Understudy-ied Theatre History is a digital humanities project created by Dara Willmarth and Colleen Rooney dedicated to remembering playwrights lost to history. Both Willmarth and Rooney are recent graduates of the University of Oregon’s Theatre Department who share a love of delving into theatre history and spreading their wealth of knowledge with others. The project itself was created for Willmarth’s capstone project for her minor in Digital humanities and functions as a multimedia narrative, built using WiX. When you arrive on the homepage you’re met with vibrant bold font contrasted against a neutral background with sepia toned images, which pulls you in and forces you to focus on the content at hand. The site hosts two options for engaging with the content, a page dedicated to the podcast they’ve created and a blog section that provides additional background information on the playwright, as well as a transcript for each playwright’s corresponding podcast. There are bibliographies provided for the books used to create the blog post and podcast of each playwright, as well as music information provided from sound cloud and credits provided for the photos used, whether that be Getty Images, New York Public Library, or Wikimedia Commons. While the site is quite minimal, it functions well, and provides a clear understanding for the user, thus providing a lovely experience.

Back to the heart of the project, the playwrights. The women featured in this project are playwrights that Willmarth and Rooney believe to be significant, whose works deserve to be held in the same esteem, and as celebrated as playwrights that almost everyone in the theatre community would be aware of today. The goal of this project seems to be an attempt to expand the knowledge of anyone who enjoys theatre or engages with the theatre community. By creating this podcast and blog site, these creators are attempting to create equity in the history of playwrights, writing the wrongs of the theatre’s historical past. It’s a conversational call to action, to get these playwrights the recognition they deserve, and to add more diversity to the historical selection of plays that are almost always over performed. Again, while the site itself is simple, the focus is solely on the playwrights being remembered, as the creators want nothing to detract from their importance, their moment to shine.

I have never dissected or reverse engineered a project before, which made this lab a challenge. A welcome challenge, but a tough challenge. Perhaps it’s the English major in me, but I kept looking over the projects details, wanting to close read the entire site, never feeling satisfied with the description of my reverse engineering. I’m not certain that I’ve ever looked at a website so closely, thinking of how it functions and what the full purpose of it is, but not I’m not sure I can go forward in life without doing so. I’m so intrigued by this lab and how it opened my eyes, frustrated me, and pushed me to grow.

Questions I found important while looking at digital humanities projects:

• Why should I care about this project?
• How are you trying to convince me to care?

I’m left caring about this project because I’m someone who roots for those who’ve been left behind, whose time it is to rise and stand in the light they deserve. I delight in the stories of history, a people’s history. And while, yes, I am someone who loves theatre, what I love more are the people who create theatre, who relish in the history of theatre, who push against the norms and expectations, and reveal the gems who’ve gone unnoticed for far too long.