Directing History: Women, Performance and Scholarship

Abstract

The emergence of the director is usually seen as a crucial moment in late nineteenth-, early twentieth-century theatre history. Traditionally, the narrative of that emergence has focused on the director as a sole heroic individual, usually male. This article questions how that figure and those practices have been historicized. That historicization process has been (and continues to be) a disciplinary demonstration of power marked by the concomitant political operations of personal, geographical, and institutional identifications and affiliations. The specific political operation explored here is that of gender as the primary identification of the figures, institutions, and arguments. The thirty-year collaboration of Edith Isaacs and Rosamond Gilder on Theatre Arts, the primary voice in the United States for the reform of the theatre during the era that saw both the emergence of the director and the celebration of that emergence as the pinnacle of theatrical achievement is the example on which the article focuses. Gilder was Isaacs's assistant and successor, and she was also the author of Enter the Actress, the first book to create a history for women in the theatre. In three parts the article demonstrates how focusing on the journal, the collaboration, and the book offer a new conception of the director's history.