Description
Description
The Richard Schechner/TDR Collection contains material related to the individual,
Richard Schechner, as well as items pertaining to the academic theater journal
The Drama Review. The majority of the
information on TDR derives from Schechner's years as editor (1962-1969, 1986- )
and includes correspondence, galley proofs, edited articles, publishing
contracts, and photographs. Because of the need to maintain original order
within this collection, material on TDR was not isolated from Schechner's
personal and professional papers, so the divisions in the above arrangement are
somewhat porous. One of the drawbacks to TDR material is the lack of information
from the pre- and post-Schechner years. Researchers interested in those
particular years are encouraged to examine the correspondence (Series 2,
Subseries 2 and 3, in particular) to obtain more information.
Unless otherwise noted, folders are arranged alphabetically and chronologically
(earliest to latest). Researchers should be aware that although a particular
person, organization, or subject may have its own folder, it is highly
recommended that the general correspondence folders in Series 2 be checked as
well. Furthermore, conferences, performance studios, and publishing companies
may contain material relating to individuals named elsewhere.
Collection Creator
Biography
Born in Newark, New Jersey, on August 23, 1934, Richard Schechner was the third of
Sheridan and Selma (Schwarz) Schechner's four sons. Richard spent his early years in
the Jewish Weequahic neighborhood of Newark. His family moved to suburban South
Orange, N.J., when Schechner was 14 where he went to Columbia High School,
graduating in 1952. He attended Cornell University from 1952 to 1956 earning a B.A.
with honors in English. At Cornell he gained considerable editorial experience by
serving on the staff of the Cornell Daily Sun. In
1956-57, he attended Johns Hopkins University studying in Elliott Coleman's writing
seminars and in the more scholarly English department. He completed his M.A. in
English at the University of Iowa in 1958 where he was a member of Paul Engle's Iowa
Writers' Workshop. At Cornell and Iowa he frequently wrote reviews of theater
productions as increasingly his interests turned to theater. His master's thesis was
a play, Briseis and the Sergeant, based on an episode
in the Iliad. During the summers of 1957 and 1958,
Schechner co-founded and co-directed the East End Players in Provincetown,
Massachusetts, writing and directing several productions. From November 1958 until
August 1960, Schechner served in the United States Army in Fort Polk, Louisiana, and
Fort Hood, Texas. While in the army, Schechner wrote troop information pamphlets,
taught, edited a post newspaper, and directed two plays.
After his discharge from the Army, Schechner attended Tulane University. In the
summer of 1961, he restarted the East End Players for its final summer season.
Schechner earned his Ph.D. from Tulane in 1962. His dissertation was a study of
Eugene Ionesco based on 8 months of research in Paris in 1961-62. Upon completing
his degree, Schechner was hired by Tulane as an assistant professor of drama from
1962-1965 and associate professor from 1965-1967. Under the terms of Schechner's
appointment, he was named editor of the Tulane Drama
Review ( TDR). Although Schechner was young,
brash, and unproven at the time, Monroe Lippman, chair of Tulane's theater
department, took a chance on him --a challenging opportunity that Schechner embraced
completely. Within five years, under Schechner's editorship, not only did the number
of TDR subscribers grow substantially, but the
reputation of TDR as a leading vehicle for writing
about radical and experimental theater developed as well.
