PhD Candidate Adam Sheaffer awarded ARHU's Ann G. Wylie Fellowship

Congratulations to PhD candidate Adam Sheaffer on winning an Ann G. Wylie Dissertation Fellowship from the College of Arts & Humanities!

Congratulations to PhD candidate Adam Sheaffer on winning an Ann G. Wylie Dissertation Fellowship for the academic year 2015-2016 from the College of Arts & Humanities!

Adam's dissertation is entitled ‘Til thou have audience’: The New York Shakespeare Festival & Audience Construction in New York City. He explains that his dissertation will address the following:

Studying audiences and their development continues to be an ongoing challenge for scholars, practitioners and producers alike. The project to build new audiences – through touring, educational programming, and the cultivation of public and civic pride – has precedents in the history of American theatre, as many practitioners and producers in the first half of the 20th century sought to reach an increasingly diverse population. The tools and methods these earlier practitioners and producers pioneered were later honed and augmented by the New York Shakespeare Festival (NYSF) in their attempts to reach diverse audiences in postwar New York City. The NYSF, and company founder Joseph Papp, sought to provide new audiences previously discouraged from the theatre – by financial or cultural constraints – with access to Shakespeare and other theatrical offerings. Specifically my dissertation examines one of their most ambitious ventures in audience construction: the Mobile Theatre Unit, launched from 1964 through 1981, and designed to tour all around the five boroughs.

My primary sources for this project reside in the NYSF’s archives at the Lincoln Center Library for the Performing Arts. Of vital importance to my project are correspondences and internal memos among NYSF administrators and various staff responsible for production of the Mobile Theatre Unit and other educational initiatives beginning in 1964. These documents chart the company’s unfolding conversation about what types of audiences they seek and how best to reach, mold, and retain these audiences. Also of interest are stage manager and house manager reports from the Mobile Theatre Unit itself, which reveal how these conversations manifested themselves in theatrical and community practices. Finally, the archive contains letters responding to Mobile Theatre Unit productions that offer rare insight into how actual audiences encountered and processed the NYSF’s offerings and their audience construction practices.

While my work focuses on the NYSF, the implications of this project reverberate beyond New York City and the performance of Shakespeare. By exploring the NYSF’s audience construction project, I hope to speak to subsequent and current practices in the area of audience development, as such practices are crucial to the success of theatrical and educational organizations. In today’s theatrical climate, audience development takes very different dramaturgical, educational, and physical forms. Many if not all of these forms of engagement and development seek to create greater access to the artistic process and product. The NYSF, in this way and in others, presages such current practices, as Papp’s avowed mission – and indeed his very aesthetic – was founded on the notion of access. The myriad ways that the NYSF created and encouraged access were fundamental to their audience construction efforts, and served – with varying degrees of success – to create a sense of ownership and kinship between audiences and the company. In examining the challenges, limitations, and opportunities encountered by the NYSF and their efforts at audience construction and development, I hope to nourish an understanding of how contemporary practices and initiatives might more directly and fruitfully engage audiences, inside and outside the theatre.