From Issue #6, Fall 2004
Editor's Notes
:::
RT
For Grownups
Keeping it alive
In America, until the advent of television and its voracious appetite for content, puppetry thrived as theatre for grownups in the European tradition of our forefathers. These days it's a rare adult who has ever experienced puppetry at its theatrical best. Today puppets are generally perceived as toys for children. Puppetry in the K12 environment has sacrificed almost all semblance to theatre in favor of the developmental aspects of the form.
Substitute a few words here and there and much the same thing can be said of readers theatre.
The New York Drama Quartet, a readers theater ensemble created in the early 1950's by Charles Laughton, with Agnes Moorehead, Charles Boyer and Sir Cedric Hardwicke toured the US to exceptional acclaim with hundreds of performances of Don Juan In Hell from Shaw's Man and Superman. Subsequently, Broadway saw its share of this exciting genre in productions of more traditional theatre pieces including Spoon River Anthology, and Brecht on Brecht. The works of Pinter and Beckett have been produced as Readers Theatre as has the voice poem Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas. A.R.Gurney's well-known hit Love Letters is pure readers theater. Thornton Wilder's Our Town, though rarely seen as Readers Theater, is ideally structured for that style of presentation.
Today, readers theater is effectively used as a teaching tool at all levels of education. Religious RT ensembles are growing in number with stunning success adapting scriptural and liturgical materials. There is a growing move toward reestablishing this performance technique as a viable theater form in and of itself.
RTDigest recognizes the tendency on the part of many theatre practitioners and patrons to dismiss RT as simply playreading or amusement for children. Our content will continue to be carefully balanced to respect RT as a legitimate form of theatre for grownups while offering support and encouragement in the use of RT techniques in the classroom and in its many non-theatre permutations.
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