Although we can name many critics and writers who have greater impacts on college theatre and college students (i.e. Brockett, Burnett, Jacobus, etc) no one seems to have the same reputation for doing such quality work, compiling quality anthologies for high school theatre and for high school drama classes. I could be wrong, of course, because you could already be aware that Norman A. Bert is compiling just such anthologies, the best of which I believe is Theatre Alive!.
Bert includes these plays in his anthology:
By saying that this book is a great anthology for high school drama classes, I am not saying that the same anthology would not work for college introduction to theatre course or even theatre literature course. But there are many books that do this well, and the Bedford may still be one of the better choices if a single anthology is used, but the plays collected in Theatre Alive are simple enough to be teachable to high school students, linguistically innocuous enough to allow the high school teacher to keep his or her job, and complete enough to replace those old drama books that we never use. The only advantage that I see the drama textbooks having is that they have pictures, and we really do like students to see the grandeur of what can be done on stage, but the Internet makes up for this drawback to Bert's book. Most schools have some sort of computer lab these days, and students can be guided to see modern pictures of recent performances on the Internet. The only other complaint I can see with this book is that it doesn't have vocabulary lists and questions about the unit. In other words, it will not provide slack teachers a means of assigning busy work, but it will be a valuable tool for the rest of us.
The book begins with Bert's introduction to theatre and defense of this art form. Bert takes nothing for granted, beginning by questioning why we would study the history of an art form whose beauty is its immediacy. It's a valid question, and he answers it clearly. He states just as clearly in the introduction that the study of theatre history is not simply the study of fated evolution. In other words, theatre did not have to progress the way it did, and the progression does not dictate theatre's future; writers, actors, directors, producers, audience members, teachers, and students determine theatre's direction and survival.
