Text & Presentation, 2007 (Text & Presentation) (The Comparative Drama Conference Series)

TEXT & PRESENTATION, 2007

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TEXT & PRESENTATION, 2007 Edited by Stratos E. Constantinidis

The Comparative Drama Conference Series, 4

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers Jefferson, North Carolina, and London

ALSO

BY

STRATOS E. CONSTANTINIDIS

Text & Presentation, 2006 (McFarland, 2007) Text & Presentation, 2005 (McFarland, 2006) Text & Presentation, 2004 (McFarland, 2005) Modern Greek Theatre: A Quest for Hellenism (McFarland, 200¡) Greece in Modern Times: An Annotated Bibliography of Works Published in English in Twenty-Two Academic Disciplines during the Twentieth Century (vol. 1, 2000) Theatre under Deconstruction? A Question of Approach (¡993)

ISSN ¡054-724X • ISBN 978-0-7864-3387-2 softcover : 50# alkaline paper

©2008 The Executive Board of the Comparative Drama Conference. All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. On the cover: Mosaic of Dionysus riding a Leopard ca. A.D. 180 (Bridgeman Art Library) Manufactured in the United States of America

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers Box 6¡¡, Je›erson, North Carolina 28640 www.mcfarlandpub.com

Acknowledgments This issue of Text & Presentation and the 3¡st Comparative Drama Conference were funded, in part, by the Department of Theatre and Dance, the College of Communication and Fine Arts, and the Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts at Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles; as well as by the Department of Greek and Latin, the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures, and the Department of English at the Ohio State University. This publication would not have been possible without the commitment and expertise of our editorial board: Marvin Carlson (City University of New York, Graduate Center), Miriam Chirico (Eastern Connecticut State University), Harry Elam (Stanford University), William Elwood (Southern Connecticut State University), Les Essif (University of Tennessee, Knoxville), Yoshiko Fukushima (University of Oklahoma), William Gruber (Emory University), Jan-Lüder Hagens (University of Notre Dame), Karelisa Hartigan (University of Florida), Graley Herren (Xavier University, Cincinnati), William Hutchings (University of Alabama, Birmingham), Baron Kelly (Chapman University), David Krasner (Yale University), Je›rey Loomis (Northwest Missouri State University), Helen Moritz (Santa Clara University), Jon Rossini (University of California, Davis), Elizabeth Schar›enberger (Columbia University), Laura Snyder (Ball State University), Tony Sta›ord (University of Texas, El Paso), Ron Vince (McMaster University), Kevin J. Wetmore Jr. (Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles), and Katerina Zacharia (Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles). I am also grateful to a significant number of additional specialists who participated in the anonymous review of the many manuscripts submitted to me for publication consideration. I would like to thank our associate editor, Kiki Gounaridou (Smith College), who assisted with the proofreading of this volume, and our book review editor, Verna Foster (Loyola University Chicago) who solicited, edited, and proofread the book reviews. The past editors of Text & Presentation deserve recognition for their contribution in establishing the reputation and standards for this annual publication: Karelisa Hartigan (¡980–¡993), Bill Free (¡993–¡998), and Hanna Roisman (¡998–¡999). v

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The inclusion of photographs in some of the articles of this volume was made possible with the permission of the following copyright owners: Stratos E. Constantinidis for the photograph on page ¡ in his Preface; Naomi Pritchard and the British Library (all rights reserved) for the reproduction of the engraving on page 30 in Ellen M. Caldwell’s article; the British Museum for the reproduction of the watercolor on page ¡4¡ and the Folger Shakespeare Library for the reproduction of the watercolor on page ¡43 in Amy Muse’s article; Margaret Setje-Eilers for the photograph on page ¡82 in her article; and the Shaw Festival for two photographs by David Cooper on pages ¡89 and ¡90 in P. S. Sri’s article. Last but not least, I want to thank the Executive Board of the Comparative Drama Conference and the hundreds and hundreds of scholars who presented the results of their research — both creative and analytical — at the Comparative Drama Conference, an annual three-day event which is devoted to all aspects of theatre scholarship.

Contents v 1

Acknowledgments Preface

¡. Chicano Theatre in a Society in Crisis Jorge Huerta

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2. Responding to a Society in Crisis Jon D. Rossini

24

3. When We Dead Awaken: The ¡6¡3 Marriage Masques of Shakespeare, Campion, and Beaumont Ellen Caldwell

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4. Out of Wasteland: Remembering the Cultural Revolution in Wasteland and the Human Being Xiao Che

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5. The Hyperrealities of America’s Vietnam War and 9/¡¡ in the French Theatre of Armand Gatti and Michel Vinaver Les Essif

61

6. Babel, Babble, and Multilingualism in Tony Kushner’s Homebody/Kabu¡ Erith Ja›e-Berg

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7. Formal Subversion in How I Learned to Drive: A Structure of Meaning Andrew Kimbrough

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8. Shaw’s Saint Joan and Shakespeare’s Joan la Pucelle Annie Papreck King

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9. Luis Alfaro’s Electricidad and the “Tragedy of Electra” Helen E. Moritz

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Table of Contents

10. Actresses and the Making of the Modern Hamlet Amy Muse

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11. Alan Bennett’s The History Boys: Education and “The Wherewithal to Resist It” Doug Phillips

149

12. No Red Blood: Clyde Fitch and the Staging of the Neurasthenic Michael Schwartz

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13. Antigone in Pre–Wall and Post–Wall German Theatre: Bertolt Brecht’s and George Tabori’s Power Plays Margaret Setje-Eilers

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14. Shaw’s St. Joan (¡923): A Platonian Tragedy? P. S. Sri

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15. Adapting an Internet Comic Strip for the Stage James Utz

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16. Antigone and Terrorism: Seamus Heaney Sends a Letter to George W. Bush Kelly Younger

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17. The Future of Dramatic Literature in the Academy: A Roundtable Discussion Verna Foster Miriam Chirico Jan L. Hagens Karelisa Hartigan Rush Rehm Jon D. Rossini Tony J. Sta›ord

213 213 215 219 222 224 227 230

18. Asian Theatre A Review Essay Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei

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Review of Literature: Selected Books David Bevington, This Wide and Universal Theater: Shakespeare in Performance Then and Now Emily Bartels

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Table of Contents

C. W Marshall, The Stagecraft and Performance of Roman Comedy Eleni Bozia David Krasner, American Drama ¡945–2000: An Introduction Dorothy Chansky John Patrick Diggins, Eugene O’Neill’s America: Desire Under Democracy Kurt Eisen J. Michael Walton, Found in Translation: Greek Drama in English Katharine B. Free Andrew Stott, Comedy, and Verna A. Foster, The Name and Nature of Tragicomedy M. Beth Meszaros Index

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Figure ¡. Professor Karelisa Hartigan (left; University of Florida) presents the Philadelphia Constantinidis Essay in Critical Theory Award to Professor Kelly Younger (Loyola Marymount University) for his paper “Irish Antigones: Burying the Colonial Symptom” Colloquy: text theory critique ¡¡ (2006) <www.arts.monash. edu.au/others/colloquy/issue¡¡/younger.pdf> at the opening of Session 39 (plenary) of the 3¡st Comparative Drama Conference in Los Angeles, California, on March 30, 2007.

Preface Text & Presentation is an annual publication devoted to all aspects of theatre scholarship and represents a selection of the best papers presented at the Comparative Drama Conference. For the past 30 years, participants to the Comparative Drama Conference have come from 35 countries: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, China, Cyprus, Denmark, Egypt, England, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, India, Iraq, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Jordan, Korea, Malaysia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Slovenia, South Africa, Taiwan, Tanzania, Turkey, the United States of America, and the Territory of Guam. This volume of Text & Presentation features sixteen research papers, one roundtable discussion, one review essay, and six book reviews. The papers included here were among a total of ¡44 research papers which were presented and discussed at the 3¡st Comparative Drama Conference. The presentations, which were divided into 57 sessions of 75 minutes each, were discussed by ¡6¡ program participants at the Radisson Hotel in Los Angeles, California, during a three-day period, March 29–3¡, 2007. The four concurrent sessions per day were complemented by three plenary sessions and a show. The keynote address, “Chicano Theatre in a Society in Crisis,” was given by Professor Jorge Huerta (University of California, San Diego) on March 30. Professor Jon D. Rossini (University of California, Davis) and Professor Oliver Mayer (University of Southern California) responded to the keynote address. The session was moderated by Professor Deena González (Loyola Marymount University). The second plenary session — The Future of Dramatic Literature in the Academy — was a roundtable discussion. It was organized and moderated by Professor Verna Foster (Loyola University Chicago) on March 30. The panelists were Miriam Chirico (Eastern Connecticut State University), Jan Lüder Hagens (University of Notre Dame), Karelisa Hartigan (University of Florida), Rush Rehm (Stanford University), Jon D. Rossini (University of California, Davis), and Tony Sta›ord (University of Texas, El Paso). The final plenary session, Author-Meets-Critic, on March 3¡ was devoted to the discussion of one of the books (Professing Performance: The1

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atre in the Academy from Philolog y to Performativity) that was reviewed in Text &Presentation, 2006 (pp. 225–228). Its author, Shannon Jackson (University of California, Berkeley), discussed her book with the following critics: Professor Penny Farfan (University of Calgary) and Professor Ron Marasco (Loyola Marymount University). The session was moderated by Professor Verna Foster (Loyola University Chicago). The show that the conferees attended was the world premier of Lisa Loomer’s Distracted at The Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles on March 29. In addition, staged readings of two new plays were presented by their authors with a cast drawn from Loyola Marymount theatre majors. The Philadelphia Constantinidis Essay in Critical Theory Award was given to Professor Kelly Younger (Loyola Marymount University) for his paper “Irish Antigones: Burying the Colonial Symptom” (2006) (Figure ¡). The award was presented to Professor Younger by Professor Karelisa Hartigan (University of Florida). The Philadelphia Constantinidis Essay in Critical Theory Award is given to the best comparative essay on any aspect and period of Greek drama or theatre that was published in English in any journal or anthology in any country between January ¡ and December 3¡ in the preceding year. The award was established in 2006 in memory of Philadelphia Constantinidis to encourage research and writing on Greek drama and theatre. This is an open rank competition for academics, independent scholars, and doctoral students. The award is administered by the Board of the Comparative Drama Conference and endowed by Dr. Stratos E. Constantinidis. This year the selection committee consisted of Michael Ewans (University of Newcastle), Helene P. Foley (Barnard College), Kiki Gounaridou (Smith College), Karelisa Hartigan (University of Florida), Helen Moritz (Santa Clara University), Elizabeth Schar›enberger (Columbia University), Gonda Van Steen (University of Arizona), and Katerina Zacharia (Loyola Marymount University). The Executive Board solicits nominations and self-nominations for this award. The winner is notified by the Director of the Comparative Drama Conference, and is o›ered complimentary hotel accommodations and a registration fee waiver to attend the Comparative Drama Conference. The winner also receives a check of one thousand dollars ($¡,000) during the awards ceremony. The deadline for nominations is December 3¡ each year. Nominating letters and electronic copies of the essays (converted to Adobe PDF) should be emailed to by December 3¡ each year. Postal mail and faxes are not acceptable. The letter of nomination includes the name of the author of the published essay, the title of the essay, the year of publication, the name of the journal, the email address and postal address of the author, and a brief statement explaining why this essay was chosen

Preface

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for nomination. Recipients of the award are not eligible for nomination or self-nomination for a three year period. The Executive Board welcomes research papers for the Comparative Drama Conference presenting original investigation on, and critical analysis of, research and developments in the field of drama and theatre. Papers may be comparative across disciplines, periods, or nationalities, may deal with any issue in dramatic theory and criticism, or any method of historiography, translation, or production. Text & Presentation is edited by scholars appointed by the Executive Board of the Comparative Drama Conference, of which it is the o‡cial publication. Text & Presentation is indexed in the MLA International Bibliography. Stratos E. Constantinidis February 2007

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1 Chicano Theatre in a Society in Crisis Jorge Huerta Abstract The Chicano Theatre Movement of the 1960s was born out of a social crisis. Many of the crises that were addressed by early Chicana/o theatre artists continue to be prevalent and important sources of inspiration today. These crises include the formation of a Chicana/o or Mechicana/o identity, labor rights, immigration status, cultural assimilation, and, for the artists themselves, visibility in a dominant Western tradition. Since its inception in the agricultural fields of California, the Chicano theatre movement has entered into the university curricula and professional theatre venues across the country. This paper traces the important Chicano theatre companies, playwrights and plays that, since 1964, have grown to engage themes of gender, sexuality, institutionalized racism, cultural identity, and mysticism. Although the plays discussed here represent a wide variety of themes and aesthetic approaches, the common thread linking these works as Chicana/o, can be found in a shared relationship with Mexico as a source of inspiration, strength and history.

The title of my talk may make some of you ask, “Whose society?” “Whose crisis?” or even “What is a Chicano?” The last question might be a symptom of the first crisis! But for whom is it a crisis? If some of you do not know what a Chicano is, is the crisis yours or mine? Theatre artists have always reflected on their societies. Since the Greeks, playwrights have drawn portraits of mankind in crisis, observing the basic rule that drama is born out of conflict. For some playwrights those conflicts remained inner struggles. For others, they became more universal statements about man’s role in the cosmos and were dramatized in order to elevate audiences by helping them understand the relationships between human beings and between human beings and the natural or supernatural forces around them. But for other playwrights the muse seemed to summon a commitment 5

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to exposing man’s inhumanity to man through dramas that revolve around societies in crisis. In 1982 Edward Albee told an audience at the University of Kansas that the artist must always be “troublesome.” In his case “troublesome” manifests itself in the language and mores of a certain social class — in dramatic statements about people like Albee. Later that evening I asked Albee if he planned to write plays that might reach the masses more readily. He responded that he writes for that small minority of theatre-goers who represent the people capable to bring about change. I thought that this was very honest of him because he did not pretend to write for the masses. I applauded his desire to reach those in power even though it was not clear to me what changes he was calling for. Chicano theatre has gone through an interesting evolution thanks to its efforts to reach a popular, working-class audience — that audience which was outside the focus of playwrights like Edward Albee. From fields and factories to union halls and community auditoriums, and then to universities and regional theatres (to what some consider the pinnacle of success, The Great White Way), Chicano theatre has come a long way as its playwrights and theatre companies have dealt with crises both within and without their communities. It is important I define what I mean by “Mexicans” or “Mechicanos” and “Chicanas” or “Chicanos.” By “Mexicans” I refer to those Mexicans who reside in the United States, legally or illegally, but were born and raised in Mexico and self-identify as Mexicans. Mexicans grew up in a society in which they were not a minority. By “Chicanos” I refer to the children of Mexicans. These children were either born in the United States or were brought to the United States and attended American public schools, beginning in the primary grades. Like all immigrant groups, second-generation Chicanos are caught between two or more cultures — the cultures of their parents and the varied cultures of the United States. The “culture clash” underscores all of the plays written by Chicanas or Chicanos since the mid–1950s, highlighted by a crisis of identity and dislocation. In this paper I will trace the history and evolution of the theatre of the Chicanas and Chicanos, a theatre of crisis.

Who Are the Chicanos? Judging from the plays and other cultural production that have emanated from Mechicano communities, there is a shift along the “Mexican — Anglo-American Identity Continuum,” a shift from “Mexican” to

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“Anglo-American.” Read from left-to-right (literally and figuratively), this continuum shifts from self-identifying as Mexican, to Chicano, to MexicanAmerican, to Hispanic, to Anglo-American, or even to Euro-American. In other words, there are those in these communities who deny their Mexicanness and try to pass for white. Historically, a Mexican who attempts to pass as a non–Mexican has been termed a vendido (sellout), a type that has been a constant fixture in Mexican and Chicano theatre for generations. An example of this is in an early acto (sketch) collectively created by the Teatro Campesino to illustrate the crisis of inadequate educational opportunities for Chicanos. In this humorous acto, appropriately titled No saco nada de la escuela (I Don’t Get Anything Out of School), we follow a diverse group of students from grammar school through high school and on to college. In the high school sequence a new student enters and the teacher tells the class: TEACHER: Her name is Esperanza Espinoza. It sounds Italian, I know, but I think she’s a Mexican-American. Isn’t that right dear? ESPERANZA: No, my parents were, but I’m Hawaiian [Valdez 1990:76].

I will distinguish between the Chicana/o and the Mexican when the differences are important and refer to a conflation of the two as Mechicana/o, when the conditions pertain to both groups equally or similarly. There are plays in which the characters who are U.S.–born confront situations that someone raised in Mexico might not have to deal with, and vice versa. With few exceptions, the plays I label “Chicana/o” are ostensibly about Chicana/os living in the United States, but Chicana/os recognize and celebrate their Mexican cultural roots. Although their plays take place in the United States, Mexico is always in the background, contributing to the characters’ fractured identities. The Mechicanos should not be confused with the other Latinos in the United States. Among Latinos living in the United States, Mechicana/os make up the largest group (63%). The second-largest group is comprised of the (mainland) Puerto Ricans (9%).1 Some people do not realize that the Puerto Ricans have been U.S. citizens since 1917.2 The third-largest group is comprised of Cuban-Americans (4%), either Cuban-born or born in the United States. All three groups have active theatre communities, often with distinct agendas but all with the common goal of bringing to the stages of their communities (and beyond) the lives of their compatriots. Members of other Latino groups have also emerged on the stages of this country. Colombian-born John Leguizamo is perhaps the best-known. Although my focus here is on the Mechicanos and the crises they deal with on a daily basis, mem-

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bers of the other Latino groups may face many of these crises because all Latinos look alike to some non–Latinos.3 In her excellent study, Theatre of Crisis: Drama and Politics in Latin America, Diana Taylor acknowledges the problems in defining the very term, “crisis.” However, she tells the reader early on that she will use the “classical or general definition of crisis,” adopted from James O’Connor, as “the turning point of an illness in which it is decided whether or not the organism’s self-healing powers are sufficient for recovery” (1991:6). She purposefully focuses her discussion on theatre in Latin America during the late 1960s, and explains: While it was much easier to recognize the crisis in the 1970s — given the firmly installed military regimes, the torture chambers, the disappearances, and the atomized populations — the years before were the turning point, the crisis, between regeneration and repression [1991:222].

I adopt Taylor’s definition, not because I believe the conditions for the Mechicanos in the United States in the 1960s were similar to those in Latin America. In many ways they were not. On the surface, as it were, the Mechicanos were not suffering from the overt oppression that other Latinos suffered throughout Latin America. However, oppression comes in many forms and degrees. Latin Americans saw the Mechicanos during the 1970s as being “en la barriga del monstruo” (“in the belly of the monster”), and therefore they respected the Mechicanos’ marginalized positions. Whereas Taylor sees “crisis” as “a turning point,” and perhaps as a hope for healing a sick society, the evolution of Chicano theatre in the last half of the twentieth century begins with a crisis for the players, the farm workers as demonstrated by El Teatro Campesino, the Farm Worker’s Theater, under the direction and tutelage of Luis Valdez. Founded in 1965, as the crisis in Vietnam was beginning to escalate, this troupe of striking farm workers had their own crises in their daily lives, exploited by the growers who reaped vast amounts of money on the backs of these mostly Mexican, Chicano and Filipino workers. The problems of these workers were virtually invisible until Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta began to organize them into a union. Significantly, 1965 marked the beginning of the Chicano Theatre Movement, a theatre of crisis. Chicana/o theatre groups and playwrights have historically addressed social justice issues in an effort to improve the conditions of the Mechicanos. In her excellent study, Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater, Jill Dolan describes the process of using theatre to explore the possibility of a more perfect society. Dolan writes, “My contention is that performance — not just drama — is one of the few places where a live experience,

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as well as an expression, through content, of utopia might be possible.” She goes on to affirm that she is: [i]nterested in the material conditions of theater production and reception that evoke the sense that it’s even possible to imagine a utopia, that “no place” where the social scourges that currently plague us ... might be ameliorated, cured, redressed, solved, never to plague us again [2005:37].

The long list of “social scourges” that Dolan gives includes issues that have always been important to Mechicana/os such as anti-immigrant legislation, racial and gender discrimination and poverty — as well the HIV/AIDS epidemic that has brought about an even more urgent crisis because it is still shunned by many in the Mechicana/o communities. As the plays show, these and other socio-political and cultural issues have always been at the forefront of the formation and creation of a Chicana/o identity. Building on Dolan’s concept of performing the social change that artists could make in the world, what is of interest to me here is the notion that theatre, as Dolan argues, “[c]an move us toward understanding the possibility of something better, can train our imaginations, inspire our dreams and fuel our desires in ways that might lead to incremental cultural change” (2005:39). Chicana/o theater artists have been searching for that utopian dream even before they were Chicana/os, which is to say, before the United States government took from Mexico in 1848 what is now the Southwestern U.S.A. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo became the first crisis for the Mexicans on the north side of the new border. As one historian put it, they were now “strangers in their own land” (Prago 1973). Or, as we saw on posters during the mass demonstrations all over the country in 2006, “We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us!”

The Six Phases of Chicano Theatre I divide the evolution of Chicana/o theatre into six phases. The first phase, which began in 1965 with the founding of the Teatro Campesino, was dominated by the acto. By 1968 other Teatros, emulating the Teatro Campesino, also began creating actos. The second phase began around 1970, when individual playwrights emerged alongside the collectives. The third phase entailed a move into the professional arena beginning with Luis Valdez’s Zoot Suit in 1978. The fourth phase was marked by the emergence of women’s voices in 1980. The fifth phase began in 1985 with individual performers. The sixth phase began during the same period with the formation of comedy troupes. All six phases have continued to evolve to this day as we shall see.

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Although they remained somewhat invisible to non–Chicana/o theatre critics and historians, after 1968, teatros emerged across the western part of the United States, from Seattle to San Antonio, San Diego to Chicago. In her M.A. thesis, “The Annals of Chicano Theater: 1965–1973,” Elizabeth Cantu Ramirez documented a total of 64 groups. Among the older companies that are still operating today, some under a different name, I include Teatro Urbano, of San Jose, California (1968) and Teatro de la Esperanza, originally of Santa Barbara, now based in San Francisco (1971). In Colorado, Denver’s Su Teatro was founded in 1972, while in Tucson, Teatro Libertad emerged in 1973. Teatro Dallas was founded in that city in Texas in 1979 and in Albuquerque, New Mexico, La Compañía de Teatro de Albuquerque appeared in the same period. Finally, the Chicago Latino Theatre was founded in that Midwestern city in 1979. Most importantly, other scholars and I recognize the Teatro Campesino for fostering the many Chicana/o theatre groups that seemingly sprouted up wherever the Teatro Campesino had performed. Most of the early Chicana/o theatre groups were composed of college or university student activists and thus they easily adapted the actos to their particular socio-political agendas. During the latter 1960s and into the early 1970s progressive Chicana/os expressed their anger over the war in Vietnam in protest marches and rallies as well as in songs, poems, and actos. Many Chicana/os were opposed to that war, not only because it was based on false premises but also because a disproportionate number of Chicanos and Puerto Ricans were coming home from Vietnam either in body bags or disabled. Other issues that occupied these actor/activists were police brutality and unfair treatment in the courts, inequities in education, the exploitation of urban workers, and the need for unity. These early teatros then inspired other teatros as well as individual playwrights, directors, producers and performance artists. The first play written and produced by a Chicano is Luis Valdez’s The Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa (1964), the first of what will be a series of plays from his and others’ pens about a Mechicano family in crisis. The late Estela Portillo-Trambley’s Day of the Swallows (1972) continues to fascinate because of its theme of “the love that dare not speak its name” between two women. Carlos Morton’s El jardín, or The Garden (1974) was his comic view of Adam and Eve as Chicanos. Their crisis begins, of course, when they are expelled from The Garden and find themselves in the streets of the urban mess that is Chicago’s barrio. The next three plays of this period are docudramas. The first, Guadalupe (1974), exposes the real life crisis in a small California farm town of the same name in which the parents were jailed for attempting to improve the schools as well as for joining the farm workers union. Carlos Morton’s Many Deaths of Danny Rosales (1976) documents the

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true incidence of police violence against a Chicano in Texas in 1974. La víctima (1976) was collectively created by El Teatro de la Esperanza, a watershed production that blended historical fact with fiction to expose the mass deportations of Mexicans whenever the nation’s economy takes a downturn. I will discuss this piece more fully later. Chicano theatre entered the professional stage when Luis Valdez’s Zoot Suit was produced in Los Angeles in 1978 and on Broadway the following year. Women’s voices began to be heard in 1980 with the plays of Milcha Sanchez-Scott and Josefina López. Sanchez-Scott’s Latina (1980) will be discussed later. Josefina López’s Simply Maria (1988) was a “super-acto,” exposing the patriarchy and the exclusion of women in Mechicano society. Luis Valdez’s I Don’t Have to Show You No Stinking Badges! (1986) is a critique of Hollywood stereotyping, a common theme among the Los Angeles–based playwrights. Also, the rise of comedy troupes begins when Culture Clash is born in the mid–1980s. Their first major piece, The Mission (1989), was yet another critique of the mis-representation of Mechicanos and Latinos in the media and even in regional theatres. The early 1990s established two important Chicanas as people to watch: Josefina López and Cherrie Moraga. López’s Real Women Have Curves (1990) and Moraga’s Heroes and Saints (1992) will be discussed later. Octavio Solis and the Latino Lab also began to make their mark. Each of these plays deal with some form of crisis, either for the characters or the Mechicano community. Octavio Solis establishes his position as one of the leading Chicano playwrights with his epic play about Chicanos and drug trafficking in Santos & Santos, based on actual events in El Paso, Texas. Oliver Mayer’s Blade to the Heat and Culture Clash’s Chavez Ravine will be discussed later. Evelina Fernandez’s Luminarias exposed the Mechicanos’ cultural discrimination within and outside their own communities. Her play, Dementia, addressed the plight of AIDS in the Mechicano communities. Both of these plays have been made into films. Culture Clash’s Bordertown was their site-specific collage of life on the border of San Diego and Tijuana, investigating some of the many communities along both sides of the border through satire and social critique. Luis Valdez’s Mummified Deer was a surreal look at the Mechicano’s Indian roots. Luis Alfaro’s Electricidad was his take on the Sophoclean Electra myth transformed to a family of cholos in East L.A. Both Electricidad and Santos & Santos have been produced widely in LORT theatres as well as Teatros and universities. In fact, Electricidad was produced in the winter of 2007 at San Diego State University and Southwestern College, 30 miles to the south, concurrently. Also, both plays were published by American Theatre Magazine, a rare distinction for any playwright.

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Highlights of a Chicano Theatre in a Society in Crisis I will now discuss nine plays that I believe represent the highlights of Chicano Theatre in a Society in Crisis. I would like to give the reader a taste of each as representatives of five of the phases listed earlier. This is a select grouping, designed to demonstrate the varieties of crises Teatros and playwrights have addressed since 1965. In La Quinta Temporada (1967), as it is usual in the typical acto, a character runs onto the stage to grab the audience’s attention. He is wearing a sign around his neck that reads “Campesino” and he speaks directly to the audience: Oh, hello —quihubole! My name is José. What else? And I’m looking for a job.... You see, I just got in from Texas this morning and I need to send money back to my familia [Valdez 1990:29].

The basic action in this and other early farm worker actos is to demonstrate à la Brecht and commedia, the need for a union. As in the early Spanish religious folk plays, allegorical figures come on stage representing the seasons, the churches, the union and La Raza, The People. Together, these figures give the campesino strength and force the grower to sign a union contract. Sadly, all of the farm worker actos are just as necessary today as they were in 1965. La víctima (1976) was created collectively by El Teatro de la Esperanza which, in 1976, was located in Santa Barbara. During that period, the economy had slowed-down considerably and the government was blaming the problem on the so-called “illegal aliens.” The Teatro members saw an opportunity to dramatize the plight of being undocumented, by creating a story about a fictitious Mexican family that immigrates to the United States to flee the Mexican Revolution of 1910. The Teatro members were well aware that these purges come in cycles, the first being during the Great Depression when tens of thousands of Mexicans were deported back to Mexico. The deportation often separated families. They created a docudrama, highlighting the historical facts with the fictitious family’s crises. The play centered on a U.S.–born boy who is separated from his Mexican mother at the train station when they are being deported back to Mexico. The boy is adopted by another Mechicano family, goes to Korea where he learns to “fight the commie bastards,” and is infused with patriotic zeal. He becomes an INS agent and eventually finds himself interrogating his own mother, who has crossed back to the United States. Even though he instinctively knows that she is his mother, he deports her. This play has been one

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of the highlights of Chicano theatre. It has been produced throughout the United States, as well as parts of Central America and even Poland to great acclaim. Teatro Vivo, of Austin, Texas, presented this play in March 2007. Luis Valdez has had the longest trajectory of any living Chicana/o playwright. Furthermore, no other Chicana or Chicano playwright or director has generated as much critical interest as Valdez. His most successful and controversial play, Zoot Suit (1978) exposes the racial discrimination suffered by Chicanos in Los Angeles in the 1940s and remains the first (and only) play written and directed by a Chicano to be produced on Broadway (1979)— a sign of crisis for some, but a non-issue for those Chicana/o theatre artists who shun commercial theatre in favor of community-based teatros.4 More importantly, the production of Zoot Suit in Los Angeles ran over eleven months, breaking all box office records in that city’s history for a legitimate play. Valdez adapted and directed the film version of Zoot Suit in 1981. Zoot Suit is important for many reasons, but especially for giving the Chicanos a history where there was none before and for exposing the crises of both the so-called “Zoot Suit Riots” and the Sleepy Lagoon murder trial. The first female playwright after Estela Portillo-Trambley to write and produce a play about Latinas is Milcha Sanchez-Scott.5 Sanchez-Scott is not a “Chicana.” Her father was Colombian and her mother was an Indonesian Chinese Dutch. Sanchez-Scott was raised in Colombia as well as in Mexico, and she writes about the Mechicana/os and other Latina/os in such a way that reveals her understanding of these varied communities. Like other Chicana playwrights to follow, Sanchez-Scott was discouraged by the paucity of roles in Hollywood for Latina/o actors, so she turned to playwriting. Her first play, Latina (1980), was based on her experience as a receptionist in a maid’s agency in Beverly Hills while awaiting “the Big Break” all Hollywood actors dream of.6 Latina is a realistic play in which the central character, Sarita, narrates the story, breaking the fourth wall to comment to the audience as events unfold in a typical day in a Beverly Hills domestic agency. In a nod to surrealism, mannequins come alive to speak to Sarita. These visions are captured within the conventions of selective realism in a microcosm of Latin American women seeking the “American Dream.”7 Throughout the play we learn a great deal about what it is like to be a maid in Beverly Hills (or anywhere, for that matter), the loneliness, the sexual harassment, the meager pay and invisibility that maids suffer. In a notable scene, Mrs. Homes, one of the agency’s clients, walks into the office with her maid at her side and announces: “I am returning Alma.” To this, Sarita says to the audience, imitating Mrs. Homes, “I am returning Alma. What does she think this is, the May Company?” (Huerta 1989: 108–109).

