Review Author(s): STANTON B. GARNER, JR. Review by: STANTON B. GARNER, JR. Source: Comparative Drama, Vol. 26, No. 2 (Summer 1992), pp. 190-193 Published by: Comparative Drama Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41153567 Accessed: 08-06-2015 12:03 UTC
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Michael Vanden Heuvel. PerformingDrama! Dramatizing Performance: AlternativeTheater and the Dramatic Text. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991. Pp. [x] + 262. $32.50. Robert Wilson's 1987 staging of Heiner Müller's Hamletmachinelike his production,the year before, of Euripides' Alcestis- reflecteda shiftfrom the largely self-generatedtextualityof Wilson's early theater to a more interventionist stagingof establisheddramatic texts. This and similar shifts are the subject of PerformingDrama/Dramatizing Performance,Michael Vanden Heuvel's bold attemptto analyze the increasing intersectionof performance theater and literary drama since the mid-seventies.As the avant-garde has turned toward the textualityit once repudiated,Vanden Heuvel claims, the postmoderntheaterhas seen the emergence of "hybrid" forms, in which traditional literarydrama and performance"mutually deconstruct,interanimate,and redefineone another" (p. 65). Afteran historicaloverviewof contemporaryalternative theater,Vanden Heuvel analyzes the emergence of hybridfroms in the performancework of Wilson and the Wooster Group. To exemplifywhat - the opening of traditionalliterary he considers a parallel development drama to more radical performanceelements- he also discusses the plays of Samuel Beckett and Sam Shepard. According to Vanden Heuvel, the appearance of text-performance hybridswithincontemporaryperformancetheateris a directconsequence of the limitations,even failures,of earlier avant-gardeexperimentation. Sixties performancewas grounded in a rejectionof textual authorityand an elevation of performance as an antiauthoritarian celebration of irrationalityand unmediated wholeness. But the work of such groups as the Living Theater, Vanden Heuvel argues, merely replicated the unitary structuresagainst which it was ostensibly opposed: "such an agenda does not seek to displace textuality,but simplyto recuperate its illusion of Presence in another guise" (p. 45). Subsequent performance theaterwould reject this unitary,transcendentalnotion of performance. Paralleling the emerging poststructuralistcritique of such concepts, auteurs of the Richard Foreman, Wilson, Lee Breuer, and other artist/ seventiesdeveloped a deconstructiveaesthetic of performancein which language and other performativeelements were subject to deformation, estrangement,and recombinationand where the activitiesof theatrical creation and perceptionwere caught up in indeterminacyand play. Yet even these second-generationperformance artists advocated a practice that valorized performanceover textuality,whether this latter was the scriptedauthorial text of traditionaldrama or the broader texts of culture and history.Vanden Heuvel illuminates the shift by which the ahistoricismof the early-seventiesavant garde has given way to a theater where performanceconfrontsits inseparabilityfrom structures of textuality."Rather than tryingto move past traditionaltext-centered or by performance-as-play/ theater- whether by performance-as-ritual, - contemporaryartists are more inclined to critique theater's deferral bases of reproduction from within its own theatrical, dramatic, and performativematrices" (p. 63). Wilson has followed Hamletmachine with productions of Woolf s Orlando and Ibsen's When We Dead
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Awaken; Foreman has collaborated with Kathy Acker on The Birth of the Poet; Breuer's recent productions include Gospel at Colonus and Lear. In his longest (and best) chapter, Vanden Heuvel traces the emergence of this "hybrid" aesthetic within the work of the Wooster Group, from the Group's more strictlydeconstructiveproduction of Spalding Gray's Sakonnet Point (1975) to what we might call the "intertextualized"staging of Thornton Wilder's Our Town in Route 1 & 9 (The Last Act) (1981) and of Arthur Miller's The Crucible in L.S.D. (Just the High Points) (1984). In these latter works, Vanden Heuvel argues, the Wooster Group has directed its deconstructiveperformancetechniquestowardthe existingtextsof American culture,within which any theatrical event- including its own- is inescapably situated. PerformingDrama/Dramatizing Performance is a splendid reading of