Theater

About Theater

Theater: A Complete Profile

Theater is an American journal of contemporary theater and performance, published by Duke University Press on behalf of the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale and Yale Repertory Theatre, according to Duke University Press's own journal page. Its print ISSN is 0161-0775 and its electronic ISSN is 1527-196X, the two identifiers carried on this Journals World record and confirmed on the publisher's page. The journal appears three times a year and, at the time this profile was researched, had reached volume 56. Duke describes it, in its own words, as having been for over fifty years the most informative, serious and imaginative American journal for readers interested in contemporary theater and performance — a self-description that fits its unusual position: it is neither a purely academic journal nor a purely literary magazine, but a hybrid that publishes new plays, essays, polemics, interviews, production coverage and book reviews side by side, with its editorial office at Yale in New Haven, Connecticut, and its production, marketing and distribution handled by Duke in Durham, North Carolina.

That hybrid character is the first thing a prospective reader or contributor needs to understand. Most journals in theater studies address scholars. Theater addresses scholars, critics, playwrights, directors, dramaturgs and serious general readers at once, and its publisher explicitly discourages the submission of academic papers, dissertations and theses. Its pages have been the first home of pathbreaking plays by writers as different as Romeo Castellucci, Guillermo Calderón, Richard Foreman, W. David Hancock, Peter Handke, Elfriede Jelinek, Sarah Kane, Toshiki Okada and Suzan-Lori Parks, and of polemics and essays by dramatists including Dario Fo, Heiner Müller and Mac Wellman. A profile of this journal therefore has to describe two things at once: a scholarly record that is indexed in the major humanities databases, and a literary magazine with a documented role in introducing international dramatists to American readers and stages.

History and Development

The journal was founded in 1968 as yale/theatre, in its own site's phrase “a gathering of responses to real events” in that turbulent year. Its first editor, Ren Frutkin, declared that it would consist of “theatre, thought, discussion, dream, art, people,” and its first issue asked “Do We Need Greek Drama?” The journal's own history, published on theatermagazine.org, records that its early editorial board included Michael Feingold, Ren Frutkin, Richard Gilman and Gordon Rogoff; that Rocco Landesman served as editor from 1973 to 1977, with Robert Marx as co-editor until 1976; and that in 1978 his successor Joel Schechter shortened the magazine's name to Theater while expanding its purview and enlarging its page size and distribution. Under editor Erika Munk (1992–2003) the magazine launched a major redesign and began regularly commissioning new writing from professional critics, journalists and artists around the world.

The current editor, Tom Sellar of Yale University, was appointed in 2003, according to both the journal's own history and Duke's journal page. He introduced new writers and features such as photo essays and an expanded editorials section, and renewed the magazine's commitment to new international voices. In 1998 the magazine had formed its partnership with Duke University Press: under that agreement Duke handles production, marketing, fulfilment and distribution, while all editorial work continues to originate from Yale. The journal says that since the partnership began it has won awards for its redesign and has continuously expanded its distribution, including into electronic forms — which is why the version most institutional readers now meet is the electronic edition under e-ISSN 1527-196X, delivered through Duke's reading platform and through library aggregators.

The journal's list of special issues is itself a map of contemporary theater debates. Its own site lists groundbreaking special issues on Russian theater in the twenty-first century, theater and violence, Witold Gombrowicz's century, theater and social change, Polish directors now, theater in the new South Africa, performances under siege in Sarajevo, theater and landscape, rethinking Meyerhold, one hundred years of Kurt Weill, contemporary children's theater and the apocalyptic century. Duke's current description adds more recent themes: site-specific performance, digital dramaturgies, contemporary Brazilian drama and the curation of performance. A journal that devotes whole issues to such topics is telling contributors something important: it works thematically and curatorially, often commissioning and assembling dossiers around an editorial question, rather than simply processing a queue of unrelated manuscripts.

Publisher, Editorial Office and People

The publisher of record is Duke University Press, 905 W. Main Street, Durham, North Carolina, publishing on behalf of the Yale drama school and Yale Repertory Theatre. The editorial office is at Yale: Theater, PO Box 208244, New Haven, CT 06520-8244, with the editorial email address theater.magazine@yale.edu published on Duke's page. Tom Sellar is editor; Duke's page names Gabrielle Hoyt as associate editor, Daria Kerschenbaum and Georgia Petersen as managing editors, and an advisory board including James Bundy, Florie Seery and Catherine Sheehy, together with a long list of contributing editors — among them Una Chaudhuri, Thomas F. DeFrantz, Miriam Felton-Dansky, Jacob Gallagher-Ross, Jonathan Kalb, Renate Klett, Tavia Nyong'o, Joseph Roach, Marc Robinson and Alisa Solomon — and a group of affiliated artists including Marc Bamuthi Joseph, Annie Dorsen, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Aaron Landsman and David Levine. Contributors named by the publisher as luminaries of the magazine include Elinor Fuchs, Stanley Kauffmann, Marc Robinson, Eric Salzman and Alisa Solomon, and the journal's own history adds critics and essayists such as Una Chaudhuri, Stanley Crouch, Arthur Danto, Daniel Gerould, Richard Gilman, Margo Jefferson, Jan Kott, Sylvère Lotringer, Annette Michelson, Joseph Roach, Gordon Rogoff, Denis Salter and Susan Sontag.

