In his recent memoir of the literary life, Experience, English novelist Martin Amis makes reference to drama’s place in the traditional hierarchy of literature:

". . . the drama is handily inferior to the novel and the poem. Dramatists who have lasted more than a century include Shakespeare and--who else? One is soon reaching for a sepulchral Norwegian. Compare that to English poetry and its great waves of immortality . . . .it is very funny that Shakespeare was a playwright. I scream with laughter about it all the time. This is one of God’s very best jokes." ¹

Indeed, the teacher of the drama, particularly in the United States, often must struggle with this long-standing prejudice in literary studies. On the other hand, again particularly in the United States, the theater has acquired a "high culture" association which serves to distance it from the other forms of popular entertainment, its "low culture" cousins. Consequently, teachers of drama are stuck between the rock of Amis’s hierarchy (Shakespeare, maybe Ibsen, ... then?) and the hard place of students’ perceptions (Shakespeare!?!).

Why study the theater? Theater is a kind of storytelling which has been a hallmark of human communities for 3,000 years. We live in a society where Monday morning newscasts report, as news, the weekend box office numbers from the motion picture industry; where the marriages of television stars demand 24-hour news coverage; where questions about the responsibilities of artists to their audiences and of the (li)ability of the arts to influence the young or uneducated is as hotly contended as when Plato wrote his Republic or Jeremy Collier his Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage.

The question for the first-time instructor of dramatic literature and theater isn’t "why should we study the theater?" but "how can we possibly avoid it?" Long-time teachers of dramatic literature will attest that extracting the elements of a discussion of Moliere’s 17th century comedy, Tartuffe, from a class of college first-year-students is sometimes a challenge, whereas the mere mention of a popular television sit-com can dominate class discussion (and, often, raise very fruitful questions) until the bell sounds. Part of the task of the instructor of drama is to make the connections between the situation comedy of Tartuffe and the situation comedy of NBC’s Friends, for instance; the drama is an unbroken chain of storytellers and audiences which we, at the beginning of the 21st-Century, aren’t looking back on and observing, but of which we are part. Moreover, studying the theater, its strategies and practices, the ways in which ideas are presented to an audience, provides a groundwork for students to be critical of all kinds of cultural production.

Conducting your course in dramatic literature as a series of lectures or as an on-going seminar/series of discussions of the plays may have as much to do with the ways in which you situate the theoretical matter of your course as it does with the various pragmatic choices which lead one to choosing among approaches. The theater historian will naturally lean toward a necessary element of lecture: the substance of each play is the reflection of an historical epoch, tensions of government and power in a community, the evolution of the aesthetic form, etc. The theater historian’s course is incomplete without grounding the students in the historical and aesthetic contexts of the plays, or the evolution of particular kinds of images throughout the history of dramatic literature. The critic, organizing his or her course around particular aesthetic or cultural touchstone questions (e.g. How does the theater represent the oppression of women? How is the constitution of the "real" an organizing principle in the drama across the eras?), might instead choose to develop a course that addresses the plays ahistorically, in the context of student discussion of textual practices, representational v. presentational functions, or interpretive strategies (for the reader, the director, the performer, etc.). In either context, the teaching of dramatic literature often gains by complementing the dramatic text with some degree of background information regarding the circumstances (both historical and aesthetic) of its original production. As an example, Eugene O’Neill’s 1920 play, The Emperor Jones, reprinted in Types of Drama, was a landmark in the portrayal of African-Americans on the stages of the United States: it provided a significant lead role for an African-American actor on the New York stage, it avoided the codified stereotypes of African-Americans which had become a part of their popular representation in American entertainment, it portrayed an African-American character in a position of power and respect, etc. At the same time, The Emperor Jones is a play which would be very difficult to stage today: it uses racist language and dialect (which were acceptable in both white and black literary communities of its day), exhibits the 1920s taste for juxtaposing the "modern" and the "primitive" in the cultural milieu of people of color, and embraces ideas of "racial memory" which contemporary audiences would find very awkward if not offensive. Teaching the whole of The Emperor Jones involves the privileging of secondary historical information, either in the form of lecture or the form of research and presentation by your students.