Schechner's work within the theater world continued to expand as well. While in New
Orleans, Schechner served as one of three producing directors of the Free Southern
Theater and one of three founding directors of the New Orleans Group. His plays were
produced by Tulane and in local New Orleans theaters. Schechner's scholarly
interests expanded to include performance in all of its aspects, from ritual and
play to the performances of everyday life. While living in New Orleans, Schechner
was active in both the African American freedom movement and the anti-Vietnam War
movement. In 1967, a bitter dispute between the theater department and Tulane's
central administration led to the resignations of five faculty members, Schechner
among them. Schechner and Lippman were invited to join the faculty at New York
University where Robert W. Corrigan, the founding editor of TDR, had in 1966 started the School of the Arts (later the Tisch School
of the Arts). Schechner was promoted to full professor when he and TDR, renamed The Drama
Review, moved to NYU in September 1967. Shortly after arriving in New
York, Schechner continued his theater work by creating The Performance Group (TPG)
in 1967. Eight months later, the Performance Group gained national attention by
premiering the radical and controversial Dionysus in 69
(textual collage and direction by Schechner). The success of Dionysus launched TPG into a varied repertory of environmental theater
productions, including Schechner's deconstruction of Shakespeare, Makbeth (1970), the group-devised Commune (1970-1972), Sam Shepard's Tooth of
Crime (1972-1974), Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage
and Her Children (1975-77), David Gaard's The
Marilyn Project (1975-76) Seneca's Oedipus
(1977), Terry Curtis Fox's Cops (1978), and Jean
Genet's The Balcony (1979), all directed by Schechner.
These works were performed both at The Performing Garage and internationally in
Europe and then India.
In order to focus his energies more on TPG and to give himself more time for writing,
Schechner passed the TDR editorship to Erika Munk in 1969, but continued to serve as
contributing editor. Munk was replaced by Michael Kirby as TDR's editor in 1969. Schechner resumed editing TDR in 1986 (these matters will be discussed more fully below in the
“Brief History of The Drama Review”).
In 1971-72, Schechner and Joan MacIntosh (one of the founding members of TPG and from
1970 Schechner's wife) traveled to India and other destinations across Asia. This
trip left a profound mark on Schechner's life, thinking, and work. Since then, he
has made many trips to Asia - especially India, China, Japan, and Indonesia - to do
research, lecture, lead workshops, and direct plays. In 1977, MacIntosh gave birth
to their son, Samuel MacIntosh Schechner. From the late 1960s, and increasingly
throughout the 1970s, Schechner wrote a number of influential books: Public Domain (1968), Environmental
Theater (1973), Theaters, Spaces and
Environments (with Brooks McNamara and Jerry Rojo, 1975), Essays on Performance Theory, 1970-1976 (1976), and Ritual, Play and Performance (co-editor with Mady
Schuman, 1976).
In 1980, after artistic differences arose over the direction of TPG, Schechner left
his position of artistic director, remaining on the Board of Directors until 1986.
Shortly after Schechner resigned, TPG was renamed the Wooster Group. For a
considerable period of time, Schechner concentrated on developing his theories of
performance, which ultimately coalesced into the field now known as performance
studies. Academically and theatrically, Schechner, who became known in the early
1970s for environmental theater, had always been fascinated by the performances of
rituals across a wide range of cultures. From the early 1970s, Schechner had been
seriously incorporating anthropology into his work. Always a prolific writer, he
collaborated with anthropologist Victor Turner planning a World Conference in
Theater and Ritual which convened for three meetings in the early 1980s.
From the mid-1970s, Schechner began teaching courses in performance theory and
theater anthropology at NYU. In 1980, NYU's Graduate Drama Department its name to
the Performance Studies Department suiting the name to the emerging actuality. Many
of Schechner's seminal ideas relating theater to the social sciences were collected
in his 1985 book, Between Theater and Anthropology. In
1987, Schechner and his then 9 year-old son Samuel co-authored a short novel, The Engleburt Stories: North to the Tropics. In 1988, a
revised version of Essays on Performance Theory
appeared as Performance Theory; a further revision came
out in 2003 . The Future of Ritual, a further
collection of essays, was published in 1996 and the first edition of Schechner's
textbook, Performance Studies - An Introduction,
appeared in 2003 with a second edition coming out in 2006.
Throughout the 1980s, Schechner continued to adapt and direct plays including a
Shakespeare collage, Richard's Lear (1981), at the
University of Wisconsin-Madison, Cherry Ka Baghicha
(Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, 1982) with the Repertory Company of the National
School of Drama in New Delhi, The Prometheus Project
(1983-85) in New York, Moliere's Don Juan (in
Schechner's translation, 1987) at Florida State University, and Sun Huizhu's Mingri Jiuyao Chu Shan (Tomorrow He'll Be Out of the
Mountains, 1989) at the Shanghai Peoples Art Theater. And in 1986, he again took
over the editorship of TDR.
