Cookbooks for Theory and Performance

Josephine Lee

Department of English
Smith College
jolee@smith

 

Case, Sue-Ellen, and Janelle Reinelt, eds. The Performance of Power: Theatrical Discourse and Politics. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991.

 

Reinelt, Janelle G., and Joseph R. Roach, eds. Critical Theory and Performance. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1992.

 

One can clearly see the directions in which research in theater and drama is moving by browsing through titles of new books and articles, of new journals that have begun or renewed their life in the last five years, and of papers presented at the annual conferences held by the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) and the American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR). Scholarship and criticism in theater and drama have become much more explicitly theoretical, and the theories used are much more interdisciplinary, with New Historicism, feminist theory, and now cultural studies, moving to the forefront. Not only have the old theories of theater and drama lost their exclusive charms; what is considered the primary object of study is no longer what happens in the theater and even less what can be read on the pages of the playtext. Performance has become a much broader, even all-encompassing term, and there is no longer an easy distinction between the theatrical and the real. Though theatricality, acting, and the stage have long provided those working in other disciplines (Sigmund Freud, Kenneth Burke, Erving Goffman, Judith Butler, to name a few) with easy metaphors, it is more novel and refreshing to have those who have worked more closely with theater turn their attention to events which take place off as well as on the stage.

 

Two recent collections, The Performance of Power and Critical Theory and Performance, act as methodological cookbooks illustrating this “nouvelle cuisine” of performance studies. Both offer a variety of recipes for the ways in which current critical theory might intersect with drama, theater, and performance. Reading either would give one a good idea of what, professionally speaking, is in demand: what is considered nutritious, desirable, appetizing, successful. This is not to say that either book is geared toward the novice; on the contrary, negotiating the ambitious and rather dizzying range of essays presented in these books demands at least some sophistication. But at the same time a certain didacticism can be read, both explicitly and implicitly, in both books. For those who are desirous of success in a field increasingly focused on academic professionalism, the books promise at least a cursory sense of competence with what one needs to interact, publish, and establish oneself.

 

The editors of both books, to their credit, make this didacticism clear. Janelle Reinelt and Sue-Ellen Case, the editors of The Performance of Power state explicitly how their book might work as an “entry-level text–a how-to for beginning to apply such considerations to theatrical texts and practices” (xix). Critical Theory and Performance also turns itself into a teaching text by supplying careful introductions, summarizing theoretical viewpoints, identifying seminal texts, and defining key terminology, all the while advertising the excitement of applying the “new theory” to drama, theater, and performance.

 

Thus it is worth looking more closely not only at the individual essays included in these books, but also these organizing principles and agendas which inform them. My criticisms of both books are directed primarily at the latter. This is not to deny that the books do contain individual articles which are noteworthy in their own right. Joe Roach’s work on the “artificial eye” of Augustan theater, Spencer Golub’s on the iconization of Chaplin in postrevolutionary Russia, and Tracy Davis’s readings of Annie Oakley in particular show the exciting results of critical theory, meticulous scholarship, and intelligent writing. And even the more tentative essays included here do provide useful models for the appropriate ways in which experimentation is allowed to take place, and deviation from norms is allowed to occur.

 

Yet I would focus on some of the distinct disadvantages of embracing the power structures inscribed within certain kinds of academic discourse. Although these two books clearly show evidence of how the “new theory” provides the fuel for some exciting work, they also make plain that dimension of what is inevitably disagreeable and frustrating about scholarship. With the eagerness to take on the terms of the “new theory” comes the occasional oversimplification of theory into formula, a willingness to teach rather conventional lessons of academic professionalism, and to that end, a deployment of confused and sometimes misleading arrangements of methodological categories.

 

Particularly revealing are the ways in which the books create theoretical space both through the choice of essays, and the headings they assign to them. The personal taste and prejudices of the editors seem less important than their attempts to negotiate the complex expectations of the academic profession. Both books shun the old historical periodizations and cultural distinctions, and instead follow divisions loosely guided by post-structuralist theory, bearing the headings “Materialist Semiotics,” “After Marx,” and “Critical Convergences.”

 

Where such headings become troubling is where the articles which follow them are not elucidated by them. The first two sections in The Performance of Power, for instance, are labelled “Materialist Semiotics” and “Deconstruction.” None of these terms seems all that clear to begin with, and the very different choices made in each of the essays, of subject matter and line of interrogation, makes the terminology even more confusing. For example, both “Materialist Semiotics” and “Deconstruction” cover a great range of topics: Kim Hall on the discourse of blackness in the Jonsonian masque, Sarah Bryant-Bertail on The Good Soldier Schwejk and the apparatus of political theater, David Savran on the Wooster Group, J. Ellen Gainor on imperialist Shaw, Geoffrey Bredbeck on Renaissance sodomy, and Jeffrey Mason on John Augustus Stone’s 1892 Metamora. Each of these essays is less wedded to the others by persistent theoretical questioning than by an appeal to older, tried-and-true foundations of historical research. Although the political cast gives the task a new urgency, the methodology remains based on close textual readings bent on unearthing historical and textual evidence for interpretation. Clearly, this is still effective. But though the quality of the essays is high, it remains unclear what they are doing in these theoretical categories. Not surprisingly, the exception is when one of the editors of this volume, Sue-Ellen Case, makes more of an effort to investigate questions of theory and methodology in her own contribution to the “Deconstruction” section. Her essay “The Eurocolonial Reception of Sanskrit Poetics” is less a reading of specific plays than a first attempt at investigation of the “strategies of concealment, suppression, and displacement” that take place in the works of theater critics, historians, and practitioners who, in constructing Sanskrit theatrical traditions, inevitably collude with “colonial imperial practices” (124).

