International Association of Libraries and Museums of the Performing Arts

Société Internationale des Bibliothèques et des Musées des Arts du Spectacle

Reconstruction of Historic Performances for Modern Productions: Performance Research at the O.S.U. Theatre Research Institute

Théâtre vivant et documentation

Acts of the XIth International Congress of the Libraries and Museums of the Performing Arts

Actes du XIe Congrès international des bibliothèques-musées des arts du spectacle.

Copenhagen 8-14 september 1974. (Editors: Per Pio & Ev Steinaa.)

Copenhagen 1976, pp. 34-39

During a symposium an theatre historigraphy held last spring at The Ohio State University Theatre Research Institute, one participant, discussing the difficulties of teaching theatre history in a heavily production-oriented theatre departement, observed that students can readily see the practical applicability of courses in acting, directing and production. Projects can easily be done in those areas; the question posed last spring was, "how can one do theatre history?"

The question is apt, and faces the performing arts librarian with as much forte as it does the teacher of theatre history. The theatre of the past must be performed to be adequately comprehended by the present; the responsibility for keeping the past's art alive rests with research institutions, both through their formal educational activities and through their relationships with production groups. Educational functions, either directly or indirectly, are part of the duties of all performing arts museums and libraries; the research institution's responsibility to theatrical producers may be a particularly American one.

The professional theatre in the United States is gradually disappearing, or so we are told annually by analyses of professional production, and the colleges and universities and increasingly the only purveyors of live theatrical entertainment for large areas of the continent. The academic theatre in the United States, however, relies overwhelmingly upon the professional stage for its repertory. Like its professional counterpart, the academic theatre is barren in imagination when it comes to selecting a theatrical season, rarely venturing beyond the twentieth century for dramatic texts apart from regular appearances of Shakespeare. It is in the province of repertory that the performing arts museum or library bears a major responsibility to the art which it so painstakingly documents. The range of plays produced on the well-equipped stages of American colleges and universities, many of which possess theatrical plants far surpassing commercial playhouses, suggests that theatre professors are as lacking in awareness of their art's past as professional producers. Barring an unforeseable sudden interest in extending the repertory among both academic and commercial producers, it is incumbent upon theatre scholars and those who administrate libraries and museums of the performing arts to both foster and increase productions of plays from outside the standard repertory. I should like to discuss our efforts at The Ohio State University Theatre Research Institute to include performance research within our activities in the hopes that an example of one theatrical research facility may be taken as representative of the work being done at other such facilities, or of the potential present elsewhere. Our efforts not startlingly original or innovative; they have for the most part been successful, and may provide a useful starting point for discussion.

Ohio State's theatre program is typical of programs at many large universities in the United States. Five degrees are offered: the Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Fine Arts for undergraduates; the Master of Arts, Master of Fine Arts and Doctor of Philosophy for graduate students. Both the Bachelor and Master of Fine Arts degrees are intended as pre-professional degrees: they aim to equip the actor, director and designer with technique and training permitting him to work professionally. The Bachelor of Arts degree is humanistically oriented, and provides a general liberal arts program with emphasis in theatre. The Master of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy degrees are scholastically oriented: their function is to produce well-trained teachers and scholars who, because of performance requirements within the degree programs, are also experienced practitioners of the theatrical art. Current enrollments show approximately one hundred and fifty undergraduates, and seventy-five graduate students.

Ohio State is located in Columbus, Ohio, a city with a total population of nearly a million. There is little professional theatre available: two 'dinner theatres' operate successfully in the area, offering light farces and comedies performed while patrons dine; occasional touring companies (the number decreases each year) play short engagements. Thus the most active producers of theatrical entertainment are the local colleges and universities (there are four educational institutions presenting theatrical seasons in addition to Ohio State) and the community theatres. Ohio State is the largest of the non-professional theatres in the area, and its annual production season is representative. Last year, eight major productiöns were mounted for a total of fifty performances. The summer season consists of four plays, performed for a total of thirty-two performances. In addition, a season of student productions, presented in a workshop setting, presented twenty-five different productions for a total of seventy-five performances.

Ohio State's annual production season is thus a highly active one: thirty-seven different plays were performed in the past year for nearly one hundred and sixty public performances. This range of production is typical for a large university. Also typical, unhappily, is the startling fact that of those thirty-seven productions, only two were of plays written before 1900. Shakespeare's Richard III and John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi (both given major productions) were the sole pre-modern plays produced; of these two, only The Duchess of Malfi is at all unusual in terms of the plays performed by colleges and universities in the United States.

There are, of course, substantive reasons for this overwhelming emphasis upon twentieth-century drama. As a major theatrical producer in central Ohio, Ohio State feels the same pressures for a commercially viably season as would a professional company. Also, on the educational level, our students who are preparing for a professional career will find work, if successful, in cinema and television, where the dominant mode of presentation remains that of modern realism: it is therefore incumbent upon the university to train its students for available positions. At The Ohio State University Theatre Research Institute, we are keenly aware of such  pragmatic considerations and therefore do not insist upon the Department of Theatre's devoting a large portion of its season to historically important plays. Rather, we are attempting to work both within and outside of the regular theatre season in order to demonstrate that valid theatrical experiences can be created from plays which are not masterpieces of dramatic literature or which are not readily accessible to modern audiences.