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We also learn about the differences in cultures that only Latinas or Latinos understand. In a kind of intercultural humor, all the women make fun of La Cubana, who is the only woman with a green card, besides Sarita, who is a citizen. Ultimately this is a play about Sarita’s identity crisis brought about by internal colonization. It is her journey from denial to acceptance, to an appreciation of her Mexican heritage rather than a denial of her roots. When the INS raids the office at the end of the play, the conflict becomes everybody’s crisis which is brought about by illegal immigration and capitalism’s reliance on a cheap pool of labor.

Roosters Sanchez-Scott’s best-known play, Roosters, was first produced in 1987 and quickly became the most produced Chicana or Chicano play during the late 1980s, bringing much attention to the playwright and her works. Since then the play has been produced by non–Latino and Latino theatres, college and university theatre departments all across the U.S. and abroad [London Theatre Record 8:18 (1988), 1189–1190].8 Roosters was also the first play about Chicana/os to be published in American Theatre Magazine, which accounts for its broad visibility.9 When it premiered, Roosters was the first Chicano play to be seen in New York (Off-Broadway) since Zoot Suit, eight years earlier. Roosters is a delicately written piece about a Chicano family in crisis, the story of a father’s return after serving a seven year prison term for manslaughter. The most significant conflict in the play is between Gallo, the father, and his twenty-year-old son, Hector, in an archetypal struggle between the old and the young, the man and the boy. Everyone wants Gallo’s attention, but he only has eyes for his fighting rooster. Central to the action, however, is Angela, the fifteen-year-old daughter who looks and acts twelve. It is her religious faith and creative imagination that carry the play to its surprising conclusion. Angela wears tattered angel’s wings and is always looking for signs from Heaven. At a high point in the action, when two thugs threaten her father she prays: Holy Father, please help me, I feel the illumination, the fever of grace slipping away. I need to know that you are with me, that you take an interest in my concerns. Send me a little demonstration, a sign. Any sign... I don’t care. Stigmata, visions, voices, send an angel, burn a bush... I am attracted to levitation, but you choose ... I’ll just stay here and wait [Osborn 1987: 271].

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In the climactic moment of the play, her brother is poised to kill their father, and Angela does, indeed, levitate. She becomes the “shooting star woman” she had longed to be and the family is calmed. A miracle has happened and nobody questions that miracle.

Real Women Have Curves Josefina López’s Real Women Have Curves (1990) centers on the character of Ana, a young Chicana who is working in her sister’s small sewing factory in East Los Angeles. The play takes place over a period of five days during which the women work to finish an order of dresses. The dramatic action is pushed forward by the women’s desire to save the financially strapped business, despite various setbacks, and the situation is given comic life by the conversations between the women about life, love, husbands, boyfriends or would-be suitors, and, of course, their bodies. In a marvelous reversal and adding to the humor and the tension, Estela, the boss, does not have her papers. Every time a certain black van is sighted outside, everyone ducks, however they quickly rise as soon as they remember they have papers. In the end, the women finish the order on time, Estela decides to open her own boutique and in the process the women discover and empower themselves as women and creators. In Virginia McFerran’s words, the women discover “that traditional reality and its norms for women are actually completely unrealistic” (1991: 210). This is a play about expectations: what society, especially Mechicano culture, expects of its women and how women might negate those expectations on a path towards liberation from the patriarchy. As the title suggests, Real Women Have Curves debates and exposes issues of the female body, especially “fat,” “large,” “plump” or “voluptuous” bodies, depending upon the gaze of the beholder. Based on her actual experiences, both with her body weight and working in the sewing factory, López places her character at the center of the story as narrator and unhappy teenager who would rather be at NYU studying writing. In her analysis, Maria Teresa Marrero conflates the two prevalent issues in this play, body weight and immigrant status: “The fat body, like the immigrant, requires fundamental alteration in order to ‘fit,’ to be assimilated into the dominant, circulating norms (be they aesthetic or cultural)” (1993: 63). Marrero widens the topogra= phy of her discussion to include all Latinas struggling to survive in low paying jobs in this country. She writes, “To be a woman, undocumented and overweight places these characters as a target in the very center of a three-pronged U.S. cultural bias” (1993: 67). This play was the most produced Chicana or Chicano play in the first part of the 1990s. From LORT theatres to universities and com-

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munity-based venues, Real Woman Have Curves reached thousands of people. The play was adapted to the screen in 2002 with great success, reaching millions. It should be noted, however, that the threat of the INS raiding the sewing factory was taken out of the film. The major crisis for the central character, Ana, is whether or not her father will allow her to go away to college — which is not uncommon in traditional Mechicano households, unfortunately.

August 29th August 29th was collectively created by the Latino Theatre Lab, a group of Los Angeles–based Chicana and Chicano professional film and stage artists, under the direction of José Luis Valenzuela, in 1990.10 This play revolves around a fictitious Chicana historian who is writing a book about Ruben Salazar. Salazar was the noted Los Angeles Times journalist who was shot by an L.A. County sheriff during the police riot that crushed the Chicano Moratorium against the War in Vietnam in East Los Angeles on August 29, 1970. This is a mixture of fact and fantasy which explores and exposes police brutality both in the past and in the present by bringing the ghost of an actual Chicano journalist into the life of a fictional Chicana history professor who is writing a scholarly book about the slain journalist. She is caught between her efforts to achieve tenure and pressure from community activists to denounce police brutality involving one of her Chicano students who lay in the hospital fighting for his life. By focusing on Salazar’s death and martyrdom twenty years after the fact, this play gave a human face to a defining moment in Chicano history, the day tens of thousands of Chicana/os marched in East Los Angeles to protest the War in Vietnam; yet another crisis which has its own resonance in today’s geopolitical climate.11 Ironically, the plot of August 29th turns on the question of whether the Chicana professor, Lucero, will speak out against police brutality at an upcoming ceremony in which the mayor of Los Angeles will honor her as “Hispanic Historian of the Year.” In the penultimate scene Lucero types as Salazar recites his final (fictitious) monologue, a moving picture of the marchers that fateful day: We were like a river. A brown river. A river whose little streams had pushed their way through the rock and dirt and mud. Pushed and pushed for years. Each one trying to reach the other. A quiet but constant flow until they came together to create a huge river of brown faces. Full of hope and anger and hurt but mostly joy and pride and love. And the river was strong and as more streams flowed in, it became stronger and its rush could be heard for a long way. And when it crashed against the rocks it was the loudest.

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And by the time they knew it, the river was pushing its way through the mountains because it wanted to reach the ocean. It wanted to flow free. (RUBÉN stands center stage. A POLICE[MAN] aims a projectile at his head. He fires.) [II-19–21A].

In the final scene Lucero does not accept the award and instead, demands an investigation into her student’s untimely death at the hands of the police.

Blade to the Heat Oliver Mayer, having been an amateur boxer, was inspired by an incident that had occurred in 1959 in which an African-American boxer, Emile Griffiths, had killed another boxer in the ring after the boxer had accused Griffith of being homosexual. Mayer decided to write a play based on this event, leading to the world premiere production of Blade to the Heat at the Joseph Papp Public Theatre in 1994, directed by then–Artistic Director, George C. Wolfe. The play is about a fictional young Irish-Mexican boxer struggling with his sexual, cultural and athletic identity. The central figure’s crisis of sexual identity is compounded by homophobia in his culture and his sport. The theme of homosexuality was not apparent in Chicana or Chicano plays until the 1980s and this play, with its explicit scenes of sensuality and even nudity broke new ground in the Chicano theatre scene. In an interview with Mayer for the Mark Taper Forum production in 1996, William Nericcio states, “The play can be read as an exposé on desire, homoerotic or hetero-erotic, set in that essential site of male essence, the boxing ring” (1996: 6). It should be noted that Mayer was the third Chicano playwright in history to have his play fully-produced by a major company in New York City and Blade to the Heat was the fourth play about Chicana/os to be produced in New York City as well.12 Like so many of the plays I am discussing, Blade to the Heat has been produced throughout the U.S. Unlike the other plays, however, this play had a very successful commercial run in Mexico City in 1997.

Chavez Ravine Culture Clash, founded in 1984, is the leading Chicano/Latino comedy trio, a performance cooperative composed of Richard Montoya, Ric Salinas and Herbert Sigüenza. In 2004 they premiered their docudrama, Chavez Ravine, yet another look at the Chicanos’ history in Los Angeles, set in the 1950s. The trio’s intention, as they began their research, was to expose how the Dodgers baseball franchise had displaced the Mexican residents of a

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Mechicana/o neighborhood called Chavez Ravine to make room for their ballpark. Instead they discovered that in the usual scenario, Big Business partnered with governmental forces and anti-communist frenzy to opt for a ball park rather than low-income housing for the working poor. In the words of one reviewer, “While there is no dramatic arch as such these comedic sketches cohere and widen our understanding of how McCarthyism’s blacklisting shattered the lives of not only the stage and silver screen luminaries, but also ordinary men and women” (Monji 2003). Chavez Ravine is a fabulous collage (a post-modern work, if you will) that keeps the viewer on his/her toes the whole time. The mixture of genres is an exciting way to keep the ball rolling and to hail the meta-theatricality of it all. The comedy is comedy and the underlining tragedy of it all is never lost in the laughter. Indeed, the fact that these political games continue to plague our communities and our whole country must be a great lesson for the politicians and the populace as a whole. At least one can hope that audiences will put two-and-two together as they analyze how Power works in this society.13

Conclusions Today, there is not a particular artistic style in Chicana/o theatre, as I hope this discussion has demonstrated. Most of the plays I have discussed are rooted in Western European traditions, the children of realism and its various permutations: absurdism, expressionism, surrealism, etc. But as I worked on this project, I found myself confronting, not an aesthetic, but a Chicana/o mythos. What I discovered was a common source, a thread linking these plays and playwrights to one another: Mexico. Not a Mexico of corrupt politics, drug lords and police extortion, but a Mexico of indigenous symbols, of pyramids and poetry: flor y canto, flower and song, a living Mexico, evident in the faces of Mechicana/os living and working in any city in the United States that they call home. Unlike all of the other Latina/o immigrants living in the U.S., the Chicana/os have no desire to “go home” because the U.S. is home. The Aztecs called the land to the north, “Aztlán,” and the Chicanos adopted this term in the 1960s to designate their indigenous roots. But their plays tell us that they do not want to forget Mexico, her colors, her joy, her pain and her history. The Mexico expressed in the plays I have discussed (and any other Chicana/o plays, really) is designated, generally, through signs as opposed to geographical locale, for none of these plays take place in Mexico. But it is the image of Mexico that makes the plays Chicana/o.

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Chicana/o playwrights invoke Mexican icons in order to position themselves as Americans of Mexican descent. Anglo icons or heroes generally do not appear in Chicana/o plays and, when they do, they are not the central figures. Rather, Chicana/o playwrights often create the Anglo characters as deconstructions of dominant histories in order to demystif y traditional images of “the great White Hero.” Anglo characters in a play may be good or they may be bad but the stories do not belong to them. Rather, the stories, the struggles, the demons and myths belong to the Mechicana/os on stage and in the audience. Traditional myths are exploded in order to define new myths and old, untold histories of the Chicana and Chicano as the children of the Children of the Sun. Chicana/o playwrights recall Mexico in their ancestors, the parents or grandparents who made the sacrifice to leave their homeland to return to the homeland, “Aztlán.” In all immigrant cultures, the homeland is seen through the nostalgic lens of the border crossers, a place that no longer belongs to them, as they attempt to make this new land their own. But in the case of the Chicana/o characters, the border is a construction, literally and metaphorically, a river or a fence that they can cross legally, although they have to prove their citizenship at each crossing if they “look Mexican.” Mexico is on their brown faces, their Spanish, Indian and African features, and in their humility. Mexico becomes a mythical place as does the barrio in which the nativeborn were raised. Their tenacity is represented in a plant growing in a rusty coffee can, an iconic symbol that might transport many a barrio-raised Chicana back to her own barrio, images of a mother, an aunt or another elder faithfully watering that plant as symbol of everyone’s determination to survive. Mexico is in that coffee can, a miniaturized “ranchito,” just as Mexico is in the brown, wrinkled hands that tend it. Mexico is in the kitchens in each of these plays. Some scenes literally take place in the kitchen and, if not, a bowl of beans is usually boiling away offstage, literally or metaphorically. The women no longer go to the river to wash the clothes, but they talk about that time, remember the hardship and the camaraderie. If characters are making hand-made tortillas these are probably the most visible image of a Mexico long abandoned, for few contemporary Chicanas (much less Chicanos) will make their own tortillas today. But the smells of the kitchen immediately establish a Mexican home and the chilies and corn growing in the garden affirm this image, giving comfort, if only for a moment to these families in crisis. Finally, all artists fight against discrimination because, as artists, they battle daily damnation of anything or anyone that challenges the status quo. In effect, the entire community of Mechicana/os has been and continues to

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be damned by virtue of its invisibility. Yet, with the phenomenal growth of the Latina/o populations in the U.S., with all that has happened in electoral politics in the last 10 years, the new millennium does, indeed, look promising for these communities. Despite the growth of a Mechicana/o middle and upper income population, however, there remains much to be done to improve the conditions of the Mechicana/os. Problems still plague the community, just as they did in 1965: access to education and health care, injustice in the courts, police brutality, women’s rights, internal and external racism, and homophobia in the barrios, all these are continuing crises. The good news is that these theatre artists are reaching an ever-widening audience as they continue to express plays that give their audiences an identity in a country that tries to erase that identity. If we are doing our job right, the younger generation of teatristas, our students, will learn to challenge us and take teatro into new and different directions. But always, I predict, there will be a sense of identity, however fractured, of a history and a place that will be called “Chicana/o.” To be a Chicana or a Chicano is to identify the crises, to recognize the oppression, to try to understand it and to attempt to change it. That is how Chicana/o theatre began and that is how it will continue. UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORINIA, SAN DIEGO

Notes 1. U.S. Census, 2005. 2. Puerto Rico became a Commonwealth of the U.S. in 1952. 3. Of the roughly 40 million Latinos living in the U.S., the largest group continues to be the Mexican-American. Also, note that of the Americans who are foreign born 53.3% were born in Latin America. Whose crisis is that? 4. See also, the ground-breaking bilingual (Spanish-English) edition of this play, also published by Arte Público Press, 2005. 5. I use the term, Latina, to describe Sanchez-Scott since she is not really of Mexican descent. By employing that term, however, I must acknowledge (remind) the reader that the first truly prominent Latina playwright was Maria Irene Fornes. 6. This play was first produced by the New Works Division of Los Angeles–based Artists in Prison and Other Places (Susan Lowenberg, Producing Director), in 1980. The play was written in collaboration with and directed by Jeremy Blahnik. 7. For more on Latina, see Alicia Arrizón, Latina Performance: Traversing the Stage, Bloomington: Indiana, 1999: 102–115. 8. Roosters was produced by the Bush Theatre Company in London in 1988. 9. Roosters is published in American Theater (September 1987): 1–11. It is also published in On New Ground, edited by M. Elizabeth Osborn. All references are to the Osborn edition.

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10. August 29th remains unpublished. The group attributed the play to a fictitious author, a “Violeta Calles,” because they feared that the critics would treat the piece differently if they knew it was a collective creation, focusing on the process rather than the production and the play. 11. For more on the Chicano Moratorium of 1970, see: Rodolfo Acuna, Occupied America: A History of Chicanos 3rd ed., Harper and Row, 1988: 345–349; Jorge Mariscal (ed.), Aztlan and Vietnam: Chicano and Chicana Experiences of the War, California, 1999; La Raza 3, Special Issue (1970) features Raul Ruiz’s photo essay of the Moratorium, documenting police repression. 12. The reader is reminded that the first (and only) Chicano play produced on Broadway to date is Zoot Suit, produced in 1979. Other plays by or about Chicana/os produced off or off-off–Broadway are Milcha Sanchez-Scott’s Roosters, Carlos Morton’s Pancho Diablo and El jardín. In 2005 Cheech Marin directed an all–Latino cast in Rick Najera’s Latinologues, a series of comic sketches. This production ran over 100 performances at the Helen Hayes Theatre on Broadway. 13. Like the Teatro Campesino, Culture Clash can be credited with inspiring and nurturing other comedy troupes. One of the most notable is Chicano Secret Service, whose members credit Montoya, Salinas and Sigüenza as their major influence.

References Cited Alfaro, Luis. “Electricidad.” American Theater Magazine (February 2006): 63–85. August 29th. Collective creation, the Latino Lab. Manuscript in the author’s possession. Dolan, Jill. Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005. London Theatre Record 8:18 (1988): 1189–1190. López, Josefina. Real Women Have Curves. Woodstock, IL: Dramatic Publishing Group 1996. _____. Simply María. Woodstock, IL: Dramatic Publishing Company, 1996. Marrero, Maria Teresa. “Real Women Have Curves: The Articulation of Fat as a Cultural/Feminist Issue,” Ollantay, I ( January 1993): 61–70. Mayer, Oliver. Blade to the Heat. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1996. McFerran, Virginia Derus. Chicana Voices in American Drama: Silviana Wood, Estela Portillo-Trambley, Cherríe Moraga, Milcha Sanchez-Scott, Josefina López. PhD dissertation, University of Minnesota, 1991. Monji, Jana J. “A CurtainUp Los Angeles Review Chavez Ravine,” http://www. curtainup.com/chavezravine.html. 2003. Montoya, Richard, Rick Salinas and Herbert Sigüenza. “A Bowl of Beings.” Culture Clash: Life, Death and Revolutionary Comedy, 57–106. New York: TCG Publications, 1999. _____. “The Mission.” Culture Clash: Life, Death and Revolutionary Comedy, 1–56. New York: TCG Publications, 1999. _____. “Bordertown.” Culture Clash in America. New York: TCG Publications, 2003.

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_____. “Chavez Ravine.” American Theater Magazine (November 2003): 37, 40– 61. Moraga, Cherríe. “Shadow of a Man.” Shattering the Myth: Plays by Hispanic Women, edited by Linda Feyder, 9–48. Houston: Arte Público, 1992. _____. “Heroes and Saints.” Heroes and Saints & Other Plays, 85–149. Albuquerque: West End Press, 1994. _____. “Shadow of a Man.” Heroes and Saints & Other Plays, 37–84. Albuquerque: West End Press, 1994. _____. “Heroes and Saints.” In Contemporary Plays by Women of Color, edited by Kathy A. Perkins and Roberta Uno, 230–261. New York: Routledge, 1996. Morton, Carlos. “El jardín.” El Grito 7, (1974): 7–37. _____. “El jardín.” The Many Deaths of Danny Rosales and Other Plays, 105–128. Houston: Arte Público, 1983. _____. “The Many Deaths of Danny Rosales.” The Many Deaths of Danny Rosales and Other Plays, 7–49. Houston: Arte Público, 1983. _____. “The Many Deaths of Danny Rosales.” Types of Drama, edited by Sylvan Burnet, Morton Berman, William Burto and Ben Draya, 809–832. New York: R.R. Donnelley & Sons, 1997. Nericcio, William. “Interview with Oliver Mayer,” program for Blade to the Heat, Center Theatre Group, Mark Taper Forum, 1996. Portillo-Trambley, Estela. “Day of the Swallows.” El Espejo, edited by Herminio Ríos and Octavio Romano V, 149–193. Berkeley: Quinto Sol, 1972. Prago, Alberto, Strangers in Their Own Land: A History of Mexican Americans, New York: Four Winds Press, 1973. Sanchez-Scott, Milcha. “Roosters.” On New Ground, edited by M. Elizabeth Osborn, 243–280. New York: Theater Communications Group, 1987. _____. “Latina.” Necessary Theatre, edited by Jorge Huerta, 75–141. Houston: Arte Público Press. 1989. Solis, Octavio. “Santos & Santos,” American Theatre Magazine (November 1995): 35–57. _____. Man of the Flesh. Plays from South Coast Repertory, Vol. III. New York: Broadway Play Publishing, 1998. Taylor, Diana. Theatre of Crisis: Drama and Politics in Latin America. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1991. Teatro de la Esperanza. “Guadalupe.” Necessary Theater: Six Plays About the Chicano Experience, edited by Jorge Huerta, 208–257. Houston: Arte Público, 1989. _____. “La víctima.” Necessary Theater: Six Plays About the Chicano Experience, edited by Jorge Huerta, 316–365. Houston: Arte Público, 1989. Valdez, Luis. “The Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa.” West Coast Plays 11/12, edited by Robert Hurwitt, 1–61. Berkeley: California Theatre Council, 1982. _____. “The Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa.” Necessary Theater: Six Plays About the Chicano Experience, edited by Jorge Huerta, 142–207. Houston: Arte Público, 1989. _____. “La Quinta Temporada.” Early Works, 28–39. Houston: Arte Público Press, 1990. _____. “I Don’t Have to Show You No Stinking Badges!” Zoot Suit and Other Plays 156–214. Houston: Arte Público, 1992.

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_____. “Mummified Deer.” Mummified Deer and Other Plays, 1–62. Houston: Arte Público Press, 2005. Villareal, Edit. “My Visits with MGM (My Grandmother Marta).” Shattering the Myth: Plays by Hispanic Women, edited by Linda Feyder, 143–208. Houston: Arte Público, 1992.

2 Responding to a Society in Crisis Jon D. Rossini Abstract Responding to Professor Jorge Huerta’s “Chicano Theatre in a Society in Crisis,” this essay discusses the limits of Huerta’s conception of the Chicano “mythos” based in Mexico by drawing examples from the 2006 pro-immigrant marches and plays by Luis Valdez and Carlos Morton. It then goes on to argue for the importance of attending to the contours of crisis by examining changes in a contemporary production of La víctima.

Professor Huerta’s six-phase description of Chicana/o theatre complicates the traditional narrative of a shift from a clearly political, immediate, and necessary theatre produced collectively in a range of teatros to a more professionalized and less explicitly communally connected practice. He is careful to clarify the specificity of Chicana/o theatre as a political and aesthetic response to crisis that can be separated from a broader conception of Latina/o theatre. In doing so, he points to a mythos that organizes the Chicana/o theatrical practices he illustrates — a symbolic Mexico that haunts the imaginative spaces of these plays. At the same time, by carefully articulating a definition of Chicana/o experience, he separates Chicana/o theatre and performance from the broader manifestations of Mechicana/o performance that permeate popular representation and everyday life. While it is certainly crucial to acknowledge the specificity of a Chicana/o experience and counter the problematic reduction of this experience to that of Mexican immigrants, to invoke a Chicano mythos steeped in Mexico runs the risk of oversimplifying the complexities inherent in the representational choices of Mexico and of de-emphasizing the complex relationships with Mechicana/o communities. I want to think briefly about a few examples in order to explore potential responses to “a society in crisis” as well as the range of performances that 24

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illustrate “a society in crisis” by examining performances that focus on the process of border crossing and immigration. These realities reveal some of the potential crises that emerge in the spaces between Chicana/o and Mexicana/o identity and performance. For both Asian Americans and Chicana/os a multi-generational family history within the United States provides no relief from the reductively problematic nativist claim to “go back where you came from.” This situation is exacerbated in the case of Chicanas/os who are not only living in an occupied homeland — they were here first, especially when consciously acknowledging their indigenous roots — but who in their more exuberant rhetorical and symbolic explorations have even seen themselves returning or continuing to occupy the ancestral homeland of Aztlán that the Mexica or Aztecs, the inhabitants of Tenochtitlan (what is now Mexico City) at the time of Cortes’ arrival, left when they began a pilgrimage southward. My first example comes from a political theater of crisis in the broadest sense — the May 2006 demonstrations in support of immigrants’ rights. One of the most controversial events of the pro-immigration demonstrations, apart from the vehement rapid backlash against Nuestro Himno, the Spanish translation/adaptation of the National Anthem, was the waving of the Mexican flag at demonstrations, marches, and rallies. Critiqued by both the left and the right as at best a poor representational choice and at worst a slap in the face to the country that had “welcomed” them, this display was read as an oppositional nationalism instead of a gesture of honoring a cultural tradition and heritage. While at times certainly intended as a deliberate provocation, in other cases it appeared to be an assertion of identity and of embodied presence that was not incongruent with post-assimilationist metaphors of diversity — tossed salads as opposed to melting pots. So, the question arises (as the specificity of Mexican imagery becomes more concrete and possibly nationalistic through the waving of a flag) does this demonstration then become an instance of Mexican political performance in the United States? Is the performative assertion of Mexican identity possible for a Chicana/o in a public space? Often already read as Mexican, and therefore (dis)placed, would a Chicana/o waving the Mexican flag — a flag whose other wavers might question the Chicana/o’s own identity — represent an attempt to re-imagine the geography of solidarity or a naïve acceptance of a monolithic Mexico? Even more importantly for the disciplinary space of theatre, does this anxiety about the representation of Mexico on the streets of the United States place into question the ability of Chicana/o theatre to continue articulating Mexico as a “mythical” space? While a call to artists to present a more complex and nuanced version of Mexico for U.S. consumption runs the risk of replicating the burden of

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representation placed upon playwrights of color, some Chicana/o plays do effectively engage the complexity of Mexico’s own political and cultural diversity. For example, Luis Valdez’s play Mummified Deer (1999), unique in his work for the strength of the female protagonists, invokes not only the cultural richness of the border spaces historically through the traveling carpas (tent shows/circuses), but also references the persecution of the indigenous Yaqui by the Mexican government. Carlos Morton’s Brown Baby, which had its premiere at UC Santa Barbara in 2006, provides a broader picture of the political and social geography of Mexico through Maria, an undocumented immigrant from Juchitán, Oaxaca, whose justification for leaving home is the fear of political persecution following the murder of her husband for his support of a progressive worker’s organization. Regardless, she is deported, having exposed herself to the authorities in the hope of finding her baby who was stolen in the process of crossing the border. The play ends with her displaced within Mexico itself, working in a maquiladora in Tijuana since, as the Hearing Officer pronounces in her asylum hearing, “[u]nfortunately, the State Department does not consider the Mexican State of Oaxaca a war zone” (Morton). The administrative platitude “unfortunately” contains within it at the least the potential for an alternative vision of Mexico. This complexity can also be erased in the shifting away from the structural causes of societal crisis in the process of celebrating the possibility of individual resistance and transformation. Professor Huerta referenced the Teatro de la Esperanza play La víctima which has been produced a number of times since its creation and has seen as recent resurgence in interest given the cyclical return of immigration as a subject for national concern. In October 2006 Teatro Visión produced the play at the Mexican Heritage Plaza in San José. This production emphasized the theatrical elements of dance and music in the episodic structure, shifting away from the political clarity of docudrama to a more emotionally charged play invested in the psyche of Sammy, a man who makes the odious choice of deporting his own mother.1 This moment of horror is the culmination of a process of victimization that is built into the structural realities of life in the United States as seen from the point of view of a mid 1970s political critique. While this production had its strengths and weaknesses, it had two very interesting moments that were not in the original production which offer insight into potential contemporary responses to a society in crisis unwilling to fully examine the contours of that crisis. The first is the choice to have Sammy’s daughter Janie (who has become a politicized Chicana at her university) acknowledge her grandmother and turn around to knock the walls that frame the stage during the second act, inviting the actors on for their final bow. This breaking down of the wall is clearly contemporary given the

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relative absence of literal walls on the border in 1976 and the increasing political attention to the idea that increasing the length of the border wall would aid in border security and control. In knocking down these walls Janie suggests the possibility of crossing over and offers an oppositional political argument that echoes the Mechicana/o solidarity of the immigration marches. While calling for change and solidarity is crucial, the published version in Spanish calls the audience together to unite and Janie has no role in the final scene. Her physical gesture of solidarity points forward to a progressive future, but runs the risk of equating the energetic on-stage gesture of knocking down set pieces with the real political transformation necessary to tear down a wall. While the production is not naively equating these activities, the danger of reframing the crisis as something that can easily soluble is a risky political gesture echoed by a second moment in the production emerging in the narrative commentary framing each episode. After the first three performances, the director decided to change the statement framing the final scene, a statement spoken by the actress playing Janie to: “A person who is dehumanized must heal themselves.” While this seems to be a reasonable acknowledgement of the need for healing in the face of emotional trauma, it is a significant shift from the statement of the previous three nights: “A person who is dehumanized inevitably dehumanizes others.” This shift in causality and responsibility, from structural determinism to a space in which individual healing is possible, is admirable for its attempt to counteract the inevitability of the previous formulation, but it constructs an individual, liberal subject whose emotional trauma is detached from society. It completely elides the cyclical political forces that perform the dehumanization. While the closure of the inevitable is unfortunate, the published version deals with this by combining volition and structure: “The individual who chooses to take part in the process of dehumanizing others inevitably begins the process of his own dehumanization” (Huerta: 363). The play as a whole suggests that this process was not a simple choice but rather a product of cultural expectation and structural violence and this comment offers a middle ground in analyzing the forces of dehumanization. The politically problematic suggestion to heal one’s self rather than becoming aware of one’s own potential complicity prevents the possibility of critically analyzing the nature of the crisis. In a society in crisis, it is important not to erase the structural realities, constructed and contingent though they are, that shape the possibilities for agency and creative action, and clarify the most effective means to represent those in the theater and on the streets. UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, DAVIS

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Notes 1. This production followed many of the changes incorporated into the 1986 LATC production that Huerta discusses in his introduction to the play.

References Cited Huerta, Jorge, ed. Necessary Theatre: Six Plays about the Chicano Experience. Houston: Arte Público Press, 1989. Morton, Carlos. Brown Baby. Unpublished mss. 1/9/06. Valdez, Luis. Mummified Deer and Other Plays. Houston: Arte Público Press, 2005.

3 When We Dead Awaken The 1613 Marriage Masques of Shakespeare, Campion, and Beaumont Ellen M. Caldwell Abstract The motif of animating statues in the 1613 marriage masques of Thomas Campion and Francis Beaumont derives from Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, a play commissioned for performance at court in December 1612 that added the “animation” of Hermione’s statue for the occasion. Behind the good-natured rivalry of the playwrights may be a caveat about the appropriate honoring of art and the lifelike artifacts it creates. In that sense, these marriage masques — performed just at the turning point from Mardi Gras to Lent— exploit the theatricality of court masques in true carnivalesque spirit. But the performances also intimate a profound nostalgia for what art may never recover, particularly in the wake of Prince Henry’s death on 6 November 1612. Henry’s elaborately painted and clothed effig y, carried through the streets of London before being placed in Henry VII’s Lady Chapel in Westminster Abbey, might well reside in the mind’s eye of the spectators viewing court performances of statues returning to life.