 

The same uneasiness haunts Critical Theory and Performance. Although its introduction is designed to answer much more explicitly theoretical questions, its categorization of essays too renders unclear what “deconstruction” for the theater is, and what distinguishes it from “semiotics.” Here both terms are placed into a single category: “Semiotics and Deconstruction.” That two such different theoretical articulations should seem so much alike in practice remains unexplained here as well. The articles included in this section of Critical Theory are all centered on contemporary productions: Jim Carmody explores the transplantation of The Misanthrope to 1989 Hollywood, David McDonald writes with a director’s view of his own productions of David Hare’s Fanshen, and John Rouse examines the Wooster Group, Heiner Muller, and Robert Wilson. Such a choice might provide a perfect opportunity to discuss the problems of historical reconstruction of the theatrical event, and the implicit claim for the authoritative presence of spectatorship: central issues for poststructuralist theory. But such a conversation is lacking in both the essays and introduction, as is any sustained discussion of postmodernist theater practice.

 

Again, a too-easy conflation of theoretical terms in the “Hermeneutics and Phenomenology” section of Critical Theory and Performance puts both essays included here at a disadvantage. The insights of Thomas Postlewait’s “History, Hermeneutics, and Narrativity” are more useful in conjunction with the earlier section on “Theater History and Historiography.” Postlewait’s thoughts on how the “challenge for historians . . . is to understand better how the models and discourse of narrativity organize the writing process” Critical Theory 363) work beautifully to help frame earlier essays, such as Tracy Davis’s fascinating study of Annie Oakley and her “ideal husband,” and to support the skepticism of both Rosemary Bank and Vivian Patraka towards the dualistic discourse of political theater. The essay which is paired with Postlewait, however, is Bert State’s “The Phenomenological Attitude.” State’s eloquent essay deserves accompaniment from others involved with the practice of phenomenological criticism or perhaps studies of audience reception. As it is, States’s essay exists in a vacuum, as a kind of ghost theory from the past, and one is tempted to pass it over for the more glittering theories of the other sections.

 

The “Psychoanalysis” section of Critical Theory and Performance seems rather bare as well. Although it contains two essays which are interesting in their own right, one by Elin Diamond on theatrical identification, and the other by Mohammad Kowsar on Lacan’s reading of Antigone, the pairing does not work. I was struck by how empty this section seems in light of what disciplines such as film studies have been able to do with Freud and Lacan. That psychoanalytic theory has had a profound effect on theory and performance is evident throughout the book, and other essays could easily have been redistributed to give this section more weight. In particular Sue- Ellen Case’s later article, with its metaphor of the “coupling” of theory and history in some “primal scene,” might have been placed here instead of in the final section entitled “Critical Convergences.” For that matter, Herbert Blau’s piece, also in this final section, would have worked as well or better in “After Marx.” Eliminating this final section would also help avoid the troubling implication that well-known critics such as Case and Blau deserve their own special section and the last word on as well as in critical theory and performance.

 

But a troubling reliance on the star system runs throughout Critical Theory and is implicit in The Performance of Power as well. Though neither book fully succumbs to what Gay Gibson calls the “blockbuster” approach of academic conference panels Power 258), both do make clear who the well-known scholars in the field are, and what they are interested in. More than once, certain essays seem to have been included for the sake of capturing the authoritative presence of the writer, rather than for scholarly or methodological reasons. Nina Auerbach’s essay “Victorian Players and Sages” is an uneasy choice for The Performance of Power; although Auerbach ends with Henry Irving and Ellen Terry, her interest is more thematic and literary, linking great works with other great works, Wordsworth with Bronte heroines. Janice Carlisle’s piece, which immediately precedes Auerbach’s, sheds far more light on the nature of Victorian theatricality. In light of all that Richard Schechner has done to encourage new approaches to the theater, his essay on “Direct Theater” is disappointing. Schechner makes the mistake of describing significant media events in a “You Are There” style, and removing them from their complex historical and political contexts. Some of his casual comparisons, such as that which he makes between the 1970 anti-Vietnam “carnival” held in Washington, and the 1989 protests by Chinese students in Tiananmen Square, can be downright insulting.

