Hyperreal Theater

 

On Friday, 18 December, last year, I spotted an obituary in the New York Times headlined “Noah Creshevsky, Composer of Complex ‘Hyperreal’ Music, Dies at 75.”  I had no idea who Creshevsky was, or what in the world “‘hyperreal’ music” could be.  I couldn’t conceive of such a thing, so I read the obit and even looked the composer up. 

What intrigued me was that though I didn’t know anything about hyperreal music, I was familiar with hyperreal art and, more specifically, hyperreal theater.  I couldn’t see how music described as hyperreal could be related to art and theater made in the same style.

The truth, it turns out, is that it isn’t.  But my brief exploration of the genre led me to the notion that hyperreal theater would be a good subject for a Rick On Theater post because it’s an interesting theatrical style, it’s little known, and had a short life in the 1980s and then largely passed from the scene.  I decided to give it a go.

Let’s start with some definitions.  Since ‘Hyperrealism’ is derived from ‘Realism,’ I’ll start there.

Realism is an art movement that advocates the representation of the subject of a piece of literature or visual art without stylization.  The world depicted in the artwork seems like real life to the reader or viewer.  It’s not, however, reality, but a representation of reality by artistic means.

‘Hyperrealism’ is made up of the word ‘realism’ and the Greek prefix ‘hyper-,’ which means ‘over,’ ‘above,’ or ‘beyond.’  Note that in the literary and visual arts, as distinguished from music, the notion of exaggeration isn’t applicable (see ‘hyperreal music,’ below).

Hyperrealism is an art form that creates illusions by enhancing reality.  Hyperreal artists in the medium in which they create place added focus in their work on the visual, social, and cultural details of everyday life.

I won’t write any more about hyperreal music, but let’s describe what it is.  Noah Creshevsky, a composer and performer of electronic music, didn’t invent hyperreal music, but he coined the label.  In his 2005 essay “Hyperrealism, Hyperdrama, Superperformers and Open Palette,” Creshevsky defined the genre thus:

Hyperrealism is an electroacoustic musical language constructed from sounds that are found in our shared environment (“realism”), handled in ways that are somehow exaggerated or excessive (“hyper”).

The “real” sounds from “our shared environment” in his works were scraps of vocal and instrumental music, speech, outside noise, television snippets, and other bits of sound, much of it sampled or taken from recordings. 

When I pointed out the Times obit to my friend Kirk Woodward, who’s far more musically knowledgeable than I am, he listened to some of Creshevsky’s compositions and then remarked that some sounded “like intellectual Spike Jones, and I heard at least one piece which made me think of the Beatles’ ‘Revolution No. 9,’ except more musical.”

My response was that “the description of his work made me think of Leroy Anderson—maybe a precursor of hyperreal music.”  For instance, “The Typewriter,” written in 1950 and recorded in 1953, features an actual typewriter as a percussion instrument.  Other pieces use instruments, sometimes exotic ones like temple blocks and a slapstick, to recreate natural sounds like hoof beats or whip cracks, as in 1948’s “Sleigh Ride.”) 

“There’s also a little Dada in it, too,” I added; “—especially George Antheil’s Ballet mécanique (1923-24),” a composition for player pianos, mechanized regular pianos (16 baby grands) plus other automated instruments (4 bass drums, 1 tam-tam, 3 xylophones) and noisemakers (siren, 7 electric bells, 3 airplane propellers, fans).

The concept of hyperreal theater is based on that of hyperreal art, so I should explain the genre in visual art first.  Hyperreal paintings and sculptures are so meticulously rendered that they resemble high-resolution photographs.  In fact, Hyperrealism in painting and drawing is often equated with Photorealism.

Hyperreal theater was pioneered as a style of playwriting by California playwright Adele Edling Shank (1940-2014),  Shank was inspired by such painters as Robert Bechtle (1932-2020) and Richard Estes (b. 1932), among several other hyperreal artists.  Theatrical Hyperrealism combines an objective perspective borrowed from photorealist painters with classic dramatic values like characterization and plot. 

In an interview requested by West Coast Plays, the semi-annual publication that first published Shank’s SUNSET/SUNRISE, the dramatist told her husband, theater scholar, playwright, director, and drama professor-emeritus at University of California-San Diego Theodore Shank (b. 1929):

You and I were both interested in exploring the theatrical equivalent of the painting style of hyperrealism or photorealism.  After studying the characteristics of the painting style we discussed how they could work in the theatre.  For example, the paintings keep the viewer on the surface, there is no projection into the painting, no emotional involvement, no interpretation. 