One method of production which has been employed during the past year at Ohio State is the conference, or festival, performance. At most large universities, a series of conferences are sponsored annually by groups within the university and offer a ready outlet for dramatic performances. At Ohio State last year, for example, three such conferences included theatrical presentations. The Committee on Ancient History's annual conference culminated in a production of the Helen by Euripides, a Classic play rarely performed, directed by a Theatre doctoral student then in the process of completing a dissertation on the Greek playright. The annual conference of the Ohio State Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies included performances of The Play of Herod, a twelfth-century liturgical drama drawn from the Fleury manuscripts and produced in conjunction with the School of Music. During the current summer quarter, the Department of History sponsored an Institute an the forthcoming United States Bicentennial for secondary school teachers; part of the Institute was a production of Colonel Robert Mumford's The Patriots, an eighteenth-century American play, directed by an advanced Master of Fine Arts student. For the coming academic year, we are planning two such productions at the moment. The Theatre Research Institute will itself sponsor performances of Bulwer-Lytton's Richelieu, with text and blocking drawn from the Macready promptbook; I will be directing, again for the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, a production of Giraldi Cinthio's sixteenth-century tragedy, Orbecche.

All of these productions had, as their bases, the common desire of the sponsoring agencies to include live performances as a means for argumenting the more scholarly and academic discussions or panels which constituted the major portion of their conferences. None of the productions, however, was approached as "museum" theatre. The interest of the performances was not in a faithful and complete replication of a production from the past, but rather in a combination of historically accurate details with modern elements. The aim was, in each case, to create a theatrical experience valid for modern audiences employing as much of the style and technique of the past as was possible, bearing in mind that each audience was composed of scholars specializing in the historic period involved. Thus while the Play of Herod's costumes were drawn from iconographic evidence of the twelfth century and most of the gestures and blocking were taken from rubrics in the original manuscript, modern directorial devices were also employed in an attempt to convey a monumentality of movement which, it was felt, was necessary for a modern and predominantly secular audience. The results were entirely satisfactory in providing contemporary viewers with an impressionistic sense of the medieval liturgical theatre while not requiring them to possess the world-view of the twelfth century.

The Ohio State University Theatre Research Institute is thus, through this series of conference productions, providing a wholly appropriate service to the other academic units on the university campus we can support (or in some instances initiate) performances of plays of specialized interest which would not normally be produced during the regular theatrical season, and which the individual sponsoring groups could not themselves present. The conference play is of value to the sponsor, which thereby acquires a graphic statement of its conference's theses. It is also of value for the theatre scholar and student, both in demonstrating techniques of performing rarely produced plays and in providing an experiental situation for the student. Although the conference play is thus a valuable adjunct to the work of the Theatre Research Institute, it is, however, only an adjunct. Since the specific plays chosen for production result from the needs of individual conferences rather than from any controlled program of research, such productions can only occasionaly be integrated within the complete program of study and research undertaken at the Institute. It has therefore been necessary to develop other programs involving research through production, programs intended to implement the more traditional scholarly research which the Theatre Research Institute supports.

Performance research at Ohio State is carried out through two basic approaches. The first, which can result in actual public performance, works from specific promptscripts in the John H. McDowell Film Archives which have been examined during the course of the usual theatre history class; the second, now being developed, is through the theatre history practicum, or rehearsal course.

The first technique can best be illustrated by the developments surrounding the forthcoming production of Bulwer-Lytton's romantic tragedy, Richelieu. Research in the English.theatre and drama of the nineteenth century has, of course, long been an area of emphasis at Ohio State; many of the graduate theses and dissertations completed at the Theatre Research Institute have focussed upon this period of theatre's history, and graduate seminars are frequently devoted to the topic. In the spring of 1973, one such seminar examined selected tragedies presented at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, between 1815 and 1840. Each student in the seminar reconstructed the original production of one tragedy, drawing upon microfilmed promptbooks, scene designs, and contemporary journa listic comments.

One of the plays thus reconstructed was Bulwer-Lytton's Richelieu, first performed by Macready at Covent Garden in 1839. As a result of the seminar work, two students have continued their work in this area; one is now preparing a doctoral dissertation an the non-Shakespearian tragedies produced by Macready, while the other has spent the intervening months adapting Richelieu for modern presentation. The acting text which has resulted attempts to make Bulwer-Lytton's play, part of the standard repertory for leading actors throughout the nineteenth century, acceptable to modern audiences, primarily through the cutting of portions of the script clearly written for the technical capabilities of the nineteenth-century playhouse. The process of adaptation has, therefore, involved both an analysis and comprehension of nineteenth-century staging techniques and capabilities, as well as the discovering of the play's elements which do not rely upon production methods now either antiquated or impossible to duplicate on modern stages. As the script was being adapted, it was in "informal rehearsal:" specific scenes and acts were rehearsed with volunteer actors to test the efficacy of the evolving adaptation. This process permitted the adaptor to adjust her work in progress rather than waiting until the completion of the entire script.