For the 1613 marriage of James’ daughter Elizabeth to Frederick, the Protestant Elector Palatine, “the funeral baked meats” did indeed “furnish forth the marriage feast,” as Hamlet had lamented over ten years earlier. Prince Henry’s elaborate funeral on 7 December 1612 was followed on 27 December with an announcement of his sister’s engagement. Some commentators assumed that the marriage would be delayed. “[I]t would be thought absurd, that foreign Ambassadors coming to condole the Prince’s death should find us feasting and dancing,” avers John Chamberlain in a letter to Sir Dudley Carleton on 19 November 1612 (Nichols 1828: 489). Despite the concern for appearances, however, nuptial preparations began 29

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before the Court had finished its official mourning of Henry’s death. The funeral day was highlighted by the procession of Prince Henry’s casket, complete with his Representation, or effigy, described by Sir Charles Cornwallis as “made in so short warning as like him as could be.” The effigy “was laid on the back in the coffin, and fast bound to the same [...] as it was to be drawne along the streets in the funerall chariot” (1828:494). On 19 December the effigy was removed from the coffin, where it had been lying in state, and “decked and trimmed with cloathes, as he went when he was alive, robes, collar, crowne, golden rodde in his hand, &c. it was set up in a chamber of the said Chappell at Westminster, amongst the Representations of the Kings and Queenes his famous predecessors, where it remaineth for ever to be seene” (1828:503). According to David Bergeron, this display of a commemorative icon created to honor Henry’s memory provides a context for the animation of Hermione’s statue in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale (1985:158–160). 1 Bergeron, moreover, arguing that this final scene was an addition prepared for the 1613 court performance of The Winter’s Tale, has noted the presence of animated statues in both Thomas Campion’s and Francis Beaumont’s masques commissioned for the occasion.2 Both masques contain pointed references to the Pygmalion story, the myth on which Shakespeare also Figure 1. Folding plate by William Hole, “The drew for his animation of Herse and Representation of our late High and Hermione’s statue in the Mighty Henry” in George Chapman, An Epicede masque scene of The Winor Funerall Song on the most disastrous death of the ter’s Tale. Ovid’s Metamorhigh-borne prince of men, Henry Prince of Wales, &c. London, 1613. Shelfmark G11258 C.30.e4 phoses (London, 1567) ©The British Library. All rights reserved. reports of the sculptor Pyg-

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malion, who “of his counterfetted corse conceyveth love in hart” (X, 372) and brings the statue to life. The monumentalizing of the young Prince might help in part to explain the masques’ negotiations between the nostalgic longing for restoration and the carnivalesque energy that animates these effigies. And yet within each version also lurks skepticism about valuing art over (human) nature. Although he himself had been reduced to a funereal monument by the time the masques were performed, Henry’s Protestant biases may have suggested the masques’ ridicule of Pygmalion’s art and perhaps a reformist anxiety about the “worship” of stone effigies. In that sense all three performances — staged just at the turning point from Mardi Gras to Lent — offer a carnival spirit that purports to chastise theatrical idolatry, even while exploiting it. Thomas Campion’s The Lords’ Masque, performed on 14 February 1613, offers clear echoes of The Winter’s Tale. The masque presents scene after scene of Inigo Jones’ elaborate staging and costuming, including a dance of eight stars that are animated by the combined powers of Prometheus and Orpheus, whose “musick [...] well/ Helps to induce a courtly miracle” (1828:557). The third stanza offers reminders of both the animation of Hermione’s statue in 5.3 of The Winter’s Tale as well as the summoning of goddesses to Prospero’s masque in 4.1 of The Tempest: Long since hath lovely Flora thrown Her flowers and garlands here; Rich Ceres all her wealth hath shown, Proud of her dainty cheer. Chang’d then to human shape, descend, Clad in familiar weed, That every eye may here commend The kinde delights you breed [Campion 1967:110, 11.165–72].

Once the theme of transformation has been introduced with this example of animated stars, accomplished to the strains of music, as Hermione’s animation is similarly attended in The Winter’s Tale, Campion offers the principal transforming action of not one, but eight statues. After Prometheus directs one dance of Torch-bearers and leads another dance of Maskers, a scene-change reveals: ... four noble women-statues of silver, standing in several niches, accompanied with ornaments of architecture, which filled all the end of the house, and seemed to be all of goldsmith’s work [...]. Over every statue was placed a history in gold, which seemed to be of bas-relief; the conceits which were figured in them were these. In the first was Prometheus, embossing in clay the figure of a woman; in the second he was represented stealing fire from the chariot-wheel of the sun; in

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This scene description, according to editor I. A. Shapiro, was probably written by Campion after the masque’s court performance (1967:100) and before publication. To the story portrayed in the frieze of Prometheus sculpting and then animating women with fire stolen from heaven, Campion has conflated the Pygmalion story of a sculptor who creates his own mate. This retelling of the myth seems to be animated by allusions to Shakespeare’s own “Pygmalion” scene. Campion’s masque further complicates the story by requiring that Prometheus, playing “Paulina” here, once again animate womankind, whose representatives have been turned to stone by the anger of the “Leontes” character, Jove. A song marks the animation of the four statues, their forms fired by love: And fill their breasts with love’s desires, That they may revel with delight And celebrate the nuptial night, That all which see may say They never viewed so fair a sight Even on the clearest day [1967:112,11. 231–37].

Animating the inanimate by love and presenting a sight that beggars description recall again the animation of Hermione for the return to her long-broken marriage: PAULINA: No longer shall you gaze on’t, lest your fancy May think anon it moves. LEONTES: Let be, let be, Would I were dead but that methinks already — What was he that did make it? See, my lord, Would you not deem it breathed? And that those veins Did verily bear blood? POLIXENES: Masterly done. The very life seems warm upon her lip. LEONTES: The fixture of her eye has motion in’t, As we are mocked with art. [...] PAULINA: Either forbear, Quit presently the chapel, or resolve you For more amazement. If you can behold it, I’ll make the statue move indeed, descend

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And take you by the hand. But then you’ll think — Which I protest against — I am assisted By wicked powers. LEONTES: What you can make her do I am content to look on, what to speak I am content to hear; for ’tis as easy To make her speak as move. PAULINA: It is required You do awake your faith. Then all stand still. On; those that think it is unlawful business I am about, let them depart. LEONTES: Proceed. No foot shall stir [The Winter’s Tale 5.3.60–97].

Even as they seek to dispel it, Paulina’s words reflect the iconoclastic anxiety that the animating of a statue might have provoked in a reformist climate. Leontes’ forthright denial of witchcraft prepares the way for the “miracle” of restoration. But the actual “artlessness” of Hermione’s statue makes this animation theologically safe. There is, in reality, no magic at all.3 When assured that she will not be accused of idol worship or worse, Paulina continues: PAULINA: Music, awake her; strike! [Music] ’Tis time. Descend. Be stone no more. Approach. Strike all that look upon with marvel. Come, I’ll fill your grave up. Stir, nay, come away, Bequeath to death your numbness, for from him Dear life redeems you.— You perceive she stirs. [Hermione comes down] [The Winter’s Tale 5.3.98–103].

In her stage managerial position, Paulina creates considerable dramatic suspense, issuing several calls for Hermione to “be stone no more” (99) and to “[b]equeath to death your numbness” (102) before the lady stirs from her pedestal. Similarly, in Campion’s masque Entheus calls for the statues’ animation by invoking a higher power, something of the “faith” that must be awakened in Leontes: Lo, how fix’d they stand; So did Jove’s wrath too long, but now at last It by degrees relents, and he hath plac’d These statues, that we might his aid implore, First for the life of these, and then for more [Campion 1967:112, 11. 243–247].

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Prometheus implores Jove, “Thy power in these statues prove,/ And make them women fit to love,” until Orpheus gratefully announces, “See, Jove is pleas’d; statues have life and move” (1967:112,11. 224–5). “Real” women, animated by Prometheus, are turned to stone by an angry Jove, only to be reanimated when Jove relents. The eight male masquers are then matched with the four animated statues and, to make up the number, four additional statues appear, are transformed, and join the masquers’ dance. Campion has included all the elements of Shakespeare’s statue scene in his own mythological redaction. But he has outdone his predecessor, increasing the wonder by a factor of eight. As soon as Campion works the Pygmalion charm, though, he promptly dispels it. The masque concludes with a reversal of the animated statue motif. After a second dance, in which the eight couples are joined by the royal Bride and Bridegroom, a final scene is revealed, featuring the silver obelisk of Sibylla and, as the stage direction notes, “standing on pedestals, [...] the statues of the Bridegroom and Bride, all of gold, in gracious postures” (1967:115,11. 342–343). Compliments are exchanged, prophecies are told, and the real royal couple rises to join the final dance of the masquers, leaving their golden effigies in anticlimactic tableau, the flesh winning out over the stage’s gilded papier-mâché. This masque dance echoes the concluding transformation scene of The Winter’s Tale, where Hermione descends to be reunited with Leontes after sixteen years of separation. In this ruse, engineered by Paulina, and in Campion’s masque, engineered by Prometheus and Entheus, the value of nature triumphs over that of art. But Campion’s masque clearly distinguishes between the inferior artistic effigies and the real royal couple, whereas Shakespeare tantalizes us, as Paulina does Leontes, with art that enhances — while also chastening and instructing — human nature. The final dance and song of Campion’s masquers subordinate the theatrical animation to the living royal couple with the command, “Turn, turn, and honour now the life these figures bear;/ Lo, while heav’nly natures far above all art appear!” (1967:116,11. 389–390). Campion, humbling his art before the glory of true majesty, affirms art’s proper limits, perhaps as a corrective to Shakespeare’s flamboyant theatrics. And yet there is a second more somber theme as well. Both playwrights represent a nostalgic attempt to reclaim what has been lost, whether the lives of women consigned to stone by an angry Jove, or a wife condemned to lifelessness by her husband’s loss of faith in her. The animation of Hermione, according to Joel Davis, recalls the Orpheus and Eurydice myth of a husband’s desire to recover his lost wife (2003:135–36). Furthermore, Orpheus’ music in Campion’s masque helps Prometheus to summon the statues from

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their stony sleep (1967:112). Indeed, the desire for restoration and recovery figures in all three masques. While Campion may seem to chide Shakespeare for his ambitious use of art to reanimate life, Beaumont goes one step further in his mild mocking of animated statues. A parody of Shakespeare’s statue scene is intimated throughout The Maske of the Inner Temple.4 Beaumont’s “Devise, or Argument,” detailed in the folio edition, informs us that Jupiter and Juno have agreed to attend the marriage of the Thames and Rhine Rivers. Their messengers, Mercury and Iris, begin the first anti-masque with Iris, pursued and caught by Mercury, blurting out the scene’s exposition. The traditional wrangling between Jupiter and Juno is comically imaged in an exchange of insults by their servants, as Iris argues, what hath [ Jove] to doe with Nuptiall rights? Let him keepe state upon his starry throne, And fright poore mortals with his thunderbolts, Leaving to us the mutuall darts of eyes [Beaumont 1966:130,11. 87–90].

When Mercury attempts to impress Iris with a dance of four Naiades and five Hyades, Iris retorts, “Great wit and power hath Hermes to contrive/ A liveless dance, which of one sex consists!” (1966: 131). Mercury in response summons four Cupids, which he claims to be Venus’ idea. The Cupids then enter and dance. To sort the couples more harmoniously, Mercury takes a hint from The Winter’s Tale: Behold the Statuaes which wise Vulcan plac’d Under the Altar of Olympian Jove, And gave to them an Artificiall life, Shall daunce for joy of these great Nuptialls [1966:132,11. 159–162].

And an elaborate stage direction describes the scene: These Statuaes were attired in cases of gold and silver close to their bodie, faces, hands, and feete, nothing seene but gold and silver, as if they had been solid Images of metall, Tresses of haire as they had been of mettall imbossed, girdles and small aprons of oaken leaves, as if they likewise had been carved or molded out of the metall: at their comming, the Musicke changed from Violins to Hoboyes, Cornets, &c. And the ayre of the Musicke was utterly turned into a soft time, with drawing notes, excellently expressing their natures, and the Measure likewise was fitted unto the same, and the Statuaes placed in such severall postures, sometimes all together in the Center of the daunce, and sometimes in the foure utmost Angles, as was very gracefull besides the noveltie: and so concluded the first Anti-masque [1966:132– 33,11. 168–180].

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These stage directions seem to offer a solemnly ritualized animation of ornately dressed statues. Music draws them from their pedestals, and their graceful poses are accomplished despite the heavily gilded, ornately carved attire. Even granting that such descriptions might tend to be as much subject to embellishment as the gilded statues, the stage directions are remarkable for their conflation of life and art in the details of art “carved” and “molded” on these masquers who are “attired” in gold and silver. The metal is “embossed” upon what the description reminds us are living actors, and the “oaken leaves” that clothe these encased bodies are equally tamed, as though the “girdles and small aprons [...] had been carved or molded out of the metal.” This is not the work of Julio Romano, the supposed sculptor of Hermione’s statue, though Beaumont seems here to recall that “most excellent carver.” This “Artificiall life” (1966:132, line 161) from Jove, as opposed to the “art [that] itself is nature” promised in The Winter’s Tale (4.4.97), is Beaumont’s reminder that Shakespeare’s lively art is a masquing trick, no miracle. Beaumont seems to use his statues to teach Shakespeare a lesson about the limits of art. But was it the solemn lesson intimated in the folio’s stage directions or something more iconoclastic? At the end of this formal description, the folio adds lines to describe a comic chase scene: “The Statues come down, and they all dance till the Nymphs outrun them and lose them, then the Cupids go off, and last the Statues” (1966:143,11.165–80). The folio’s stage direction offers further evidence of near-vaudevillian antics in Beaumont’s marriage masque: in the first anti-masque arranged by Mercury, the Cupids “are weary with their blind pursuing of the Nymphs, and the Nymphs weary with flying them” (1966:143,11.153–58). Suddenly, the formal artistry of the masque is turned to a self-conscious reminder of its own preposterous artifice. If the folio text hints at some comedy at the expense of clumsily animated statues, the broad slapstick comedy is even more apparent in the quarto, “a reading edition especially prepared for the press,” claims editor Fredson Bowers. In the quarto, he adds, “certain of the descriptions must derive from the event itself, and some are so interpretative of the text as to suggest [that they were composed by] the author himself or else someone closely connected with him and with the production” (1966:120). Here is the description of the first anti-masque prepared in “The Devise or Argument of the Masque” for the quarto text: Mercurie [...] in token that the Match should be blessed both with Love and Riches, calleth forth out of the Groves foure Cupids, and brings downe from Jupiters Altar foure Statuaes of gold and silver to daunce with the Nymphes and Starres: in which daunce the Cupids being blinde, and the Statuaes having but halfe life put into them, and retaining still somewhat of their old

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nature, giveth fit occasion to new and strange varieties both in the Musick and paces. This was the first Anti-masque [1966:127,11.13–21].

Both the quarto and folio editions suggest that this solemn occasion is marked by comic disruption in the first anti-masque of animated statues. The comedy, moreover, derives explicitly from the animation of gold-leafed, stifflimbed statues trying to catch their partners (equally clumsy blind cupids) and dance elegant measures. Is this the “graceful” scene promised in the folio’s “Argument”? Beaumont seems not to imitate Shakespeare’s spectacle of Hermione’s animation on stage, but to burlesque it, particularly in the notes to the quarto edition, where the animated statues can’t quite escape the clumsy stiffness that is part of their stony nature. Not to be outdone by Mercury’s show, Iris offers her own, and Beaumont’s second anti-masque must surely credit Shakespeare as well as Juno for its origins: therefore thou, Delightfull Flora, if thou ever felt’st Encrease of sweetnesse in those blooming plants On which the hornes of my faire bow decline; Send hither all that Rurall company, Which decke the May-games with their Countrey sports; Juno will have it so [1966:133,11.186–90].

A group of rustics rushes in, among them a May Lord and Lady, a Shepherd and Country Wench, a He- and She-Baboon, and a He- and She-Fool. A description appearing in both quarto and folio texts claims, “The Musicke was extremely well-fitted, having such a spirit of Countrey jollitie as can hardly be imagined, but the perpetuall laughter and applause was above the Musicke”(1966: 134,11.205–207). The note carefully specifies that the antimasque dancers are not the same as those to appear in the more solemn main masque: The dance likewise was of the same strain, and the Dancers, or rather Actors, expressed every one their part so naturally, and aptly, as when a Mans eye was caught with the one, and then past on to the other, he could not satisfy himself which did best [1966:134,11.208–211].

High praise indeed, for actors, possibly members of the King’s Men, who had performed two months earlier at court The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest, both plays offering rustic dances, of Bohemian peasants in the former, of harvesters and nymphs in the latter.5

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Beaumont’s main masque, in part because he forgoes the borrowing from Shakespeare that had enlivened the two anti-masques, is far less interesting. Yet there are still echoes of the statue scene in the action and setting. A drawn traverse reveals two pavilions housing fifteen seated Olympian Knights. Between the tents appears “Jupiters Altar gilt, with three great Tapers upon golden Candlesticks burning upon it: and the four Statuaes, two of gold, and two of silver, as supporters, and Jupiters Priests in white robes about it” (1966:135–136,11.260–263). Condemned again to lifelessness, as are the royal couple’s effigies in the concluding moments of Campion’s masque, the statues supporting Jupiter’s altar do not stir, but the Knights, who are dressed head to foot in silver with touches of carnation, are summoned by the Priests to a dance: “Shake off your heavy traunce,/ And leape into a daunce/ Such as no mortals use to treade.” The Knights are then told, “Runne ev’ry one of you and catch/ A Nymph in honor of this match;/ And whisper boldly in her eare,/ ‘Jove will but laugh if you forsweare!’” (1966:136–137,11. 290–292, 310–313). And the comic chase of the antimasque is more decorously reenacted to conclude the festivities. Although the text of Beaumont’s main masque is thoroughly complimentary and conventional, the evidence of comic stage business in the quarto text of Beaumont’s anti-masques suggests playfulness in performance not apparent in the folio script. Beaumont, like Campion, offers spectacular animation of statues, both comic and formal, in the first anti-masque and main masque. Some gentle mocking of Shakespeare’s animation of Hermione seems evident in the description of the animated statues, clumsily attempting to dance in the first anti-masque. What might have provoked such mimicry of Shakespeare’s animated statue scene by Campion and Beaumont? Perhaps it was Shakespeare’s own decision to include her animation in a revision of the play. David Bergeron argues that Shakespeare developed the idea for his statue scene from the 1611 Lord Mayor’s Show, which had presented the dramatic restoration of a former mayor by the character of Time (1978:128). But whereas Shakespeare’s masque scene of The Winter’s Tale is ritually reenacted for believers, the masques of Campion and Beaumont, even with the help of Inigo Jones’ elaborate scenery and costumes, seem unwilling to generate similar awe. And perhaps even Shakespeare does not require us to set aside our skepticism about art even as we awaken our faith. The animation of Hermione’s statue is so often read as a moment of solemn awe that the comedy of the ruse is lost. After all, Julio Romano’s art is pure fabrication, as are the magical powers of Paulina that supposedly animate the statue. But contemporary shifts in aesthetic taste may also have influenced the work of the three playwrights. B.J. Sokol argues that as early

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as 1609 the members of Prince Henry’s intimate circle were denigrating the custom of elaborately painted statues in favor of marble replicas praised in Coryat’s Crudities, one of several accounts of courtiers’ excursions to Italy, this one circulating in 1609 and published in 1611. Sokol suggests, “Shakespeare could have been parodying Jonson’s courtly set when this painted statue by ‘Julio Romano’ [...] is given extravagant praise by a connoisseur Italian courtier (5.2.94–9) and then is revealed to be no statue at all” (1989:252).6 Moreover, Shakespeare may well be metatheatrically commenting on his own art with Paulina’s tongue-in-cheek reminders of Hermione’s theatrical face painting: The statue is but newly fix’d, the colour’s Not dry. [...] The ruddiness upon her lips is wet; You’ll mar it if you kiss it, stain your own With oily painting [5.2.46–7, 81–3].

Did Campion and Beaumont share the joke? Or were they anxious to subordinate the lush staging and elaborate art of their masques in order to pay ultimate tribute to the “real” royal couple? Was it their attempt to show an upstart public theater playwright the protocol of this court genre? Or were they capitalizing on the popularity of Shakespeare’s animated statue motif? Perhaps all of the above. All the artists — Shakespeare, Ovid, Romano, Inigo Jones, Campion, Beaumont, and no doubt others — seem to test aesthetic concerns within a carnivalesque formula. The setting of the 1613 marriage masques at a particular time within the liturgical church year reminds us of what license may be employed within artistic, political, and religious boundaries. Campion’s masque was performed on the evening of the marriage, St. Valentine’s Day, Shrove Sunday. The notes to Beaumont’s masque indicate that the performance was scheduled for Shrove-Tuesday, or Mardi Gras, the day before Lent. The inclusion of statue-motifs within the masques of Campion and Beaumont, thus, both celebrates and wittily competes with Shakespeare’s added scene. The comic animation of statues is placed at the very moment when blasphemous, idolatrous claims would be tolerated before the law of marriage and the order of the Lenten season are restored. We return, again, to these effigies, and to what their animation may represent, as it is so insistently reenacted in these masque scenes. The image of the “living” statue embodies the philosophical debate between the relative powers of nature over art. It complicates our sense of the artistic form by bringing it vividly to, and into, life. It makes the impossible seem pos-

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sible on stage, and even as spectators knowingly recognize the ruse, they nonetheless offer at least momentary consent to the fiction. The desire of Shakespeare, Campion, and Beaumont to restore what has been lost and to shape life by attempting aesthetically to recreate it recalls John Chamberlain’s account of a “very ridiculous accident” one week after Prince Henry’s death: A very handsome young fellow, much about his [Henry’s] age and not altogether unlike him, came stark naked to St. James’s, while they were at supper, saying, he was the Prince’s ghost from Heaven with a message to the King; but by no manner of examination or threatening could they get more out of him, or who set him at work. Some say he is simple, others mad. He belongs to one of the Chancery. All the penance they gave him was 2 or 3 lashes, which he endured, as it seemed without sense, and keeping him naked as he was all night and the next day in the Porter’s Lodge, where thousands came to see him [Nichols 1828:490].

The following day, the King dismissed the fellow “without more ado or inquiry.” Even such a counterfeit return from the dead met with considerable tolerance by a grieving father. Chamberlain’s note stands amid the several published accounts of the funeral procession and over thirty printed tributes to the dead Prince. The Funerals of the High and Mighty Prince Henry (London, 1613) offers detailed descriptions of the hearse-drawn effigy and its placement in Westminster Abbey (Nichols 1828:493–501). Although relatively few members of the court and guests witnessed the bringing to life of numerous statues in the 1613 nuptial celebrations, thousands lining the London streets witnessed the procession of Prince Henry’s effigy. More thousands flocked to the Porter’s Lodge to scoff at a madman, or perhaps to glimpse a vestige of the Prince’s spirit come back to life. What hope was summoned by the artful display of Prince Henry’s effigy? What power of desire infected the overactive imagination of a boy who thought himself the lively ghost of the dead Prince? And finally, what desperately idealized version of dynastic marriage did the playwrights summon in their imitations of miraculous resurrections of statues in their court masques?7 The aesthetic competition and parodic exchange among Shakespeare, Campion, and Beaumont in fact complements the motif of nostalgia for what is lost that also shapes the emotions of Shakespeare’s statue scene. Hermione’s restoration is darkened by the reminders of her dead son Mamillius, the still palpable estrangement of Leontes, Polixenes, and Hermione, and the suggestion that Paulina’s actions might be unlawful witchcraft. For Beaumont and Campion, comedy distances spectators from imaginative identification with any real belief in the miraculous revivals performed on stage.

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Even on the royal stage, it seems, princes may not return from the dead, and when statues shake off their lifelessness, they are the subject of comedy, not miracle. In perhaps the oddest marriage of all, the playwrights link artistic counterfeit with iconoclastic sentiments. Shakespeare symbolically incarnates the statue of Hermione, but realistically she was flesh and blood all along. The women of Campion’s masque who had been turned to stone by an angry Jove are “restored” to flesh and blood. Beaumont’s masque actually presents the animation of statues, but they are so stiff and clumsy in their dances that art is instantly put to shame when the royal couple rises to dance their far more graceful measures. Nature trumps art, then, in the work of each playwright’s self-consciously artificial entertainment. And yet some carnivalesque spirit still strives to animate the “counterfeited corse.” After the dances of bumbling statues and rowdy rustics in Beaumont’s Masque of the Inner Temple, the description notes that “It pleased his Majestie to call for [the rustics’ dance] again at the end, as he did likewise for the first Anti-masque [the statues and Cupids’ dance], but one of the Statues by that time was undressed” (1966:134,11.211–214). Sometimes the ideological realities of court masques and the calamitous events befalling the royal family defy even a kingly summons to awake the dead. CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, FULLERTON

Notes Acknowledgment. My grateful thanks to the anonymous referees for their help with suggested revisions to this essay. 1. The title of this essay, drawn from the last play that Ibsen wrote, recalls a similar death and rebirth of a long-separated couple. I am including Shakespeare’s romance under the rubric of marriage masque because of the masque elements that characterize Hermione’s “animation” in the final scene W.W. Greg appears to have been the first to suggest that Shakespeare added the statue scene to the court performance (1955:415–417). Glynne Wickham, however, suggests that The Winter’s Tale celebrates Henry’s investiture as Prince of Wales in the summer of 1610 (1969:249–56, 1973:82–99). A number of critics discuss ways in which tomb art influenced the Renaissance psyche and provided a model or context for Shakespeare’s work. Catherine Belsey’s analysis of Renaissance tomb sculpture leads her to suggest that Hermione’s statue “might have been represented on stage as an effigy” (1999:114). Belsey elaborates on the argument by Bruce R. Smith that Shakespeare’s audience would be most familiar with life-sized tomb sculptures or effigies rather than museum pieces (1985:20), another of the masques’ startling links between death and love, dirge and marriage. In an extension of this funerary art motif, Howard Felperin proposes the startling insight that the Shakespearean sonnet might be seen as “a coffin or tomb, with the beloved as the body it contains” (178). His discussion of sonnet

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81 likens the couplet to “the swinging open of the coffin lid through which the youth is released from the box of the sonnet’s four-square quatrains...” (179). 2. This essay does not deal with the masque by George Chapman also presented for the wedding festivities, since it does not make use of the statue motif. In my attention to the carnivalesque/lenten nature of Campion’s and Beaumont’s masques, I follow the lead of R. Chris Hassel, who finds the mingling of “vital penitential reminders during the season of shriving, in the midst of a celebration of the joys of marriage and carnival” (1979:127). I am also indebted to Mikhail Bakhtin’s study of the “carnivalesque” (1984:4–17). Other speculations about the festivities have been advanced. Jerzy Limon assumes that four masques (one lost) were intended for performance, with each focusing on one of the four elements (1999:125–69). David Norbrook (1986) discusses the anonymous Masque of Truth, strongly Protestant in theme and published in Heidelberg in 1613, which he believes was intended for the 1613 court performance. Graham Parry argues that a “Virginian theme,” applauding explorations in the New World, united the masque texts (1993:104). Norbrook and Parry intimate that the masques often seem to offer tribute more to Prince Henry than to the wedded couple, since Henry was the adamant supporter of Protestantism, including his sister’s marriage to a Protestant courtier, as well as a prominent supporter of new world exploration. Although I would not make similar claims, I believe the shadow of Prince Henry hangs over all three masques. 3. For discussions of the magical/religious and sacrilegious elements of the scene, see Leonard Barkan and David Schalkwyk. The anxiety about the worship of images is admirably discussed in Peter G. Platt’s chapter on The Winter’s Tale (1997:153–168) and David Kaula’s distinction between the “trumpery” and idolatry represented by the clown Autolycus vs. Paulina’s legitimate awakening of faith (1976:294–303). B.J. Sokol’s book-length study of The Winter’s Tale offers the most complete analysis of these reformist tensions in the play. See especially (1994:55–84). 4. The masque text is preserved in a number of versions, the two most important being the undated quarto, published soon after the masque’s entry in the Stationer’s Register to George Norton and printed by Felix Kingston, and the 1647 folio. The folio is not a reprint of the quarto; instead, as Fredson Bowers notes, it “represents something of a different tradition in that the descriptions are wanting and the directions are relatively brief ” (1966:113–14). Because the quarto is the text closest to performance, it becomes a more reliable means of determining the parodic nature of the masque performance. 5. David Farley-Hills (1990) has studied the influence of Shakespeare’s rival playwrights in the years from 1600 to 1606, but I suspect the rivalry only intensified in the later years of Shakespeare’s career. The court milieu, particularly during the popularity of Ben Jonson’s court masques, was a prime arena for rivalry and parody. The intermingling of “court” playwrights and “public theatre” playwrights is clear in the record of court performances during celebrations of the betrothal, including The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest during the Christmas season, 1612. See the appendix of court performances in John Astington’s study (246–47). 6. David Norbrook suggests that growing suspicion of the masque form was affecting court productions as early as 1604 (1986:89ff ). B.J. Sokol links Shakespeare’s comments on Hermione’s painted statue to Truewit’s skeptical examination of artifice in Ben Jonson’s Epicoene and the “condemnation of the collegiate ladies’

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cosmetic practices” (1994:73ff ). Furthermore, Sokol asserts that painted statues would have raised questions for religious reformers (78). Any playwright working at James’ court would have taken these issues into account. 7. Michael Neill offers a fine study of Elizabethan funeral pageantry, suggesting that Hermione’s monument provides “a bridge between the worlds of tragedy and comedy, between dirge and marriage, funeral and revels” (1985:182). For a detailed discussion of Prince Henry’s life and the trauma of his early death, see Roy Strong’s study, especially the discussion of the elegiac tributes (1986:220–225).

References Cited Astington, John. English Court Theatre, 1558–1640. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Helene Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. Barkan, Leonard. “Living Sculptures: Ovid. Michelangelo, and The Winter’s Tale.” English Literary History 48.4 (Winter 1981): 639–667. Beaumont, Francis. The Masque of the Inner Temple and Grayes Inne. In The Dramatic Works of Francis Beaumont, Vol. 1, edited by Fredson Bowers, 126–139. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966. Belsey, Catherine. Shakespeare and the Loss of Eden. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999. Bergeron, David. “Hermione’s Restoration in The Winter’s Tale.” In Shakespeare’s Romances Reconsidered, edited by Carol McGinnis Kay and Henry E. Jacobs, 125–133. Lincoln: Nebraska University Press, 1978. _____. Shakespeare’s Romances and the Royal Family. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1985. Campion, Thomas. The Lords’ Masque, edited by I. A. Shapiro. In A Book of Masques in Honour of Allardyce Nicoll, 127–148. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967. Davis, Joel. “Paulina’s Paint and the Dialectics of Masculine Desire.” Papers on Language and Literature 39.2 (2003): 115–143. Farley-Hills, David. Shakespeare and the Rival Playwrights, 1600–1606. New York: Routledge, 1990. Felperin, Howard. Beyond Deconstruction. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1985. Golding, Arthur, trans. The Fifteen Books of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. London, 1567. Greg, W.W. The Shakespeare First Folio. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955. Hassel, R. Chris. Renaissance Drama and the English Church Year. Lincoln: Nebraska University Press, 1979. Kaula, David. “Autolycus’ Trumpery.” Studies in English Literature 16.2 (1976): 287–304. Limon, Jerzy. The Masque of Stuart Culture. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1990. Neill, Michael. “‘Exeunt with a Dead March’: Funeral Pageantry on the Shakespearean Stage.” In Pageantry in the Shakespearean Theatre, edited by David Bergeron, 153–193. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985.