One correction to the stored Journals World record should be noted plainly. The thin record from which this profile was built carried the publisher as a bare number, “323,” which is not a publisher at all but a database artifact. The verified publisher, from the journal's own publishing arrangements, is Duke University Press, publishing for Yale. Readers who cite this journal should cite it that way.

Scope and Subjects

Duke's guidance to authors states the scope directly: the journal focuses primarily, but not exclusively, on experimental theater — American and international — and on theater that touches political and cultural debates. Within that frame its subject matter is broad: new play texts and their authors; directing, acting, design and dramaturgy; performance and performance studies, including site-specific and digital work; theater and ecology; music theater; theater under political pressure and in conflict zones; national and regional theater cultures, from Poland and South Africa to Brazil; children's theater; and the history of modern performance revisited through figures such as Meyerhold, Weill and Gombrowicz. The journal has introduced countless important international dramatists to United States readers, its own history says — among them Thomas Bernhard, Thomas Brasch, Dario Fo, Peter Handke, Elfriede Jelinek, Sarah Kane, Biljana Srbljanović, René Pollesch, Falk Richter, Vassily Sigarev, George Tabori, Michel Vinaver and Ivan Vyrypaev — and has published, often for the first time, innovative American playwrights including Richard Foreman, María Irene Fornés, David Greenspan, David Hancock, John Jesurun, Adrienne Kennedy, Suzan-Lori Parks, Sarah Ruhl and Mac Wellman.

For researchers, this scope means the journal is a primary source as much as a secondary one. Because it publishes plays themselves, interviews, manifestos and production documents alongside criticism, an issue of Theater is evidence of what the field was arguing about in that season, not only commentary written afterwards. Theater historians, performance-studies scholars and dramaturgs use it accordingly: to trace the American reception of European directors and playwrights, to follow debates about devised and documentary theater, and to document productions that might otherwise leave little printed trace.

Metrics and What They Mean

Two different measurement systems describe this journal, and they give different numbers because they count different literatures. OpenAlex, resolving the journal through its ISSN endpoint to source S4210227130, records 2,299 works and 2,700 citations for Theater, with an h-index of 21, an i10-index of 54 and a two-year mean citedness of about 0.159, with a first publication year of 1964 in that database. The SCImago-based record from which the earlier Journals World entry was built reported a considerably lower h-index of 10. Neither figure is a mistake in itself: citation indexes for the humanities differ sharply in which books, reviews and magazine contributions they count, and a journal that publishes plays and essays will be represented very differently in a database built around research articles. What both sources agree on is the shape of the title: a long-running, moderately cited humanities journal whose influence is exercised mainly through the field's conversation rather than through citation volume.

Readers should therefore not judge Theater by the standards of a science journal. It has no Journal Impact Factor of the kind Clarivate assigns to science titles that would summarise its standing, and any single-number claim about its prestige should be treated with care. Its standing is better read from verifiable facts: more than five decades of continuous publication, a university-press publisher, a Yale editorial home, indexing in the Arts and Humanities Citation Index and Scopus (see below), and a contributor list that includes many of the central critics and playwrights of its period. Article processing charges are not part of its model: it is a subscription journal, and Duke's page lists an individual subscription price of $33 at the time of research; no author-facing publication fee is published, and any fee claim beyond that could not be verified from the publisher's page.

Indexing and Access

Duke University Press publishes a long list of services in which the journal is indexed or abstracted. That list, reproduced here in shortened form from the publisher's page, includes Academic Search Complete, Elite and Premier, the Arts and Humanities Citation Index, Current Contents, ERIH PLUS, Humanities International Complete and Index, the International Bibliography of Theatre and Dance with Full Text, the MLA International Bibliography, Periodicals Index Online, ProQuest collections, Scopus, TOC Premier, Ulrichsweb and Web of Science. For a researcher deciding where a contribution will be seen, the practically important entries on that list are Scopus, the Arts and Humanities Citation Index, the MLA Bibliography and the International Bibliography of Theatre and Dance, because those are the discovery systems theater and literature scholars actually search.

Access is by subscription, in print and electronically. OpenAlex classifies the journal as not open access, and a search of the Directory of Open Access Journals API for its electronic ISSN returned no listing at the time of research, which is consistent with that subscription model. Individual articles, plays and issues can generally be bought or read through institutional library subscriptions, and the journal's own website publishes editorial material and information about current and forthcoming issues. There is no shame in that model for this kind of magazine: its economics are those of a curated literary and critical journal, sustained by subscribers and institutions rather than by authors.

