Many of us seek to involve students in our courses in ways that lectures, textbooks, tests, papers, and even discussions don't provide. A student working in a science lab is much more likely to grasp the principles than another one trying to memorize a page in a text. Some courses send students out into the field, others arrange internships, and still others encourage problem solving with as practical an orientation as possible. I have found success using another approach, one that requires just a bit of imagination and involves the students in some role-playing.

Theatre 101, Introduction to the Study of Theatre, is a general education course at California State University Bakersfield that typically enrolls forty to sixty students (mostly in their first or second years), who are pursuing majors ranging from criminal justice to psychology to business administration to liberal studies. Theatre is a participatory, social, vital, and active art form—one hardly congruent with a traditional large lecture course. Yet the principal course objective is to guide the students towards becoming informed audience members—people who can attend a theatrical event and better understand the experience, what it means, and how it's accomplished. Upon returning to teaching the course after a hiatus of several years, I resolved to find a more effective way to engage the students. My new strategy involves organizing the students into groups of four in order to mount virtual theatrical productions, and I present the instructions and information in a Website configured as a game called "Broadway."

In the old version of my course, I relied heavily on lectures, taking the students on a tour of the production process (playwright, playscript, theatrical space, director, designers, actors, technicians, performance, and audience), introducing them to such topics as "theatre in America," "ethnic theatre," and "theatre on a screen," and even attempting hasty glimpses of such historical high-water marks as classical Greece, Shakespearean England, and Moliére's France. I also sent them to see a few shows: our own major production of the term, plus a couple of plays produced by local community theatres or the occasional touring troupe like the Guthrie or Seattle Rep.

In general, I was satisfied with my broad strategy, which aimed at bringing the students to the field from both the inside and the outside, giving them some understanding of the process and some appreciation of the result. Yet in actuality, the course made the students too passive—they read the book and they listened to lectures. I hadn't found enough ways to generate class discussions (if you know but little about a topic, you have difficulty talking about it), and Bakersfield just doesn't offer enough professional theatre to permit my fantasy, which would consist of sending the students to a different play every week. I know of instructors who turn their Theatre 101 courses into seat-of-your-pants performance exercises, with untrained and inexperienced students rehearsing and presenting one-acts or scenes in the classroom, but I feel that such an activity too closely resembles what we do in our beginning acting course, and I believe that the pressure of even low-key production can distract the students' attention from the big picture.

To complicate my pedagogical problems, the typical group of Theatre 101 students presents some challenges. Many have never seen a live stage production, and most have read only the few plays required in their high school English classes, so they come to class with little experience in making insightful aesthetic judgments. Because the course has no prerequisites, many are still learning how to write even brief university-level essays.

My solution was Broadway. The students form production companies that mount virtual productions in an imaginary city called "Gotham." Each company includes four people: a producer, a director, a scenic designer, and a costume designer. Each company chooses a play from three I assign, and then each company chooses a theatre from three imaginary venues I provide.

Each director devises a production concept, each designer formulates some visual ideas, and each producer allocates the budget I've assigned. Everyone in the class auditions so the directors may "cast" their shows. At the end of the term, each company presents a solution to a problem I assign at random, such as poor reviews, the effects of inflation, or censorship by local jurisdiction.

I create my websites using Adobe PageMill, one of the popular applications that permits even a beginner to create pages without knowing anything about HTML. For the Broadway website, I went cold turkey, composing Broadway almost entirely from straight text because I wanted the site to load quickly, even for the impatient student who is writing an assignment the night before it's due while "sipping" the data through the constricted straw of an ordinary modem connected to a telephone line. Each page is as simple and clear as I can make it—the point is to provide, not to dazzle.

My first version included a gallery of pictures intended as potential settings and costumes for the designers, but I couldn't begin to cover all the possibilities, and after watching the results in a couple of sections, I decided that the students would have much more fun (and come up with better results) if I let them loose to find or create their own material.

