Notes Found in a Klein Bottle

The academic theater tradition at Northwestern has always been text driven, literary-as Frank Galati, Mary Zimmerman, David Catlin, and Virgil Johnson describe-laying performance on unexpected texts, challenging the forn1 by creating theater pieces fro1n texts never designed to be staged. The Department of Theatre at Northwestern began as the Department of Reading Aloud, became, after several transformations, Performance Studies within the School of Speech, and now is embraced in the School of Communication. Literature requires that you speak back. Performances of actors dran1atizing the reading of names in the phone book were legendary, a reminder that a gifted theater artist can impose emotion and structure, order and beauty on any series of words, in the spaces between words, and in the absence and expectation of words. Unfortunately, the converse is also true, the attempted dramatization of the most poetic, thrilling words will fail when delivered on flat feet.

If the making art or science or invention cannot be taught, if the leap of the imagination must be spontaneous, the foundation can be laid. In the theater, where the effort is always a group effort, the role of an individual teacher will always be tempered by the presence of the others necessary to make it happen. And this selection, attention, preparation for the moment is critical.