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.