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Nichols, John, ed. Progresses, Processions, and Magnificent Festivities of King James the First. Vol. II. London: J. B. Nichols, 1828. Norbrook, David. “The Masque of Truth.” Seventeenth Century 1.2 (1986): 81–109. Parry, Graham. “The Politics of the Jacobean Masque.” In Theater and Government Under the Early Stuarts, edited by J.R. Mulryne and Margaret Shewring, 87–117. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Platt, Peter G. Reason Diminished: Shakespeare and the Marvelous. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997. Schalkwyk, David. “‘A Lady’s “Verily” Is as Potent as a Lord’s’: Women, Word, and Witchcraft in The Winter’s Tale.” English Literary Renaissance 22.2 (Spring 1992): 242–272. Shakespeare, William. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, edited by David Bevington. 4th ed. New York: Longman, 1997. Smith, Bruce R. “Sermons in Stones: Shakespeare and Renaissance Sculpture.” Shakespeare Studies 17 (1985): 1–23. Sokol, Barnett Jerome. Art and Illusion in The Winter’s Tale. New York: Manchester University Press, 1994. _____. “Painted Statues, Ben Jonson, and Shakespeare.” Journal of the Warburg and Coutauld Institutes 52 (1989): 250–253. Strong, Roy. Henry, Prince of Wales and England’s Lost Renaissance. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1986. Wickham, Glynne. “Romance and Emblem: A study in the dramatic structure of The Winter’s Tale.” Elizabethan Theater III, edited by David Galloway, 82–99. Toronto: Macmillan, 1973. _____. “The Winter’s Tale: A Comedy with Deaths.” In Shakespeare’s Dramatic Heritage, edited by Glynne Wickham, 249–56. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969.

4 Out of Wasteland Remembering Cultural Revolution in Wasteland and the Human Being Xiao Che Abstract Li Long yun’s play Wasteland and the Human Being dramatizes a young intellectual’s recollection of his experiences in China’s Great Northern Wasteland during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). The play shares many aspects of Bakhtin’s “carnivalism,” and it reflects the Chinese liberalism of the 1980s. However, a new hierarchy of values is established in the play based on carnivalesque subversions. Aside from Bakhtin’s carnivalism, the playwright’s voice is present through narration, emplotment, conceptual strateg y, “chronotopic” imagination, carnivalesque laughter, conflict, metaphor, symbolism, and visual and sonic imagery that represent different agencies. The Chinese traditions of both classical Chinese theatre and socialist realistic theatre are used in this play to focus the audience’s sympathy and emotions. However, the end of the play does not give a definite answer to the protagonist’s quest, and the forces of nature eliminate all traces of human struggle.

Written in 1985, Li Longyun’s play Wasteland and the Human Being dramatizes a young intellectual’s memory of his experiences in China’s Great Northern Wasteland during the Cultural Revolution. Hailed as “the glorious dream of a generation” (Huang & Guan 1988:62) and “a fable about the spiritual existence of human beings” (Wang 2006:7), the play was entered into the canon of contemporary Chinese dramas, and represents the achievements as well as limitations of experimental Chinese drama during the 1980s.1 The action of the play is set in the imaginary Kingdom of the Fallenhorse Lake in China’s Great Northern Wasteland along the border with Russia. A group of young intellectuals from the cities — including Ma Zhaoxin, Xicao, Su Jiaqi, Ning Shanshan, and Li Tiantian — were sent to cultivate the 45

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Great Northern Wasteland during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). The head of the group is Big Yu, a military officer who tries to establish a kingdom through ruthless oppression. Big Yu rapes Xicao and, when she gets pregnant, he blames the pregnancy on her lover Ma Zhaoxin. Unable to accept Xicao and her baby son, Ma Zhaoxin leaves the wasteland in search of a home elsewhere. Su Jiaqi, another member of the group, defects from the border war with Russia to save his life, but his lover, Ning Shanshan, takes his place and gets killed. As for Li Tiantian who is passionately in love with Su Jiaqi, she initially tries to escape reality by immersing herself in the study of literary works. In the end, however, she drowns herself in the lake because she can no longer endure public humiliation and the loss of her beauty. The remaining young intellectuals are so enraged that they overthrow Big Yu’s regime. Fifteen years later, Ma Zhaoxin returns to the wasteland and holds a series of imagined dialogues with his former self, the people who were alive back then, and the people who have survived. The play displays many aspects of Bakhtin’s carnivalism in its numerous monologues and dialogues, multiple narrators, the juxtaposition of different times and locations, the transcendence of boundaries and barriers, and the intermingling of reality, memory, and imagination, along with the coexistence of numerous sounds and images. The interaction of multiple discourses and agents, the dramatization of complex characters and psychological conflicts, the subversion of the oppressor’s discourse, the mixing of the mighty and the weak, the high and the low, the spiritual and the material, the young and the old, the beautiful and the ugly, male and female, seriousness and parody, gloom and utopia, all contribute to the carnivalesque aspect of this play. Its carnivalesque aspect corresponds to the carnivalesque inversion and transgression of established order, authority, tradition, norms and prohibitions brought about by the Cultural Revolution. However, the Cultural Revolution established the absolute authority of an oligarchy by degrading millions of people and annihilating dissent. The same paradox is also evident in Li Longyun’s Wasteland and the Human Being. In this play, the playwright is omnipresent and imposes his moral judgment to establish a new hierarchy of values, whereas Bakhtin’s carnivalesque writing was different in that it called for the absence of an authoritative idea and of the imposition of the author’s views on others. The playwright’s presence is established first through emplotment and its respective ideological implications, especially the conceptual strategies chosen to present historical data and their pre–figuration of history in different ways. Emplotting history in romance implies the ideology of anar-

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chism, whereas comedy implies conservatism, tragedy implies radicalism, and satire implies liberalism (White 1973:x). Using metaphor to present historical data, the playwright prefigures the historical field in a representational manner, metonymy2 prefigures in a reductive manner, synecdoche3 in an integrative manner, and irony in a dialectical manner (White 1973:29). Li Longyun’s omniscience is also actualized in the narrators who, as characters in the play, make their appraisals clear through their narrative that introduces characters, organizes episodes, explains emotions, analyzes motivations, and comments on events. Events and characters are also embodied in different images and sounds that convey the playwright’s approval or disapproval. While the strife between diverse forces resembles Bakhtin’s dialogism, it always ends in the victory of one force over the other. The use of expressive theatricality appealing to the audience’s emotions is also Li Longyun’s way to impose judgment. So, despite the play’s carnivalesque aspects, its dialectic ultimately ends in a synthesis as the dialogue turns into a monologue, the ambiguity becomes clarified, and the fluidity crystallizes. A new authoritarian discourse is established at the end of the play advocating the full development of human beings according to the dictates of morality. The entire play is Ma Zhaoxin’s recollection of events that took place fifteen years earlier. However, as Li Longyun explicitly stated elsewhere, Ma Zhaoxin, the protagonist, is the playwright himself.4 Or, as Susan Crane says, “[Memory] becomes sensible and visual through imaginative recollection and representation.... Memory is an act of ‘thinking of things in their absence’” (2000:1–2). The play is structured around the protagonist’s revisiting of the wasteland and his conversations with his previous self, the people who died and the people who have survived in such a way that these characters’ subjective emotions and imaginative recollections are externalized in an expressive dramatic world. This immediately becomes manifest in the play’s “chronotopic” imagination. The Greek term means a “time-space continuum,” and, for Bakhtin, it emphasizes “the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature” (Bakhtin 1981:84). In Li Longyun’s play, “Wasteland is not only a concept of space and geography, but also a concept of time and psychology” (Li 1988:55). The space is the “Fallen-Horse Lake Kingdom” (Li 1987:6). In traditional Chinese culture, horses are seen as innocent, intelligent, loyal, and courageous animals that help people realize their needs, goals, and dreams. The “fallen” horse prefigures the historical battlefield as the locus where humanistic ideals, spiritual values, and cultural heritages get destroyed. The dimension of time in the play is metaphysically described as “the space between the two beliefs of the human being” (Li 1987:6). Symbolically, it is referred to as “after that fall”:

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Text & Presentation, 2007 It seems that everything started from that fall! Life was like a merciless hoe that hit that palace in the people’s mind. Initially, it was struck down piece by piece. When it collapsed, a storm blew over the palace, sweeping everything away, including all of the powder. People lost their sense of belonging and human nature lost its balance. People began a crazy search for their identity in the midst of all that loss and confusion [Li 1987:8].

On one level, “that fall” refers to the beginning of the Cultural Revolution in the fall of 1966 that ruthlessly crashed the socialist utopia and all its related values during the following ten years. On another level, “that fall” refers to any moment in one’s mind that marks the loss of an ideal or belief, rendering life meaningless or insignificant, while increasing one’s confusion and anxiety. Wasteland, as a metaphor, signifies the “progress” of history in this play. The playwright, who intended the play to be understood universally, dramatizes the alienation of human beings by social structures, as well as their sense of loss and ceaseless quest for a sense of belonging. Since the meaning of life and human belonging remain precarious, life’s significance and beauty lie in the endless striving of human beings. I try to deal with some irresolvable human issues: the human being’s stubbornness and tragedy in confronting fate, integrity and self-abasement when facing nature, resistance and reconciliation with innate weakness, perseverance and devastation during the process of re-establishing ideals, loss and frustration in search of belonging to someone or something [Li 1988:55].

This fundamental philosophical quest that transcends the restrictions of time and place is relevant to human experience throughout the world. In Li Longyun’s memory, wasteland is an archetypal universal space wherein the human being has to wage an eternal war with nature, fate, society, and the self. Longyun’s melancholic nostalgia for youth, ideal, struggle, and sacrifice is embodied in the romantic, beautiful, and poetic images used to present the wasteland. “In the memory of those lucky survivors of the reclaiming team, wasteland here is forever shrouded in the beam of sunset” (Li 1987:7). In the stage direction at the beginning of the play, Longyun describes the wasteland as a dreamy and mysterious world wherein everything forms a harmonious and serene whole. According to Hayden White, the emplotment of romance implies the ideology of anarchism. One of the purposes of sending intellectual youths to the wasteland was to overcome nature and transform it according to the human will. The adoration of nature conveys the ideology of anarchism in the sense that it subverts the Maoist adoration of the human being as master of the universe.

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Contrary to the fleeting, transitory and precarious human world, the wasteland is a utopian land where time accumulates indefinitely. Past, present, future, reality, memory, and imagination, all mix together, constantly flowing into each other and coming out of each other. As the characters experience change, crisis, degeneration, death, resurrection, and regeneration, they often come onto the stage representing different phases in their development. No matter what happens to them, no matter whether they are alive or dead, all of them are revived when they acquire wisdom, maturity, serenity, and strength, and face themselves and the world with peace in mind. In the wasteland, no matter how marginal it is, there are many races and cultures that constantly intermingle and hybridize — such as the folk culture of the national minorities and the rural residents, the elements of Russian culture, the inland culture of the Chinese migrants, and the municipal culture of the relocated young intellectuals (Li 1988:55). When Li Longyun presents the life and culture of national minorities, he uses the tropes of metonymy and synecdoche. He selects a few exotic customs — such as the eating of raw fish, dog-pulled sledges, mesmerizing folk music, sumptuous wedding ceremonies, gallantry, and hospitality — to present the qualities presumably inherent in the whole. In this way, he prefigures the national minorities in a reductive and integrative manner. By romanticizing their primitive life and culture as innocent and humane, and by presenting it as a desirable counterpart to the complex, gloomy life and culture of the dominant Han nationality, Li Longyun reveals his anarchism because he questions the superiority of official discourse and China’s rush towards a supposedly higher level of social development. Foreign culture is also presented in a romantic manner. It is embodied in sounds and images that symbolize love and beauty which stubbornly contend with the oppressor’s intimidating voice on the wasteland. The Crucifix and the bell ringing of the Russian churches coming from the other side of the river border offer some of the characters special emotional comfort and spiritual transcendence. Here is how Xicao describes Jesus Christ on the cross: Just look at him, hanging his head, hiding inexpressible misery and worries in his eyes.... [Choking with emotion] When life is most miserable and unendurable, I remember it. [Gazing at the cross with gratitude] No matter what I say to him, he listens to me carefully. Never feel irritated or angry... Look at his eyes. How sad they are! He knows everything. He can understand me and sympathize with me [Li 1987:22].

Marxist materialism and Chairman Mao’s permanent revolution had denounced the Christian teachings of reconciliation, endurance, and uni-

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versal love as poisons of the mind. It was a radical move to dramatize a spiritual quest in this play at a time when religion was seen as a taboo. However, the use of bell-ringing and the Crucifix on the one hand as synecdoche to portray benevolence as an inherent quality of Christianity, and the simultaneous silencing of the Church’s strict organization and dogmatic practices on the other, prefigures Christianity in a reductive manner, illustrating the ideology of conservatism seeking to replace one hegemonic discourse with another. In the play, social materialism overcomes religious idealism. In the middle of the play, when Ma Zhaoxin, the protagonist, crosses the border between China and the Soviet Union to escape from the wasteland, a chiming church bell mysteriously calls him forward. This attraction is mitigated by the song of a little girl, the cordial twittering of egrets, the trumpet melody of his friend, the calling of his grandma and friends, the children’s ensemble (“We are the Inheritors of Communism”), and Meng Guibin’s song celebrating the beauty of the motherland. It would seem that the entire wasteland is calling him back to China (Li 1987:27–28)! During his psychological conflict, Ma Zhaoxin imagines that two armed policemen are approaching to arrest him, reminding him of the moral education he has received. Thus, he is eventually drawn back to the “warm, gentle” land of the Fallen-Horse Lake by the voices that appeal to his patriotism, loyalty, friendship, moral uprightness, community values, and filial piety: “Bending himself in the embrace of the wasteland, he crawls over to the audience, crying and waving his hand” (Li 1987:29). When “Ma Zhaoxin of 15 years later” recalls this experience and the scene about overcoming temptation is reenacted before him, he bursts into tears. This emotionally charged scene is structured to ensure the audience’s sympathy for Ma Zhaoxin’s inner struggle and victory. Of course, the violation of human rights in the Soviet Union, the enemy of China at the time, was as severe as in China. So presenting the Soviet Union as a place where one could escape from oppression was preposterous. Ma Zhaoxin’s intended escape held no promise of a happy ending. In this way, the Bakhtinian inversion of two opposites actually becomes the inversion of two similarities. Intentional or not, this twisted appropriation of Bakhtin’s carnivalism points to the fact of how inescapable the wasteland is. Foreign cultures offer a transcending dream world to the oppressed young intellectuals to help them transcend the harsh reality of the wasteland. Su Jiaqi’s trumpet plays a variation of a Russian folk song with a melancholic, exquisite tune that sounds “like a streak of sunlight, leading people into a different world” (Li 1987:10). According to Hayden White, metaphor prefigures the historical field in a representational manner. The metaphor of

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sunlight (that represents the Russian folk song) romanticizes the foreign culture and conveys an anarchist ideology by relegating the foreign land as a brighter and happier place than the bleak wasteland. This lyrical melody rises during moments of love and humaneness throughout the play, and the harsher the oppressor’s voice grows, the more moving the melody becomes. The humanity of the Russian and Chinese people is asserted as an alternative to the combativeness and animosity of their governments. When Su Jiaqi secretly watches the Russian play The Dawn Here Is So Quiet at a monitoring television station on the border, he imagines that the five Russian girls in the play transform themselves into Xicao, Li Tiantian, Ning Shanshan (who was killed during the border war), and the two Russian sisters of Xing Fulin (a member of the team and an offspring of a Chinese and a Russian). That same evening, Su Jiaqi dreams of killing two Russian female soldiers, and his dead lover, Li Tiantian, returns to ask the statuette of Cupid back from him. This tragic episode delivers a radical message, questioning the war between China and the Soviet Union, and its toll on the lives of young men and women from either side. Rebelling against China’s official ban on foreign literature imports that were seen as contaminated by a pernicious bourgeoisie ideology, Li Tiantian secretly immerses herself in reading a love story by Rabindranath Tagore, India’s and Asia’s first Nobel laureate in 1913. The exotic land described by Tagore is aurally embodied in Bengalese music that is mixed with a mother’s lullaby, the clinking of Bengalese girls’ angle bangles and the gurgling of their water pitcher. This beautiful world is also visualized on stage through poetic images: Fiery-red oleanders and high palm trees. An old man is standing upon the land of ancient India. His eyes are so kind, blinking the light of profound wisdom. Cloaking a white robe, he is embracing green grassland, mountains, rivers, moonlight and flowing water [Li 1987:24].

In Tagore’s love story, the heroine sacrifices herself in order to preserve the ideal image of her beauty for her lover, and in this way she foreshadows Li Tiantian’s suicide later in Longyun’s play. This kind of love was unacceptable because the Cultural Revolution promoted only down-to-earth relationships between proletarian comrades. The depiction of romantic love in the play sends a dissenting message. By making all love affairs in the play end tragically, Longyun conveyed a pessimistic view about finding fulfillment through ideal love in a material world. Although Li Longyun’s play is a big improvement over the black-andwhite dichotomies present in socialist realistic works by dramatizing human complexities and ambiguities, he presents characters and events along a line

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of morality couched in metaphors, symbols, images and sounds that guide audience sympathies. For example, childhood symbolizes innocence, happiness, hope, and uprightness — in short, a state of wholesome purity lost in adults who have degraded and alienated themselves. Maomao, a six-yearold girl, always sings a deeply moving song, holding fiery-red petals. She later sacrifices herself in order to bless the marriage between Li Tiantian and Su Jiaqi with a lovely baby. During midsummer June, snow falls in big feathery flakes overnight. The snow freezes the Falling-Horse Lake into a huge ice-plate. In the middle of the ice-plate, a delicate Dazixiang flower suddenly arises. It grows taller and taller within this silvery world, gradually becoming a big tree piercing into clouds and sky. The huge fiery-tree is burning on the wasteland [Li 1987:33].

Maomao’s voice comes from the middle of the fiery tree asking Li Tiantian to regard her as Cupid. The snow, the flower, the flame, and the fiery tree symbolize purity, love, delicacy, youth, energy, life and hope. This is a radical view on love from that part of Chinese history because the play asserts that true love can be attained only by sacrificing the beauties represented by Maomao. Ma Zhaoxin, who accidentally started a wild fire on the wasteland, returns home in Beijing secretly. He recalls his childhood: Childhood memory is like a spring torrent, bursting the dyke and rushing into the brain. All kinds of historical echoes suddenly appear.... Historical echoes weave a childhood cradle. This cradle is so bright, lively, harmonious and beautiful, but also so faraway [Li 1987:34].

Prefiguring the historical field in an integrative manner, these echoes present childhood as a pure state of being, a kind of spiritual home, to which he can return as an adult. He recalls how a good-natured worker educated him to be morally upright. In order to avoid implicating his family because he is a fugitive, he hides outside his home and has an imaginary dialogue with his mother who can read his thoughts. As noted by Bahktin, dialogism helps people define themselves and their position in the world in relation to others. Ma Zhaoxin’s touching dialogue with his mother restores his belief in human relationships and social responsibility. He decides to return to the wasteland like a lost sheep returns to the herd. No matter how hard communal life is in the wasteland, leading the life of a fugitive and loner diverges from the traditional Chinese values. His reluctance to return to the wasteland is expressed through the integrative description of the train that carries him back. “The sound of the

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train wheel and the shrieking of the siren are so piercing that they seem to tear the whole human world into pieces” (Li 1987:36). The synecdoche of the wheel and the siren convey his accusation of Chinese government’s Rustication Policy that forced millions of urban educated youths to live away from home. Against the carnivalesque dissenting sounds and images in the play stands Yu Changshun as an oppressive and controlling force in the wasteland. He is the captain in charge of the wasteland and “the king of Fallen-horse Lake Kingdom” (Li 1987:6). His nickname is “Big Yu” because he is a short man with tall ambitions, an irony that prefigures the historical field in a dialectical manner according to Hayden White. This grotesque exaggeration is also a strategy of carnival misalliances that allow for extravagant juxtapositions, unusual combinations, grotesque mixing, and confrontation between opposites. An aspect of Bakhtin’s carnivalism is degradation, “the lowering of all that is high, spiritual, ideal, and abstract” (Bakhtin 1994:205). Big Yu’s official status is degraded by grotesque sounds and images manifesting the playwright’s lack of appreciation of the Chinese government at that time. Big Yu beats a rapid bell that stands on one side of the stage to summon people to his order. At first, the people are not afraid of this bell. But as the play unravels, the people gradually realize that this is not an ordinary bell, but a symbol of the Fallen-horse Lake Kingdom’s imperial power! It is gallows! Time and again during their lives the people fall into “that autumn” and then they always hear this whip-like bell [Li 1987:8].

Big Yu’s crude attempt to bring back imperial rule in the wasteland is evident in the metaphoric use of the bell and the whip that always preceded an emperor’s entrance in feudal China. The metaphors establish a lineage between revolutionary China and feudal China. The young intellectuals condemn the bell openly because it destroys human nature and paralyzes one’s will power: MA ZHAOXIN OF 15 YEARS LATER: At that time what we feared most was to hear the sound of this bell. XICAO: This bell cannot wait to beat all the humanity out of us.... MA ZHAOXIN OF 15 YEARS LATER: It is so savage that it reminds us of the terrifying sound of fate knocking door ... [Li 1987:10].

Such explicit commentary by the characters in the play shows an influence from both the classical Chinese theatre that relies heavily on moral binaries and Brecht’s epic theatre that regards didacticism as one of its major

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goals. The commentary was also radical because it uses negative images and sounds to represent the only cadre in this play, and it presents life under Big Yu’s regime as tragic. It manifests Li Longyun’s protests against the injustices of the governing regime at that time. Big Yu manipulates the other characters by enforcing military discipline. His bell ringing is complemented by the shrieks of a military whistle and a fervent military song that is typical of the songs of the Cultural Revolution. Hierarchy and obedience satisfy Big Yu. His obsessive desire for power rests on a childhood trauma when he was humiliated and tortured in his hometown. It was a small, stagnant agrarian town surrounded by mountains, and it crumbled under a hegemonic bureaucracy that violated human rights. Growing up in this oppressive environment, Big Yu was convinced that “Power is more valuable than anything! Having power is the greatest enjoyment of human life!” (Li 1987:13). As an adult, Big Yu makes a tremendous effort to acquire power and privileged social status. By setting himself as the head of a hegemonic power structure in the wasteland Big Yu perpetuates the feudal system that had ruthlessly destroyed his humanity and integrity. The collective memory of Chinese feudal customs and practices is seen as a fundamental reason for the degradation of Chinese culture and society and the repetition of the vicious cycle in Chinese history. However, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution aiming to overthrow feudal legacies, produced yet another form of feudal dictatorship. Joseph Roach comments on how the “new” is a mutation and adaptation of the “old” (1996: 28–29). The historical past controls the present and orients the future. Wasteland, an organic part of past Chinese culture, cannot be erased from the people’s memory. Nonetheless, tradition is transformed with the passage of time. The characterization of Big Yu transcends the black-and-white dichotomy practiced by playwrights of classical Chinese theatre and socialist realism. Big Yu shows some humanity and vulnerability despite his intimidating presence. “Ma Zhaoxin of 15 years later” is mature enough to see the other side of Big Yu. Big Yu’s humanity is expressed not only through his childhood memories, but also through his tender feelings for Maomao, the six-year-old girl who reminds him of his dead sister. The cap that he gives to Maomao to shield her from mosquito bites symbolizes his intention to protect her, even though he constantly harms other people. The contradictory aspects of Big Yu’s characterization reveal Li Longyun’s effort to make the human being the focus of literature, instead of making literature the vehicle of a political agenda as with the case of socialist realists. According to Bakhtin, carnivalesque laughter tears down authoritarian and sublime figures:

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To degrade also means to concern oneself with the lower stratum of the body, the life of the belly and the reproductive organs; it therefore relates to acts of defecation and copulation, conception, pregnancy, and birth. Degradation digs a bodily grave for a new birth; it has not only a destructive, negative aspect, but also a regenerating one.... Grotesque realism knows no other level; it is the fruitful earth and the womb. It is always conceiving [1994:206].

This dialectical transformation between opposite sides is also a principle of Taoism. This ancient Chinese philosophy is exemplified in the play during the sexual intercourse between Xicao (the prettiest woman) and Big Yu (the ugliest man). By raping Xicao, Big Yu destroys Xicao’s innocence and purity, but he also degrades his own “sublime” status by mingling with the low. However, out of this mingling and destruction comes a baby. “The cry of the baby is so loud and majestic, like a harbinger of dawn. He brings irreplaceable comfort to the wounded older generation” (Li 1987:44). Even “Ma Zhaoxin of 15 years later” is excited by this arrival of new life: “No matter how evil is his father and how weak is his mother, he is the son of the wasteland!” (Li 1987:44). Comparing the baby to a “harbinger of dawn” represents new generation and the promise of hope, renewal, and regeneration, even though his father is Big Yu, the man who degrades humanity. In this way, Li Longyun redeems Big Yu from total condemnation. Near the end of the play, Big Yu is presented as a lost, pathetic dog yearning for humanity: “Like a wounded dog, he barks madly, hoarsely calling for the name of his son” (Li 1987:45). This metaphor marks Big Yu’s defeat. The playwright demolishes the people’s fear of and awe for Big Yu’s authoritative power. This is a radical move, but its impact is reduced because Li Longyun still interprets history according to a Hegelian progressive view and ends the play with the triumph of the “positive” over the “negative” forces. The conflict between Big Yu and the young intellectuals ends with the subversion of Big Yu’s authoritative regime. The bulldozer that Su Jiaqi drives over Big Yu’s headquarters is described in metaphors like “whirlwind,” “roaring lion,” and “galloping horse.” On the other hand, the defeat of Big Yu is symbolized by the breaking of his bell that is thrown away. As the bell hits the icy ground, it makes a lamenting sound (Li 1987:39–41). For the first time in the play, the voices of the young intellectuals rise over the voice of Big Yu who shouts and laments hysterically. A ring made of dry dark-red petals is used to symbolize the death of Li Tiantian, the sacrifice of youth and beauty. “Red petals are scattered on the wasteland and in the lake like patches of a blood-red azalea” (Li 1987:41). A sharp contrast to this sublime spectacle is Big Yu on the other side of the stage. He is crying, holding his dead dog in his arms and calling its name. The hierarchy is reversed

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through different sonic and visual images that convey a new moral and political value system. The oppressed are now on the top and their fallen oppressor at the bottom of the new hierarchy. This reversed new hierarchy is the paradox in Li Longyun’s play. According to Bakhtin, carnivalesque laughter originates from folk humor. “Precisely because of its unofficial existence, it was marked by exceptional radicalism, freedom, and ruthlessness” (Bakhtin 1984:72). This is exemplified by Li Longyun’s play in a metatheatrical episode during which a revolutionary model play, Taking Tiger Mountain by Strateg y, is parodied by a performance staged by a local rural commune’s propaganda troupe. The propaganda troupe is invited by Ma Zhaoxin to perform for the young intellectuals in the wasteland because performing a revolutionary model play — that, incidentally, features an uncouth country bumpkin, a dog, and a monkey — was the only legitimate cultural activity encouraged during the Cultural Revolution. The hilarious performance ridicules the bathos of the model play that recounts the adventures of gallant PLA5 soldiers ordered to wipe out KMT6 remnants in the mountains of northeastern China where the Fallen-Horse Lake is located. Model plays promoting revolutionary enthusiasm and a black-and-white viewpoint are officially performed in a way that “even the postures of the different characters became statements of truth or confessions” (Chen 2002:117). The positive characters are made to stand tall and erect, while the negative characters invariably stoop, cower and grovel to the ground. The bandits are always depicted as clowns with hunched backs, whereas the PLA soldiers are “always straight-backed and of impeccable moral fiber” (Denton 1987:127). This stereotypical characterization in performance is a transformed heritage of classical Chinese theatre in which inner truth is embodied in obvious signs such as make-up, costume, stylized movement, and gestures. In Taking Tiger Mountain by Strateg y, the protagonist is Yang Zirong who kills a tiger and wears its skin as a vest. This alludes to the Monkey King who also slays a tiger in Journey to the West and wraps the skin around his waist. As Denton noted “the allusion charges Yang Zirong’s tiger vest with images of the magical, supernatural powers of the enlightened monkey” (1987:129). As the quintessential trouble-maker of the Chinese folklore tradition, the Monkey King is a rebellious figure who subverts every established hierarchy, order, or authority. His wild, prankish conduct always causes carnivalesque laughter and disorder. In this play, the pumpkin propaganda troupe includes the above cultural allusion in their performance. A monkey riding on a dog impersonates Yang Zirong, and decorates itself with the sacred PLA badge to the musical accompaniment of the bumpkin’s song and gong. In carnival, just as Bakhtin argues, “the truth of laughter embraced

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and carried away everyone; nobody could resist it” (1984:82). The young intellectuals who watch this parody are greatly fascinated and carried away by the performance. This metatheatrical episode provides a satirical and ironical subversion of the official ideology and its discourse. According to Hayden White, satire implies the ideology of liberalism and irony prefigures the historical field in dialectical manner. Irony tends to dissolve all belief in the possibility of positive political actions. In its apprehension of the essential folly or absurdity of the human condition, it tends to engender belief in the “madness” of civilization itself and to inspire a Mandarin-like disdain for those seeking to grasp the nature of social reality in either science or art [White 1973:38].

