I was hired, in 2003, as a tenure-track assistant professor of English at Drake University. While Drake boasts a vibrant theater and drama program separate from the English department, I was hired as the “drama” professor, that is, the one who would conduct research and lead classes in literary-critical approaches to teaching and reading drama. I suspect that my own background in theater production—as an actor, director, and designer—had some bearing on my candidacy for the job, and a member of the theater department faculty served on my hiring committee. During the interview, I was given to understand that any steps I might take to begin building connections between English and the theater and drama department would be welcome, but that I would largely be on my own in doing so.As anyone hired into a tenure-track assistant professorship knows, creating administrative and operational synergies is a low-priority undertaking compared with building a tenurable record of scholarship, teaching, and service in one's home department. And, having been trained in drama, I came to Drake with the ability to teach both contemporary and historically distant texts. So, when I wasn't teaching directly in my specialty, I often served as a kind of utility infielder, covering classes for colleagues on sabbatical or designing courses that would fulfill both genre requirements and historical requirements for the majors. A revision of our curriculum, focusing on offering courses that integrate critical reading with creative, expressive, and analytical writing, also meant redesigning a literature course, titled “Reading Drama,” into a hybrid course, “Reading and Writing Drama” (emphasis mine). These, the usual burdens of tailoring one's teacherly repertoire to suit the needs of a new institutional context, together with administrative duties of one kind or another and the course reassignments that supported them, continued to draw on any energy and intellectual reserves I might have thought I could devote to integrating theater arts and literary study single-handedly.In short, the record I established and upon which I was tenured reflected a decidedly “English-department” version of drama. The considerations of performance and theater production that make their way into my courses magnified my literary-critical background and institutional context, which, I hasten to add, has always served me well in production contexts, but which may or may not find a cognate in the way courses on reading drama and playwriting in the theater and drama department are taught. Also, because mine is an English class, these production-oriented considerations emerge less by design and more as the occasion warrants. Sometimes, as I am about to explain, those occasions arise routinely; and yet, at the same time, unexpected conversations about the relationship of the study of English to the practice of theater can suddenly disrupt otherwise comfortable and serviceable disciplinary assumptions, and can do so in a way that is, in fact, salutary.“Reading and Writing Drama” is a lower-division class that asks students to critically examine and discuss twentieth-century and contemporary one-act plays as a means toward writing one of their own. In reading and discussing the plays, our goal is to identify, isolate, and analyze the maneuvers by which the texts—and here I emphasize texts—create a variety of effects. The students write weekly response papers in which they are to quote a single line or brief exchange from the assigned play and explain what effect it produces, and, reading the passage closely, how it does so. We consider word choice, punctuation, syntax, and grammar; we look at verb tenses and moods; and we imagine alternative ways that the same idea might have been phrased to produce quite different effects. Our method, then, is rooted in painstaking close reading.The course enrolls both English and theater majors, and so, shortly into every semester, one of the theater students will inform me and the rest of the class that the meaning and effect of a particular line—usually something from Pinter—depends on how the actor delivers it. “After all,” they'll say, as if it were so obvious as to barely need saying, “a script is just a starting point.” So used to these remarks am I that my response is practically memorized by now. It goes something like this: Yes, that's true, in a way. But in this class, we're not thinking like actors. We're thinking like playwrights. And to think like playwrights, first we have to face the fact that once the script is in the hands of a director, designer, and troupe of actors, they will do everything in their power to screw up what we've tried to say. They'll find the most unlikely modes of delivery; they'll set it to music; they'll costume your outer-space, futuristic masterpiece as if it were set among a pre-Columbian North-American tribe of mimes. As a playwright, your job is to minimize the director's and actors' propensity to misinterpret your lines. It's a losing battle, since ambiguity is built into language, and since we won't ever get the last word; but, it's a battle we have to fight if we want to write plays—and language is the only weapon we have. Against the actor's insistence that characters are made up of motivations, through-lines, sense images, personal histories, psychological depth, and human flesh, we have to continuously remind ourselves that characters are made of words. And so we have to use words to convey our intentions in the most iron-clad way we can. Usually, that does it. Most of the time, the obviously over-the-top rhetoric