Schechner and MacIntosh divorced in 1978. In 1987, Schechner married Carol Martin,
and their daughter, Sophia Martin Schechner, was born in 1988. Throughout the 1990s
and into the present, Schechner has been extremely active in the USA and
internationally as a theater director, editor, workshop leader, lecturer, and
professor. In 1992, he directed the first play by an African American ever done in
South Africa, August Wilson's Ma Rainey's Black Bottom
and in 1995 in Taipei, his own adaptation of Aeschylus' Oresteia (translated into Chinese). In 1992, he founded the East End
Players, which continues to the present. With ECA Schechner has directed his own
Faust/gastronome (1993), Chekhov's The Three Sisters (1995-97), Shakespeare's Hamlet (1999), Beckett's Waiting
for Godot (2002, in collaboration with Cornell University), and Saviana
Stanescu and Schechner's YokastaS (2003) and YokastaS Redux (2005). As of 2005, Schechner and Stanescu
are working with novelist Paul Auster on a dramatization of Auster's Timbuktu.
In 1991 Schechner was named University Professor at NYU. In 1992-93 he was an Old
Dominion Fellow at Princeton where he helped develop the Richard Schechner/TDR
Collection. Schechner has also been a Montgomery Fellow at Dartmouth, and an Andrew
H. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell. He is also the winner of a number
fellowships and awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship (1975), the Mondello Prize
(Italy, 1985), a Lifetime Achievement Award from Performance Studies International
(2002), and an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship (2004). Schechner's
books and essays have appeared in many languages including Chinese, Japanese, Dutch,
Korean, German, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Hungarian, and Serbo-Croatian.
Brief History of The Drama Review
TDR, The Drama Review, one
of the world's leading academic performance journals, had a modest beginning as the
Carleton Drama Review in 1955. At that point, TDR actually was mostly about drama. Over the years, the
journal has changed focus several times - from dramatic literature, to theater and
staging, to the broad field of performance studies. At its outset, founding editor
Robert W. Corrigan, with the urging and help of advisory editor Eric Bentley,
transformed the Carleton from a first idea of
publishing a lecture series into a more full-fledged scholarly journal. When
Corrigan moved to Tulane in 1957, he brought the Carleton from Minnesota to New Orleans, renaming it the Tulane Drama Review. The journal began to grow, albeit
slowly, challenging the prevailing ideas of Broadway theater with a more avant-garde
and European approach.
With the appointment in 1962 of Schechner as TDR's
second editor, the growth and influence of TDR began to
take flight. For the first year of his editorship, Schechner published a backlog of
articles, and therefore his impact was not immediate. But by 1963, TDR began to assert its new voice. Schechner instituted
an editorial column, TDR Comment, which he often wrote
himself. In one of the first Comments (T20), Schechner set the tone for TDR: “You choose Broadway and I'll choose an experimental
theater. There are many roads to truth. But neither of us can choose both Broadway
and the experimental theater. That's a contradiction in intention.” This was a
daring statement, for at that time the concept of experimental theater was in its
infancy. Two issues later, Schechner and associate editor Theodore Hoffman laid out
a seven-point mission statement for TDR: “An absolute
commitment to professional standards. The decentralization of the professional
theater. A deep and continued interest in both practical and theoretical
experimentation. A committed employment of the open stage. The reintroduction of the
playwright into the theater. A recognition that the best contemporary theater is
international. The redirection of education theater into the mainstream of American
theater” (T22).
Whether Schechner was successful or not in fulfilling this mission remains an open
question. What is not in doubt was the exploding popularity and success of TDR over the rest of the 1960s. Always controversial and
intensely disliked by some of the more traditional theater minds, TDR offered a source for experimental ideas, an outlet
for nontraditional playwrights, and an opening which embraced all types of
performance, not simply drama. In a series of essays and editorial choices,
Schechner not only championed experimental and political theater, he broke ground by
publishing a special issue on Happenings (T30, 1965), opening TDR's pages to writings about non-Western theater, and beginning the
turn toward the social sciences and critical thought that would eventuate in
performance studies.