alternativetheaterand a fresh,intelligentanalysis of the hybridform that represents this tradition's most recent, and most clearly "postmodern," achievement.It draws upon contemporaryphysics and mathematics in order to articulate new models for the relationshipsbetween text and performance.The theoretical discussion gets a bit dense and self-consciousin places, particularlythe book's Introduction.But on the whole Vanden Heuvel writeswith facilityand authority,and his handling of the complex subject of performancetheateris vigorous and insightful. The book's other claim- concerninghybridformswithinmore traditional dramatic texts- is argued less successfully,although the chapters on Beckett and Shepard are writtenwith the vigor evident in the book as a whole. Vanden Heuvel is certainlyrightto deplore the extent to which dramatic texts and performance works have tended to be discussed in isolation from each other, and his attemptto find points of intersectionbetween the two traditions is admirable. But one cannot escape the impressionthat the fieldsof drama and performancetheater may not overlap to the degree that Vanden Heuvel claims, at least based on his readingsof Beckett and Shepard. In large part, the problems with his readings of these two playwrightsderive from a terminological fuzziness that recurs throughoutPerformingDrama/Dramatizing Performance- particularlyregardingthe key terms "drama" and "performance." AlthoughVanden Heuvel statesin his the book's Introductionthat he will adopt "ratherstrict"definitionsof the two terms,these definitions shiftand slide throughoutthe book. "Drama" is, at different times,taken to referto the dramatic text, cognitive activity,logocentrism,language, narrative,authorial control,power, determinate(though sometimesindeterminate) meaning,and Presence. Similarly,the term "performance"is taken to include the stagingof a text,theatricalactivitywithoutany text, stage business,improvisation,play, indeterminacy,and Absence (though sometimes Presence). Though each of these terms can (in specific contexts) bear the weight of any of these meanings, too many at once (or too many shiftsover the course of an argument) preclude distinctions necessaryfor specificapplications. Beckett's drama, for example- which Vanden Heuvel considers paradigmatic of the hybrid phenomenon as a whole- is characterized by "a consistent,theorized desire to displace authorial control through performance"(p. 68). The developmentof Beckettiantheater,according
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to thisargument,reveals a steadydecenteringof the textby "performative openness" and "powerlessness" (p. 93). The plays themselves,though, suggest the problems presented when such terms are applied without qualification.Far from being a domain of authorial powerlessness,the performance field of Beckett's late plays is clearly subject to strict - down to the level of lightintensityand the duration authorialscripting of individual silences. In comparison with the regimentedworld of Not I or Rockaby, one could argue, Waitingfor Godot offersfar more subversivepossibilityto the performers.Even if we were to take the audience as our point of measurementas it strugglesto deal withthe indeterminacy of the late plays in performance,the question remains: does this struggle result fromthe performanceor fromthe text,whose fragmentswork to disperse and rendermore deeply enigmaticthe image that appears before us? Faced with a play like That Time, one mightwell reverse Vanden Heuvel's formulationand argue that it the Beckettian text that is most deeply troué, most involved in cognitiveopenness. In the end, however, both text and performanceare vehicles of authorial control, as JoAnne Akalaitis found out when she attemptedgenuine performativeopenness in her production of Endgame, Similar questions are raised by Vanden Heuvel's discussion of Shepard. AlthoughShepard's late plays certainlyconstitutea synthesizing stage in Shepard's drama, joining the narrativeand stage conventionsof realism with narrative principles from Shepard's earlier, more avantgarde drama, does this developmentreally effecta new hybridof drama (as text) and performance?Vanden Heuvel's discussion of Buried Child identifiesTilden as the figurewho most fully"subvertsthe realist action of the drama" (p. 220), representing(it seems) the claims of performance on the dramatic text. But Tilden's actions are certainlyscripted, like all actions in the play, and though (like other stage business in the play) they