In “Against Interpretation,” her famous 1964 essay, Susan Sontag asserts, “The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.”  I cited this passage in my 12 June 2018 blog report on Where We Are: Selections from the Whitney’s Collection, 1900–1960, a Whitney Museum of American Art exhibit, and declared:

I have had a hard time agreeing with Sontag’s ban on interpretation for one fundamental reason: it’s not possible to experience a work of art—or nearly anything else—without finding some kind of meaning in it.  I think it’s human nature—we’re hard-wired to find meaning in what we see and experience.

So I can’t entirely accept the Shanks’s premise about plays that can’t be interpreted—or whose elements can’t be interpreted.  I still don’t think that’s possible.

Playwright Shank continued, nonetheless:

What you see is what there is.  I extended that into a theatrical style and made some basic decisions.  The focus would always be on the present moment; there would be no projection into the future and virtually no past revealed.  This meant little or no exposition.

This is a slightly disingenuous remark because of the six California Plays in the hyperreal style, several are connected narratively, so some of them do comment on the pasts or futures of others.  For example. Winterplay, though it was written later, is a prequel to SUNSET/SUNRISE and Tumbleweed follows on The Grass House (and also includes a character carried over from Sand Castles, a sequel to Stuck).  (I’ll discuss some of these plays shortly.)

Theodore Shank, who staged most of his wife’s hyperreal premières, differentiated between theatrical Realism and Hyperrealism as exemplified by the work of Adele Shank:

The theatre style called “realism” is quite different from “hyperrealism.”  Realist plays present characters behaving in a theatricalized manner which oversimplifies the work of the audience through exposition, a high degree of selectivity, and by performance techniques such as a single focus, actors facing the audience and pointing lines, etc.  All but the central action tends to be suppressed.  Actors focus on the dominant stage interest rather than on the preoccupations of their characters.  As spectators we have become so accustomed to this style in the theatre that it seems natural even though highly theatrical.  In hyperrealism the apparent lack of selection and the abundance of detail is actually more natural, but because it is unusual in the theatre, the performances seem theatrical.

(I take exception to Shank’s characterization of the acting in Realism; what he describes above is not in line with my training or my practice.  Indeed, all the teachers I worked with emphasized the opposite techniques of those Shank describes.  Shank’s general conclusions are not wrong, however, so the comparison generally holds.)

All of Adele Shank’s hyperreal plays—she wrote in other styles as well—construct portraits of the American dream, or rather the difference between the promise of that dream and the dissatisfaction of characters who’ve achieved it.  The Grass House, which I discuss a little more in a bit, looks at what one theater’s literary adviser called “a spoiled Eden.”

Shank’s hyperreal plays microscopically examine how individuals relate to one another.  The style requires a script of simple language that’s interesting, but free of artful ambiguities, heavy symbolism, or other distractions that might keep the audience attending to presentation (language) rather than underlying truth (human relationships). 

In terms of plot, playwright Shank meant the organization of the incidents of the action, not the progress of a storyline.  While her hyperreal plays do have narrative elements, they’re not examinations of a protagonist’s destiny, but rather explorations of a condition.

Further, the dramatist kept the plots very simple,  “A complex plot,” said Adele Shank, “creates too much suspense.  It involves the audience too deeply in the fictional world, so they hang on what might happen rather than being focused on the present moment.”

The hyperreal sets make the intended microscopic examination of the characters all the more accessible.  Even the minutest details are rendered with photographic accuracy—and everything is as real as a theater can possibly manage.  (It might remind one of David Belasco’s famous 1912 production of The Governor’s Lady for which he recreated a Childs Restaurant on stage using materials and food from the actual restaurant chain rather than conventional representative stage scenery.)

Speaking of his wife’s writing, Ted Shank wrote of the sets:

The setting was the starting point for . . . the . . . hyperreal plays.  In order for the productions to function in the hyperreal way intended it was essential to develop the setting from closely observed reality because imagination is not sufficiently detailed and is too influenced by mediated experience.

Among Adele Shank’s most prominent hyperreal works were the six California Plays that included SUNSET/SUNRISE (1979), Winterplay (1980), Stuck: A Freeway Comedy (1981), Sand Castles (1983), The Grass House (1983), and Tumbleweed (1984).  (These plays, once hard to find in print, are now published together in California Plays [South Gate, CA: NoPassport Press, 2015].)