Satire and irony in the play reveal the absurdity and ludicrousness of making the model play the sole legitimate historical discourse and cultural activity during the Cultural Revolution. They also question the existence of any positive meaning in the political struggle between CCP and KMT. Since this struggle had been legitimized by CCP as the struggle between the Chinese people and their feudal landlords, capitalist bureaucrats, and foreign imperialists as represented by KMT, Li Longyun’s play reveals its author’s liberalism and dialecticism that enable him to see the historical forces in their totality, instead of being limited to one specific ideology. Chairman Mao’s grand project that sent millions of intellectuals to rural areas to be integrated with the peasants is presented as a total failure in this play. The rural people are portrayed as crude and ignorant. Their gossip and sneer at the spiritual pursuit of the young intellectuals often help politicians. In contrast to the Maoist glorified image of peasants and proletarians as the driving force for historical progress, the play, in a radical manner, presents them as a cause for tragedy. This perception also reflects a reversal of power during the Deng Xiaoping era (1978–1994) when the intellectuals were restored to a prestigious social status. The Chinese intellectuals in 1980s had an inflated image of themselves as China’s saviors and as harbingers of modernity because they believed in the power of ideas to reshape socioeconomic realities, and they blamed China’s backwardness on the cultural tradition nurtured by the petit-peasant economy that lasted for thousands of years. Before China embarked on a secularized, nonpolitical, anti–heroic modern culture in the 1990s, the intellectual idealism of the 1980s was heavily imbued with Mao’s utopian impulses and voluntarism. However, this time it was the intellectuals instead of the proletarians (workers, peasants, and soldiers) who led the revolution. Finally, the overwhelming force that covers up all instances of het-

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eroglossia in the wasteland is nature. Throughout the play, nature is presented to be the human being’s most loyal friend that provides a serene, harmonious and beautiful homeland. Against all the harsh struggle, boisterous clamor, and tumultuous uproar of mankind, the silence of the wasteland is a comment on the futility, meaninglessness, and absurdity of human struggle. At the end of the play, when “that fall” is over and Big Yu has lost everything he had acquired, he stubbornly resists amnesia and the passage of time by recording his version of the past. He erects a wooden tablet and carves the following inscription: “Once upon a time, a group of young cultivators came here to the wasteland. In search of true selves, they sacrificed their blood, sweat, life, and soul to the Bielahong River” (Li 1987:46). On the back side of the tablet, Big Yu carves his own name in an effort to commemorate his authority, kingdom, and contribution. However, at the very end of the play, the overwhelming forces of nature eliminate all traces of human presence, struggle, or ambition, rendering human life and effort both transient and trivial: This snow-storm lasts for a long time. Sledge-house collapses and Fallenhorse Lake is blown away! It sweeps away all life on the wasteland: good, evil, successful, defeated, everything is blown away! Nothing exists between heaven and earth.... Nature seems to love serenity and its original crudity. The empty Fallen-horse Lake is like a deserted battlefield. Winter snow, summer sun, autumn wind, and spring rain gradually appease the scars on the battlefield. Serenity is restored here [Li 1987:46].

Examining the past aims to build a better future. The efforts and sacrifices of that generation of young intellectuals should not be made in vain. Their pursuits, sufferings, achievements, and failures should be remembered and understood. The paradox, according to Zizek, is that, “in order really to forget an event, we must first summon up the strength to remember it properly” (2002:22). Through this play that is based on personal recollections, Li Longyun helps Chinese audiences to have a dialogue with their national past and cultural memory. Cherishing a pure heart and a strong sense of social responsibility, Li sincerely believes in enlightenment founded on reason, morality, and humanity. The play, written in mid–1980s when the Chinese had embarked on a new venture for a bright national future, helped audiences to experience a kind of spiritual purgation and to come out of the wasteland. At the end of the play, Li Longyun does not give a definite answer to Ma Zhaoxin’s search because the understanding of the past cannot substitute the understanding of the present (Li 1988:57). After this spiritual purgation, the audience comes out of the theatre with a deeper understanding

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of the fundamental issues concerning fate, nation, and selfhood. According to the play, this is the first step one must take to get out of the wasteland. UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SANTA BARBARA

Notes 1. Unless otherwise indicated, all English translations of the quoted passages are mine. 2. Hayden White defined metonymy as “(literally, name change), the name of a part of a thing may be substituted for the name of the whole, as in the phrase ‘fifty sails’ when what is indicated is ‘fifty ships’” (1973:34). 3. Synecdoche is defined by Hayden White as “using the part to symbolize some quality presumed to inhere in the totality, as in the expression ‘He is all heart’” (Ibid). 4. In his essay, “Ren, daziran, ming yun, xijuwenxue” (“Human Being, Nature, Fate, Dramatic Literature”), Li Longyun writes: “For the accuracy and wholeness of myself, in this play I divide myself into two: there are both ‘Ma Zhaoxin’ then and ‘Ma Zhaoxin of 15 years later’” (1988:55). 5. PLA refers to People’s Liberation Army led by Chinese Communist Party. 6. KMT refers to Kuomintang, the National Party led by Chiang Kai-shek.

References Cited Bakhtin, Mikhail M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. _____. Rabelais and His World. Translated by Helene Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. _____. The Bakhtin Reader: Selected Writings of Bakhtin, Medvedev and Voloshinov. Edited by Pam Morris. London: Glossary Edward Arnold (Publishers) Ltd., 1994. Chen, Xiaomei. Acting the Right Part: Political Theater and Popular Drama in Contemporary China. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2002. Crane, Susan A. Museums and Memory. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. Denton, Kirk A. “Model Drama as Myth: A Semiotic Analysis of Taking Tiger Mountain by Strateg y.” Drama in the People’s Republic of China. Edited by Constantine Tung & Colin Mackerras, 119–136. New York: State University of New York Press, 1987. Huang Lili & Guan Lin. “Huang yuan yu ren —Wang Gui fengge de xintixian.” (“Wasteland and the Human Being: A New Presentation of Wang Gui Style.”) Xiju Yanjiu (Theatre Research) (September 1988):61–63. Li, Longyun. Saman yueguang de huang yuan — Huang yuan yu ren. (Wasteland Bathed in Moonlight—Wasteland and the Human Being.) Juben (November 1987):6–47.

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_____. “Ren, daziran, ming yun, xijuwenxue.” (“Human Being, Nature, Fate, Dramatic Literature.”) Juben ( January 1988): 54–59. Roach, Joseph. Cities of the Dead. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Wang, Xiaoying. “Daoyan de hua.” (“Director’s Notes.”) Production Program. Beijing: National Theatre Company of China, 2006. White, Hayden. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore & London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973. Zizek, Slavoj. Welcome to the Desert of the Real!: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates. London: Verso, 2002.

5 The Hyperrealities of America’s Vietnam War and 9/11 in the French Theatre of Armand Gatti and Michel Vinaver Les Essif Abstract This essay uses Jean Baudrillard’s concept of America’s cultural hyperreality to discuss representations of the United States in Armand Gatti’s V comme Vietnam and Michel Vinaver’s 11 September 2001. Both plays enlist a variety of dramaturgical strategies to present an American reality that is “deterred.” The essay’s central argument is that, in the eyes of these French dramatists, hyper-mediated American society has lost both its ability and desire to conceptually distinguish between mediated (simulated) and unmediated reality. The qualities of absoluteness and multiplicity that Baudrillard uses to define American hyperreality are especially useful to analyze the images of America in both works: (a) Gatti’s televisual depiction of the U.S. central administration, embodied by a Megasheriff president and processed through a megacomputer at the core of the theatrical space, and (b) Vinaver’s radiophonic staging of the multiple dissonant voices (from Bush and Bin Laden, to the Arab terrorists, American journalists, and Wall Street Traders) that coalesce around the incomprehensible horror of 9/11.

The Gulf War did not happen, as the prominent French philosopher Jean Baudrillard has claimed.1 Similarly, the current war and occupation of Iraq is not occurring, and this is largely because the key player in both wars, the culture of “America,” did not and does not exist — not according to Baudrillard’s philosophy and certainly not according to the drama of celebrated French dramatists like Armand Gatti and Michel Vinaver. Well maybe these 61

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authors are not exactly professing that the U.S. does not physically exist, but rather that its essential culture is not so much “for real,” as it is “for hyperreal,” a transfiguration that poses its own set of problems in the era of globalization. As early as 1967, Gatti wrote and directed V like Vietnam, a play that wholly de-realized the “reality,” the form and the content, of the U.S. central political administration and the Pentagon. As recently as 2001, Vinaver’s 11 September 2001 wholly derealized the target culture of the 9/11 terrorist attack. A film like Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) reminds Americans of the utter “surreality” of the Vietnam War. For much of the French intelligentsia, however, the atrocities of the Vietnam War and the terrorist annihilation of the Twin Towers, two reality-challenged historical events whose epicenter was located in U.S. culture and whose quakes opened fissures around the globe, were more the consequence and the exercise of a hyperreal time and a hyperreal place: hyper-mediated American make-believe.

American Hyperreality In this essay, I revisit the concept of cultural hyperreality and illustrate its relevance to a form of French theatrical hyperreality in which the reality presented on stage is not so much rendered “absurd” (as it was in the socalled postwar “absurdist” theatre of the sixties and seventies) as it is negated, or, to use one of Jean Baudrillard’s key terms, “deterred.” Particularly enlightening for my approach to this topic is Baudrillard’s very French-postmodernist discussion of America’s dynamic yet extraordinarily uncritical, undialectical, and “uncultured” (1989:8) self-invention as an “achieved utopia” (1989:77); in short, as a Disneyfied land. Disneyland is seen as a kind of microcosm of American hyperreality. It is a space and a concept that Baudrillard believes is there to conceal the fact that it is the “real” country, all of “real” America, which is Disneyland.... Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation [1983:25].

Baudrillard takes for granted the American predilection for positive, absolute belief over negative, contradictory reality. Since America has never truly existed in reality, it was absolutely necessary for the generations of its immigrant offspring to invent it through a unique form of free-market utopian ideality. The real world is not real, believable, and “hyper” enough for hypo-

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critical Americans. It is not simple, pure, and spectacular enough to warrant absolute belief. The make-believe of Disneyland simulates, stimulates, and signifies as it fosters and communicates an achieved utopian past (Frontierland), present (Main Street USA), and future (Tomorrowland) of America, a hyperreality which transcends the realm of the imaginary primarily because, removing the border between reality and illusion, Americans do not so much imagine it (as an alternative reality) as believe it. From another European point of view on hyperreality, Umberto Eco points to the abundance of American cultural constructions like Disneyland and Las Vegas, which are “absolute fake cities.” He refers to Robert Venturi’s “new phenomenon in city planning” that represents “not a city like the others, which communicate in order to function, but rather a city that functions in order to communicate.” The raison d’être of these absolutely fake “message” cities is to represent the real “real thing” (1986:40), i.e., the fake absolute, and to offer it up for belief.2 The main implication for the French and other Europeans is that, beyond the hyperreal character of the “message cities” or message culture themselves, hyper-mediated American society has lost both its ability and its desire to conceptually distinguish between mediated and unmediated reality. Baudrillard makes it clear that Americans can not apprehend fully their hyperreal situation, because “they are themselves simulation in its most developed state” (1989:28–29).3 Let’s not deny it, while the whole of Western culture is in the throes of a hyperreal revolution — as Baudrillard and Eco will attest — in American culture more than any other on earth, Americans re-imagine and recreate the world (in their own image) through photographic, cinematic, and electronic productions and reproductions. Fictional constructions play a more determinant role in their daily lives, and spin reigns superior to fact: “Whence the characteristic hysteria of our time: the hysteria of production and reproduction of the real” (1983:44). “It is no longer a question of imitation, nor of reduplication, nor even of parody. It is rather a question of substituting signs of the real for the real itself ” (1983:25). Thus Disneyland is “a deterrence machine set up in order to rejuvenate in reverse the fiction of the real” (1983:25). Disneyland, Los Angeles, New York, and the U.S. are not so much fake representations of reality (a mimetic strategy belonging to the realm of ideology) as they are all systems or machines of deterrence whose primary purpose is to conceal the fact that the real is no longer real and whose ultimate effect is to neutralize the people’s interest and desire to recognize the really real. Los Angeles “is nothing more than a network of endless, unreal circulation — a town of fabulous proportions, but without space or dimensions” (1983:26). The “hyper” prefix suggests at once the qualities of absoluteness, mul-

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tiplicity, constant movement and change. American hyperreality, as a madeto-order product designed to suit American taste, has become more deliberate, more calculated, more structured, and consequently, more absolutely meaningful and easier to believe in than everyday reality; and it simulates a multiplicity of possibilities, or, as Baudrillard described it, the “orbital recurrence of models” (1983:4), which in turn simulates the difference of meaning (or meaningful difference) in the form of a “network of endless, unreal circulation.” No thesis, no antithesis, no synthesis, and certainly no contradiction, as is the case with an ideological, dialectical world view. The role of “difference” in the production of meaning (something is what it is not) shifts from a process of perpetual différance/differal to one of deterrence, deterrence from reality awareness, from a consciousness of what is real and what is not. Undialectically full of themselves, Americans have broken with history and ideology, the two underpinnings of modern and even postmodern European civilization.4 Another way of putting the argument, one that will simplify what I want to say about the French theatrical production of American hyperreality, is that Disneyland, Los Angeles, and “America” represent hyperreal screens of mediation that determine our perception of reality. In a French comic book by Sandrine Revel titled Le Onzième Jour (The Eleventh Day) and referring to 9/11,5 the cover illustration pictures the second plane crashing into one of the Twin Towers in the background of a downtown New York City street. In the foreground we see the story’s young female protagonist gazing into the window of what appears to be a store selling television sets and which has rows of television screens showing images of the catastrophic event that is occurring in the background. Interestingly, instead of simply turning around to capture an unmediated, first-hand account of the event, the protagonist prefers to watch it on either one or all of the screens. This simple scene from a French comic book is something of a metaphor for American mediated society, showing at once the lack of desire to confront reality head on — especially what Baudrillard has called the “excess of reality” (2002:26) produced by 9/11 — and the need to seek a more absolute image of it through multiple mediating screens. The frame of the screens, enhanced by their multiple presence, produces a more credible effect of an excess of meaning, one which deters the subject’s reality awareness as it determines hyperreality. Televisions and message cities constitute the mise an abyme— smaller screens within the larger screen — of a self-realizing national culture. Theatre represents a privileged fictional space for the French to communicate their representations of and responses to the deterrence machines of American hyperreality. Armand Gatti, a very prominent experimental “nouveau” dramatist of the sixties and seventies, wrote and staged V like

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Vietnam during the heat of the war. Michel Vinaver, probably the most celebrated living dramatist in France today, wrote 11 September 2001 just a few weeks after the most globally momentous event of the twenty first century. Both dramatists approach American hyperreality from two very different dramaturgical angles. Gatti’s play is a full-length, intricately structured, metatheatrical piece consisting of 29 scenes that are full of dialogue and action showcasing the political-military-capitalist technocracy that created and perpetuated the war in Vietnam. In the very short 11 September (about 25 minutes), whose structure emerges solely and subtly from the polylogic shift from one speaker to the next, the aesthetic message results from the conjunction and juxtaposition of bits of mediated responses to the event. Yet, both plays enact not a story but a disjointed and hyper-mediated glimpse into the “reality” of an Americano-global (the U.S. equals the world) crisis and the political, social, and economic institutions that generate and perpetuate it. Judging by the short titles of both plays, the two authors seemed to be saying that the American political and sociocultural reality associated with the two events has become so “hyper” that they need only place the events in theatrical quotes, so to speak, to capture the theatricality of the hyperreality. So the self-addressed, self-contained titles of the plays are simple, direct, schematic presentations: “Presenting the Americano-global war in Vietnam,” “presenting the Americano-global tragedy of 9/11.”

V like Vietnam Gatti’s V like Vietnam is about the American war in Vietnam. Some Americans have forgotten and others are unaware of how sociopolitically unreal — i.e., incomprehensible and unrepresentable — the Vietnam War era was. Gatti’s play is truly prophetic in many respects and it reminds us that the hyperreality of American empire does not begin with either of the George Bush presidential regimes. Gatti places the emphasis on the American war machine, including the central political administration of the U.S. president, his top advisers, and the Pentagon. As David Bradby puts it, “The play contrasted the mechanistic, computer-dominated strategy of the Pentagon generals with the Vietnamese people’s simple will to resist” (1991:161): conspicuous hypercomplexity versus simplicity, hyperreality versus reality. Space-wise, all the action of the play either takes place in the Pentagon or it is followed through the mediating window of the Pentagon. At the dead center of the theatrical space the central administration takes on a literal, cyber-material existence in the form of a huge electronic brain, an IBM computer named “The Chestnut” (la Châtaigne). A screen is built into the brain

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and a “large cyclorama surrounds it, one made of illuminated cards into which are built four additional screens” (1967:7). Stage left there is a platform on top of which stands the map of Vietnam and which serves as a point of reference for the Pentagon’s demonstrations and presentations, and at certain points of the action this area localizes scenes that take place mostly in Vietnam but also in California-the-state and Los Angeles–the-city. Stage right is the office of the arch-technocrat Secretary of Defense, named Quadrature (square-like). This space is bordered by a number of additional electronic devices. From the very beginning of the play, there also appear on this side of the stage five layered rows of televisions that emit close-up shots of all the Pentagon chiefs and the president. This dramaturgical machinery conforms to what Baudrillard has described as the end of the perspective and panoptic space, a cultural framework that has switched over “from the panoptic apparatus of surveillance (of Discipline and Punish) to a system of deterrence, where the distinction between active and passive is abolished. No longer is there any imperative to submit to the model, or to the gaze” (1983:53). Thus at the core of America (its central administration) lies, not a panoptic surveillance mechanism, a model Big Brother, but an electronic machine that both generates and mediates reality: a dramaturgical strategy that reinforces the contrast with the primitive, natural, “real” existence of the Vietnamese. While we might consider that the absolute focus of this spatial core is physically undermined by the multiplication of the screens and the playing areas, the hyperreal effect is absolutely and multiply enhanced. The exploded space shouts at the spectator that it is there! But where? All spatial frames of reference are multiplied, fragmented, compartmentalized, multi-mediated, and switched on and off. The theatrical space reminds us of Baudrillard’s description of the spacelessness of Los Angeles. The screens and machines disrupt and dissolve the physical reality of the theatrical space, and the spectator gets the impression that there is no “real” space here. As the “reality” of the space dissolves, the hyperreal illusionary quality of the central administration becomes more theatrically relevant. Cast-wise, while the characters of the American war machine are represented both live and tele-communicated, the Vietnamese always have a live presence on stage, yet one that is nonetheless dramaturgically linked to the hyper-mediated central administration. In an early scene (scene 2) Vietnamese characters (including peasants, a rice mill builder, a wood seller, teacher, and a bicycle repairman collectively building a house) present a mime show (the text calls it an “oriental mime”) that parallels a narrative description of their lifestyle by Dr. XXX, the head of psychological services at the Pentagon. At the end of the mime show, Dr. XXX asks, “What is a

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Vietnamese peasant?” a question that leads to the self-introduction of the Vietnamese characters (1967:15–16). On the other hand, the primary characters of “America” have highly suggestive names, including not only Quadrature and Dr. XXX, but also Quadrature’s undersecretary Théorème (Theorem), called Théo, General Bulldog, and Ambassador Ventriloque (Ventriloquist). But the most central character, who does not appear until scene 6, is the one who represents the President of the United States: Mégasheriff. He “appears” on stage electronically (on Screen number 3) while Quadrature, Théo, and Dr. XXX are attempting to explain to two Vietnamese characters, Tang and Dinh, how, owing largely to its technological and military success, the U.S. is moving the world from History to hyperhistory. In the very first scene of the play, Quadrature announced this “hyper” concept as a new global strategy designed to replace traditional military tactics: “Habitually,” he says, “people dream of entering into History. For us, we are going to exit from it.” With all the sophisticated weapons at their command, the U.S., he says, would no longer “be subjected to the laws of history, but to the laws of global geo-history which we shall call hyperhistory. Vietnam will no longer be a war but a problem” (1967:13). Now, in scene 6, he explains that in the hyperhistorical world there will be 200 possible versions of History” (read: 200 possible “screens”) from which “the electronic brains will choose the most adaptable” (1967:28). Megasheriff tells Quadrature —“the intellectual” he calls him — that he should do what is necessary to be sure that the version chosen is his. (Does this engineering of reality sound familiar?) The multiplication of versions and choices of (hyper)history and (hyper)reality sidesteps reality and its historical representation. To be sure, hyperhistory is not History, with a capital H (read Reality with a capital “R”), especially when it is offered in multiple versions and controlled by the mediated and mediating image of a “mega-individual.” Despite the multiplication, the act of channeling history, reality, and megaindividuals through cyber-machines betrays an undialectical interest in an absolute approach to reproduction — the incessant quest for the perfect (utopic) “screen.” However, in Gatti’s play as in the “real” world of American political culture, this political strategy results not in the production of a postmodern Matrix-like world of intricate cyborgs, but an all-too-familiar trip through the brutish manners of a modern-day American frontier. Megasheriff (his televised image) then instructs Théo to insert a dime in the Chestnut, an act that produces “Texas music” and transforms the atmosphere of the Pentagon into something out of a Western film. Dorothy Knowles calls the scene “Texanized”: “the comico-satirical scene where the Megasheriff and his entourage, dressed as cowboys as though in a saloon bar

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in a Western, play poker and draw guns upon each other for a mere word” (1989:146). In this “Texanized” scene — a reference to Lyndon Johnson — Doctor XXX refers to a “chosen people, i.e., a people who hammer into its own likeness the rest of the universe. No one could have foreseen that the Texans would be the chosen ones” (1967:29). French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy considers the “Messianism” of American culture, “that odd conviction that holds that the American people is the chosen people,” to be “the most problematic aspect of American religiosity” (2006:281). So this remark about the “chosen people” and Texas made by Gatti in his 1967 play (and reminiscent of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove) has only gained in relevance in the twenty-first century: Who could have known? Does it take a French philosopher to appreciate the crux and the consequences of a U.S. administration wholly immersed and selfabsorbed in the realm of a mediated, illusionary hyperreality, an achieved utopia that believes in its right to dismiss the inherent diversity of global populations, world views, and problems and to aspire to the absolute power not so much to re-write history as to pre-write it? In 1967, near the beginning of the contrivance of America’s Vietnam War machine, did it take a French dramatist to stage a Texan sheriff as a Texan sheriff, and to comprehend an American public that had lost interest in either American or global reality since the reality they sought was not the immediate one that would be lived, but a mediating, diverting, deterring screen that could sustain and enter-tain a belief in the American dream, i.e., the American penchant for what Harold Pinter has called “self-love”?6 After all, the stage directions tell the reader that during the entire Texanized scene “all the characters on stage turn toward the screens and sit as if they were attending the showing of a movie” (1967:28). It is moreover relevant that, as Dorothy Knowles points out, “At a rehearsal Gatti explained this scene as being a scene in the future, yet at the same time a scene in the past: the Johnson story compiled and related in the future by the computer” (1989:146). Given the temporal and the critical distance we can now take from the cultural, political, and theatrical realities of the Vietnam War, it appears that the Americans of this play, like the American public at large, were not interested in any American or global reality above and beyond the one mediated by their electronic screens. If the “reality” of Vietnam projected on American TV screens had not changed during the course of the war, it is not clear that American public opinion would have eventually shifted against the war, as it did. The absolutizing “mega” quality of the central character and the electronic multiplication and movement-mutation of images are not sufficiently “hyper” for the hyperworld of the U.S. that Gatti wanted to portray. Later

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in the play, in scene 14, he represents “The entire career of the president” by exploding the character into five individuals, Megasheriffs 1 through 5. Thus, as was the case with the dramatic space of U.S. central intelligence in this work, the characters representing this absolute megapower multiply not only among individuals but within the subjectivity of the mega-central character himself. According to the stage directions, the multiple Megasheriffs can either enter on stage in person, or only Megasheriff 1 enters in person and the others appear on screen. In the penultimate scene, scene 27, “the five Megasheriffs enter, one as a Texan, the others costumed as Shakespearean characters: Macbeth, Lear, Richard III, Henry V” (1967:119). They are all enthroned and holding court on the ruins of the megacomputer, which has been disassembled piece by piece. Evidently due to an act of sabotage involving a Vietnamese primitive weapon of choice, a nail-studded plank, the computer has gone out of control and has begun to throw up images of the absurd and grotesque (hyper)reality of the war. The result is a very hyperreal “gigantic kaleidoscopic revue” (1967:114) of the play and of the war with all its horrors, including napalm, mutilated bodies of children, and anti-war marches in the United States. The “ruins” here are at once the ruins of the electronic “deterrence” machine and those of Vietnam, the world, and hyperhistory. Reaffirming his politically committed agit-prop roots, Gatti completes the play with an explicit metatheatrical reference to an unmediated and ultra-realist Shakespearian take on the absurdity of British medieval history. The final focus is on the words of Macbeth. With the five Megasheriffs still enthroned on the ruins — waiting for the U.S. presidential elections, they say — the five rows of television screens descend from the flies and Quadrature himself steps out of his role: “it is no longer Quadrature who speaks to you.” After evoking the quintessential humanity of the Vietnamese (“The whole of humanity belongs today to each one of these rice fields”) and the “powerlessness” of the U.S. and their “guns that bring death” instead of hope, Quadrature confesses that “The forest is moving. The prophecy is fulfilled” (1967:125–26). Gatti’s Megasheriff, whose political persona was born not of woman but of a hyperhistorical, megacultural Texan technocracy — which seems to serve as the matrix of contemporary American politics — moves as magically as Birnam Wood into the cruauté of Shakespeare’s medieval Britain and the ranks of its psychopathic tyrants. Yet these concluding didactic references to political and theatrical history — to a readily recognizable reality — do little to quell the spectator’s uneasy sense of the multifaceted hyperreality of the United States that Gatti has so intricately constructed in this play.

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11 September 2001 Four decades after Vietnam, the U.S. and the world experience the hyperreal event that was 9/11, and a French dramatist was there to capture the historical moment in all its simulated unreality. Vinaver’s dramaturgical writing style is quite different from Gatti’s. Considered by French critics to be representative of the “theatre of the everyday,” Vinaver’s plays present not a linear, cause-and-effect story of reality but a non-linear, disordered, “cubist” impression of it. In all his dramatic works, he begins with a potentially dysfunctional resource (the life of a corporate office or a family home, for example). Then, withholding grammatical punctuation marks, he brings together what often appear to be randomly selected fragmentary utterances of characters representing multiple points of view whose interlace helps to unveil the fundamental disorder of reality and the imprecision of the meaning of life. In Vinaver’s own words, he attempts to establish “intersections” among the “discontinuous, shapeless, indifferent materials without cause or effect” of everyday life.7 11 September 2001 represents a new level of polyphonic confusion for Vinaver and it is certainly the most daring, the most uncanny of his cubistimpressionist compositions thus far. While Vinaver has represented or referenced the U.S. in earlier works (Par-dessus bord, 1967, and King, 1998), the reality of “America” in this text is more “deterred” than ever. The assemblage of discourses in the text has no explicit structure: no acts, no scenes, no marked divisions; shifting from one speaker to the next, it seems more random and artificial. The simplicity and directness of the title, together with the very short 25-minute duration of the play, speak not only for the author’s initial desire to simply frame the occasion, as was the case with V like Vietnam, but also for the immeasurable and unfathomable impact of the event and the meaningfulness of its aftermath. Are there any other historical dates that carry so much global significance in contemporary times? (After all, for Americans, Pearl Harbor Day merely “lives in infamy.”) Unlike the televisual strategy of V like Vietnam, one could call this play “radiophonic.” In the “Forward” to the text, Vinaver advises that the play’s form “is close to that of the cantata and oratorio, composed of arias (for one, two, or three voices), choral parts ... and recitatives spoken by a ‘journalist,’ whose function may recall the evangelist in the Passions by J. S. Bach” (2002:8). The emphasis on the aural accounts, on the actors as so many performing voices, intensifies the visibility of the performance frame, and it increases at once the text’s distance from story and objective reality and its proximity to the performance of an American deterrence from reality. Connecting the voices to the spectator’s visual memory of the “real” event and

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its aftermath, a memory that was already elevated by the media “hype” to the level of the hyperreal, the text produces yet another type of hyperreal screen. Ironically, in the illusory space of the theatre, as far as representational technologies go, Vinaver’s decision to visually stage (to ostend) the voices of 9/11 and those of America constitutes equally a regression in the technology of reproduction and a progression in the dramaturgy of hyperreality. He creates a “screen” that, by nature of its technological and organizational simplicity, austerity, and detachment, has a more intimate bond with the consciousness of the spectator and is therefore more likely to be effective in conveying to the audience the “truth” of the process and the product of the deterrence machine. Vinaver produces the aura of the hyperreality of the 9/11 event, its dissolution of nuts-and-bolts reality, by interweaving a large selection of the voices involved. Most of the verbal accounts appear to issue from various types of media reports, including newspaper headlines. In the mix, there are also voices that are not directly related to the event but which emanate from sources such as the advertising industry and which represent a kind of “background” or “white” noise that, by the very mediated nature of U.S. advertising culture, become part of the aural fabric and acquire an awkward, uncanny relevance that only a hyperreal culture could convey. Though the text’s structure has no marked divisions, the reader-spectator can glean a chronological progression through sequences arranged according to the participating voices. First, the Terrorists, the Air Traffic Controller, the flight crews, a passenger, and the Chorus, representing the time before the crash into the towers. In the second sequence, the Chorus evokes an array of what seem like media bulletins, news headlines, and advertising slogans in addition to a line that short circuits any audience perception of some latent literality: “Hi/ Jacked/ Hi/ Jacked Jets Jackety Jets/ Hijacked Jets/ Hi/ Jets Hit Trade/ World Weird/ Worderly Trade/ Pentagon/ Twin Towers/ Falling Down Falling Down Falling” (2002:22). Next the Chorus’s lines alternate and then coalesce with Bush’s call for the defense of freedom and his cries for revenge. In the following sequence, we hear voices of the journalists reporting the collapse of the Twin Towers, and interviews with the survivors. Subsequently, excerpts from the terrorists’ Instruction Sheet are added to the polylogue of this part of the text. This leads to an “aria” of three voices: Atta the lead terrorist, a journalist, and Wall Street traders. Atta recounts his death and his last will and testament, the journalist comments on the organization of the attack, and the Wall Street traders strategize a “rational” market response to the disaster and they express their assurance of the positive prospects for the U.S. economy. Vinaver adds to this the voices of the Chorus and of Bush who also comment on the eco-

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nomic consequences: the Chorus evokes the need for Wall Street to avoid seeming heartless and to “Keep Desires Afloat” (2002:54), and Bush pleads to the American public “To keep consuming” (2002:52)— an especially obvious deterrence from reality. In the next phase of interweaving discourses, the text returns to the journalists’ and the survivors’ testimony of escape from the Towers. As the play comes to a conclusion, this is followed by the religiously and patriotically charged position statements of Bin Laden and Bush, statements that resonate and echo similarities between the personal and political cultures of the two leaders. The final lines of the play are those of the Young Female Voice, a woman whose life was saved when, against her better judgment, she listened to her husband and stayed home from work at her office in the Towers in order to care for their sick son. Despite what would seem like a fortunate turn of events, she is convinced that she has failed her boss because she missed the closing of a multi-billion dollar deal. She also feels guilty that she survived and seems deeply troubled by her decision. The play concludes with her following summation of the 9/11 event : “And now and now and now” (2002:70). Patrice Pavis refers to this voice as “the voice of American [sic] and conscience of the average spectator” (2004:94). If this is true, below the absolute hyperreality of America’s achieved utopia lies a fundamental state of uncertainty. Despite the rhetoric of conviction and belief (“You’re either with us or...”), the voice of America is the voice of uncertainty, one that is both marked and masked by the simulated certitude of the hyperreal utopia. As Bernard-Henri Lévy argues, despite the view of the American people as sure of itself and domineering ... in reality no large modern nation today is as uncertain as this one, less sure of what it is becoming, less confident of the very values, that is to say, the myths, that founded it; it’s a certain disorder; a disease; a wavering of points of reference and certainties; a vertigo [2006:238].