Most of the information is available on the website. From the home page, the students can jump to descriptions of their various job roles, to information about the three plays, to details about the three theatres, or to the instructions for the game. Each page provides unobtrusive links to related pages. Anyone who gets lost can consult a site map configured as an index.

Could I have assembled all of the information and instructions as a printed course packet? Yes, but the beauty of the website lies in the hyperlinks because they permit the student to act on the impulse to learn more about the topic of the moment. Any printed resource presents its contents in linear fashion—word by word, page by page, and so on, and most books and articles are written under the assumption that the reader will progress from the beginning to the end. Yet a website is not linear but three-dimensional, so the student may explore the material not in the order I think best but on an "as-needed" basis.

For example, someone reading the page on auditions can jump to actors and from there to resident theatres (complete with external links to a variety of professional companies) or to the site run by the professional actors' union, Actors Equity Association. A student producer can jump to a summary of New York audience demographics, to a description of advertising media, or to a page listing ticket prices for shows in New York, which also includes links to a couple of online ticket sales services. I don't decide when a student is ready to learn about something; the student responds to the assignments in the game and investigates material in response to necessity or inspiration. I doubt that every student reads every page in Broadway, but I hope that each encounter is timely and meaningful.

Yet the digital aspect of Broadway is much less important than its interactive nature. During three of the four rounds in the game, the students are required to meet as companies during class time in order to discuss the question of the moment. For round one, each person has read the three plays, and each has written a one-page essay arguing a case for choosing one of them.

This assignment works best when the students advocate from the viewpoints of their roles. In other words, the director promotes The Heidi Chronicles because of its directorial challenges, the producer recommends Speed-the-Plow for reasons connected with marketing and finance, the scenic designer urges Macbeth for its visual potential, and so on. By playing the role of a theatre professional, each student has a chance to see the problems and challenges from a certain point of view. When each company meets in class, each person gets a chance to "pitch" a show, and then they vote on the question. The producer, of course, gets to break any ties.

After each round of meetings, the companies report to the class at large. This can be a lot of fun, especially in the early weeks of the term, when the companies are forming, agreeing on job assignments, and choosing names. Even university students can break out of their customary "cool" to enjoy the fact that a certain individual will direct the show, or that those four grinning people over there have chosen a particularly trendy name for their outfit. Yet when the tasks become more substantive, those who present the class reports tend to get very invested in making the case why this play or that theatre really is best for the company.

The role-playing is pleasantly appropriate for a theatre arts course, but it also provides a means of active learning. It is one thing to read a book or listen to a lecture and memorize how a company assembles a production, but anyone learns more effectively when faced with a problem to solve; the information serves the task. The student pretending to design costumes must study the play for ideas, respond to the director, appeal to the producer for funds, figure out what the characters should wear, and explain—even defend—the costume choices to the other group members as well as to the entire class.

For each round—choosing a play, choosing a theatre, and making a major contribution to the production—each student writes a short paper. In addition to rewarding competent writing, I evaluate each paper in terms of how creatively the student addresses the problem at hand and demonstrates command of the relevant issues and information. Altogether, these papers comprise 30% of the quarter grade, and the Broadway experience can contribute up to 10% more through the participation grade, which allows me to reward the energy and enthusiasm of people who speak up in class. I don't assign group grades, watching instead for above-average group interaction as well as situations in which an individual is trying to excel in spite of lackluster work by the others.

My only wish for the website is that someday it might include a plethora of graphics—photos, drawings and slick artwork—to address the fact that theatre is partly a visual medium. However, I'll wait until I know that the images won't slow down the pages as they load on the students' computers.

Broadway isn't the entire course; I still spend some time on lecture and discussion of various important issues that I want the students to consider—commercial vs. experimental theatre, public funding of the arts, and so on. Students still take reading quizzes and they still write short papers on plays they attend. Yet they now learn how it all works not by reading a book but by engaging —virtually—with the questions that involve theatre professionals every day. By pretending to work on the theatrical process and breaking it down into a series of challenges, the students think actively and creatively, and they leave the course with a better understanding of the results, which they can enjoy from their seats in the audience.