Brooks McNamara died on May 8, 2009 at the age of 72. He was a longtime member of ASTR, served on the Executive Committee, and received the Distinguished Scholar Award and the Errol J. Hill Award in 1997. But his contribution to American theatre was amazingly diverse, and his influence on several generations of scholars cannot be overestimated.

Brooks was born in 1937 in central Illinois where his family had lived for over 100 years. He attended Knox College as an English and Art major, then studied at the University of Iowa’s Playwrights Experimental Theater program, and received his Ph.D. from Tulane University in 1965. Tulane, of course, was the home of the Tulane Drama Review, founded by Robert Corrigan, and at that time was at the leading edge of theatre studies. He subsequently taught at the University of Delaware. Corrigan, Richard Schechner, and Monroe Lippman moved from Tulane to the newly-founded NYU School of the Arts, and Brooks joined them in 1968. By the early 1970s, the faculty of the Department of Graduate Drama (precursor to Performance Studies) consisted of Schechner, Michael Kirby, Ted Hoffman, and Brooks McNamara and was home to the transplanted journal now known simply as The Drama Review. Brooks, in a sense, provided the fundamental core of the program. His course called Physical Theatre was the primary introductory class and focused on the material conditions of the theatre. All of his classes were firmly grounded in the conditions of performance and the experience of reception. Brooks retired from NYU in 1996.

His first book, The American Playhouse in the Eighteenth Century, was the first to explore early American theatre architecture and remains a landmark in the field. His background in stage design was employed by Richard Schechner who asked him to collaborate with Jerry Rojo on the environment for Makbeth, the second production of The Performance Group. Brooks’ second book, Theatres, Spaces, Environments, co-authored with Schechner and Rojo, was the first real examination of the architecture and design of environmental theatre and included a cogent history of the tradition by Brooks. The book, which is structured as a series of interviews by Brooks with Rojo and Schechner, demonstrates his meticulous work as an historian. The questions he poses keeps bringing his collaborators back to crucial details, examinations of physical space, the process that led to decisions, and so on. It is a model for anyone conducting interviews with theatre artists.

Brooks’ reputation as a scholar, however, was largely connected to his lifelong exploration of popular entertainments and culture, and he was an early champion of moving the concept of theatre into a much broader category of performance. In “Broadway: A Theatre Historian's Perspective,” written for the Winter 2001 issue of TDR, he set out what might be considered his credo: “The theatre in any time is not exclusively made up of high art, but of a complex of related forms: popular and amateur entertainment, and, in the 20th century, to a great extent, radio, television, motion pictures, and the internet. Until recently, most of these have been ignored by historians of theatre and drama, though they are important influences on the theatre and are influenced by it.” Among the 13 books that Brooks wrote or edited, sometimes with co-authors or editors, are studies of medicine shows, the New York concert saloons, festivals and parades in New York City, and minstrel shows; he edited the Popular Entertainments issue of TDR in 1974; and has written numerous articles on the subject. He was even the creator of Healin' and Hawkin' THE VI-TON-KA MEDICINE SHOW, a recreation of an old-time medicine show which was performed at the American Place Theater in New York in 1983. He even wrote a children’s book about a family of rather bad vaudevillians. Brooks’ home was a veritable museum of ephemera from a vast array of popular forms.

His most lasting contribution to the American theatre may be his role as the founding director of the Shubert Archives. In that capacity for 20 years he oversaw the consolidation, preservation, and cataloguing of several million items dating back to the 19th century that comprise the vast Shubert archives, and made them accessible to scholars around the world.

His equally significant contribution was as an advisor. Brooks McNamara oversaw at least 100 dissertations during his 30 years as a teacher. His influence in that regard was profound.

Brooks McNamara was an historian in the truest sense of the word. The word ‘history’ comes from the Greek, istoria, meaning a learning or knowing by inquiry according to the OED, and a narrative of the findings of that inquiry. An historian is an istor, a learned, wise man. Brooks was indeed a wise man who delighted in telling the story of theatre.

Arnold Aronson

Columbia University