Against Theatre
Performance Interventions Series Editors: Elaine Aston, University of Lancaster, and Bryan Reynolds, University of California, Irvine Performance Interventions is a series of monographs and essay collections on theatre, performance, and visual culture that share an underlying commitment to the radical and political potential of the arts in our contemporary moment, or give consideration to performance and to visual culture from the past deemed crucial to a social and political present. Performance Interventions moves transversally across artistic and ideological boundaries to publish work that promotes dialogue between practitioners and academics, and interactions between performance communities, educational institutions, and academic disciplines. Titles include: Alan Ackerman and Martin Puchner (editors) AGAINST THEATRE Creative Destructions on the Modernist Stage Elaine Aston and Geraldine Harris (editors) FEMINIST FUTURES? Theatre, Performance, Theory Lynette Goddard STAGING BLACK FEMINISMS Identity, Politics, Performance Leslie Hill and Helen Paris (editors) PERFORMANCE AND PLACE Melissa Sihra (editor) WOMEN IN IRISH DRAMA A Century of Authorship and Representation Forthcoming titles: Amelia M. Kritzer POLITICAL THEATRE IN POST-THATCHER BRITAIN Performance Interventions Series Standing Order ISBN 1 4039 4443 1 Hardback 1 4039 4444 X Paperback (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England
Against Theatre Creative Destructions on the Modernist Stage Edited by Alan Ackerman and Martin Puchner
Introduction, selection and editorial matter Alan Ackerman & Martin Puchner 2006 Chapters 3, 4, 6 and 10 Modern Drama 2001 All other chapters Palgrave Macmillan 2006. The Introduction and chapters 3, 4, 6 and 10 were originally published in Modern Drama volume XLIV, number 3, Fall 2001 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2006 978-1-4039-4491-7 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2006 This paperback edition first published 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 978-0-230-53745-3 DOI 10.1057/9780230289086 ISBN 978-0-230-28908-6 (eb ook) This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Against theatre : creative destructions on the modernist stage / edited by Alan Ackerman & Martin Puchner. p. cm. (Performance interventions) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Experimental theater History 20th century. 2. Performing arts History 20th century. 3. Experimental drama History and criticism. I. Ackerman, Alan L. (Alan Louis) II. Puchner, Martin, 1969 III. Series. PN2193.E86A33 2006 792.02 23 dc22 2005055291 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07
For Barbara Johnson and Elaine Scarry
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Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Note on the Contributors viii ix x 1 Introduction: Modernism and Anti-Theatricality 1 Alan Ackerman and Martin Puchner Part I Frames 2 Avant-Garde Scenography and the Frames of the Theatre 21 Arnold Aronson 3 Clown Shows: Anti-Theatricalist Theatricalism in Four Twentieth-Century Plays 39 Elinor Fuchs 4 Anti-Theatricality in Twentieth-Century Opera 58 Herbert Lindenberger 5 All the Frame s a Stage : (Anti-)Theatricality and Cinematic Modernism 76 Charlie Keil Part II Materials 6 Anti-Theatricality and the Limits of Naturalism 95 Kirk Williams 7 Deploying/Destroying the Primitivist Body in Hurston and Brecht 112 Elin Diamond 8 John Cage s Living Theatre 133 Marjorie Perloff 9 Mallarmé, Maeterlinck and the Symbolist Via Negativa of Theatre 149 Patrick McGuinness vii
viii Contents Part III Values 10 Narrative Theatricality: Joseph Conrad s Drama of the Page 171 Rebecca L. Walkowitz 11 The Curse of Legitimacy 189 David Savran 12 Performing Obscene Modernism: Theatrical Censorship and the Making of Modern Drama 206 Julie Stone Peters 13 Seeming, Seeming: The Illusion of Enough 231 Herbert Blau Index 248 Illustrations 1 John Cage, Roaratorio: An Irish Circus on Finnegans Wake (1985) 141 2 The danse du ventre at the Chicago World s Fair (1893): a suggestively lascivious contorting of the abdominal muscles, which is extremely ungraceful and almost shockingly disgusting 207
Acknowledgements We gratefully acknowledge the journal Modern Drama for granting us permission to reprint four chapters of this volume as well as parts of the introduction and afterword, which first appeared in a special issue entitled Modernism and Anti-Theatricality (Fall 2001). Thanks also to the editors of the journal at that time, Ric Knowles, Joanne Tompkins and W. B. Worthen, who allowed us to serve as guest-editors. Also at Modern Drama, Kim Solga and Sylvia Hunter were indispensable in seeing the articles to press. We are also pleased for our book to inaugurate Palgrave s Performance Interventions series and wish to extend special thanks to Bryan Reynolds for helping to make that possible. We gratefully acknowledge those at Palgrave who have contributed to this project along the way: Paula Kennedy, Helen Craine and Penny Simmons. We are delighted to take this opportunity to thank Andrea Most and Amanda Claybaugh for reading drafts of the introduction and for their support in innumerable ways as we worked on this project. Finally, we wish to express our deep gratitude to two of our finest teachers, Elaine Scarry and Barbara Johnson, to whom we dedicate this book. They taught us that to think against can also be a way of thinking for and that to resist representation is to challenge assumptions about the world and, at the same time, to intervene in it. The jacket reproduces Picasso s Harlequin 2006 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. ix