The resulting adaptation is now in the first stages of preparation for actual production in Columbus. Movement patterns, drawn from the blocking in the Macready promptscripts, are being charted, and the original settings are being adapted to the available theatrical space. Full rehearsal will start in October, with public performances tentatively scheduled for December.

The first stages of preparation for production have proven of immense value for researchers now working at the Theatre Research Institute even though the Richelieu project has directly involved only a handful of students. Five other students are engaged in advanced research upon nineteenth-century theatre; each has had the opportunity to check his own work, undertaken in the traditional manner, against that emerging from the demands of eventual performance. Such work could also make it possible for students enrolled in theatre history courses and seminars to experience the drama of the early nineteenth century directly, rather than relying upon secondary materials for an understanding of the period's vitality. Performance research like that involving Richelieu thus has the potential to benefit not only the students directly involved and those working in analogous areas, but to provide a sophisticated teaching aid for a wide range of classwork.

Actual preparation of a production like Richelieu is at once invaluable and impractical on a continuing basis: this specific text has involved over a year of work thus far, and will entail several more months of labor before public performances are presented. Moreover, the thrust of this project has been modern performance: the adaptation of a given item from the past - and in this case, a play which can be completely reconstructed with great accuracy - to the demands of the present. If the public performances of Richelieu are successful, the audiences witnessing the play should not be aware of watching a museum reproduction, but rather should enjoy a theatrical experience valid on its own terms. This process is, of course, invaluable for a performing arts research facility: it demonstrates, if successful, that a wide range of dramatic litersture can be used for modern production and, hopefully, extends selection of the material available to the academic and professional director. But The Ohio State University Theatre Research Institute is not primarily a production organisation: it exists to foster and sponsor research into the theatre of the past, and, like other performing arts libraries and museums, is not in the business of providing entertainment for local audiences. In order to directly support our research programs, we are therefore developing the concept of the theatre history practicum, or rehearsal course.

In its simplest form, the practicum is a workshop for theatre historians, in which specific problems are explored through performance techniques. In the coming academic year, for example, one area of emphasis at the Theatre Research Institute will be the theatre of the Classic period. An advanced course will be offered during the Autumn Quarter, followed by a graduate seminar in Classic and Hellenistic theatre during the Winter Quarter. Courses will also be offered in Classic critical theories and dramatic literature. After a thorough exposure to ancient theatre, criticism, and literature, students will then be able to entroll in a practicum course, to be offered in the Spring. Working with the texts of Euripides, Sophocles and Aeschylus, students will attempt to work through such problems areas as the need for machinery in the theatre of the Fifth Century B.C., the staging of spectacular scenes, and the function of the chorus. Rather than attempting to adapt the scripts for modern performance, however, the focus will be upon the synthesizing of knowledge acquired from earlier study in the hopes that any working hypotheses which emerge will not conflict with the literary, archaeological and iconographic evidence, as is too often the case when the aim is modern performance. Such a 'working through' of historical problems can be effective, of course, only with researchers trained in both theatre history and production.

A more traditional form of the practicum idea is also being employed at Ohio State: the use of model stages, with working scenic units, exploited for research into nineteenth-century staging techniques. The largest model stage, constructed for use with toy theatre prints is currently being used for research into methods of staging disasters during the first half of the nineteenth century in England as part of an exploration into the standard repertory of London's minor theatres. The stage was so constructed as to be usable for research involving any permutation of wing-and-shutter staging: another model includes working apparatus for the changement-a-vue mechanism.

Both uses of the practicum concept assume that actual performance - whether in a rehearsal workshop or in miniature on a model stage - is a valid methodological approach to the study of theatre's history. Many of the conclusions thus far reached by individual researchers employing this approach are hardly astounding: the obvious has been discovered and rediscovered, a frequent occurance at a research institute whose major function is pedagogical. But The Ohio State University Theatre Research Institute is an educational entity, charged with providing training for specialists and non-specialists alike, and for this purpose the experiencing of theatre history directly, rather than through the alienating medium of the formal lecture, is an excellent tool.

In addition to its directly pedagogic intent, our work at Ohio State with research through production has the more sweeping aim of increasing the range of repertory available to theatrical producing groups on all levels, through the simple method of demonstrating the viability of theatrical works outside the normal and usual field of selection. This is, I am convinced, the proper role of the performing arts museum and library. Otherwise the museum becomes simple a collection of artifacts, perhaps interesting for their own sakes, which reduces the vitality and mystery of the theatrical art to fixed, catalogued, and lifeless display objects. Theatre is preeminently a living art form; the function of performing arts museums and libraries should be to assist in rediscovering the living art of the past, rather than only documenting it.

11th Congress

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