Paratheatrical Shakespeare: Audience Engagement, Universality, and the Shakespeare Industry in the United States
Open AccessThis dissertation investigates the ways in which Shakespeare theatres in the United States structure and execute engagement initiatives and how these initiatives serve to support the Shakespeare industry at large. While mainstage productions of Shakespeare’s work and the artists connected to them receive a great deal of marketing, media, and academic attention, my focus is how the work of theatre administrators sustains the Shakespeare industry and affects conceptions of the playwright and his worth within the United States. The theatres included in this project (The Public Theater, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Chicago Shakespeare Theatre, Shakespeare Theatre Company, and American Shakespeare Center) represent a snapshot of Shakespeare institutions within the United States and my analysis is based off of in-person interviews with staff from each theatre. I have chosen these five theatres because they vary in age, region, size, and budget yet feature similar programs focused on community, audience, educational, and digital engagement. Building off of work in audience studies, Shakespeare studies, performance studies, theatre history, critical race theory, digital humanities, and disability studies, this project considers the ways theatre engagement programming has affected and contributed to perceptions of Shakespeare as a cultural figure. Across four chapters, I explore how staff at each theatre use community, paratheatrical, educational, and digital programming to make the case for Shakespeare’s continued relevance and value through universalizing language and how that impulse is at odds with stated institutional missions. Chapter one explores the history of each theatre and the way staff utilize Shakespeare to engage with local and regional communities. This community engagement provides the baseline for the other engagement efforts I chart throughout the dissertation. Chapter two analyzes in-person paratheatrical programming, investigating how each theatre uses a combination of engagement initiatives to expand the outer frame of performance in order to promote Shakespeare as a desirable commodity to audiences. Chapter three provides a brief history of Shakespeare’s role in education in the United States with an eye on betterment narratives. I connect these narratives to the way educational programming has centered Shakespeare in order to attract school partnerships as well as private and governmental grants. The fourth chapter turns to the digital sphere, excavating how digital engagement tactics attempt and fail to make Shakespeare accessible, ultimately reinforcing exclusionary practices and structures. Each chapter shows a tension between staff desire to expand approaches to Shakespeare and constrictive institutional structures. Staff at each theatre do this engagement work with good intentions, hoping to provide meaningful experiences for students, audience members, and community members. However, each institution operates within supremacist structures, resulting in the majority of theatre engagement serving to reinforce current power imbalances, perpetuating harmful narratives of betterment through Shakespeare. Despite institutional missions stating values connected to community, diversity, and access, these programs in effect serve to increase the institution’s financial bottom line through revenue, donations, and grants and through further mythologizing Shakespeare’s universality, rather than to foster meaningful relationships between the theatre and audiences. I end this project then with a look forward, taking stock of the events of 2020, offering actionable steps theatre leadership and staff can take in order to rebuild a more equitable industry and to decenter Shakespeare in favor of the audience.
- All rights reserved
Notice to Authors
If you are the author of this work and you have any questions about the information on this page, please use the Contact form to get in touch with us.