Even in Gatti’s V like Vietnam, uncertainty lurks behind and within the hyperreal screens. The ferocious push toward an absolute state of hyperhistory communicates through the relentless recourse to the multiplicity of screens, all of which contrasts with the unambiguous reality of the Vietnamese enemy. Similar to the thematic structure we’ve seen in V like Vietnam, the voices of 11 September 2001 suggest a vital contrast between the representations of two very different civilizations. In V like Vietnam, the American war machine contrasts with the simple life of a “primitive” Vietnamese culture; in 11 September 2001, a sort of media-managed economic fundamentalism (the adver-

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tising slogans, Bush-the-politician’s pleas to consume, the Wall Street Brokers and the Chorus’s echoing of their concerns, the Young Female Voice’s abiding concern for the multi-billion-dollar deal) contrasts with the religious fundamentalism of the Arab terrorists and their unequivocating Instruction Manual (“Obey God/ His messenger/ ... And stand fast” 2002:34). Bush’s fundamentalism, set in tandem with Bin Laden’s, is in the end an economic one and therefore less “fundamental,” less certain, less “real,” and more hyperreal. The terrorists’ manual and Atta’s testament convey a sense of fundamental certitude while the American characters — especially the Twin Tower survivors whose voices are threaded together by a somewhat naive, pseudo–American Chorus — are marked by their indecision in response to the contradictory advice they receive and to the unpredictable consequences of their actions. A journalist reports the dilemma of the Twin Tower occupants who must decide whether to disobey the orders of the authorities and continue their evacuation of the Towers: “Amid the uncertainty about the best thing to do/ Some left others stayed” (2002:32).... “People who made it out depict a scene of carnage/ Calm and some confusion/ About what to do” (2002:38). Finally, the play ends with the Young Female’s (in)decision to stay home: “and now and now and now.” This radical uncertainty is a sign of a hyperreal time and a hyperreal place. Striking is the absence of any attempt on the dramatist’s part to verbally articulate or interpret the philosophical, psychological, or cultural depth of any phase or any aspect of the uncertain event. Hence, Vinaver’s dramaturgical style intersects with the uncertain subject of American hyperreality. His chaotic polyphonic presentation of the subject subtly captures the radical uncertainty of the event by arranging the simple, prosaic, unphilosophical, yet contradictory voices that participate in it, in the hope of coaxing the enlightened spectator into reinterpreting the event, not as “real,” as unbelievable as it might have been, but as the “event-that-would-be-real.”

Conclusion In a recent book on the mediated condition of postmodern reality, Thomas de Zengotita seems to be searching for a popular, reader-friendly way to present the topic of hyperreality to Americans—the high order simulation of hyperreality is, of course, a hyper-mediation. According to Zengotita, in today’s world, all “real” or actual events immediately become subject to what he calls “The Blob” of the mediating process. Zengotita borrows the term from the 1958 Steve McQueen horror movie in which the Blob appears as an amorphous substance that threatens to consume the world with its limitless elasticity and expansibility. From Zengotita’s media perspective,

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the Blob consumes all information and distorts (or deters) all communication: “its osmotic processes calibrated to enfold the tiniest, most private gestures of your secret life and contain your sense of the universe and the meaning of love and death as well” (2005:26). Even events such as 9/11 that you think would be “sharp” or “edgy” enough to “pierce the membrane and slice the pulp” are incorporated and digested by the mediating Blob. Thus Zengotita concludes that “the thing-that-would-be-real,” which in this case is the hyperreal cataclysm of 9/11 that might be “edgy” enough to penetrate the Blob, “has been [and will be] digested and incorporated. It no longer threatens to be anything else” (2005:27). For Baudrillard, the “excess of reality” (2002:26) that produced 9/11 wound up as an “image-event”: “The image consumes the event ... and gives up the event for consumption” (2002:37). The complicated, unfathomable, self-contradictory signs of any “real,” unmediated 9/11 become consumable mediated signs of 9/11. The event becomes just another electronic game of world politics that takes on a new familiarity, the familiarity of war and terrorism, one that Americans can comprehend and consume, because as Americans they tend to comprehend by consuming. Comprehension is a form of consumption, and vice versa. Consequently, the Blob being what it is, American national culture is just as holistically mediated and hyperreal in its conceptualization and its presentation as an “image-culture,” as 9/11 was as an “image-event.” To turn Zengotita’s phrase, Europeans believe Americans ignore the reality-that-is–America in order to comprehend (consume) an American “achieved utopia” as a “culture-that-might-not-be–Disneyland” but nonetheless, as a hyperreal “culture-that-would-be-real.” French intellectuals, in this case the dramatists Gatti and Vinaver, see American hyperreality for what it is, i.e., a non-reality, outside of any comprehensible cultural logic: the bombing of Cambodia, the Peace Prize for Kissinger, the Gulf War, and, as a consequence of 9/11, Bush’s call for Americans to keep consuming and his war on Iraq. “Consumed” within the hyperreal Blob, the American public as a whole is unable to see clearly through the enter-tainment of Las Vegas, the fantasy of Disneyland, and the hypermediated crises of Vietnam, 9/11, and Iraq. If it is true that Disneyland is there to make us believe that the rest of American culture is real, the French plays V like Vietnam and 11 September 2001 are there to make French audiences aware that the rest of America, that is, the non-theatrical America, is wholly unreal. Vietnam, the Gulf War, and 9/11 did not happen and America does not “really” exist. Since it does not exist, it has nothing to learn, and certainly not from the French: What is there to learn in a world of hyperreal spin? UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE, KNOXVILLE

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Notes 1. See Baudrillard’s The Gulf War. 2. See also, Ada Louise Huxtable’s The Unreal America: Architecture and Illusion: “What concerns me as much as the state of American building is the American state of mind, in which illusion is preferred over reality to the point where the replica is accepted as genuine and the simulacrum replaces the source. Surrogate experience and surrogate environments have become the American way of life” (1997:2). 3. See also my “Dialectical Representations,” p. 153. 4. For a more detailed discussion of the “dialectical” character of Franco-European culture as opposed to the undialectical character of U.S. culture, see my “Dialectical Representations” and my “Lost in Space.” 5. This and all further translations from the French are mine. 6. In his 2005 Nobel lecture, “Art, Truth and Politics,” Pinter challenged the political consequences of U.S. hyperreality by calling the U.S. “the greatest show on the road.... As a salesman it is out on its own and its most saleable commodity is self love. It’s a winner. Listen to all American presidents on television say the words, ‘the American people.’ ... It’s a scintillating stratagem. Language is actually employed to keep thought at bay. The words ‘the American people’ provide a truly voluptuous cushion of reassurance. You don’t need to think. Just lie back on the cushion” (2006:815). One could explain the “cushion” as hyperreality and the commodity of “self love” in terms of “achieved utopia.” 7. Cited in Pruner, p. 100.

References Cited Baudrillard, Jean. America. Translated by Chris Turner. New York: Verso, 1989. _____. L’Esprit du terrorisme. Paris: Galilée, 2002. _____. The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. Translated by Paul Patton. Sydney: Power, 1995. _____. Simulations. Translated by Paul Foss, et al. New York: Semiotext[e], 1983. Bradby, David. Modern French Drama: 1940–1990. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Eco, Umberto. Travels in Hyperreality: Essays. Translated by William Weaver. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986. Essif, Les. “Dialectical Representations of (Undialectical) American ‘Unculture’ in Late Twentieth Century French Drama.” Dalhousie French Studies 67 (Summer 2004). 143–54. _____. “Lost in Space: American Characters as Creatures of a Culture/Dramaturgy of Abstraction in Koltès’s 1977 Play Sallinger.” Mosaic 39.1 (Spring 2006):79–97. Gatti, Armand. V comme Vietnam. Paris: Seuil, 1967. Huxtable, Ada Louise. The Unreal America: Architecture and Illusion. New York: The New Press, 1997. Knowles, Dorothy. Armand Gatti in the Theatre: Wild Duck Against the Wind. London: The Athlone Press, 1989.

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Lévy, Bernard-Henri. American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville. New York: Random House, 2006. Pavis, Patrice. “Staging 11 September 2001 in the United States.” Theatre Forum 25 (Summer/Fall 2004): 91–96. Pinter, Harold. “Art, Truth and Politics.” PMLA 121.3 (May 2006):811–18. Pruner, Michel. L’Analyse du texte de théâtre. Paris: Nathan, 2001. Revel, Sandrine. Le Onzième Jour. Paris: Delcourt, (August) 2006. Vinaver, Michel. 11 septembre 2001/11 September 2001. Paris: L’Arche, 2002. Zengotita, Thomas de. Mediated: How the Media Shapes Your World and the Way You Live in It. New York: Bloomsbury, 2005.

6 Babel, Babble and Multilingualism in Tony Kushner’s Homebody/Kabul Erith Jaffe-Berg Abstract This essay explores conceptions of language, multilingualism, and intercultural contact in the two published versions of Tony Kushner’s Homebody/Kabul (2002 & 2004). What may be seen as intentionally confounding babble, suggestive of the alienation implicit in intercultural contact in the 2002 version, shifts in the 2004 version. Subtle changes to the opening monologue and the inclusion of a key scene in the 2004 version, as well as a reduction of the languages used make this shift possible. Furthermore, the presence of a kind of “utopian performative” is more pronounced in the later version. Multilingualism functions as a dramatic device in both versions but it is framed differently because, dramaturgically, alterations in the 2004 version shift the tone arguably to a more hopeful one.

Despite a reputation of being monolingual, contemporary American drama has recently produced a spate of multilingual plays. Whereas Chicano and Latino-American theatre has for at least three decades challenged American theatre by incorporating Spanish and Spanglish within performances, recently this multilingualism has been met by similarly diverse linguistic schemes in plays that deal with the Middle East and Asia. Tony Kushner, Betty Shamieh and Naomi Wallace, to name a few, are contemporary playwrights who have incorporated Pashtun, Dari, Esperanto, French, Hebrew, Arabic, and Vietnamese, respectively, within their explorations of culturally diverse communities.1 This polyglotism reflects the increasingly complex and culturally diverse communities that make up American theatre and suggests the use of multilingualism as a dramatic device that lends itself to broadening the scope of character, conflict, plot, and the dynamic between stage and audience. What better mechanism to polarize audiences than to 77

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assault them with a text that they do not understand? At the same time, beyond mere shock value or the alienation of the audience, multilingualism concretizes the distances and incompatibilities of languages, where a word may not exist in all languages and in which syntax and logic may not be universal. As Marvin Carlson states in his work on multiple languages in the theatre, along with the use of multilingualism for verisimilitude, for comic effect and the effacement of the foreign and unfamiliar, there is another purpose more evident in contemporary performances. “More recently multiple languages have been increasingly utilized in more serious attempts to explore cultural contact and negotiation on stage” (Carlson 2001:15). On that level, multilingualism mirrors not only the social and political complexity borne out of a world in constant contact, but also the ambivalence inherent to it. Ambivalence towards multilingualism is present in the theatre when the audience is made aware of the limits of their own comprehension of the full text. At the same time, multilingualism can be a powerful statement for the necessity of intercultural contact and mutual understanding in a utopian view. On a certain level, the use of many languages can be utopian by nature, because it suggests possibility — there are infinite ways of combining languages, and there is kind of triumph inherent in making sense despite the fact that a text may be composed of many languages. Jill Dolan has recently proposed that the theatre going experience can be utopian in itself. Even though Dolan is not specifically writing about multilingual theatre, her ideas are commensurable with the hopefulness that is one aspect of using more than one language within a performance. Dolan’s focus is not on utopia on a grand scale but rather on small moments of illumination that occur during a performance and depend on the co-presence of the audience and performer. “My concern here,” Dolan wrote, “is with how utopia can be imagined or experienced affectively, through feelings, in small, incremental moments that performance can provide” (460). It is enough for the performer and the audience member to share a look, a breath, a period of respite acknowledging their presence in each other’s worlds for these “utopian performatives” to be enacted. These moments can, like an epiphany, appear suddenly and fade, but their presence is unmistakable and becomes, for Dolan, much of the answer to the question of why she goes to the theatre in the first place. To relate Homebody/Kabul to anything close to “utopia” seems paradoxical at first. And that may be true of the 2002 version, published in the immediate wake of 9/11. However, subtle changes to the opening monologue and the inclusion of a key scene in the 2004 version, make the presence of a “utopian performative” more pronounced in the later version. Multilingualism functions as a dramatic device in both versions, but is framed

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differently because dramaturgically, alterations in the 2004 version shift the tone arguably to a more hopeful one. As the context — historical and dramatic — changes, the implications of multilingualism in the performance also change. Kushner’s prescient Homebody/Kabul was performed as a reading in London in 1997 and had its first performance at the New York Theatre Workshop in December of 2001. The play was as much the American theatre community’s first response to 9/11 as was Anne Nelson’s play The Guys. Whereas Nelson’s series of dialogues set around “ground zero” still reel with the haze and disbelief of 9/11, Kushner’s Homebody/Kabul explores more broadly the global players who enforce the circumstances that make a 9/11 possible. The United States is markedly absent within his drama, but then, one may argue like the proverbial “elephant in the room,” its absence “speaks louder than words.” The play itself is highly multilingual in its composition — made up of French, English, Arabic, Pashtun, Dari and the “language” of the Dewey Decimal system. Though the play was directed at an American audience, the one language it does not incorporate is American English, since only British characters are present. In the absence of this noticeable American player, in Brechtian fashion, the space is created for the American audience member to contemplate his or her place amidst the various pieces of the global puzzle which emerges on stage. In this performative rumination on transcultural juncture languages pixilate to form an image of the status quo. The centrality of polyglotism to Homebody/Kabul is apparent to both the reader of the drama and the viewer of the performance. But whereas the uses of multilingualism can be a creation of post–Babel babble, the presence of two versions of the play, and the significant revisions in the 2004 version, suggest that polyglotism itself can be seen as a threshold to catastrophe or hope, depending on one’s perspective. In this essay, I analyze differences between the two published versions of Homebody/Kabul in 2002 and 2004 and explore each version’s use of multilingualism and contemplation of language. Kushner’s interest in the sociopolitical landscape of the Middle East spans far beyond one play. Kushner, Wallace, and Shamieh traveled to Israel and the Palestinian territories together as part of a group of playwrights in 2003.2 His collection of commentaries Wrestling with Zion (2003) co-authored with Alisa Solomon suggests his sense of responsibility as an American Jew to respond to both the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the legacy of Zionism. In addition Kushner’s interest in multilingualism is apparent not only in Homebody/Kabul but also both in Angels in America in which Hebrew and Latin are incorporated, and in his directing of a production of Naomi Wallace’s polyglot play, In the Heart of America, at Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut (November, 1994).

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Both the 2002 and 2004 versions of Homebody/Kabul literally transplant a Western, English woman’s body to Taliban-ruled Afghanistan and make this body disappear within the foreign landscape. Although the disappearance at first appears to be the fulfillment of a paranoid Western take on the brutality of the East, the play complicates Homebody’s absence by making this disappearance ambiguous, even suggesting that she may have chosen to remain in Afghanistan, and has actually found herself in a new marriage and a new life there. In that case, the “disappearance” is reformulated and Homebody has become a transplanted Englishwoman, an EnglishAfghani hybrid reflecting on the two-sided nature of transnationalism. In the absence of the Homebody, whose proper name we are never given, all that is left is for her daughter Priscilla and her husband, Milton, to come searching for her in Kabul, venturing further and further from their “home” front. Priscilla, who, in her mother’s absence becomes the main protagonist of the story, follows Homebody’s footsteps, even finding her own male companion in the Tajik Afghan poet and guide Khwaja Aziz Mondanabosh, in whom she has found a partner for platonic dialogue. Like her mother, Priscilla discovers who she is, in the paradoxical landscape of Afghanistan, a land damned by the West, and associated with the forgotten in an historical chain that leads all the way back to Biblical Cain. However, Priscilla’s journey and her moment of self-discovery are much more pronounced, as we will see, in the 2004 version. The imbalance created by Homebody’s disappearance is figuratively redressed in both versions when father (Milton) and daughter (Priscilla) replace her with a Muslim woman’s body (Mahala). The much oppressed, silenced and Burqa’d ex-librarian, Mahala, whose outspokenness is jeopardizing her life, is transported to the United Kingdom. In this way, Mahala’s body actually replaces the missing body of the British Homebody. In a wry twist on the title of the play, by remaining in Kabul (alive or dead) Homebody has literally become a part of Kabul, as is suggested by the title Homebody/Kabul. Kushner’s title enacts the binary of home and foreign, of London and Kabul at the same time as it deconstructs this binary since the two words are fused in a one-word title. In fact, the term homebody is playful and enigmatic itself. Homebody is the lone name by which we know Priscilla’s mother; it is neither name nor clear delineation of place because it suggests the person who bears that name is paradoxically a homebody or “at home” wherever she is. And if Homebody is equally a Homebody in London and Afghanistan, how can she belong in two such extremely different places? The play begins with a long, 40 minute monologue to be spoken by the Homebody. And, though critics have sometimes suggested this monologue can be pulled apart from the play in its entirety because it is almost a separate piece, it is the monologue that audi-

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ences and critics alike find incredibly enticing, because of its language and because of Homebody’s eccentric character. As Ben Brantley writes in a New York Times review of the May 2004 restaging of the revised play: Anyone who met the Homebody in the late fall of 2001 has surely been missing her since. It was in December 2001 to be exact — only weeks after the events of 9/11 forever transformed New York’s sense of itself that she was introduced to Manhattan audiences as the title character of Tony Kushner’s “Homebody/Kabul.” For many of us this graciously awkward woman of flighty, elliptical speech and ineffable convictions offered warming comfort in a world that had taken on a newly aggressive chill.3

The success of the monologue accounts for the fact that it is largely unchanged in both versions of the play. The main difference in the body of the monologue is that in the 2004 version there are several typographical alterations that may impact directorial choices about pace. For example, at one point, a paragraph is split in the 2004 version, indicating a pause (2004:17). At another point the stage direction “(a bit slower!)” is added (2004:20). Other than these relatively minor changes that were probably added as an indication of Kushner’s experience viewing the play, the biggest difference is that whereas in the 2002 version the stage directions have Homebody “sitting in a comfortable chair, in a pleasant room in her home in London,” in the 2004 version it is in “a plain wooden chair in the kitchen of her home in London” that she is found (2002:9; 2004:9). More significantly, whereas in the 2002 version nothing else is mentioned, in the 2004 version, “[t]here’s another chair at the opposing end of the table” (2004:9). The more austere setting of the 2004 version nevertheless suggests that someone is being invited to share in the conversation. Whether that is us, the audience, or Mahala, the person who eventually will replace the Homebody at the end of the play, is open for the audience to decide. There is, however, another point in the 2004 edition in which significant additions are made to the monologue text. In the 2002 version, nearing the end of the long monologue, Homebody says: And now my daughter. Come home as one does. She must have and may not budge, and I understand, I am her mother, she is ... starving. I ... withhold my touch [2002:28].

This frigid version of maternity is offset greatly by an emotive yearning inserted by Kushner in the 2004 version. And now my daughter; come home as one does. Mother knows mysteries; hence her implacable scrabbling at my gate. I so wanted her to be out in the

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The opening segment of the 2004 version is more fluid, and the sentences are connected by punctuation that creates a greater flow. Homebody is not staccato-like, making two separate statements. “And now my daughter. Come home as one does.” Rather, she is connecting her ideas with a comma, as though speaking to her daughter directly, coaxing her back. “And now my daughter, come home as one does.” Furthermore, the 2004 version adds a seductive statement about mother knowing “mysteries.” Is that a foreshadowing of the possibility that Homebody will actually survive? In addition, the 2004 version clearly articulates Homebody’s desire that her daughter be “out in the world” and furthermore “of use.” Arguably, the 2004 version will allow this aspiration to be fulfilled when Priscilla will actually seek her mother (a possibility that is not equally present in the 2002 version). From that viewpoint, Homebody has willed the journey into being in the 2004 version, and so Priscilla’s engagement with Afghanistan (and symbolically the contact of “East” and “West”) occurs in a much more providential way. This is supported by another textual inclusion in 2004, the statement that “there is a country so at the heart of the world the world has forgotten it, where one might seek in submission the unanswered need” (2004:28). The compulsion to go back to what Homebody (and perhaps Kusher) identifies as a country “at the heart of the world” that is so omnipresent that it is forgotten sets in motion the ensuing scenes, which are all about a journey to Afghanistan in search of the Homebody.4 In both versions, the monologue’s charm is due in part to Homebody’s Thesaurus-like capacity to fuse eclectic words into her expressions. In the 2002 version Priscilla appears to be able to do the same. “Yet in this newborn lachrymosity of yours there’s nothing I know of the maternal, which never manifest itself in mummy in fluid epiphora but rather in fluency, in that sempiternal dyscrasic fluxion of logorrheic blatherskite beneath the weight of which so much was ... crushed” (2002:38).5 An outpouring to which Milton can only retort: “Hah. That’s ... very like her. Semipternal. Didn’t know you could do ... that” (38). Priscilla’s identification with her mother is immediately conveyed to the audience. The ensuing journey to find her is obvious. However, since in the 2004 version Priscilla does not convey the same genetic logorrheic ability, her identification with her mother is slower in coming. It is notable that in the 2004 version she displays logorrhea once only, at the end of the play, when speaking to Mahala. Priscilla states: “Something unpronounceable inside is waking up. I ... I’ve no words for this. Psychopannychy. (She

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laughs.) (2004:139). Whereas in the 2002 version Priscilla displays this verbal ability throughout, in the 2004 version it is more clearly a mark of her journey toward self-discovery, and her emerging realization that there is something obscure and “unpronounceable” in her that connects her to her mother. What began with a focus on idiosyncratic use of English changes by Act II, with the appearance of the Lady in Burqa (who in both versions can be played by the actress who plays Mahala), to a preoccupation with the body. Priscilla’s assertion that she is going “out” begins her journey through Afghanistan, where she meets a number of characters and also confronts the capacity of language to alienate someone who does not speak it. Lost, in a new city in the third scene in both versions, Priscilla approaches a woman in a burqa and addresses her in English whilst the lady responds in Dari. LADY IN BURQA: (In Dari) Mah nah may donam cheezayk’shomaw may go ayd. Bah cheezabon shomaw harf mayzanayd? ([Which ironically means:] I do not understand what you are saying. What language are you speaking?) [2004:43].6

.been rendered impotent, drained of its revolutionary, messianic power” (2004: 16). Another omission from the 2004 version, the use of Arabic, confirms that multilingualism is used as a device to equate linguistic opacity with cultural threat in the 2002 version. In the 2002 version, Act III Scene 3 takes place in the land mines surrounding Cheshme Khedre, where Cain is supposedly buried. In 2002 the scene includes the Marabout, a Sufi hermit who acts as a guide and speaks in Arabic, adding another language to the polyglot mix. In 2004 it is organized as Act III Scene 1 and is a two person scene with Khwaja and Priscilla; the character of the Marabout does not appear in that or any other scene. The omission of this character that is gently portrayed in the 2002 version means that Arabic is virtually omitted from the play in 2004 but for a short moment when, significantly, it is spoken by Khwaja. I will return to this scene and the evocation of Arabic a bit later in the essay. Like Kushner, Phillips is writing in the period immediately following 9/11 and seems both moved and haunted by the events. He ends his article on Homebody/Kabul with an almost nihilistic view of humanity filtered through the play: Kushner claims a creative possibility for every human tragedy [...] and he calls upon the west to respond imaginatively and compassionately. And yet, the Homebody has done exactly that, and it has resulted in her negation, either her physical annihilation or an even more profound obliteration of

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Text & Presentation, 2007 personhood. Priscilla remains haunted and emotionally scared by the uncertainty of her mother’s fate. Khwaja, the poet of peace, has, in all likelihood, been executed, his poetry never to be read. Redemption is illusory. And for the reader/spectator, there is another extra-textual dimension —“the knowing what was known before the more that has since become known,” the memory of the twin towers and the Pentagon, of two subsequent American wars and their as-yet uncertain repercussions. History has cracked wide open and the world lies exhausted at its feet [2004:17].

Whereas this conclusion to Phillips’ reading of the play is commensurate with the tone of the 2002 published version of the play, the 2004 version shifts in tone due to significant dramaturgical changes. Not only do the versions organize the scenes differently, but the 2004 version includes a scene that can only be explained as a concretization of what Dolan has termed a “utopian performative.” In the 2004 version Kushner develops the character of Priscilla, characterizing her journey more in terms of one of self-discovery and connection to her mother due to an added scene in which Priscilla experiences a transformation which is not as present in 2002. Whereas the 2002 version presents the monologue and the autopsy scene as Act I Scenes 1 and 2, the 2004 version integrates the monologue with the ensuing four scenes. Act I (2004) begins with the autopsy scene, followed by Priscilla out in the street, meeting Khwaja, and then ends with the added scene five. Thereby, in script (if not always in the actual staging), the act begins with Homebody and ends with Priscilla identifying deeply with Homebody. Thus, by the end of the first act in the 2004 version, the direction of the play is defined in terms of Priscilla pursuing her mother/self and is clearer than it is in the 2002 version in which the acts are organized differently. In an article which examines the importance of mothers, change and creativity in three of Kushner’s plays, Catherine Stevenson remarks: “Angels, Homebody/Kabul, and Caroline, or Change, however, do not sentimentalize the mother-child relationship nor do they identify mother figures with some unalterable biological ground of being. Instead, ‘mothers’ in these dramas perform actions that disrupt the status quo and the fixity of identity: they shift location, stir up change, and even multiply into doubles and triples, whose personalities and ideas sometimes mirror, sometimes contradict, each other” (759).7 Homebody’s disappearance sends Priscilla in a new direction, and in the 2004 version that search shifts from a crisis-ridden experiencing of the developed world and the chaos and confusion that are also implicit in the play, to a transformative, life-affirming journey for Priscilla. However, before that happens, in the 2004 version Kushner has added an additional scene in Act I, Scene 5, which is when Khwaja makes his request that Priscilla take poems he has written in Esperanto to London to

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be disseminated there. The request signifies an important dramatic moment in which there is a new level of intimacy between the characters but it is also a moment in which the stakes are raised, since Priscilla (and the audience) does not know if to trust Khwaja and assume the poems are innocuous.8 Act I Scene 5 of the 2004 version takes place at dusk at the sight of a place where hundreds of British soldiers were massacred in a battle in 1841. Though the historical record is gruesome, the landscape is “beautiful,” in Priscilla’s words (2004:55). Priscilla tears the burqa off and looks at the landscape; she lights a cigarette and feels free. In the silent “moment” that is created with the staging of this scene one is reminded of Jill Dolan’s reference to such a “moment” in a creation by the actress Deb Margolin. “In Deb Margolin’s performance, where there is a moment in which she simply sits in the chair stage right. She’s just finished relating a story, and she looks out at us with a pleasant, expectant, ruminating expression on her face. It’s a pause, a break, a moment inserted between things, another moment of rest” (476). For Dolan, this rest creates a bridge between performer and audience and allows for a space of communication within the play that is metatextual but still performative, a “utopian performative.” It is perhaps a statement of our times that a mere respite can be termed “utopian;” nevertheless, such is the case when Priscilla smokes and looks out at the audience. Kushner is conscious of the performance text enabling this moment of repose. He utilizes this pause to introduce an important plot point that will shift the mood substantially. It is here that Khwaja gives Priscilla the poems he has written in Esperanto to deliver to someone in London, poems that express hope but also the poems that will raise doubts as to whether or not Khwaja is really as innocent as he seems. It is almost as if Kushner’s recurrent reliance on ambivalence dramaturgically is his way to keep open, keep questioning, and keep unresolved what “utopian performatives” as types of appeasing moments, suggest as resolutions. Still, at the end of this scene, after taking the package Khwaja offers her, Priscilla’s remarks on her own physical sense of change, allow hopefulness into her words: (She holds out her hand ) I’m trembling. I’m unused to exercise. I can’t believe this day. It’s as if there’s more room suddenly, and air to breathe. Something snapped, or sprung loose. [...] If she was dead, there’d be her body. You can’t lose a body. (Little pause. She takes in the view) Perhaps as they moved her body from one hospital to another, perhaps at every hospital they left some piece of her. So now ... she’s scattered all over Kabul. The whole city. It’s her [2004:60].

The awakening takes place outside, not in the chaotic and war-torn streets

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of Kabul, but on the outskirts of the city, in the vastness of the nature surrounding the city. Priscilla, who otherwise is always either forced to wear a burqa against her will or struggling for breath or angry is now allowed to take in breath. In the theatre, that gesture of taking a moment, staring out at the audience and breathing, is itself a kind of “utopian performative.” Having seen the 2004 staging of the play with Maggie Gyllenhaal at the Mark Taper in Los Angeles, I would also like to note that, on stage, this scene is magnificent, the actors forced to look at the place in the theatre that best embodies an equivalent to the vastness Priscilla sees when “she takes in the view,” and in that theatre that spaciousness is the pit where the audience sits. The audience is made beautiful, in all its chaotic pluralism, and the moment is poignant, a gestic moment, metatheatrical in that it takes us beyond the contours of the scene. In fact, I wonder whether in Priscilla’s awareness that “something snapped, or sprung loose” Kushner is not dialoguing with that famous performative direction in Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard that the sound of a broken string be heard, thus alluding to another famous metatheatrical moment. Priscilla’s epiphany that her mother is Kabul, reinforced by the title Homebody/Kabul, as Stevenson suggests, “[may] functio[n] as a metaphor for the political condition of Afghanistan itself ” (766). In Priscilla’s epiphany and awakening, in the midst of the horrors of Kabul, there is also a moment of repose. And this moment leads the way to Priscilla’s awakening, which is not as apparent in the first version. In the second version Priscilla defends the possibility that the body is not missing and Homebody is still alive. It is significant that in the scene in the 2002 version Priscilla displays her mother’s tendency for logorrhea characterized by an excessive and often incoherent wordiness whereas in the 2004 version it is Khwaja who has that ability, although he controls the tendency much more. This linguistic characterization is identifiable in a scene in which Priscilla and Khwaja are looking at a map of the “grave of Cain” (in Cheshme Khedre.) In the 2002 version it is Priscilla who says: “But such an accuracy as might discombobulate more than mere geography and make the hierophants of all fixed order dash madly for cover” (2002:64). In the 2004 version it is Khwaja who says: “It may be more accurate, but such an accuracy as might discombobulate more than mere geography and make the hierophants of all fixed order dash madly for cover.”( 68). Thus linguistic proficiency, and a command of a thesaurus-like capacity to find uncommon synonyms for words is reversed in the two versions. Whereas in the 2002 version the linguistic affinity between Priscilla and Homebody is genetically justified, in the 2004 version the connection between Homebody and Khwaja is more symbolic. Khwaja, and his brand of language, symbolically transpose the Homebody into this and later scenes, and it can be argued that Esperanto, Khwaja’s language of choice, is con-

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nected to Homebody’s personalized and eclectic use of language. Earlier I referred to a moment in Act III Scene 1 (2004 version) in which Khwaja speaks to Priscilla in Arabic. In that moment Khwaja prays for her and says: “Hafazakee Allahu ala al-dawaam;” or, “May God keep you in His embrace forever” (2004:118). In this moment, foreshadowing Priscilla’s utterance of the word psychopannychy in the penultimate exchange with Mahala, the idea of a dormant or sleeping consciousness or soul is alluded to.9 And it is Khwaja who first conceptualizes the idea of a dormant or sleeping soul in a way that will eventually be explained by the word psychopannychy. Khwaja explains that his poems written in Esperanto are about ... someone waiting in a garden, in the snow. Deep within, someone waits for us in the garden. She is an angel, perhaps she is Allah. She is our soul. Or she is our death. Her voice is ravishing; and it is fatal to us. We may seek her, or spend our lives in flight from her. But always she is waiting in the garden, speaking in a tongue which we were born speaking. And then forget [2004: 118].

