ITI: Tomorrow’s Theatre Today

Abstract

The International Theatre Institute’s purpose, its charter declared, was “to promote international exchange of knowledge and practice in theatre arts.”¹ To this end, every member nation was required to establish and maintain a national center. The various national centers worked with each other and the Paris office for the “collection and diffusion of all types of information in the realm of theatre, the promotion of every initiative in favour of its free development in the world, the encouragement, to the maximum, of exchanges of works and of persons, … and, finally, with the issuance of such publications as may facilitate its activities.”² Rosamond Gilder, one of ITI’s founding members and head of the US-ITI Center, began one of their first meetings with a fundamental question about ITI itself: “Is it for the good of the theatre or for international understanding through the theatre?”³ C. Robert Kase, who two years earlier had founded the University of Delaware’s theatre department and was representing the American Educational Theatre Association (AETA), spoke quickly: “Both are important. The theatre should come first, but if we don’t have a world we wouldn’t have a theatre, so the secondary objective shouldn’t be lost sight of.” His comment was quickly seconded by Evelyn Burkey, who would later found the Writers Guild of America East.