One excellent example of Shank’s hyperreal plays is The Grass House, first presented by San Francisco’s Magic Theatre from 12 October to 4 December 1983; the director was Theodore Shank, the playwright’s husband and UCSD colleague.

Set on a marijuana farm in the California hills, The Grass House depicts Anemone preparing to marry Moon Hawk.  Present are Anemone’s mother, a “call girl” (she lives and works out of a VW bus), and her father, a municipal court judge, as well as other members of the bride’s and groom’s “families.”  As the group prepares for the ceremony, many hidden facets of their characters and histories are revealed, baring many small cracks in façades and relationships.

Shank, as in most of her work, is parodying the American dream—here the back-to-nature simplicity of rural America.  In a 1983 script evaluation, literary manager C. Lee Jenner (who was also the teacher who introduced me to Shank’s hyperreal plays) observed that Grass House “evokes an image of the pioneer spirit gone awry.”  

The idyllic myth of farm life is turned on its head: the farm is a pot farm (an illegal crop in 1983), and far from escaping the threats of modern city life the alternative lifestyle was meant to leave behind, the would-be urban refugees contend with coyotes, a fear of strangers, and the site of an ancient tragedy on their retreat.  They surround themselves with guard dogs, rifles, and bolted doors.

Most of the characters are trapped in untenable lives that only seem productive.  Only Anemone and Moon Hawk, who seem just as trapped as the others, finally show signs of being able to escape.

Like all hyperreal plays, the style of Grass House requires fastidious attention to minute detail in production and characterization. 

Adele Shank used what she called “role models” for her characters, so each of them possesses characteristics and behavior traits of actual individuals.  While the characters’ lives are different from those of the models, Shank limned “their way of speaking, their energy level, and their personality.”  Actors playing the roles have the characteristics of real-life people to work on—even if they don’t know the models.

Shank followed the same pattern with the settings, which were created from actual locations in California.  The house in SUNSET/SUNRISE (see below), for instance, was conceived from a composite of real homes in the Davis, California, neighborhood where the dramatist lived when she wrote the play.

SUNSET/SUNRISE (Shank’s first hyperreal play), premièred in February 1979 by the Dramatic Art Department of UC-Davis under the direction of Ted Shank; it was then presented in the Actors Theatre of Louisville’s New American Play Festival from 28 February to 23 March 1980. 

In the backyard of a California home, a lawn-and-pool party is getting underway.  During the course of the evening and night, cracks appear in the surface of several of the empty relationships, some temporary liaisons are made, and some realizations dawn on a number of the characters. 

Principal among these are Louise and James, whose yard is the scene of the party, and their daughter, Anne, who’s believed for some time that she’s so allergic to everything except plastic that the only way she can venture out of her room is in a gas mask and wetsuit.  Ordinarily, she stays in her room and communicates with the world through a two-way TV hook-up. 

As her parents finally make tentative overtures to reestablishing their faltering, empty relationship, Anne makes an attempt to come out of her protective shell, literally and figuratively facing the world naked.

Offering a cockeyed picture of affluent California suburbia, the dramatist is telling us that a life that doesn’t go below the surface is ultimately a lie and will destroy what remains.  It’s clear that none of the characters begins the play with a true relationship based on honesty and trust with anyone else.  Most are engaged in duplicitous affairs with others at the party—some of which affairs are, in themselves, lies. 

One character, Josh, Louise and James’s son, lives in an old car in the backyard.  It doesn’t run and is connected to the house’s power supply by an immense extension cord—what one of my teachers called “the world’s longest umbilical cord.”  Josh won’t live with his parents, but he won’t actually move away, either.  It’s an inverted take on youthful rebellion and the vaunted California car culture.

That’s probably one of the most visible idiosyncrasies in SUNSET/SUNRISE (after Anne’s set-up), but another, less obvious one is much more intriguing.  Throughout the party, Louise incessantly feeds James cholesterol-heavy foods and drinks.  It’s never mentioned in the dialogue, but we’re witnessing a slow-motion attempted murder by cholesterol poisoning!

I think this is an extraordinary play, Hyperrealism notwithstanding, with a stimulating situation that’s both recognizably all-American, and unique.  Though the empty lives of all the characters could be seen as symbolic, it plays as reality.  The effect is startling and moving. 

The Hyperrealism of the play demands an elaborate set, which requires that all of the trappings of life—sounds, objects, language, light, and so on—be represented with absolute, precise reality on stage.  Everything that is seen on stage, including a practical barbecue, TV monitor and camera, and the general patio with furniture, must be absolutely true-to-life. 