Since in this version alone it is Khwaja who is the only speaker of Arabic, Arabic, Esperanto, English as well as French, Pashtun and Dari are all embodied by him. The mother tongue that Khwaja refers to, an Ur language, or a pre–Babel language, spoken by all, is literally (and hopefully) evoked by Kushner as well as Khwaja because Khwaja is linguistically omniscient. In his multilingualism, and particularly, in his extension of Homebody’s logorrhea and his penchant for Esperanto, Khwaja can be seen as a threshold for hope (in his linguistic ability, his humanity, and his poetry) or despair (since by the end of the play he is presumed dead). On the one hand, Khawaja can be seen as the subaltern who translates to the colonizer, unwittingly betraying his culture while still idealizing the encounter as one of mutual benefit. Khwaja’s idealism is reflected in his clinging to the invented language of Esperanto, created by a European. On the other hand, Khwaja’s use of Esperanto is not so much naïve as reflective of his deep dissociation from the world as it exists around him. “When I write in Esperanto I am transported to a time when such a thing as a dream of universal peace did not seem immediately crazy” (2002: 67). Phillips points out that “[i]nvented out of a desire to unite the human race, Esperanto becomes the medium for Khwaja’s poems of peace. But it is also a language that no one actually speaks: homeless and stateless, it is an expression of global idealism that fails utterly in the real world” (17). From this perspective, Khwaja’s Esperanto is just as insular as Homebody’s effusive use of English, and is, disconnected from the world. Yet, Khwaja’s utilization of Esperanto is marked by rebelliousness. In a world that is corrupting

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in ways that cannot be predicted, it is Esperanto’s inability to serve an actual function that makes it enabling to Khwaja. After all, as Priscilla recognizes about her mother’s disappearance: “Her, not knowing the language, that’s hardest of all. Maybe it’s the not speaking that appealed to her...” (2004:91). Excessive speech and its polar opposite (silence) are actually both means of self-distancing and escape. The association of Khwaja and Homebody linguistically in the 2004 version suggests that at least spiritually she is not really dead, only dormant, in an “all night sleep of the soul.” Implicit in the association of the two characters is an uncanny realization of connection and hope. In the 2004 version, Khwaja’s explanation of Esperanto, too, is more hopeful. In the 2002 version, Khwaja made these remarks: It’s nice, no? It was created by a Polish Jew, Zamenhof. He believed that until we could speak to one another in a mother tongue which draws from us our common humanity, peace will never be attained. When I write in Esperanto I am transported to a time when such as dream of universal peace did not seem immediately crazy [2002: 67].

Compare this with more exuberance in the opening section as well as a very different conclusion in the 2004 version: I had never heard of such a marvel! Esperanto. It was created by a Polish Jew, Zamenhof, who believed that until we could speak to one another in a mother tongue which draws from us our common humanity, peace will never be attained. Who doesn’t want peace? Who would not want to be able to speak the world’s language? [2004: 58].

In the 2002 version the segment I quoted is followed by juxtaposing the utopian vision of Esperanto with the horror-filled reality of Afghanistan in which daily news of land mines blowing up children stands in direct opposition to the hope of Zamenhof ’s creation. But this is not emphasized in the revised vision. Instead, Kushner returns Khwaja to a kind of utopian desire for pan-global communication, knowing the “world’s language.” There is also a gesture towards cultural relativism in the question “who doesn’t want peace?” Whereas Khwaja’s use of Esperanto reflects a desire to democratize language, and Homebody’s logorrhea is a kind of escape from language, Mahala represents the pursuit of language as an evocation of the inevitable consequences of journey and change and survival. Her enactment of multilingualism is significant in meta-theatrical terms because her text is performed before audience members who themselves speak a variety of languages. After

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all, not all audiences are monolingual. In the Los Angeles context, for example, there are many speakers of Persian, who were able to understand the Dari quite well, not to mention Mahala’s French. The multilingual text speaks differently to different audience members, further breaking down a monolithic conception of what an “American audience” is. Fluent in Dari, French, and the Dewey decimal system, able to communicate in Pashtun and in English, Mahala is the embodiment of a polyglot. An alternative to Esperanto, which Khwaja articulated as the “world’s language,” polyglotism is accomplished by dizzying code switching. Note how Mahala surfs among four languages (English, French, Dari) in the following: The Quran these cannot read! Illiterates and child murderers, Nettoyeurs ethniques. Suray char, seporahyay noh (Dari?: surah four, chapter nine): “Let people fear the day when they leave small children behind them unprovided.” (In Dari, to Khwaja and Zai Garshi) Wah too khodraw mard may donee? [and you call yourselves men?] [2004:87].

She and Khwaja alone, among all the Pashtun speakers, among all the Taliban we encounter in the play, speak Arabic, the language of the Q’uran. She embodies the language, through which Islam is conducted, as well as English, the language of globalization, French the traditional language of diplomacy and Dari. Mahala’s literal embodiment of many languages makes her a personification of what Milton describes as his work of computer networking: “Energies, languages traverse a passing-through place, a, an ... intersection” (2004:127). To which Mahala replies “Intersection. Like Afghanistan.” And Milton recognizes “Oh. Yes. Precisely! Precisely! Afghanistan! That’s the metaphor! Armies, and , and gas pipelines and even Islam, communism, tribes, East and West, heroin, refugees, moving chaotically, and each is a language” (127). Though they speak different languages, Mahala and Milton are able to communicate through a common conceptual frame. But despite the hopefulness of this interaction and the fact that Mahala will eventually be rescued to London, implicit in Milton’s description of linguistic intersection is a definition of the state of exile. Mahala’s desire for affirmation, identity and stasis is her struggle, through the vehicle of London, to find a new home. Still, Kushner is careful to suggest that for Mahala, the “West” is vehicular — it is a mechanism not a home. She remains an Afghani in exile. In the words of Martha Lavey, in the introduction to the 2004 version of the play: No one is “at home” in the play. There exists, instead, a terrible longing to be understood, to touch the authentic (instead of its displacement, its sub-

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Text & Presentation, 2007 stitute). That, of course, is the engine of language: the signifier that stands in for the signified — the symbol in place of the genuine article. Homebody/ Kabul is an investigation — set in the language of contemporary politics — into how we might find the bridge, how we might become a traveler across our boundaries (instead of a tourist). Our common language is a polyphony.10

This polyphony, this multilingualism is emblematic of movement and change. In exposure to other languages comes a deeper sense of understanding of what our own language is, of what the limits of our own knowledge may be and of what possibilities for journey and change await us. UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, RIVERSIDE

Notes 1. These theatrical responses to our increasingly cosmopolitan culture are reflected on by Marvin Carlson in several works on the subject. Carlson’s article “Speaking in Tongues: Multiple Languages on the Modern Stage, published in Text & Presentation (2001) was followed by his book Speaking in Tongues: Language at Play in the Theatre (2006). Patrice Pavis has theorized on the mixing of languages on the stage and on theatre as a juncture point for language and culture in Languages of the Stage and Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture. To this list I can add my own examinations of commedia dell’arte and the tradition of multilingualism in Renaissance and contemporary performances that are commedia-inspired and my article on contemporary multilingual theatre in the Canadian context. See my referenced thesis and article listed below. Among the contemporary companies and playwrights committed to multilingualism in theatre are: Culture Clash, El Teatro Compesino, SF Mime Troupe, Guillermo Gomez-Peña, Naomi Wallace, Monica Palacios and Octavio Solis, to name a few working in the US. In addition, there is Cirque du Soleil which incorporates a multilingual soundscape, and in Canada there are also Robert Lepage, R. A. Shiomi, David Fennario and Guillermo Verdecchia. 2. This journey was recorded and reported on in “On the Road to Palestine: Six American Playwrights Come Upon the Checkpoints — Both Military and Metaphorical — That Define the Daily Realities of Palestinian Life.” 3. Brantley, “Theatre Review; Afghanistan Still Stirs a House Wife.” 4. Here I refer to the idea sometimes applied to religious texts (such as the Book of Esther), that a lack of explicit mention of something (in the religious context, God), is an affirmation of its obvious presence. 5. It is interesting that the use of such words as blatherskite, which is a Scots word, in themselves suggest multilingualism and they suggest that Homebody’s language is an enactment of what the literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin called heteroglossia, the layers of speech (class, national language, age, professional speech type) present in an utterance. For more on heteroglossia in application to multilingualism in theatre see my thesis listed below. 6. The text in Dari remains unchanged from the 2002 version.

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7. Catherine Stevenson, “‘Seek for Something New’: Mothers, Change, and Creativity in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, Homebody/Kabul, and Caroline, or Change.” 8. As opposed to the 2004 version, where the poems are exchanged outdoors, against the vastness of the landscape, in the 2002 version the exchange of the poems between Priscilla and Khwaja takes place in Act II scene 3 in Khwaja’s small room. Priscilla and Khwaja are in Khwaja’s apartment described as “very small and poor” (2002:62), where Khwaja shares with her his poems in Esperanto and asks them to transport them to London. In the 2004 version, Khwaja and Priscilla will be in his apartment, in Act II Scene 2. 9. Psychopannychy is to be defined the “all-night sleep of the soul” that marks the place of the soul from death to its eventual resurrection and judgment. And, as I have already stated, in the end of the play (2004) version, Priscilla will say: “In the space she’s left.... Some ... joy? or something has been rising. Something unpronounceable inside is waking up. I ... I’ve no words for this. Psychopannychy. (She laughs) In this house, I knew ... I could hear her still. Y’see Mum? One sharp goad from a terrible grief and ... the soul is waking up” (2004: 139). 10. Lavey, xi.

References Cited Brantley, Ben. “Theatre Review: Afghanistan Still Stirs a House Wife.” New York Times, May 13, 2004. On line at http://theater2nytimes.com/mem/theater/ treview.html. Carlson, Marvin. “Speaking in Tongues: Multiple Languages on the Modern Stage.” Text & Presentation 22 (2001): 1–16. Corthron, Kia, Tony Kushner, Robert O’hara, Lisa Schlesinger, Betty Shamieh and Naomi Wallace. “On the Road to Palestine: Six American Playwrights Come Upon the Checkpoints — Both Military and Metaphorical — That Define the Daily Realities of Palestinian Life.” American Theatre ( July/August, 2003):28– 32, 71. Dolan, Jill. “Performance, Utopia, and the ‘Utopian Performative.’” Theatre Journal 53 19??): 3. Glore, John. “Of Paradise and Ruin” program note, Center Theatre Group: Performances, Mark Taper Forum Program. The Music Center, October 2003, pp. 5–6. Kushner, Tony. Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1992 rpt 1995. _____. Homebody/Kabul. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2002. _____. Homebody/Kabul, revised edition. New York : Theatre Communications Group, 2004. Jaffe-Berg, Erith. “Enacting Translation in Multilingual Theatre” In The Theater of Translation, a special issue of Translation Perspectives 12 (2003): 77–92. _____. Towards a Paradigm of the Polylingual Theatre: Linguistic and Metalinguistic Functioning in the Commedia dell’ Arte, Ph.D. thesis (University of Toronto, 1998).

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Kushner, Tony, and Alisa Solomon, eds. Wrestling with Zion: Progressive JewishAmerican Responses to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. New York: Grove Press, 2003. Lavey, Martha. “A Foreword” In revised version, Homebody/Kabul (2004): ix–xi. Nelson, Anne. The Guys. New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2002. Phillips, M. Scott. “The Failure of History: Kushner’s Homebody/Kabul and the Apocalyptic Context.” Modern Drama 47/1 (Spring 2004): 1–20. Stevenson, Catherine. “‘Seek for Something New’: Mothers, Change, and Creativity in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, Homebody/Kabul, and Caroline, or Change.” Modern Drama 48/4 (Winter 2005): 758–776.

7 Formal Subversion in How I Learned to Drive A Structure of Meaning Andrew Kimbrough Abstract Paula Vogel questions whether a “structure of meaning” might be articulated for her play How I Learned to Drive. While she and David Savran have offered Russian Formalist and Brechtian theory as possible solutions, this article responds with the argument that Bakhtin’s notions of answerability and polyphony offer formal strategies that take into account social and ethical concerns. The article revisits Formalist positions on content and ideolog y as well as Bakhtin’s response to those positions. It then argues for a Bakhtinian reading of Vogel’s unique shifting of genre within the play’s structure, her polyphony of character speech, and her use of quotation and dialogism as a means to give her text added social dimension.

“How do you make a structure that is actually the meaning of How I Learned to Drive?” Paula Vogel asked this rhetorical question in an interview with David Savran (1999), and in response both she and Savran offered several suggestions. Vogel readily acknowledged Viktor Shklovsky and the Russian Formalists as one influence, another being the negative empathy and catharsis found in what she called “classic theatre.”1 Savran concurred and further offered a Brechtian reading of Vogel’s dramaturgy.2 In the course of their conversation I am led to believe that “structure of meaning” refers, in shorthand, to the Formalist concern for the ways in which structure either creates, conveys, or supports content and meaning. By posing the question, Vogel seeks the articulation of a structural strategy that communicates the play’s thematic concerns. Therefore, while the play evinces the influences Vogel and Savran mention, I believe that they fall short of providing a comprehensive theory that describes a structural relationship to the personal and social meanings in the play, for they do not make 93

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room for an ideology that can be considered both structural in composition and socially inclusive in its perspective. To provide such a theory, I propose an analysis of the formal devices and themes of How I Learned to Drive through Bakhtin’s concept of “answerability” as an ethical authorial position. I argue that the ideology that informs the structure of Vogel’s play is the ideology that Bakhtin attributes to the ethical dimension of polyphony. In the play, a woman approaching middle age, named Li’l Bit, revisits her past, ostensibly, as she says, “to tell a secret” about a history of sexual abuse and her efforts to forgive and heal (1998:7). But as the audience journeys with her, it finds that the play is about many other things, like the way American culture eroticizes its children and objectifies its women, about how the individual is sexually constituted, about growth, power, loneliness, and alcoholism, as well as family dysfunction, victimization, and, in Vogel’s words, how “we can receive great love from the people who harm us” (Holmberg 1998). Structurally speaking, the most obvious characteristic of How I Learned to Drive is that it proceeds somewhat in reverse, jumping back and forth from the present to when Li’l Bit was a teenager to finally when she was eleven years old. Along the way, the audience witnesses the development of a relationship between her and her Uncle Peck, a man with whom she shares a meaningful and close friendship, but one in which the romantic and sexual boundaries are severely blurred. Contrasting this relationship are other relationships Li’l Bit negotiates with blood relatives and school friends — all of whom compare unfavorably with Peck. Vogel invites the audience to empathize with Li’l Bit, and the journey becomes emotional, even cathartic, as it witnesses her breaking off her relationship with her uncle in a hotel room when she is eighteen, and as it sees her first experience of sexual abuse at the age of eleven at the hands of the same man at the end of the play. Of note, neither Vogel’s play nor its heroine condemn Uncle Peck. Instead, through Li’l Bit’s compassionate regard for her uncle, and Vogel’s ability to let the character speak for himself, the audience understands that the villain of the play — a mixed-up and alcoholic pedophile — is also a deeply caring and thoughtful individual in need of love, understanding, and help. This last point may be the central lesson of How I Learned to Drive, for it is through the perspective of a radically compassionate regard for others who hurt, and through giving those others a voice, that Vogel offers a venue to forgiveness, healing, and forward movement in life. Within the world of the play, the perspective is also profoundly ethical, for Vogel does not judge her characters, nor does she allow her audience to judge or condemn her characters either. Underlying the thematic elements of her play rests an ideol-

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ogy of social concern that governs the aesthetic choices that Vogel makes, including the structural. The discussion that follows has four parts. First, in order to frame a discussion of structure and meaning, and because Vogel claims indebtedness to Shklovsky and the Formalists, I revisit Formalist positions on the central topics of content and ideology, as well as Bakhtin’s response to those positions. Then I argue for a Bakhtinian reading of Vogel’s unique shifting of genre within the play’s structure, her polyphony of character speech, and her use of quotation and dialogism as a means to give her text added social dimension. The Formalists never elucidated an ethical ideology of their critical approaches. Instead, at the inception of their work, the Formalists attempted to practice a critical approach to literature along empirical lines. Inspired by the Futurists’ radical experiments with form and skeptical of the Symbolist belief in the metaphysical dimension of literature, the Formalists focused their investigations primarily on structural devices as means to convey content.3 Their initial reticence in approaching meaning or ideology stemmed from a recognition of the critic’s subjective, and therefore potentially faulty, view of those subjects, whereas they believed the critic could maintain an objective view of form given its concrete nature. Shortly after their foundation, the Formalists battled the institutionalization of Marxism as Bolshevik and then Communist Party ideology, and therefore they were pressured to maintain a limit to their investigations to what they variously called literary technology or the conventionality of art, that is, those studies that by necessity stopped short of questions of social and ethical criticism. As Boris Eykhenbaum wrote in defense of the formalist method against various criticisms in 1924, The formal school studies literature as a category of specific phenomena and constructs a history of literature as the specific, concrete evolution of literary forms and traditions. The question of the genesis of literary phenomena (their connection with the facts of everyday life and economics, with the individual psychology or physiology of the author, and so on, ad infinitum) is consciously put aside, not because it is generally unimportant, but because it clarifies nothing within the limits of this single category [1979:59].

Of the Russian Formalists, Viktor Shklovsky may have been the most disposed towards ideology and ethics. While the majority of Formalists, like Eykhenbaum, limited their studies to formal devices, Shklovsky maintained a commitment to social justice, as evidenced by his writing for Maxim Gorky’s Moscow journals (Thompson 1971:27–28).4 The social dimension of his aesthetics was presaged in his first essay, “The Resurrection of the

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Word” (1914), in which he advocates the necessity for artists and individuals to not simply “recognize” things in the world but to actually “see” them. In a passage well known to students of Brechtian alienation, Shklovsky writes, When words are being used by our thought-processes in place of general concepts, and serve, so to speak, as algebraic symbols, and must needs be devoid of imagery, when they are used in everyday speech and are not completely enunciated or completely heard, then they have become familiar, and their internal (image) and external (sound) forms have ceased to be sensed. We do not sense the familiar, we do not see it, but recognise it [1973:41–42].

He praises the Futurist practices of creating new words and making common or everyday words strange, two strategies that he would later develop into his idea of defamiliarization, which he would define in “Art as Device” (1917). In that essay, Shklovsky invests defamiliarization with aspects of social criticism when he laments the “automatization” of living to which mere recognition dooms us as opposed to real seeing which restores, in Ewa Thompson’s words, “authentic contact with the outside world.”5 Shklovsky believes that art helps people attend to objects and ideas, and to enter into active contact with them (Thompson 1971:67–68). Victor Erlich imparts to this process a “therapeutic value for creative deformation,” and by doing so grants a cathartic dimension to structural experimentation (1981:180). As Shklovsky put it in a rather jubilant phrase that closes “The Resurrection and the Word,” “Only the creation of new forms of art can restore to man sensation of the world, can resurrect things and kill pessimism” (1973:46). As a contemporary of the Formalists, Mikhail Bakhtin took exception with them for their preoccupation with form at the expense of any consideration of a social dimension in the composition of literature. Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson note that, in contrast to the Formalists, two of Bakhtin’s lifelong critical preoccupations were “the dynamics of the creative process and the nature of ethics” (1990:10). As evidenced from his earliest works, produced during the Formalist heyday of the 1920s, Bakhtin believed that art and life had to be united by what he called “answerability,” or what might be understood as an author’s ethical responsibility to the autonomous individuals portrayed in literature (Bakhtin 1990:2). He stresses that art is not supposed to exist solely within its own aesthetic bubble; it should be a vehicle that allows the individual to shift focus from the self to an engagement with one’s community. He writes, Art gives me the possibility of experiencing not just one but several lives, and this enables me to enrich the accumulated experience of my own actual life. It gives me the possibility, that is, of partaking, from within, in a different life for the sake of that life in itself, for the sake of its remarkable significance qua life [1990:80].

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But Bakhtin hesitated to propose a system of ethics (literary or otherwise) because he recognized the particularity of specific ethical dilemmas. Philosophy and theory have their limitations because they attempt to deduce codes and formulas from the brilliant cacophony and mess of life, and hence they are practices that naively, and yet unjustly, totalize and finalize the unfinalizable — that is, they attempt to summarize, define, and explain aspects of life that can never be summarized, defined, and explained. Hence, Bakhtin preferred a study of literary forms that justly portray particular examples of lived experience, including crises and moral debate, and his sense of ethics as an aesthetic act finds expression in his critical studies (Morson 1990:26–7). Two of his concepts which have gained currency in literary analysis, and which are evidenced in Vogel’s play, are polyphony and dialogism. Bakhtin never explicitly defines polyphony, although he does describe it as the presence within a text of “a plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses ... with equal rights and each with his own world” (1984:6). These voices are not consumed by an author’s world view — what Bakhtin calls “monologizing discourse”— which forces all of the voices to recognize the author’s ideology as dominant. One trait of polyphony is that all of the characters are free to express “their own directly signifying discourse” reflective of their own ideologies. The author’s voice, when it becomes present (and it must), is one amongst many. The author places herself on an equal footing with her characters. The term “dialogism” signifies the quality of expression of multiple voices inhabiting and expressing themselves within a single text. A text that is dialogic differs from a work that employs dialogues, for dialogues between characters can still reflect a single authorial point of view or reach finitude. Dialogism represents a type of discourse that does not seek closure or consensus. Dialogism resembles a world in which people use speech mainly as a form of interaction with others, not necessarily to engage in argument or debate but as a means to explore one’s environment, one’s ever-evolving thoughts, as well as the thoughts of others. For Bakhtin, Plato’s Socratic dialogues are not dialogic at all, but monological forms of one author’s (Plato’s) conclusions (Morson 1990:60). Bakhtin states that a polyphonic work “tends towards dialogue, toward a dialogic opposition” (1984:252). Morson and Emerson affirm the close relation of polyphony and dialogism when they write, “A ‘dialogic sense of truth’ is absolutely constitutive of polyphony” (1990:232). Polyphony is more than mere artistic style or choice and more than just one approach to structuring a work. Polyphony reflects an author’s ethical regard for her subjects. Believing in their autonomy and in their right to embrace a point of view different from her own, the author approaches her art with an aim to grant her subjects freedom. Bakhtin’s arguments reflect

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his belief that to create a polyphonic work is to engage the world responsibly (Morson 1990:257), and the engagement results in a specific use of literary form. Polyphony coupled with Bakhtin’s sense of ethics articulates an ideology of the creative enterprise. Bakhtin and Shklovsky share a similar idealism in that in polyphonic works readers and audiences should sense authentic contact with the world. But Bakhtin’s ideology surpasses that of Shklovsky because the latter’s notion of reifying the subject through literary devices (defamiliarization and so forth) could still reduce the subject to the author’s world view — as it would in Brechtian dramaturgy. Vogel is a polyphonic author precisely because she imparts to her characters a sense of freedom that surpasses ideological constraints. The ideology that shapes her drama constantly has as its aim the ethical desire to liberate characters from all totalizing discourses, including the formal constraints of narrative, genre, and style. In the first scene of the play, Li’l Bit, described in the list of characters as “a woman who ages forty-something to eleven years old” (4) and written to be played by a woman in her late thirties to forties, addresses the audience in a monologue that serves to frame the play. She promises to “tell a secret” by first “teaching a lesson,” and to do this she proposes to take the audience back in time (7). Generically, the play is immediately marked as a memory play, written from the first-person perspective of the lead character, but the secret and lesson also raise the possibility that the play is in parts both a mystery and morality tale. After it begins in the present (1990s), the play goes back to the summer of 1969, where the audience witnesses a seventeen-year-old Li’l Bit in a car with a married man more than twice her age (8). They engage in sexual banter and the tone is at first light and humorous. The two seem quite comfortable together. Then subtle changes take place. A proposal of eventual intercourse follows, but the audience is left with the impression that the two have not yet slept together. Li’l Bit grows uncomfortable as the man, in pantomime, fondles her breasts. Only at the end of the scene does Vogel reveal the man to be Li’l Bit’s uncle, married to her biological Aunt Mary. Throughout, the scene has been difficult to gauge. It was at times funny, but there was an undercurrent of pathos and tension; it is neither comedy nor drama, yet both. And at moments Li’l Bit actually seemed to enjoy the sexual camaraderie with her uncle, despite the incestuous circumstance. Before the audience can piece together a secret tale of pedophilia or sexual coercion that Uncle Peck and Li’l Bit hide, the next scene introduces Li’l Bit’s dysfunctional family, a mother, grandmother, and grandfather, who are played by an ensemble of three actors who also play all of the other characters in the play. But the characters in this scene do not resemble the realis-

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tic characters presented in Li’l Bit and Peck. Because the ensemble portrays at least three different characters each, they cannot be cast close to type. Instead, the family members are personified through a minimal use of stage signifiers — properties, behavior, and the like — that indicate a character type, even stereotype. Her grandfather, Big Papa, played by the male member of the ensemble, resembles an opinionated misogynist who ridicules Li’l Bit’s body and intelligence while her mother and grandmother, played by the two female members of the ensemble, sit by laughing and mocking her sensitivity. The family’s ribald hilarity signals a generic shift to the farcical. Li’l Bit, who in the scene is seventeen, will at times address the audience as an adult and comment on the characters and situation. Ironically, Peck is the only family member who treats Li’l Bit with respect and compassion. The mistreatment Li’l Bit receives from her biological family members in this scene severely tempers the question of Peck’s sexual predation raised in the previous scene. Several devices and styles are at work already three scenes into the play. As the rest of the play confirms, all of the scenes with Li’l Bit and Peck are presented in the style of Stanislavskian realism. Both characters pay attention to given circumstances of place and time, engage in active listening and response to each other, and a palpable emotional subtext underlies their relationship. Li’l Bit does not break the veneer of illusion with Peck and comment as an adult. In contrast, all of the other scenes and characters are interpreted by the ensemble, which Vogel calls a “Greek Chorus.” The scenes resemble Brechtian epic stagecraft in that the actors do not strive to create fully realized and detailed characters but rely instead on an identification of character that resemble Brecht’s use of “quotation.” That is, the addition of iconic clothing or a change in voice that signal “grandmother” or “schoolboy” readily identifies the characters as types. Li’l Bit drops in and out of these scenes to offer commentary or reflective thoughts from the hindsight of her adulthood. In so doing she facilitates one of Brecht’s aims, the breaking of stage illusion in order to establish direct communication or dialogue between performer and audience. Indulging as they do in vulgar jokes often at Li’l Bit’s expense, most of the ensemble scenes are farcical; the farce further disrupts an illusion of realism and sentiment, and instead affords the audience the kind of critical distance that Brecht valued. The two types of styles also reflect separate generic moods: the realistic scenes with Peck are, for the most part, serious and dramatic; the ensemble scenes are comedic. Evident also are two Formalist devices defined by Shklovsky. First, Vogel employs defacilitation in that the play progresses in a backwards order (although there are exceptions to this device as well) and the scenes jump between styles and moods. Thompson describes defacilitation as relating “to

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the effort to arrange artistic elements in an intricate and difficult way, so that we have to attend to them more than if we met them in everyday life” (1971:27). With the jumps in time and place the audience cannot rest on the cognitive comfort that a linear narrative provides. The changes demand from the audience a heightened attentiveness to circumstances and character. Second, Vogel employs Shklovsky’s defamiliarization in regard to Uncle Peck. She readily admits in interviews that with her portrayal of Peck she attempts to challenge the public imagination’s view of the pedophile as trench-coated and sleazy.6 Vogel defamiliarizes such an image with her portrayal of Uncle Peck as a warm and caring individual who is also one of the family: a man who shares the dinner table, takes out the garbage, and looks after the kids. Vogel’s sense of ethics dictates that all individuals should be seen in their complexity and not as projections of societal fears. Although an audience views him engaged in what North American culture deems a morally inappropriate relationship with his niece, he is the only one in her family who treats her with compassion. Comparing Peck to her abusive family, anyone asked to identify the greater of two threats and abuses could not point easily to the pedophile. As a mystery play Drive seems to reveal a secret history of sexual abuse as well as a secret of care and mutual need shared between Li’l Bit and Peck. But what could be the lesson that Li’l Bit mentions at the start? As in a mystery, the audience might indeed visit a crime scene. But if a crime has taken place, whose crime is it: Peck’s, Li’l Bit’s, or Li’l Bit’s family’s? Vogel aptly labels her ensemble a Greek Chorus, but the allusion is subtle, given that the chorus is never identified as such in the play’s dialogue, and the only way an audience would be aware of this designation is by reading a playbill or script. Nonetheless, with their presence Vogel links Drive with the Greek tragedies in which someone is on trial. In doing so she creates a rational dialectic, and Peck, Li’l Bit, her family, and ultimately North American society are on trial, with the audience in the tenuous position of judge. But the shifts in genre, style, mood, and character, in addition to the defamiliarization, obscure authorial intention and hinder the audience reception of a clear judgment or critical position. No monologizing discourse provides the conclusions one must by necessity draw were one watching either classical or Brechtian drama. Although Bakhtin describes polyphony as the presence within a text of many autonomous character voices that are free to express their own ideologies, I propose that Vogel treats dramatic form as polyphonic. She employs tragedy, comedy, realism, and epic stagecraft in different scenes for purposes of audience affect, but she does not allow one style or genre to dominate the form of the play or to completely shape audience perspective. If, as Bakhtin