of this rant—stopping just short of “Cry God for Harold Pinter and Sam Beckett”—elicits laughter, particularly from the creative writing majors and the theater people majoring in design, stage management, and costuming, who have already had it up to here with the acting majors and their incessant vocal rest.But in spring 2017, the theater majors seethed; I knew at once that I had lost them (this was in week 5) or at least any stage credibility I might have had, however well I may have performed my role. They objected, argued, pouted, rolled their eyes, harrumphed, and gloated by turns. Everything, they had somehow come to understand, came down to the actors and their innate ability to intuit and convey the inner meaning—the “subtext”—of their lines. Without the actors on their side, playwrights are, after all, irrelevant.The next class period, I came determined to earn their respect back, and to offer another way into the question of text and performance, one that went beyond acknowledging the differences in the way an English course in playwriting might differ from a theater course in script analysis, and tried to convey the genuine regard I feel toward actors and directors and designers; after all, it was, as I've said, through acting and directing that I myself came to drama, and over the past two days, I had come to see the terms in which I routinely dismissed these ways of reading drama as a kind of neoformalist snobbery. I am not, by any means, renouncing my views that a play-text can be as complete and whole and valid an artistic achievement as a fully mounted production can be: Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, for instance, amply rewards reading and rereading. In fact, more than a handful of productions have diminished, not enlarged, the text they began from, some almost irreparably so. But I should also admit that some plays absolutely require a very compelling production to save them from their own banality or simple-mindedness or nauseating melodrama (Tracy Letts's August, Osage County springs to mind as one of these). Still, what I had gotten wrong, in my attempt to turn my students' focus away from the stage and back toward the page, was largely the manner in which I presented my case, more exorcism than evangelism.So, in that next class, I brought, as a starting point for discussion, a chart comparing the way we use the terms “meaning,” “character,” and “intention” in the realms of real life, theatrical production, and textual analysis. For instance, whereas in real life we think of the word “meaning” to include the intentions of actual human beings, in textual analysis it depends much more on the interplay between the symbolic choices an author makes and the interpretive dispositions of the readers; in theater, the term “meaning” is further complicated by actors' and directors' interpretations and the effect of the entire theater apparatus. By examining both the similarities and differences among how we use common terms inside and outside the theater context, we were able, then, to begin talking about the nature of academic disciplines and disciplinary conventions; we spoke of how a reader, writer, and performer come to texts with different goals, not just different epistemologies. And we engaged in dialogue about how we can all learn something by thinking across the disciplinary and professional boundaries surrounding us. For instance, writers must be mindful of the material limits of the stage, the constraints on the representation of time and space, the essentially collaborative nature of meaning-making in theater, and the degree to which inner states of mind must be made legible through language and gesture to be meaningful on stage. Likewise, actors need to come to a realization that meaning in language always depends upon the conventions of a symbolic system: No amount of meditation on motivation alone can bring an actor to a reliable understanding of what a speech or a line or even a word might be capable of meaning. Course evaluations told me there were a couple holdouts who decided that the class just hadn't been for them. But most ended up finding value in the experience and appreciated what they perceived to be my appreciation for the interpretive validity of production.Still, it was only during the question-and-answer session that took place not in my class, but a year later at the “Drama Drama” panel at the January 2017 Modern Language Association's annual convention in Philadelphia, that I began to see that my account of this experience, and my implicit lament that there isn't strong enough institutional support for cross-disciplinary teaching and learning in drama, relied on a latent sense of English's superiority to theater studies. “Yes, theater happens,” the subtext of my remarks said, “but it doesn't require the rigor and acumen demanded by literary study.” At the MLA panel, a series of questions—about what we in English—in particular, as teachers of writing—could learn from theater and performance—invited me to think through the inverse of this relationship.The overall sense that English does interpretation better than other disciplines, with which I walked into that panel, derived from a particular privilege—the privilege of not having to have anything to show for my interpretation except for my interpretation. When I present a reading of, say, Othello or Bernard Shaw's prefaces or Harold Pinter's drama, I am by and large reporting on an encounter between a fixed text and the relatively more fluid capabilities of my interpretive faculties. The stakes of getting an interpretation “wrong” are