The production of theater--the writing of a play, its interpretation by a director, its physical manifestation by designers, its performance by actors--is a critical and interpretive process. To this end, here are some ideas that you may want to keep in mind:

• Develop assignments which encourage students to make critical, interpretive choices.
• Don’t just ask your students to read portions of a particularly demanding play (e.g. Hamlet or Funnyhouse of a Negro) in class; ask the class to challenge your student "actors": Why did they make a particular choice in their readings? What do they think motivates their characters’ actions? Their answers won’t be the answers of trained, professional (or even rehearsed) actors; they will be the most basic reactions to the process of interpretation.
• Ask your students to develop interpretive directorial concepts for historical plays: How might Fuente Ovejuna be different if set in a 19th-Century American industrial city? What kinds of changes would be necessary? What would remain the same?
• Assign your students group dramaturgy projects in which they must track down the historical events, personages, and movements which figure into a play like Angels in America, Part I.
• Propose to your students that they imagine a play written in one style as if it were written in another: How might We Won’t Pay! We Won’t Pay! work if it were a commedia dell’arte scenario? How might the expressionism of Machinal be reformulated into the realism of The Cherry Orchard? What do these questions tell the reader about the choices made by the playwright?
• Endeavor to demonstrate the theatrical possibilities of the plays anthologized in Types of Drama; making the decisions of the theater artist in interpreting theatrical texts in performance prompts your students to ask questions about what, in fact, interpretation is.

• How is Tartuffe a progenitor of television situation comedy?
• How are the comic types of the commedia dell’arte the same comic types we see today?
• Machinal is based on a real-life murder case, as is Kimberly Peirce’s 1999 film, Boys Don’t Cry; why use historical events as bases for drama?
• Finding the kinship between the "us" of contemporary film and television and the "them" of the production of theater throughout the centuries is often the key to unlocking and diffusing student prejudices about the theater. Shakespeare was a commercial writer who appealed to multiple socio-economic classes and produced dramas on a regular basis for a specific company of actors and technicians. History remembers him as uncommonly good at what he did. Perhaps, in four hundred years, history will remember television writer/producer David Chase (the creator of Northern Exposure and The Sopranos), for instance, in a similar way. The theatrical entertainments which delight your students on television in their living rooms and in cinema multiplexes on weekends are the product of 3,000 years of storytelling. Emphasizing this connection will go a long way.

Consider how many of your students have ever read a play before or have attended a play. Drama provides a blueprint for theater; reading drama requires specific skills. The editors of Types of Drama suggest that "we must try to see the characters, costumed and moving with a specified setting; costumes sets, and gestures are parts of the language of the drama . . . when we are readers, we must do what we can to perform the play in the theater under our hat" (1). On the first day of class, emphasize these special considerations to your students. In addition to the imaginative leap of "perform[ing] the play in the theater under our hat," suggest that your students read all stage directions and notes carefully (the student who neglects the final direction of A Doll House by Henrik Ibsen, that "sepulchral Norwegian," for instance, misses the slamming door); stage directions are as much a part of the text as dialogue. Utilize the introductory materials which precede each play in Types of Drama; without the historical context in some cases, your students will not have the opportunity to read the play the playwright wrote (appreciating A Doll House, for instance, requires students to have some hint of the significance of the issues and methods of the play in late 19th-Century Europe). Provide your students with the basic building blocks of dramaturgy so that in their reading they can identify climactic points, significant conflicts, and character relationships; suggest that they keep a list of characters on a separate sheet of paper when reading a play like Fuente Ovejuna which boasts over twenty speaking roles and a variety of character names exotic to the native English speaker. And encourage your students to read portions of the play aloud; the challenges of Shakespeare’s language will often recede if the reader hears the lines, even if it comes from his or her own mouth.

The suggestions and strategies in this Instructor Resources section represent an assortment of teaching techniques and backgrounds. The wide variety of courses and disciplines which might be supplemented by the plays anthologized in Types of Drama will undoubtedly be taught by a wide variety of instructors. In the Introduction to Theater courses taught by theater departments on major university campuses alone, coursework might be taught by theater professors schooled in criticism, history, or both; or by graduate students pursuing MA or Ph.D. degrees in the theater or MFA degrees in acting, design, or directing. The study of dramatic literature can encompass a range of methodologies and foci. Remember that the perspective of the MFA candidate in acting is no less valuable to the student than the perspective of the veteran professor of English literature.