challenge "textual" comprehension,they do so no more than the indeterminacyand strangenessof Shepard's text as a whole. Does the stagingof a play decenterits textualityeven when the parameters of this stagingare specifiedwithinthe text itself?Perhaps. But if so, this is somethingdifferentfrom (and tamer than) the competitionof text and performancein the Wooster Group and from the more radically autonomous, often more improvisatoryperformance generally found within avant-garde theater. When the "performativelevel" of Buried Child is claimed to represent"myth and potential transformation"(p. 221), the concept of performancestartsto resemble the very narrativity it was importedto subvert. Perhaps one should look to Shepard's music/text collaborationswith Joseph Chaikin in order to find a more true relinquishingof authorial power and a more radical example of text and performancecontesting place. In terms of contemporarydrama as a whole, Vanden Heuvel's argumentmighthave found more convincingsupportin Caryl Churchill, whose Brechtian commitmentshave resulted in a complex dramaturgy and whose career has been characterizedby of performance-against-text recurrentsurrendersof authorial control to the shared creativityof her theatrical collaborators. A Mouthful of Birds would make fascinating gristfor Vanden Heuvel's mill.
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This tendencyto misread the status of performancewith dramatists like Beckett and Shepard, and even the slipperiness that plagues the terms "drama" and "performance"throughoutthe book, should not be overstressed: they may point as much to the difficultiesinvolved in theorizingperformanceas they do to the book's unwillingnessto define. It is probably true that contemporarydrama is undergoing shiftsthat resemble those evident in performance theater (and in the work of individual performance artists like Carolee Schneeman and Rachel - like Akalaitis- who assume a deconstructive Rosenthal, or directors stance toward classic texts) even if Vanden Heuvel hasn't yet clarified the vocabulary for discussingthis trend. That this book may finallybe more secure with the subject of "Dramatizing Performance" than it is with the more vexed issue of "PerformingDrama" does not invalidate its many achievementsor the importanceof the questions it raises. With PerformingDrama/Dramatizing Performance,Michael Vanden Heuvel has claimed a place among those theorists(Philip Auslander and Elinor Fuchs come to mind) who discuss the most challenging work in contemporaryperformancetheater and who manage to engage theatrical issues that always seem to reside on the boundaries between disciplines. STANTON B. GARNER, JR. Universityof Tennessee, Knoxville Sandra Billington. Mock Kings in Medieval Society and Renaissance Drama. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. Pp. xiv + 287. $79.00. Sandra Billington'sbook is set up in the same way that the "Yale dissertation"used to be set up in American graduate studies until about twentyyears ago. After identifyinga distinctiveliterary pattern, she traces it through several key texts, noting its permutationin each. In her case, the pattern is "the mock king pattern," and the texts are several Renaissance English plays, includingsome of the best known by Shakespeare, from the Henry VI plays to The Tempest. This model for a comparative study of literatureis exemplifiedby Thomas Greene's The Descent from Heaven and A. Bartlett Giammatti's The Earthly Paradise in the Renaissance Epic. Perhaps its best known representation in studies of English Renaissance drama is Howard Felperin's Shakespearean Romance. Billingtonemploys this classic critical model with admirable learning to illuminate her subject in some new ways. Though she knows C. L. Barber's Shakespeare's Festive Comedy and refers to it several times, she avoids covering the same ground and bringsfreshinsightto several non-Shakespeareancomedies, especially Beaumont and Fletcher'sA King and No King (pp. 188- 96). Troilus and Cressida, King Lear, and Antony and Cleopatra are an unusual group, to say the least, but Billington's reading makes sense of them as "festivetragedies" that borrow fromthe mock kings of winterfestivals (Christmas, St. Stephens, Twelfth Night, Epiphany), though for reasons explained below I thinkshe makes more of some plays' associations with court festivitiesthan evidence permits. Angelo as a mock king presiding over a world of misrule is a fresh
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