(Shank has said that the SUNSET/SUNRISE set can be designed with the pool off stage—but if it’s part of the mise-en-scène, it must be a real pool.)

The style also affects the acting and directing.  Because of the hyperrealism of the language and conversation, there must be what Shank calls “out-of-focus” dialogue and other Robert Altman-esque touches of cinéma vérité. 

The actors and the director must construct the behavior of the characters with a clarity that will make the process as transparent as possible to the audience.  Careful attention needs to be paid to details in body language, vocal intonation, and blocking, every element that delves beneath the words to the feelings and attitudes that constitute relationships.

Stuck: A Freeway Comedy, Shank’s third hyperreal play, was arguably her most audacious—with respect to its production style, though not so much in its text.  First produced by the Magic Theatre from 7 October to 22 November 1981, the première was staged by Ted Shank. 

The premise of the plot is that on the same stretch of a California freeway that connects a suburb with a city, there is an accident resulting in a traffic jam every morning and every evening.  Over the months, some of the commuters have gotten to know one another and have developed rituals that help them cope with the frustrations and boredom of their lives.

The 12 men and women in the carpools all work for the same corporation, but they have little contact with one another except during the traffic jams.  They aren’t neighbors, and they aren’t friends.  This situation is the same for both acts and, in Ted Shank’s début staging, the cars—five for each act (with two of them in each act the same)—are facing in the opposite direction in act two than in act one.

For all intents and purposes, this is the carpoolers’ world.

In a 1982 issue of Theatre Design & Technology, Ted Shank described his production:

Adele Shank’s Hyperrealism demanded, the director asserted, “nothing short of actual cars and the appearance of a real freeway.”  The Magic Theatre staged the play in a warehouse on a pier extending into San Francisco Bay the length of two football fields (720 feet or 240 yards, including the end zones).

A special enclosure was built inside the warehouse to serve as a performance area and seating for 99 spectators sitting in three rows in each side of the performance area, designed to look like a two-lane freeway. 

The seating platforms were sharply raked “so the spectators looked down into the [performance] space at a steep angle.”  This, felt Ted Shank, “gave the spectators an unusual perspective . . . which aided in creating an increased psychic distance for the spectator somewhat akin to looking down on a street from a window in a building.”  Shank thought that this made the theatergoer more an observer than a “psychic participant.”

The ends of the freeway performance area were closed off with black drapes.  One end could be opened with pulleys so that the cars could be repositioned during intermission.  The asphalt floor of the warehouse was painted with Aquatar to make the roadway look freshly surfaced and all the details of the road were based on California Department of Transportation specs so they’d be authentic.

The specifics of the freeway set were meticulously matched to actual highway appearance, such as the yellow painted lines that demarked the shoulders which were sprinkled with glass powder to make them reflective as on actual highways.  Some materials were even purchased from the same suppliers from which Caltrans gets its road materials.

Here’s how director Shank describes the visual effects of the production; note all the atmospheric detail set designer Andy Stacklin and lighting designer Patty Ann Farrell incorporated in the concept:

The flood lights used to light the seating areas were directed toward the audience so they could not see into the unlighted performance space until the house lights went down and the stage lights came up.  Act One begins with the commuters in a morning traffic jam on their way from the suburbs to work in the city.  It is a foggy spring morning which gradually clears.  Act Two takes place the following fall during an evening traffic jam as the commuters are on their way home from work.  As the act begins the rain has just stopped.  The highway and cars are wet (having been sprayed during intermission) and the windshield wipers are on.  By the time the play ends it is dark and the only sources of light are the interior lights of the cars, a reading light in one car, and a flashlight—at the very end of the play the cars are started and the headlights and taillights are turned on.

Adele Shank wrote in a “Playwright’s Note” in the play text: “None of the cars need have engines, although it would be desirable if one car in each act could start.”  You can see where that comes into play, and in Hyperrealism, it wouldn’t do to use a recording of an engine turning over to substitute for an actual car starting in the performance area in front of the audience.

(In the Magic’s production, it seems that all the cars were operable.  Except for one, says the director, they were borrowed from him and the actors.  Spiffed up, tricked out a little for the show, and polished to a showroom sheen, they were as real as any street-worthy car in San Francisco.)

