The future of the play text, as imagined from the 1980s and 1990s.

            As much as I fancy myself a Shakespearean, my biggest interest in literature is actually in the staging of American theatre over the last century or so. So, following some of my earlier posts about the future of the book and the ability to include film in the future of the book, I’d like to go back to the 1980s and 1990s (and maybe just a little earlier than that) to tell playwrights and theatre companies about the future of the book that will allow their plays to be recorded more thoroughly.

Part of the reason I choose the recent past, and not the far past, is that many of the technologies that are required for recording audio and video are available to these people (and thus I won’t have to introduce an entire civilization to a futuristic technology that could significantly alter time and technology as we know it). How incredible would it be to have professional-grade recordings of the opening nights of major shows like Tony Kushner’s Angels in America and Jonathan Larson’s Rent. Or (from a more “fun” angle) Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera or Cats. Imagine seeing Ethel Merman sing Mama Rose in the original production of Gypsy (whether you love her or hate her – it would be a thrill to see)! Not only would we have more of these things (for we do have plenty of recordings of early broadway shows in the Rogers and Hammerstein collection at the New York Public Library), but by setting this precedent we would make it commonplace for current shows to be recorded.

Having just come back from a theatre trip to New York City (where, among other shows, I saw Waiting For Godot with Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen and the opening night of If/Then with Idina Menzel and Anthony Rapp), I am desperate to evangelize the importance of documenting these wonderful performances. The production of Waiting For Godot that I saw fundamentally changed the way that I have read and will read Beckett’s text. McKellen and Stewart brought a warmth and a humour to the show (that I think is actually present in the text) that I have literally never been taught exists in the text. And it’s a shame that this production will only exist in the public consciousness as long as theatre scholars like myself talk about it. If filming a Broadway production for posterity was a commonplace practice, we would have a record of these performances that would allow scholars like myself to access them, and we would be able to share them as valuable pieces of entertainment with the masses.

If I could promote this future of the book where it will be essential to include a recorded performance as part of an edition of the play, I could make these practices normalized and much more theatre history could be preserved. It would make interpretative arguments that rely on authorship (broadly speaking) much easier to make, and would help to legitimize performance studies as a field.

If only I had the power (whether in the past or now) to help make this a norm…