pretty low, even if my work gets past an editor or a reviewer; the institutional resources invested in my drama criticism are minimal and the outcome, for better or worse, has almost no palpable effect on any other human life but mine.Theatrical production, particularly when it either answers to the expectation of financial investors or serves an educational purpose, is a much higher-stakes venture than literary-critical interpretation alone. In the educational context alone, massive resources of time, energy, and treasure make a single production possible, and those expenditures always bear an opportunity cost: when a college or university invests many thousands of dollars into a full-scale production of a play, it has decided, in most cases, not to spend those dollars on something else: lab equipment, administrative assistance, a new H-VAC system, more bandwidth, what have you. And so, the freedom to play imaginatively in response to a script is constrained by the quite justifiable expectation that a high-quality production be mounted on time and within budget.By contrast, as an English professor I am unencumbered by resource constraints in deciding what texts to assign, what learning outcomes to pursue, and what assignments to give. Even as a playwright and a teacher of playwriting, I can ignore the constraints of any particular theater in conceptualizing and crafting my work and in assessing students' work. It finally does not matter, in my class, whether a play could actually be produced, because the goals we are pursuing in that course have to do with language and interpretation, not with production. And so, when I complain, as I have often done, that theater students' seem compelled to limit rather than open interpretive possibility and that production, as the goal of reading, places severe constraints on meaning making, I am, in a sense, complaining about the difference between material realities, each of which obtains in a different disciplinary space. If, however, I treated my students' time, patience, attention, and effort as a resource as limited and valuable as the resources that sustain theatrical production, might my pedagogy and my expectations change? I don't know, because it's a question I have only begun to think about, but I imagine that the answer is “yes.”In addition to being mindful about the wise use of scarce resources to achieve particular, definite goals, the performing arts may teach us in the more contemplative disciplines something about the idea of performance itself. We—that is, those of us whose professional activities do not place us before patrons of the theater—often use the word “performance” to describe what students do in our classes. They perform well or not so well on exams, writing assignments, and quizzes, for instance; but, if we thought of these “performances” in the same way an actor or director might, how might our understanding of student accomplishment change? If “homework” was conceived of as a kind of practice, if the classroom or the blank page was imagined as rehearsal space, and if formal assignments were thought of as performances in the theatrical sense, might we not discover a vocabulary for engaging students more meaningfully in the work of learning?Finally, as we in the traditional humanities continually invent excuses for not doing student-learning assessment or not doing it very well or doing it only half-heartedly, the performing and fine arts have integrated assessment into the very materiality of their practices. When a production opens in the theater, the work of the director, designers, technicians, stage management team, and actors is on public display, inviting critical and evaluative responses. Student learning, in other words, is fully on display, available for assessment. Studio performances and juries in music departments and studio critique and juried exhibitions in the visual arts are so central to both formative and summative assessment, and the responsibility for carrying them out so frequently shared among the faculty, that the silly platitudes of us humanists, who say things like “You can't assess interpretation” or “I just know when a student in my class ‘gets it,’” wither. If the fine and performing arts can muster the courage to put student and faculty work alike on display and to engage in serious, rigorous, and systematic assessment of teaching and learning, then certainly we, who teach writing and literary study, can, too. Assessment, after all, through performance and juries, has never been seen to undermine the project of learning in the fine and performing arts, and, indeed, serves as a means toward continuous improvement in student and faculty work alike.And so, in addition to expressing the wish that we might more fully integrate performance-based and text-based approaches to reading, criticism, and interpretation across disciplinary divides, I want also to express a commitment to learning from my colleagues in the arts, particularly about pedagogy and assessment. The possibility of this kind of engagement is precisely what my more-or-less scripted response to student resistance in my reading and writing drama class worked against. I will, I confess, be sorry to give up that monologue: it has been a fun role to play, and it has allowed a lot of self-indulgent and self-righteous scenery-chewing. I won't give up on trying to introduce students to the disciplinary assumptions we make as writers and readers in an English department; but I will remember that the meaning and effect of what I wish to share with them depends a lot on how I deliver the lines.