Here’s more of how that worked:

Simple effective solutions for the required sound effects were devised by Al Agius-Sinerco.  As an overture to each act and to help make the transition into the performance, two-track stereo tape recordings of cars passing on a freeway were heard going from West to East in Act One and from East to West on wet pavement in Act Two.  The two channels were fed into two Bose 800 speakers, one at each end of the performance enclosure.  At first the cars travel at highway speeds past the audience, then they slow down, gradually come to a stop with engines idling, horns honk, and engines are turned off.  At the end of each act cars are heard starting in the distance, then cars nearer are heard starting, and finally the cars on stage are started by the actors.

Ted Shank describes several other sound effects employing cassette tape recorders in each car for various purposes (along with some other audio tech such as a PA system and a siren in one car), and then he concludes:

The hyperreal setting, cars, sound, the use of car lights, and the unusual perspective from which the performance was viewed created a theatricality which led the audience to perceive the common place [sic] objects as well as the characters and events in a fresh more acute way. . . .  Having entered the unique seating area audience expectancies were aroused.  The sounds of cars passing on the freeway began, house lights dimmed, and the stage lights came up on a surprising view of a freeway with real cars stuck in a traffic jam.

According to Theodore Shank, the hyperreal painters who were Adele Shank’s models emphasized “the materialism in our culture by painting in more-than-usual objectified detail which helps keep the spectator’s focus on the surface materiality of the objects represented—often cars, storefronts, or rooms in middle-class houses.”

This, Ted Shank asserts, was also the playwright’s aim.  He explained:

As with the hyperreal painters, the accumulation of detail in our productions creates a distance which tends to keep the focus on behavior, on appearance rather than on psychology, social analysis, or emotion.  Traditionally, realism in the theatre has been used to draw the audience into a subjective relationship with the characters, their desires and predicaments.  The spectator becomes psychically absorbed into the fictional world rather than being distanced from it.  Instead of perceiving acutely the events presented, the spectator is psychically suspended awaiting what is about to happen.  In our hyperreal productions the use of accumulated detail is an attempt to create a distance which puts the spectator in the position of observer or voyeur rather than psychic participant.  In this condition each audience member is forced to focus on present events and is able to perceive them more keenly.  Spectating becomes more an act of perception than emotional involvement.  It is as if one were looking through a window watching unknown people and gradually coming to understand how they are related and why they behave as they do.  Although interested in the fictional situation, the spectator is not made to want a particular outcome because each spectator is a detached observer.

Interestingly, to my ear, this sounds positively Brechtian.  What Ted Shank is describing is an application of the Verfremdungseffekt, the distancing device Bertolt Brecht applied in his Epic Theater that’s often Anglicized as the “alienation effect” (a translation I dislike; I favor “defamiliarizing effect”).  (Of course, this is Ted Shank’s exegesis so it may be he who’s the Brechtian.)

I’ve never read that Adele Shank was specifically influenced by Brecht, but lit manager Jenner wrote that Adele Shank’s “Brechtian side is warmed with compassion and humor,” which I think is accurate.

The playwright herself observed, “There is a very distanced relationship between the spectators and the characters.  We in the audience have almost no emotional involvement with the characters.”  But she also acknowledged that “there is a recognition of the characters by the audience, not an emotional identification.”

Jenner also used another Brechtian principle to characterize Adele Shank’s Hyperrealism.  The playwright “intends her audience to ‘look at’ but not ‘feel with’ her characters,” the lit manager wrote.  “To this end,” she continued, “she manipulates various distancing devices within a generally realistic context. . . .  [A] web of realistic behavioral and contextual detail keeps audience attention  on the surface of the action.”

Another painter whom Adele Shank’s hyperreal works evoke, at least for one analyst, is David Hockney (b. 1937).  Bonnie Marranca, now the publisher and editor of PAJ (formerly the Performing Arts Journal) and a theater professor at The New School, compared SUNSET/SUNRISE to “people picnicking in a David Hockney set,” invoking “the non-explosive, past[el] shadings of Hockney,” a pop artist, photographer, and set designer for plays and operas.  He’s sometimes considered a forerunner of the Photorealists.

Ted Shank outlines several techniques his wife used in her dramaturgy to accomplish her aims, but one that especially interests me is his and Adele Shank’s approach to acting in a hyperreal play.  In part, this is because I mentioned acting earlier and in part because I trained as an actor and have taught it.  In any case, Ted Shank says his and his wife’s goal is “to increase performance detail.”