In 1967, because of frustrations with Tulane University, Schechner joined a group of
theater faculty in resigning. Schechner and Tulane theater department chair Monroe
Lippman accepted teaching positions at New York University where Robert Corrigan was
developing a new school of the arts. Schechner took the Tulane
Drama Review with him to NYU, renaming it The Drama
Review. Once in New York, TDR became
increasingly politically engaged. Schechner invited playwright Ed Bullins to edit a
black theater issue (T40) which remains a landmark publication. In 1969, T43 had a
feature on the Living Theater's tumultuous return to the USA. T43 was Schechner's
last issue during his first stint at TDR editor. He
wrote that he resigned his editorship in order to devote more time to writing and
theater directing.
Schechner's longtime managing and then associate editor Erika Munk assumed the
position of TDR editor in the summer of 1969. The first
number under Munk's editorship was a special issue on “Politics and Performance”
(T44) that she and Schechner had prepared. In fact, TDR
had turned increasingly political during the late 1960s. Many articles concerned the
political and social changes within and beyond the United States. For example,
Schechner and Latin American theater specialist Joanne Pottlitzer traveled
throughout Latin America, including Cuba, in 1968. The results of their encounter
were published as TDR's Latin American issue (T46),
clearly one of the journal's most radical numbers. However, Munk did not remain
TDR's editor long. She was fired by NYU not because
of controversial political ideas but because of administrative and financial
troubles. With Munk's departure, there was doubt concerning whether or not TDR would continue publishing.
In 1971, with the cautious approval of New York University Michael Kirby - a TDR contributing editor and NYU faculty member - was
appointed editor. Kirby brought the financial crisis under control by cutting costs,
bringing in a professional managing editor to run the office, and signing up with
MIT Press who from that time forward became responsible for the physical production
of TDR managing its non-editorial budget. MIT Press has
turned a profit running TDR's business and production
side and, in fact, subsidizes the editorial offices which are at NYU.
In terms of editorial policy, Kirby was concerned that TDR had concentrated too much on the social science and political
aspects of performance, and not enough on the history and practice of theater,
drama, and dance. Kirby abhorred what he called “value judgments” and wanted TDR to be “objective.” Over the next 17 years, Kirby
accomplished his program. He gave up omnibus issues. Every number of TDR was a “special” issue, devoted to one topic or idea.
Over time, a very broad range of subjects was featured. The special issue concept
began with Schechner but had been used only occasionally before Kirby.
At its height in the late 1960s, TDR's paid circulation
approached 20,000. A slow decline began under Kirby's editorship - though it is not
correct to blame his policies for the decline. As the activist 60s and early 70s
cooled down, and as the cost for subscriptions increased, TDR began to lose significant numbers of individual subscribers. The
journal became a mainstay of university libraries - often used in courses and cited
by scholars, TDR was no longer a “have to have”
magazine for directors, actors, designers, or producers. For all this, TDR is in the forefront of academic theater journals.
After 17 years as editor, Kirby resigned in 1986. Schechner was eager to again become
editor, a post he still holds. Joining him in 1986 was associate editor Mariellen
Sandford, who still holds that position. During Schechner's second editorial stint,
TDR vigorously publishes across the broad range of
performance studies. In his TDR Comments, Schechner
argues for reforming university theater departments. TDR continues to champion experimentation, interculturality, and the
careful study of the broad range of performance from the performing arts to rituals,
play, and the performances of everyday life. The current contributing editors come
from North and South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia - making TDR the only truly international and intercultural
performance journal. TDR's annual student essay contest
draws entries from around the world. A freshly designed TDR is widely available online through such services as Project Muse and
Jstore. TDR is also offered in an online only format
for those subscribers who prefer paperless publishing. As TDR celebrates its 50th birthday in 2006, its outlook is youthful, its
core editorial values unchanged. Led by Schechner and Sandford, TDR continues to challenge the conventional performing
arts world, broadening horizons while introducing both established and new writers
and artists to eager readers in scores of countries.
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