Note on the Contributors Alan Ackerman is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Toronto. He is author of The Portable Theater: American Literature and the Nineteenth-Century Stage and editor of the journal Modern Drama. Arnold Aronson is Professor of Theatre at Columbia University. He has written on both avant-garde theatre and scenography. His books include The History and Theory of Environmental Scenography, American Set Design, American Avant-Garde Theatre: A History and Looking into the Abyss: Essays on Scenography. He will be the Commissioner General of the 2007 Prague Quadrennial. Herbert Blau is Byron W. and Alice L. Lockwood Professor of the Humanities at the University of Washington. He has also had a distinguished career in the theatre, as co-founder and co-director of The Actor s Workshop of San Francisco, then co-director of the Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center in New York, and as artistic director of the experimental group KRAKEN, the groundwork for which was prepared at California Institute of the Arts, of which he was founding Provost, and Dean of the School of Theater and Dance. Among his books are Take Up the Bodies: Theater at the Vanishing Point, The Audience, To All Appearances: Ideology and Performance and, recently, Sails of the Herring Fleet: Essays on Beckett. He has also published a book recently on fashion, Nothing in Itself: Complexions of Fashion, and a new collection of essays, The Dubious Spectacle: Extremities of Theater, 1976 2000. He is currently working on As If: An Autobiography. Elin Diamond is Professor of English at Rutgers University. She is the author of Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and Theater and Pinter s Comic Play, and editor of Performance and Cultural Politics. Her essays on performance and feminist theory have appeared in Theatre Journal, ELH, Discourse, TDR, Modern Drama, Kenyon Review, Cahiers Renaud-Barrault, Art and Cinema, MASKA and in anthologies in the United States, Europe and India. She is at work on a new book on modernism and performance. Elinor Fuchs is Professor of Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism at the Yale School of Drama. She is author of The Death of Character: Perspectives x
Note on the Contributors xi on Theater after Modernism, winner of the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism, and the Choice Outstanding Academic Book citation. She is co-editor of Land/Scape/Theater and co-author of the documentary play Year One of the Empire, which won the Drama-Logue Best Play award for its Los Angeles production. Her articles and essays on theatre have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. She has taught at Columbia, Harvard and Emory universities, and has been the recipient of Rockefeller and Bunting Fellowships. Her most recent book is Making an Exit, a memoir about her mother. Charlie Keil is Associate Professor in the History Department and the Cinema Studies Programme at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Early American Cinema in Transition: Story, Style and Filmmaking, 1907 1913 and co-editor, with Shelley Stamp, of American Cinema s Transitional Era: Audiences, Institutions, Practices. In addition to numerous essays on early cinema, he has published on documentary and contemporary cinema. Herbert Lindenberger is Avalon Foundation Professor Humanities Emeritus at Stanford University. Besides books on Wordsworth, Büchner and Trakl, his writings includes studies of historical drama and critical theory. He has published two books on opera, Opera: The Extravagant Art and Opera in History: From Monteverdi to Cage. He is currently writing a series of essays on the interactions of various art forms. Patrick McGuinness is Fellow and Tutor in French at St Anne s College, Oxford. His books include Maurice Maeterlinck and the Making of Modern Theatre, Symbolism, Decadence and the Fin de Siècle and Anthologie de la poésie symboliste et décadente. He has also edited T. E. Hulme s Selected Writings and written a book of poems, The Canals of Mars. Marjorie Perloff is Sadie D. Patek Professor Emerita of Humanities at Stanford University and currently Scholar-in-Residence at the University of Southern California. She is the author of a dozen books, among them, co-edited with Charles Junkerman, John Cage: Composed in America and, most recently, The Vienna Paradox and Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy. Martin Puchner is the H. Gordon Garbedian Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and author of Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality and Drama as well as Poetry of the
xii Note on the Contributors Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Gardes. He has written introductions to works by Henrik Ibsen, Karl Marx and Lionel Abel and is co-editor of the Norton Anthology of Drama. He is also the associate editor of Theatre Survey. David Savran, distinguished Professor of Theatre and Vera Moury Roberts Chair in American Theatre, CUNY Graduate Center, is author of A Queer Sort of Materialism, Taking it Like a Man, Communists, Cowboys, and Queers: The Politics of Masculinity in the Works of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, Breaking the Rules: The Wooster Group and co-editor of The Masculinity Studies Reader. Julie Stone Peters is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. A specialist in early modern and modern comparative drama, her most recent book is Theatre of the Book: Print, Text, and Performance in Europe, 1480 1880 (winner of the ACLA Harry Levin Prize, among others). She is currently working on a study of the historical relationship between theatre and the law. Rebecca L. Walkowitz is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and an editor of six books in the field of literary and cultural studies, including The Turn to Ethics and the forthcoming Bad Modernisms, and author of the forthcoming Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation. Kirk Williams teaches at the Yale School of Drama. He has published work on German literature and culture, modern drama and the role of technology in the humanistic disciplines. He is currently finishing a book that explores the relationship between the German stage and military theory and practice from the eighteenth century to the Third Reich.