Specifically, he describes “an unconventional focus for the actors.”  This is the concentration not on the character’s “single center of interest,” but on his or her “specific interest  . . . at each moment.”  What Ted Shank is referring to here are what most actors call their objectives. 

The “single center of interest” is what Stanislavskians call their main objective or superobjective; it’s what the character wants to achieve.  For Hamlet, say, this might be “to unmask the murderer” or “to avenge my father”; for Lady Macbeth, it might be “to make my husband king.” 

(In some other acting systems, this has alternative labels: Bernard Beckerman called it the project and Aaron Frankel called it the character’s action or the main character action.  Director Harold Clurman called it the spine—both of the play and of each character.)

The “specific interest” for each moment is the individual objective for a scene or beat.  In Stanislavskian acting, these momentary objectives are derived from the main action, which is overarching.  What Ted Shank is proposing is that the actors all essentially eschew the main action and focus solely on the objectives for each scene.  This is the hyperreal detail translated into acting technique.

The rationale, according to Shank, is that because the specific interests might be different from an overall interest, this technique makes “for several simultaneous centers of interest thus creating an impression of complexity and the absence of dramatic contrivance.”

This dramaturgical technique appears in another context as well.  In conventional Western theater, conflict drives the drama; it is the engine that carries the play from the beginning to the conclusion.  There is often a protagonist and an opposing antagonist with conflicting objectives: Macbeth wants to be king of Scotland, but Macduff wants to prevent that. 

As another literary manager said in her evaluation of SUNSET/SUNRISE in 1979: “This is a play which doesn’t have strong dramatic conflict but rather a series of encounters.”  She added later that “several little dramas are evolving.”  This is certainly a product of the actors concentrating on the momentary objectives rather than a superobjective for the play as a whole.

Shank went on to provide more specifics about Hyperrealism in his wife’s plays:

The more-than-usual detail, the lack of an obviously-directed focus, and the use of simultaneous conversations and action [those Altman-esque tactics I mentioned earlier] give the audience the impression that they are discovering the details of action and setting for themselves as they do in the real world.  Because the spectator’s focus is not forcefully drawn to each detail that is seen, the details seem not to have been contrived for perception but left to chance discovery.  And because the spectators are put into a frame-of-mind for observation rather than emotional involvement, they are able to make these discoveries.

Playwright Shank had a final admonition about the scope of Hyperrealism on stage.  While some analysts have commented on what her husband characterized as “the bizarre elements” in her plays (the daughter’s communicating through a CCTV rig in SUNSET/SUNRISE), or the “non-realistic, magical elements” (the specter of that ancient catastrophe at the pot farm in The Grass House) as Jenner described them, the writer insisted, “Hyperrealism is not at all the same thing as documentation.” 

SUNSET/SUNRISE is not a blow-by-minute account of family life in Davis, California.  It is a contrived and structured play presenting an illusion of reality, based on observations.  Like hyperrealist painting, I have attempted . . . to make the spectator observe acutely, [not] become involved in the psychology or emotions of the characters. . . .  The play focuses attention to things we don’t usually notice.

[ROTters interested in learning more about theatrical Hyperrealism should turn to the two essays mentioned above.  Ted Shank’s TD&T article is accessible on line at https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/hickmanbrady/tdt_1982summer/index.php; he discusses many more details about the physical production of Stuck as well as more specifics of hyperreal theater. 

[“Hyperrealism in the Theatre,” the interview of Adele Shank, is only available on the ’Net in California Plays on Google Books, but it’s slightly edited.  When libraries reopen, back issues of TD&T should be in many collections, but West Coast Plays 4 was hard to find 25 years ago, so I expect it will be harder still today.

[Adele Edling Shank was a long-time member of the faculty and chair of what is now the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of California, San Diego.  A native of Litchfield, Minnesota, she grew up on a farm 50 miles west of Minneapolis..  In 1953, her father got a job with the California Agriculture Department and the Edlings moved to Sacramento, California.

[Adele Edling enrolled at the University of California, Davis (BA, 1963; MA, 1966), where she met Theodore Shank; they were married in 1967,  She joined the faculty at the University of California, San Diego in 1981 as a lecturer and was named to the permanent faculty in 1984.  Shank and her husband, who is a professor emeritus in the Department of Theatre and Dance at UCSD, established the Adele and Theodore Shank Professional Playwriting Residency Award at the university.  The endowed position funds internship positions for master of fine arts students at UCSD with theater companies around the U.S.  A theater on the university campus is named in honor of the Shanks.]