 

There also seems to be a marked tendency to insist on the relevance of well-known theorists for theatrical studies. When Marvin Carlson considers the possible uses of Bakhtin’s terms “dialogism” and “heteroglossia” for theater and performance, his conclusions are so optimistic that he out-Bakhtins Bakhtin. This eagerness to employ a theoretical vocabulary leads one to suspect that in the essays as well as the introductions, theoretical approaches are sometimes absorbed rather than questioned too closely. In the section labelled “Cultural Studies,” for instance, the first essays seem models of careful scholarship and sensitivity, a blend of traditional scholarship and new theoretical positions. It is not until James Moy’s article that the position of enlightened cultural critic is challenged. Moy finds what he calls a “new order of stereotypical representations” of Asians in plays hailed by others as breaking new ground. Moy’s objections, although not altogether agreeable, are argued with disconcerting vigor; his voice is polemical, challenging readers to dispute as well as applaud his efforts.

 

Overall, the most successful section in either book is the grouping in Critical Theory and Performance entitled “Feminism(s).” Here essays work with and against one another in ways both satisfying and thought-provoking. Of particular interest is Kate Davy’s essay, which persuasively argues the inability of lesbian performance to be served by using the strategy of camp, and Jill Dolan’s work, which questions what she calls the troubling “sanctimonious structures of politically correct lesbian identifications” (266), and looks for ways in which less attractive representations of gender and power might be reconciled with feminism. Jeanie Forte’s examinations of the theatrical female body, and Ellen Donkin’s work on Sarah Siddons as split subject, are also part of the focused and engaged set of theoretical questions that feminist critics explore inside and outside the theater.

 

In contrast, the other sections in Critical Theory and Performance seem rather tentative as articulations of theoretical positions. In the “After Marx” section in particular, the essays seem curiously restrained, and the heated debates anticipated in the introduction do not materialize. Most of the essays call for revision and reform, but do so in a tone of academic disengagement. Both Bruce McConachie’s perceptive examination of the term “production” a la Raymond Williams, and Philip Auslander’s interesting comments on stand-up comedy as baby-boomer refuge, make rather subdued conclusions. Jim Merod chooses a more polemical set of questions on theory and the academic profession, but his remarks seem directed at a very different audience; his section on jazz does not offer any insights into performance or theory more stirring than “it may be that music is the lingua franca of all people and all culture and that jazz is its most common discourse” (193). Most immediately and enjoyably provocative in this section is David Roman’s essay, which challenges the liberal view of AIDS as a scientific reality and the resultant rational/disinterested liberal response to the epidemic.

 

The Performance of Power avoids some of the problems which are accentuated in Critical Theory and Performance by not billing itself as a “theory” book, and preserving an emphasis on text and production. To this end, the book moves away from categories evoking poststructualist theory into headings such as “Revealing Surveillance Strategies” and “Constructing Utopias.” The book does not, however, treat the theater as a privileged aesthetic space of high culture; rather, it affirms that theatrical performance participates fully in the dynamics of power that characterize all forms of discourse. Power in the theater is not just what is represented within some fictionalized stage world, but also what is inscribed in the relationships between performers, spectators, and societies in the act of performing.

 

Happily, the book is suspicious of power in academic circles as well. The Performance of Power gives sustained attention to the power dynamics played out in academic departments, the classroom, and conference panels, in what Sue-Ellen Case calls “the production of knowledge at the site of the academy as performance” Critical Theory 422). The book begins with a narrative account of the specific conferences from which the idea for the collection took its shape, and ends with a section on the state of the profession, with a series of essays calling for the redistribution of power, more interdisciplinary research, and the need for revitalization of both research and pedagogy. While these final essays are vocal about the need for change as well as the changes that are already taking place, they express their complaints in rather too moderate and reasonable voices. I miss the angry and impassioned call for more radical institutional reform, and a more sustained self-questioning of the writer’s own complicity in the preserving the status quo.

 

Still, the power structures of the academy do come under fire in The Performance of Power, in ways that are oddly absent in Critical Theory and Performance. The latter volume has a much more cautious, “rules-of- the-game” feel to it. Billed on the back cover as “the first comprehensive introduction to critical theory’s rich and diverse contributions to the study of drama, theater, and performance,” it promises to teach state of the art academic professionalism to a field long accused of insularity and backwardness. Such an advertisement may go unchallenged; the other books, articles, and collections which might claim to be seminal in this field were also written by those very “leading critics and practitioners” who were “specially commissioned” for this book.

 

The Performance of Power and Critical Theory and Performance reveal much about the current demands of the field; to the skeptical and resistant reader, they will reveal even more. Even though these books leave many crucial questions of practice and methodology unanswered, they are important and necessary reading for anyone who wishes to engage critically with theater, drama, and performance studies; the choices made in both books are worth studying closely. To call something “deconstruction” is neither arbitrary nor whimsical, even when the term is unexplained or misapplied; it is by means of such labellings that a sub-discipline attains recognition and credibility within larger circles of discourse. We who study theater and drama have been relatively late in jumping onto the theory bandwagon. But now that we are on board, we must engage with the dynamics of power, authority, and value that are imposed by the new conventions as well as the old. Thus, professionally speaking, there is much to be gained through reading these books, even if only one or two of the individual essays are relevant to one’s own particular areas of interest. Whether one ultimately dismisses the “nouvelle” performance studies as mere passing fashion, or finds that it actually tastes good, to be active in the discipline today means at least sitting down to this sort of table. And I, for one, hate to eat alone.