Theatre Histories, as anyone who looks at it knows, is structured around modes of communication roughly along the lines that I argue in my book Theatre, Communication, Critical Realism. What people probably don’t know is that I had nothing to do with that decision. I didn’t even know the textbook existed when I was invited to become the General Editor for the 3rd edition. (The previous editions had no one in charge.) The book’s use of my ideas, along with Walter Ong’s, came as quite a surprise, and I had (and have) mixed feelings about it since I have no reason to imagine my theory has achieved anything near general scholarly acceptance, or even general knowledge within the theater studies community.

However, Routledge’s surveys of instructor opinions showed that instructors liked that orientation, and in working on the new editions I found it would be much harder to extricate my ideas than one might expect, so the best I could do was try to moderate the technological determinism evident in some chapters. I’m not sure how successful my efforts were, and in any case readers may interpret discussions of communication’s role in theater history in a deterministic way no matter what I do.

Before work on the 4th edition began, I informed everyone that I won’t stay on for a 5th edition (rotation is important, especially to get diverse voices involved, and also it’s a lot of work). So maybe some future edition will drop the historiographic orientation around communication. The textbook will be somebody else’s baby, I’ll have no say in it, and I shouldn’t.

The bigger question is whether there will even be a 5th edition. The reactionary politics sweeping the US, and in particular the anti-DEI censorship being imposed in some states, may mean Theatre Histories won’t be usable in some places. That would impact sales, and a textbook doesn’t get a new edition unless the publisher is reasonably confident that it will sell. Since sadly the Hildy/Brockett History of the Theatre will never have a new edition (unless lightening strikes its publisher), university-level theater studies may be left without a sufficiently advanced textbook (Wilson & Goldfarb is tailored for a humanities elective course, in my judgment). I know many instructors in the US don’t use any textbook–some prefer to use play anthologies and wrap lectures or additional readings around that–which personally I think is folly. But I’m more troubled by the eventual impact of not having a well-rounded textbook upon theater studies as a whole. 

The 4th edition of Theater Histories: An Introduction, written by Daphne Lei, Tamara Underiner, Patricia Ybarra and me, with me again serving as General Editor, has now been published by Routledge. I think it’s a significant improvement over the 3rd edition, which was already a massive improvement over the earlier edition–certainly more than I expected, since I was anticipating a more modest updating and filling in gaps. But my co-authors saw there was more to do than I realized, particularly in the coverage of China and Latin America (and also some issues in the book’s organization) and they deserve the credit for most of the improvements. The one notable change I introduced was to the case studies (short essays on particular people, styles, issues, etc., incorporated in each of the chapters). Previously all case studies were written by the textbook authors; I decided we could build the book’s authoritativeness and variety of viewpoints by commissioning scholars with expertise to write some of the case studies.

If you teach theater history survey courses, you can request an examination copy from Routledge; otherwise you can get it from your local college bookstore, or order it from any of the usual places (including of course Amazon); many academic libraries don’t buy textbooks, so don’t expect to find it that way. Due to a change in library cataloging rules, the book appears to be by Daphne; I’m trying to get that fixed, but it probably won’t happen soon.

It was always expected that Theatre Histories would have an ever-changing roster of authors. The 4th edition is the first with an entirely new group. I decided from the start (some four years ago!) that I would step down after this edition, and Tamara intends to too. If you’re interested in shaping minds….