To hear "A Whole New World" onstage, you can buy a ticket to Aladdin on Broadway. For "a whole new world of possibilities" for exploring the world of theatre, students at the College of William & Mary have a new option: an online, interactive textbook surveying theatre history from the time of the Ancient Greeks.
"It's not quite a video game, but it has some of the qualities of a video game." That's how William & Mary Theatre Professor Richard Palmer describes Theatre: a Visual History, his new online book, which lets students "access this wonderful wealth of material that’s now on the Web – recordings, videos, encyclopedic entries – the kinds of things that students do anyway." Now they can explore everything from Sophocles and Noh to Robert Wilson with the click of a mouse.
Professor Palmer, also a director, lighting designer and scenic designer, has been teaching since long before students had video games to distract them. And as the author of books with titles like The Lighting Art: The Aesthetics of Stage Lighting Design and Tragedy and Tragic Theory: An Analytical Guide he's no stranger to the ways of the wordsmith. But when it came time to write a new textbook for 21st century theatre students, he felt called upon to change with the times.
After all, young people are now used to learning interactively. Not only that, the textbook economy is leaving them behind: Professor Palmer found he couldn't expect his students to be able to afford to buy his textbooks, which can go for $75, $100 and more. "So," he told William & Mary's website, "I tried to do something that was as rich visually and in terms of intellectual resources as any book you can buy, but was much less expensive and hopefully, much more interesting to use."
The book is organized topically rather than chronologically, with sections on each aspect of the theatre – lighting, costuming, music, acting, the business of theatre, etc. – "a collection of micro-histories" that reference deeper sources available according to each student's interests or assignments. Palmer hopes this teaches students the relevance of theatre history to the onstage world of today.
A book based on the Web, he says, "clearly is a resource that is going to be expanded and explored in the future. It just opens up a whole new world of possibilities."
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