial reckoning. Classes moved online, mandatory surveillance testing was implemented, and instructors received optional online teaching training. Responding to nationwide calls for racial justice, NIU embarked on a variety of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. A workshop series called the Faculty Academy on Cultural Competence and Equity (FACCE) was held. Faculty members were offered the opportunity to earn a micro-credential in Inclusive Teaching for Equitable Learning from the Association for College and University Educators (ACUE). Another effort aimed to reduce the drop, failure, withdrawal (DFW) rate for introductory gen-ed courses. In the fall of 2022, I received a course release to redesign Introduction to Theatre for non-majors. The class had been taught with a similar syllabus for two decades. Over the past five years, it boasted one of the worst DFW rates at NIU. The class failed students of color in alarming numbers. At the height of the pandemic, fall 2020, the rate was 43%. By the spring of 2022, it had risen to an astonishing 52%. I sought to change those outcomes by decolonizing Intro to Theatre.

What does it mean to decolonize our curriculum? For Joseph Flynn, NIU’s Executive Director for Equity and Inclusion, speaking at FAACE, “Decolonizing is about understanding and dismantling mythologies” (Flynn 2023). When I learned theatre history as an undergrad, the central myth went something like this: “the Greeks invented theatre; the Romans stole it; the Christians banned it, then unbanned it, then Shakespeare, Chekhov, Ibsen, and Miller.” If for Roland Barthes “myth is a language” (Barthes 1957, 11), then, theatre history’s language is the language of white supremacy. In this mythology, theatre is the torch of civilization carried forth through the centuries by white male geniuses, with the occasional assistance of Hrosvitha and/or Aphra Behn. (Despite what some appear to believe, Calderon and Lope de Vega are not people of color, just white men from Spain.) The singular white male genius myth divided all theatre and performance into two categories: “Western” (read white) or “non-Western” and unworthy of serious study. This is what sociologist Steve Garner means when he defines whiteness as “the Greenwich Mean Time of identity” (2007, 47). White theatre was theatre. Non-white theatre was not theatre.

Sometime when I was in grad school, this racist and reductive narrative expanded slightly to include Noh, Kabuki, Kathakali, Jingju, Hikayat, Hopi Kachina dances, and other global practices. Yet, the central framework remained rigidly Western. Even today, major textbooks seem preoccupied with striking the appropriate balance between Western and non-Western material. I continue to believe this balancing of the scales is wrongheaded. The “West and the rest” approach repackages the same white mythologies as its predecessor. Rather than othering by omission, the “West and the rest” syllabus treats theatre and performance from historically and currently marginalized communities as mere daytrips from the main cruise of “real” theatre. Imagine a white-clad cruise director megaphoning, “Everybody off the boat! We’re traipsing around Black theatre today!”

When I developed my first Intro to Theatre syllabus, I determined not to repeat this teaching malpractice. I was guided by two maxims:

1.) I do not have to teach the way that I was taught.

2.) In the words of historian Eric Foner, “this history we were taught could not have produced the present we were living in” (quoted in Homan 2021).

Reflecting on over a decade of syllabi, however, I see the various ways in which I reinscribed mythologies of whiteness into my curriculum. Megan Lewis compares whiteness to the laager, the literal circle of wagons that protected nineteenth-century descendants of Dutch colonists on their great trek across Southern Africa. “Like whiteness,” she writes, “the laager must maintain a belief in its infallibility to remain intact and powerful and, like whiteness, it becomes vulnerable to anxiety when its porousness is revealed” (Lewis 2016, 28). I recall this white anxiety, especially during my many years as a contingent faculty member at various private universities. How far outside of Western theatre mythologies can I stray without upsetting my employer and being replaced by someone who will obediently teach the canon?

From the relative safety of the tenure track and with the imprimatur of course release funding from NIU’s College of Visual and Performing Arts, I injected several decolonizing interventions into the syllabus. I held a Viking funeral for the progressive narrative of theatre history—just put it on a boat, pushed it into the current, and set it ablaze. I taught theatre and performance as part of a mimetic impulse innate to all human beings and not the sole possession of white men. I focused on a diverse group of case studies in the production roles: the performer, playwright, director, and designer. My mantra was, “If the students are moving, I’m winning. If they’re sitting, I’m losing.” Assignments offered students practical experiences in each of these different roles. A final project placed students in small teams with the task of producing a short play. I eliminated punitive attendance and late work policies and instead incentivized participation and revision. I implemented equitable grading practices geared toward assessing students’ mastery of the material, rather than their ability to behave the way I think a student ought to behave. With these changes and the help of excellent instructors, I’m proud to say that in the spring of 2023 we were able to reduce the DFW rate from 52% to 17%. (Hold for applause.)

While that is a significant result, there is still plenty of room for improvement. As we know, decolonization is an ongoing process, not a destination. In 2024, I received a grant from the Illinois State Library Association to create an Open Educational Resource (OER) for my Intro to Theatre Course. The result is the textbook you are currently reading. The central challenge in developing an OER for a theatre course is finding freely accessible material that also reflects diverse perspectives. Here, I have relied on a network of friends and colleagues currently working in the theatre who have generously agreed to make some of their work and their artistic processes available for public study. I will continue to reimagine the course in the future, but I am encouraged by this direction. At the 2022 meeting of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE), playwright Dominique Morrisseau charged ATHE members and leaders to “build from the rubble” (ATHE 2022). But in the case of undergraduate intro to theatre gen-ed and theatre history curricula, there is simply not enough rubble. We have not fully understood the white mythologies of theatre and theatre history so we can begin to dismantle them. This textbook represents one effort toward that larger project.

References

Barthes, R. (1972, originally published 1957) Mythologies. New York: Noonday Press.

Flynn, J. (2023) “Anti-Racism and the Act of Decolonization.” Presentation at Faculty Academy for Cultural Competence and Equity, Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, IL, May 22.

Garner, S. (2007) Whiteness: An Introduction. London: Routledge.

Homan, K. (2021) Twitter post. January 3, 9:57 AM. https://twitter.com/KenHomanSJ/status/1345761173384421377.

Lewis, M. (2016) Performing Whitely in the Postcolony: Afrikaners in South African Theatrical and Public Life. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.

Snyder-Young, D. et. al. (2023) “Building from the Rubble: Centering Care.” Call for Papers for the annual meeting of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, Austin, TX, Aug

How to Use this Book

The book was created as a companion to Northern Illinois University’s Introduction to Theatre general education course. As the title suggests, the textbook focuses on Theatrical Roles. Each chapter/unit introduces the global history of a particular production role: playwright, director, performer, and designer/technician. This history is followed by a case study that delves into a contemporary theatre artist’s approach to a particular project. A filmed interview with the practitioner accompanies the chapter. Each chapter ends with a practical production assignment. I hope that this resource can be helpful to my colleagues and their students by providing a high-quality and freely available introduction to theatre.

Acknowledgements

I owe an enormous debt to the incredible artists Mary Kathryn Nagle, Mikael Burke, Alys Dickerson, Marcus Doshi, and Wilson Chin, who freely gave their time and their creative work to make this textbook possible.