How to Submit

Duke's page gives unusually concrete submission guidance, and prospective contributors should follow the current version of that page rather than any summary. Articles: the journal focuses primarily on experimental theater, American and international, and on theater touching political and cultural debates; it discourages submissions of academic papers, dissertations and theses; and submitted articles should not exceed twenty double-spaced manuscript pages. Scripts: the journal states that it is no longer able to accept or return unsolicited manuscripts of plays — an important point, because the magazine's fame as a first publisher of new plays leads many writers to assume the opposite; play publication in its pages is arranged editorially rather than through an open script queue. Manuscripts for submission and letters on editorial matters go to the Yale editorial office address given above, or by email to theater.magazine@yale.edu; the publisher says the magazine accepts hard copies as well as submissions by email in plain or text-only format, that only manuscripts accompanied by a self-addressed stamped envelope can be returned, and that authors should allow about one month for a response on articles and four months for scripts. Book review copies go to the Book Review Editor at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale, 222 York Street, New Haven.

Practical advice follows from the journal's character. Write for an intelligent reader who may be a practitioner rather than a specialist in your subfield. Prefer a live critical argument, a document, an interview or a report from inside a production process over a literature-review-driven academic paper. Check recent special issues before submitting: if your topic matches a theme the editors are actively pursuing, say so; if it repeats a dossier published two years earlier, expect a harder path. And keep to the stated length: twenty double-spaced pages is a firm editorial signal about the essay form the magazine wants.

Similar Journals

Readers comparing venues in theater and performance studies will usually consider Theater alongside TDR (The Drama Review), which approaches performance from a broader anthropological and performance-studies angle; Theatre Journal, the scholarly journal associated with the Association for Theatre in Higher Education; Modern Drama, centred on dramatic literature of the past two centuries; New Theatre Quarterly, with its emphasis on theatre practice and debate; PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, the closest cousin in spirit as a magazine of performance and new writing; Text and Performance Quarterly, which examines performance in scholarly and experimental modes; and Theatre Survey and Contemporary Theatre Review for theatre history and contemporary practice respectively. Theater's distinctive place in that company is its combination of new play texts, artist voices and criticism under a single editorial roof at a major drama school — none of the others is the magazine of a producing theatre and drama school in quite the same way.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the ISSNs of Theater? Print ISSN 0161-0775 and electronic ISSN 1527-196X, as confirmed on Duke University Press's journal page.

Who publishes Theater? Duke University Press, on behalf of the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale and Yale Repertory Theatre; editorial work is done at Yale. The bare number shown as publisher in older directory data is a database artifact, not a publisher.

Who edits Theater? Tom Sellar of Yale University has been editor since 2003, according to the journal's own history and the publisher's page.

How often does it appear, and where is it now? Three issues a year; Duke listed current volume 56 at the time of research.

When was it founded? In 1968, as yale/theatre; it took its present one-word title in 1978 under editor Joel Schechter.

Is Theater peer-reviewed and indexed? It is an edited scholarly and literary journal whose publisher lists it in Scopus, the Arts and Humanities Citation Index, the MLA International Bibliography, the International Bibliography of Theatre and Dance and other services; it is not an open-access journal, and it was not listed in the DOAJ API results at the time of research.

Can I submit a play? Not as an unsolicited manuscript: the publisher states the journal can no longer accept or return unsolicited play manuscripts. Articles within its stated scope, of no more than twenty double-spaced pages, are the open route in.

What metrics describe it? OpenAlex (source S4210227130) records 2,299 works, 2,700 citations and an h-index of 21; SCImago-derived data in the earlier record gave an h-index of 10. The difference reflects the databases' different coverage of humanities material, and neither number alone summarises a magazine of this kind.

Why This Journal Matters

Longevity alone would earn this magazine a profile: few American theater publications have appeared continuously since 1968. Its real claim is documentary. Because it publishes the plays, the arguments and the production records of contemporary theater as they happen — introducing European dramatists to American readers, giving American innovators their first print hearing, and devoting whole issues to the questions the field is actually arguing about, from Sarajevo under siege to digital dramaturgy — its back run is one of the places where the history of English-language theater since the 1960s is written down by its participants. Scholars cite it, but they also quote it as evidence. That dual status, as both a journal of record and a participant in its field, is rare, and it is the product of the arrangement described in this profile: editors at a great drama school, a university press handling everything else, and an editorial policy that has preferred the live voice — the playwright, the director, the critic in the room — over the processed academic article for more than fifty years.

Verification Notes

This profile is anchored on the live Journals World record for post 36920 (title Theater, slug theater, print and electronic ISSNs as above, already published but previously described in only 239 words) and on sources fetched for this update: Duke University Press's official journal page, the journal's own history on theatermagazine.org, the OpenAlex source record resolved through its ISSN endpoint, and the DOAJ search API, which returned no listing. Fields that could not be verified from those sources — for example a current Journal Impact Factor — are described above as not published or could not be verified, rather than filled from secondary aggregator claims.