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believed, genres are really forms of thinking that shape ideology (Morson 1990:280–282), then a logical step towards subverting ideology or thematic reception is to subvert genre. In applying defacilitation to genre, Vogel succeeds in creating polyphony of dramatic form. The juxtaposition of styles and genres serve additional purposes. First, the play’s structure reflects in part Li’l Bit’s memory. She views her childhood memories of school and home as extremely unpleasant, and therefore Vogel gives the school and home scenes an exaggerated, nonrealistic quality, albeit farcical. On the other hand, Li’l Bit remembers Peck rather fondly, and his scenes are saturated with an alluring realism. Second, the contrast of realism with epic stagecraft assists in defamiliarizing Peck’s status as sexual deviant and allows him to be seen as a compassionate and complex man rather than a one-dimensional villain. Third, in a similar way, the farcical portrayals of family members and school friends are absurd to the point of comedy; the comedy thus diffuses audience judgment and thereby provides leverage for audience empathy for people Li’l Bit considers neglectful or hurtful. Fourth, as Vogel veers between extremes of comedy and tragic pathos, she affords herself the opportunity to ask her audience how they feel about what they see. The dialectic that Brecht considered vital to theatre becomes manifest. But by undermining an audience’s emotional expectation, Vogel also creates a greater potential for empathetic and emotional audience response, something Brecht sought to thwart. As she notes in the Holmberg interview, she believes that while watching a tragedy, an audience prepares for the worst, whereas comedy “defuses that vigilance” and keeps an audience unprepared for surprises and shocks (1998). Expanding upon the dialectic, Vogel provides an experience of her play that is both intellectual and emotional. As the play moves back in time, Vogel reveals information about the characters that makes initial judgments difficult to maintain. In regards to Peck, in the restaurant scene in which he and Li’l Bit celebrate her receiving a driver’s license, he obliquely infers that he was raised in an atmosphere of neglect and that he has difficulty talking about his experience fighting in World War II (26–28). In terms of Li’l Bit, even though Peck may victimize her within a relationship in which viewers are led to believe incest has not yet been consummated, there is still an unhealthy incest dynamic within which Li’l Bit consciously (though naively) participates. In terms of her extended family, audiences find out that Li’l Bit’s grandmother was an unwilling child bride who still believed in the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus at fourteen while her older husband forced her to have sex at least three times a day (36). Sexual repression was nonetheless so strong in the house that Lucy became a pregnant teenager forced to marry a dead-beat Dad who ended up

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leaving his family after a year (44). By providing the characters with complicated pasts, Vogel highlights the questionable and relative nature of facts and memory. Because it seems everyone in the play is at fault for some form of misdeed or another, judgment or blame cannot be neatly placed on any one person in particular. Keeping in mind that the entire play is told from Li’l Bit’s perspective and framed as her memory, however, the equivocal nature of the evidence may be moot. One might argue that the entire play is still biased, relying as it does on one character’s point of view. But Vogel is aware that for one character to speak on behalf of others is an act of injustice — what Bakhtin calls a “secondhand, finalizing cognitive process.” One person can never fully and justly speak for others because, as he puts it, “in a human being there is always something that only he himself can reveal, in a free act of self-consciousness and discourse, something that does not submit to an externalizing secondhand definition” (1984:58). Authorial answerability dictates that the characters be allowed to speak for themselves. Therefore Vogel subverts the formal construction of the memory play by employing polyphony and allowing several of her characters to speak on their own behalf. In the first instance, Li’l Bit sleeps in the car after the restaurant scene and Uncle Peck delivers a monologue to which only the audience is privy. During the monologue, entitled “Uncle Peck teaches cousin Bobby how to fish,” the audience witnesses Uncle Peck seducing Li’l Bit’s young cousin Bobby, and it learns something Li’l Bit never did: that Peck’s taste included pre-pubescent boys. But the monologue also reveals tender aspects of Peck that he does not show to Li’l Bit. Earlier in the restaurant scene, Peck implies that he is not fond of visiting his childhood home of South Carolina (27). In the monologue with cousin Bobby he reveals that he actually misses it very much, especially the fishing, and that the northern stereotypes of the South bother him (34). He shows aspects of his humanity that contradict Li’l Bit’s memory. In the second instance, the polyphony affords the greatest depth of character in the person of Peck’s wife, Aunt Mary. In a monologue towards the end of the play, Vogel allows Mary to speak for herself for the first time. Earlier, in the first family scene, Li’l Bit remembers and presents her aunt as a woman who is totally unaware that something festers in the relationship between Li’l Bit and Peck. The audience watches as Mary encourages Peck to “go after” Li’l Bit after she has stormed away from the dinner table, insulted and embarrassed by her grandfather. Mary comments, “Peck’s so good with them when they get to be this age” (19). But in her monologue, Mary contradicts her niece’s memory. She says, speaking for herself, “And I want to say this about my niece. She’s a sly one, that one is. She knows

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exactly what she’s doing; she’s twisted Peck around her little finger and thinks it’s all a big secret.” (67). Through polyphony Vogel not only allows characters to speak for themselves, but she disrupts audience perception. She forces audiences to ask themselves anew what they think of situations and relationships that they are constantly assessing through different points of view. As through a process of defamiliarization, they are asked to see people again and again as though for the first time. In the specific case of Aunt Mary, when she speaks for herself the audience understands her position, and her pain, in a way that Li’l Bit doesn’t. Vogel also gives spectators permission to doubt that the truth of Li’l Bit’s story may not be entirely accurate. Viewers have been under the impression that Li’l Bit believes that the relationship she had with her uncle was secret, which is a belief that Mary contradicts. But neither can one entirely side with Mary in the belief that Li’l Bit has done all the twisting and that she is ultimately responsible, even though both she and Peck are on a certain level aware of what they are doing. So if neither Aunt Mary nor Li’l Bit is right, then who is? Vogel doesn’t say. As Bakhtin affirms about Dostoevsky’s polyphonic novels, the driving questions should not be about right or wrong, judgment and condemnation, but about understanding individuals in the maze of life’s complexities. Likewise, Vogel desires to “tease out contradictions” (Holmberg 1998). She wants, in Bakhtinian fashion, to raise the level of discourse and raise a level of consciousness. Such an ethics finds aesthetic expression not simply by what characters say or do, but also within the structure of the play. A third example of polyphony occurs when the generic construction of one of the ensemble scenes breaks down and two of the characters demand to be heard on their own terms. Lucy, Li’l Bit, and her grandmother are seen together in three separate scenes. The first two scenes obey the comedic convention Vogel establishes with her ensemble. But in the third scene, Lucy and her mother argue over who was ultimately responsible for Lucy’s teenage pregnancy. What begins as a scene generically predetermined for comedic potential quickly becomes dramatic and it undermines audience expectation. Two characters who previously enjoyed a humorous camaraderie are suddenly given over to rage. What was a moment ago a scene about Li’l Bit is now about these two women. Lucy blames her mother for not teaching her about men and sex; her mother defends herself by saying “I told you what my mother told me,” and at one point levels the accusation, “I hold you responsible!” (44). Lucy and Grandma’s exchange exemplifies one aspect of Bakhtin’s notion of dialogism, its quotational nature. He observes that speech for the most part is quotational of other speech acts. People tend to repeat what they

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have learned or heard from others, and conversation tends to report on speech acts or conversations previously had with others. Bakhtin calls this dialogic aspect the “already-spoken-about” quality of utterances, and they represent what Morson and Emerson label an “internal dialogism.” In clarifying the concept, they note, “No speaker is ever the first to talk about the topic of his discourse” (Morson 1990:137–138). In a sense, every time we speak, our words borrow from and respond to speech and ideologies in other contexts, whether consciously or not. Considered in an ethical light, our speech reflects our communities and societies, and our speaking is never in isolation (Morson 1990:138–139). In the exchange noted above, Li’l Bit’s grandmother evades responsibility by quoting her mother. Later in the play Lucy employs the same strategy as she readily quotes her mother when she does not want to take responsibility for her eleven-year-old daughter spending seven hours alone in a car with Uncle Peck — especially given that she suspects Peck does not harbor the purest intentions towards Li’l Bit. She tells her daughter, “If anything happens, I hold you responsible” (88). Both claims are insidious. Surely, if both Grandma and Lucy were able to follow their better instincts, their daughters may not have suffered the trauma they did. But to blame these two individuals simply scapegoats them for responsibilities either they were ill equipped to handle or that their societies had already chosen not to confront. Furthermore, it is impossible for one person, even a parent, to shield anyone from trauma. The girls would eventually grow into women who would eventually encounter men who just might succeed in seducing and subjugating them. Vogel wants to admit that this cyclical nature of blame and collusion in violence exist. Identifying who is responsible for crimes is not the issue. Rather, escaping the endless cycle of judgment and condemnation presents the more immediate challenge. Fittingly, another of the quotations in the play comes from one of Shakespeare’s well-known speeches on ethics, “The quality of mercy is not strained” from The Merchant of Venice (18). Li’l Bit quotes this in response to Big Papa’s question, “How is Shakespeare going to help her?” (17). The quote may also serve as a thematic response to the question of how theatre can serve a public, and how the lesson of How I Learned to Drive in particular can serve us. As Vogel seems to indicate, the quotational aspect of dialogism also has its positive uses. One key plot device of the play is the survival technique that Li’l Bit learns from her Uncle Peck. He gives her the tools not only to overcome obstacles while operating a car or navigating her life, but he gives her the tools to overcome him. In the final confrontation between Li’l Bit and Peck in the hotel room, she repeats to Peck what he had taught her in an earlier driving lesson when he said, “You’re going to learn what the other guy is going to do before he does it” (50). Only in this case, cutting

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off Peck’s advances to go to bed with her, she says, “I know what you want to do five steps ahead of you doing it” (76). After he proposes marriage, she claims that it violates the family contract that Peck had confirmed twice before when he said, “family is family” (69). In order to be heard, she repeats Peck’s words to him while having made them her own. In this example, quotation is celebrated. Li’l Bit gains strength from what she has been taught. Bakhtin speaks of dialogism as “poised on the threshold” of new insights and greater awareness of life (1984:63). How I Learned to Drive likewise exists on a threshold, given that in it Li’l Bit evaluates a past before turning to the future. The last image of the play shows her getting into a car and embarking on a journey, but the audience is not told where that journey lies. While the play may be finished, it remains “unfinalized” because its end is also a beginning. Li’l Bit leaves with the ghosts of her past with her, given that the image of Peck accompanies her in the car. Li’l Bit’s lessons come at a price. As in the Greek tragedies where someone dies or is killed, Peck becomes the sacrificial victim; he is a tragic figure in the classic sense because he is the pawn of forces beyond his control. The Fates in the form of an intolerant society have mapped out a destiny for him that ultimately ends, like Agamemnon, Herakles, and Ajax, in death. As a victim of childhood abuses and war he is an innocent, but as Li’l Bit’s victimizer he is an agent of oracles and curses. In the long run he is punished for crimes the gods had authored, and Li’l Bit escapes death in much the same way as Electra and Agave: implicated in the death of another. Although she cannot be blamed for the relationship with her uncle, or for breaking it off, her actions have consequences. Peck cannot survive without Li’l Bit, and he ends up drinking himself to death (86). As much as she try, and as unjust as it is, Li’l Bit will never quite wash the bloodstains from her hands. As the lights go down on the final tableau of Li’l Bit and Peck together, nobody can guess what the future holds for her. For Vogel, classical tragedy is of social importance because, as she puts it, “catharsis purges the pity and the terror and enables the audience to transcend them.... Purgation means forward movement” (Holmberg 1998). Despite the shifts in style and genre, she succeeds in teasing out an emotional response from an audience. After all, much of the success of the play depends upon the audience’s emotional involvement with both Li’l Bit and Peck. Still, Vogel wants the critical mind to be working. Worth noting in the description of characters, Vogel recommends that the Teenage Greek Chorus, who is to play the voice of the eleven-year-old Li’l Bit in the scene of her first sexualized “driving lesson,” should be of legal age, warning that “If the actor is too young, the audience may feel uncomfortable” (4). Actors and directors more often revel in the notion that they might disturb their

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audience. But emotionally unsettling the audience is not Vogel’s primary aim. Vogel has great faith in the mind, and great faith that her play can appeal to both the intellect and the emotions. Thematically and structurally How I Learned to Drive reflects social and ethical concerns. As in a memory play, the character Li’l Bit investigates her past in order to attend to its particulars and to share her experiences with others. The investigation has therapeutic value for her, even though she ostensibly tells her story in order “to teach a lesson” to the audience about family and forgiveness (7). The play demonstrates Li’l Bit’s reaching back into her past with the desire to see and hear and feel the people who hurt her as well as helped her. Particularly in regards to her uncle, Li’l Bit attempts to look back without judgment and without a condemning “recognition.” Towards the end of the play, after the audience learns that Peck has drunk himself to death, Li’l Bit says, “Sometimes I think of my uncle as a kind of Flying Dutchman. In the opera, the Dutchman is doomed to wander the sea; but every seven years he can come ashore, and if he finds a maiden who will love him of her own free will — he will be released” (86). Appropriately, as Vogel describes the final image of the play, “a faint light strikes the spirit of Uncle Peck, who is sitting in the back seat of the car. [Li’l Bit] sees him in the mirror. She smiles at him, and he nods at her. They are happy to be going for a long drive together” (92). In a real sense, Li’l Bit has set her uncle free. This freedom granting process, I suspect, is one of many secrets in the play, and it is a process Vogel mirrors in the construction of her play. For Drive represents a reaching out as well with the hopeful, positive desire to restore an open and inclusive sensation of the world. The process can only be effective as long as it is does justice to all parties concerned, and when everyone has a voice. Vogel’s aesthetics formally embodies such an ethics — one that is made possible in the polyphonic drama answerable to the concerns of its characters and it audience. UNIVERSITY OF KENTUCKY

Notes 1. See Vogel’s discussion of her influences in Holmberg 1998 and Savran 1999. 2. See also Savran, “Loose Screws,” in Vogel 1996 and Savran 2003:188–189. 3. For historical overviews of the Formalist school, see Erlich 1981; Thompson 1971; Christopher Pike’s introduction in Pike 1979:1–38; and Kristeva 1973:102–104. 4. Victor Erlich notes that Roman Jakobson came close to admitting an ethical concern, but Jakobson’s investigation of ethics was limited to their expression within compositional style and devices. Ethics were to be studied only from the per-

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spective of their “literariness.” See Erlich 1981:199. 5. Shklovsky 1990:5; Thompson 1971:67. I wish to note that Benjamin Sher, one of Shklovsky’s translators, believes the English translation of ostraniene as “defamiliarization,” “estrangement,” or “making strange” to be flawed for various reasons and therefore prefers “enstrangement.” See his discussion in Shklovsky 1990:xviii–xix. 6. See as examples Giuliano 1998 and Brace 1998.

References Cited Bakhtin, Mikhail M. Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, edited by Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990. _____. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, edited and translated by Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Brace, Marianne. “A journey to the dark side; Paula Vogel thinks paedophilia lurks in us all, and her new play is intended to expose it.” In The Independent, London, 24 June 1998. Erlich, Victor. Russian Formalism: History—Doctrine. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981. Eykhenbaum, Boris M. “Concerning the Question of the ‘Formalists.’” In The Futurists, the Formalists, and the Marxist Critique, edited by Christopher Pike. London: Ink Links, Ltd., 1979. Giuliano, Mike. “Driver’s Seat: Playwright Paula Vogel Breaks Taboos—and Picks Up a Pulitzer.” In Citypaper Online, 6 May 1998. Accessed 30 July 2007 at http://www.citypaper.com/arts/story.asp?id=4498 Holmberg, Arthur. “Through the eyes of Lolita. Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Paula Vogel is interviewed by Arthur Holmberg.” American Repertory Theatre program notes, 1998. Accessed 30 April 2007 at http://amrep.org/past/drive/drive1.html. Kristeva, Julia. “The Ruin of a Poetics.” In Russian Formalism: A collection of articles and texts in translation, edited by Stephen Bann and John E. Bowlt. New York: Harper & Row, 1973. Morson, Gary Saul, and Caryl Emerson. Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990. Pike, Christopher, ed. The Futurists, the Formalists, and the Marxist Critique. London: Ink Links, Ltd., 1979. Savran, David. The Playwright’s Voice: American Dramatists on Memory, Writing and the Politics of Culture. New York: Theatre Communications Group, Inc., 1999. _____. Queer Sort of Materialism: Recontextualizing American Theatre. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003. Shklovsky, Viktor. “The Resurrection of the Word.” In Russian Formalism: A collection of articles and texts in translation, edited by Stephen Bann and John E. Bowlt. New York: Harper & Row, 1973. _____. Theory of Prose, translated by Benjamin Sher. Elmwood Park, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1990. Thompson, Ewa. Russian Formalism and Anglo-American New Criticism: A Comparative Study. The Hague: Mouton & Co., 1971.

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Vogel, Paula. The Baltimore Waltz and Other Plays. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1996. _____. How I Learned to Drive. In The Mammary Plays. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1998.

8 Shaw’s Saint Joan and Shakespeare’s Joan la Pucelle Annie Papreck King Abstract Bernard Shaw often expressed contempt for the Victorian conceptualization of Shakespeare, admonishing his contemporaries for at once idolizing and manipulating their favorite English playwright. Shaw himself wanted to be worthy of exerting influence on the same grand scale as Shakespeare. He dealt with this anxiety, I argue, by being as antithetical to his precursor as possible. Often — in his efforts to be contrary — he failed to recognize the Shavian elements in the creations of Shakespeare and thus excised from his characters even those elements in Shakespeare that are congruous with his own thinking. This paper examines Shaw’s complicated relationship with Shakespeare by looking at Shaw’s attempt, and ultimate failure, to produce a heroic Joan of Arc wholly unlike the Joan of Arc of Shakespeare.

In the Epistle Dedicatory (1903) to Man and Superman, Bernard Shaw asserts, no doubt after careful polling, that 9,999 Victorian women out of 10,000 want nothing more than to get married, and this assurance is what you can safely rely on “as their religion, their morality, their principles, their patriotism, their reputation, their honor and so forth” (1951:494). With Shaw having such a condescending opinion of his female contemporaries, it is no wonder that he looked to the past for inspiration in creating his greatest female hero — and the one, many critics think, that earned him the Nobel Prize — Saint Joan. And it is also no wonder, given Shaw’s belief that the female’s quest for a spouse is perhaps her biggest flaw, that he would choose for his Superwoman a historic figure who allows him to underscore her asexuality and her avowed celibacy. Although Shaw is not as explicit in his condemnation of Shakespeare’s portrayal of Joan la Pucelle in 1 Henry VI— and thus his need to rehabilitate her image — as he was with Shakespeare’s conception of Julius Caesar, Shaw is nonetheless working against a Renaissance view of the Maid whose negative aspects found their way into Shakespeare and were perhaps never fully dispelled until her eventual canonization 109

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by the Catholic church in 1920 and Shaw’s subsequent elevation of her to the status of hero. Shaw, in the midst of the many differences between the Elizabethan Joan and the twentieth-century Joan, fails to see the numerous Shavian qualities in Shakespeare’s Joan and in the play surrounding her. Shakespeare’s portrayal of Joan la Pucelle has for some time been problematic for critics because of the extreme shift in character she undergoes between Acts 1–4 and Act 5. Shaw himself observes in his preface to Saint Joan that the impression left by [this extreme shift] is that the playwright, having begun by an attempt to make Joan a beautiful and romantic figure, was told by his scandalized company that English patriotism would never stand a sympathetic representation of a French conqueror of English troops, and that unless he at once introduced all the old charges against Joan of being a sorceress and a harlot, and assumed her to be guilty of all of them, his play could not be produced [1951:768].

And later A. L. French echoes Shaw’s hypothesis: So odd and out of key with what has gone before is the third scene of Act 5, when Joan enters and starts raising evil spirits, that we can only wonder whether there was not an abrupt change of intention on Shakespeare’s part. Perhaps he felt that the non-evil and breezily attractive Joan of Act 1 to 4 was altogether too attractive, and did not sufficiently accord with chauvinistic prejudice [1968:427].

But whether these inconsistencies arise as a result of an abrupt change of intent on the part of Shakespeare or as a result of the play itself being an amalgam of several different authors, as some critics have suggested,1 the ultimately negative feelings toward Joan in the play are what impresses both Shaw and contemporary readers. And to understand this impression Shakespeare leaves us with, we must explore the sources he used to fashion his French villain. Richard F. Hardin has explored the sixteenth-century sources for the character of Joan that Shakespeare would have been familiar with and concluded that the playwright “enthusiastically compounded the felony” (1989:30) of tarnishing the saint’s image by exaggerating her negative qualities and by inventing aspects of her personality and actions that do not coincide with the historical facts. According to Hardin, Edward Hall was “the first English historian to develop a full-scale assassination of Joan’s character” (1989:27).2 Hall described her as “a rampe of such boldnesse, that she would course horses and ride them to water, and do thynges, that other yong maidens both abhorred & were ashamed to do” (qtd. in Hardin 1989:28).

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This account, along with a similarly harsh portrayal by Holinshed, fashioned Shakespeare’s understanding of the unique female figure that was to inform his first part of Henry VI. Whether or not Shakespeare fully succumbs to the call to vilify Joan will be considered later, but it is clear that the general, late-sixteenth-century English attitude toward her had no love for a character who is Catholic, French, and a woman. Hardin concludes that after the execution of Mary Stuart and the narrow escape of the Armada, not to mention the ongoing self-doubts among the English about their Catholicism or Protestantism; after the social rank-jumping that rendered it increasingly difficult to tell the ruling class by its clothes or family name, after the joining of the religious wars in France by a good number of English soldiers, many of whom must have guessed that their Protestant champion was less than reliable — after so many episodes conducive to collective uncertainty, it was useful to have such a character [1989:34].

Shaw’s exposure to and understanding of the figure of St. Joan differed from Shakespeare’s, and — in the absence of political or nationalistic pressure3— he was able to reject those accounts of her character with which he did not agree in favor of a preconceived notion of Joan’s heroism. In the preface to his play, Shaw does not shy away from harsh criticisms of the portrayals of Joan in Schiller, Voltaire, and Shakespeare and even takes on Mark Twain for making the saint “a beautiful and most ladylike Victorian” (Shaw 1951:770). Nobody, in his mind, had done her justice, and with her canonization recently finalized, he felt the time had come for a “true” portrayal of Joan of Arc. Shaw cites as his main source the 1841 publication by Quicherat of the reports of Joan’s trial and rehabilitation and asserts that the use of this primary source and his own placement in the twentieth century combine to make him Joan’s “ideal biographer” (1951:752). And he is, indeed, the ideal person to present her story in that he can create a character who reflects the general populace’s renewed interest in the saint and its changing view toward women. Although as Karma Waltonen4 has argued that “following the Great War, it was increasingly difficult to tell the heroes from the villains” (2004:192), in a post–World War I England that lacks the degree of uncertainty that Hardin attributes to the late-sixteenth-century audience, the playwright feels little need for a scapegoat to dispel fears and can present a play in which, by Shaw’s own admission, “there are no villains” (Shaw 1951:794). But how Shaw’s Joan relates to the Joan of history is of less interest to this argument than how she relates to her Elizabethan counterpart. And it is in this area that Shaw once again reveals himself to be, in the plays’ differences and similarities, a dramatic descendant of Shakespeare.

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As with the character of Julius Caesar, Shaw does everything he can to create a heroic figure in St. Joan completely opposite to the one he encountered in Shakespeare. And in many ways he succeeds. He goes to great lengths to set his Joan apart from the Joan of 1 Henry VI by creating a being wholly different in her sexuality and in her rhetorical style, and by transforming the characters surrounding Joan — namely her judges and prosecutor — in order to assuage the adversarial tone of Shakespeare’s la Pucelle subplot. Any reader with patience enough to tackle Shaw’s preface to Saint Joan, half as long as the play itself, will become very familiar with the playwright’s goals for his portrayal of Joan’s sexuality long before ever encountering the character. For Shaw, Joan is “neutral in the conflict of sex because men were too much afraid of her to fall in love with her” (Shaw 1951:752). He calls her a “pioneer of rational dressing for women” (1951:747) and declares that “had she lived in our time, picture postcards might have been sold of her as a general: they would not have been sold of her as a sultana” (1951:753). For those who skip the preface, Shaw immediately highlights Joan’s sexuality, or lack thereof, in the very first scene, lest his audience attempt to view his heroine as a typical early-twentieth-century female with “specific charms and specific imbecilities” (Shaw 1951:752). Robert de Baudricourt claims to “know the sort of girl that is always talking to soldiers” (Shaw 1951:804), but any presumptions of promiscuity are quickly dispelled by Polly, who indignantly declares he “should as soon think of the Blessed Virgin herself in that way, as of [Joan]” (Shaw 1951:807). Shaw’s Joan, much like his Julius Caesar, is meant to have a far more heroic agenda than anything involving paramours or petticoats. Any sexual involvement would only serve to divert her from the task of expelling the English from France, and any hint of femininity from the title character would likewise divert the French soldiers from carrying out this task. Any reader of Shaw familiar with his tracts on marriage and the role of women in Victorian society will immediately recognize the character of Joan as Shaw’s ultimate female Superman when she encapsulates all of her creator’s thoughts on the matters in her loud declaration to her French soldiers during the siege at Orleans of Scene III: “I am a soldier: I do not want to be thought of as a woman. I will not dress as a woman. I do not care for the things women care for. They dream of lovers, and of money. I dream of leading a charge” (Shaw 1951:835). It is tempting to argue that Shaw wants not an asexual heroine but a masculine hero, but the playwright seems to suggest that a female is exactly what the French needed in order to agitate themselves into action: to paraphrase Polly, the French have tried all of the sane, rational (read male) ways of defending their country, with no success; so why not follow someone with a tinge of madness to her? (Shaw 1951:

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809). Joan herself even remarks in the Epilogue to the play — which takes place twenty-five years after her execution — that it was a pity she wasn’t a man, for she “should not have bothered [them] so much then” (Shaw 1951:900). But Shaw clearly presents Joan’s success — in convincing Robert for support, in bolstering Charles’s self-esteem, in defeating the English at Orleans — as a function of her femaleness. Joan must be a sexed character in order to garner the necessary attention for her cause while at the same time remaining asexual in order to bring that cause to fruition. While Shaw creates Joan’s sexuality as a reflection of his own ideologies of marriage and the role of women in society, he also uses this aspect of her character as an answer to the overtly sexual Joan la Pucelle of Shakespeare. At first encounter, Shakespeare’s Joan seems very similar to Shaw’s in regards to how each character relates to her femininity. Joan la Pucelle petitions the French soldiers to take her on as a compatriot with “...thou shalt find that I exceed my sex/ ...thou shalt be fortunate/ If thou receive me for thy warlike mate” (Shakespeare 1997:1.2.90–92). While the English revile her for her supposed witchcraft and sorcery, the audience never views her as female until the physical encounter between Joan and Charles of Act 1, Scene 2. It is here, in Shakespeare’s portrayal of the male reaction to Joan, that the two Joans diverge. After la Pucelle has bested Charles in one-onone combat, the soon-to-be-king declares his ardent devotion to the Maid: Impatiently I burn with thy desire; My heart and hands thou hast at once subdu’d. Excellent Pucelle, if thy name be so, Let me thy servant and not sovereign be. ’Tis the French Dolphin sueth to thee thus [Shakespeare 1997:1.2.108–1??].

Whereas Shaw’s Frenchmen, both peasant and royal alike, would never think of romance entering into their relationship with Joan, Shakespeare’s Dauphin obviously sees first a female and then a soldier. And while Shaw’s Joan would never think of using feminine charms to get what she wants, in Shakespeare’s French court the French lords see her as a “shrewd tempter” (Shakespeare 1997:1.2.123) with her tongue, one who uses every female ploy available to her. Shakespeare pens what can be described at best as an ambivalent view of Joan’s sexuality on the part of his English characters as well. To excuse their defeat in battle, the English must emphasize her masculinity in order to spare themselves the humiliation of being beaten by a woman: Burgundy prays to God that “she prove not masculine ere long,/ If underneath the standard of the French/ She carry armor as she hath begun” (Shakespeare

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1997:2.1.22–24). Here Joan is their military peer, but once she steps off the battle field and begins to taunt Bedford, Talbot is quick to hurl insults intended for only a female: “Foul fiend of France, and hag of all despite,/ Encompass’d with thy lustful paramours!” (Shakespeare 1997:3.2.52–53). As much as the English retinue despises and fears Joan in Shaw’s version, the playwright will never allow a single question of her purity to escape their lips. The characters surrounding Saint Joan, both her supporters and her detractors, see her much differently from the way Shakespeare’s characters do. Perhaps more important than how others view Joan la Pucelle’s sexuality is how the character presents herself sexually. In an apocryphal addition to the Maid’s character, Shakespeare, according to Hardin, “goes out of his way to invent the most unpleasant part of his portrayal of Joan, the scene [5.3] where she debases herself into a camp whore” (1989:30). Shakespeare’s Joan has no hesitations about slandering her own name in order to escape execution, claiming pregnancy and then offering several possibilities for the father of her fabricated child. Granted, Shaw’s Joan becomes equally desperate as the inquisitors sentence her to death, but her last ditch effort to avoid the torture is to admit to any heresy the court wants her to, knowing full well that she will recant the confession later. Even if lying about a pregnancy would gain her a reprieve until she gives birth, Shaw’s Joan would not do it. Her creator must keep her asexual in all things, while Shakespeare can fuel his audience’s disgust of Joan by highlighting the worst parts of her femininity. Another major difference between Shaw’s Joan and Shakespeare’s Joan is the degree and purpose of their respective rhetorical skills. To counteract the manipulative and purposeful rhetoric of Joan la Pucelle, Shaw creates a Joan entirely too naïve to be aware of the effect her words produce, a heroine who would much rather engage in action than speech. M. L. Stapleton argues that for Shakespeare’s Joan, “rhetoric serves as [her] most potent witchcraft” (1994:241). And nowhere is this claim better illustrated than in Act 3, Scene 2 when Joan convinces Burgundy to abandon his loyalty to Talbot and the English cause and come join the French. Joan tells Charles she will use “fair persuasions, mix’d with sug’red words” (Shakespeare 1997:3.2.18) to entice Burgundy to defect, and indeed, in a relatively few number of lines, she flatters his military prowess and convinces him that he has no respect or standing in England to return to anyway. Shakespeare’s Joan is keenly aware of her own duplicity, and the playwright makes his audience keenly aware of the power of her words: Burgundy doesn’t just quietly turn traitor; he does so with the pathetic admission “I am vanquished. These haughty words of hers/ Have batt’red me like roaring can-

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non-shot,/ And made me almost yield upon my knees” (Shakespeare 1997:3.2.78–80). It is important to keep in mind that historically, Burgundy did not defect until after Joan’s death,5 but since Shakespeare deprives his audience of witnessing any of Joan’s battlefield victories, he has to highlight her dominance over the English as a rhetorical one. Joan la Pucelle, more so than Shaw’s Joan, is much more a woman of words than of action. A. L. French has called Joan la Pucelle’s military victories “singularly unimpressive” (1968:427), and yet the English troops remain terrified of her. Although much of this fear can be attributed to her supposed witchcraft and supernatural powers, Talbot reveals that it is, in particular, the way she uses those powers that ultimately confounds the English: “A witch by fear not force, like Hannibal,/ Drives back our troops and conquers as she lists” (Shakespeare 1997:1.5.21–22). She does not conjure vile spirits to come engage in physical combat with the English (although she tries); she does not give the French horses supernatural strength to carry her troops into battle — these are physical obstacles that the English could, if not conquer, then at least understand. Rather, Joan’s power comes from the fear she evokes with her words and the words of others, as her reputation spreads. While Joan herself claims that her wit is “untrain’d in any kind of art” (Shakespeare 1997:1.2.73), Shakespeare creates her as a character who relies heavily on the flattery, persuasion, and manipulation of her rhetoric to force others’ actions and to mold others’ opinions of her. Shaw says of his own Joan that “had she learned to flatter and manage [men in power], she might have lived as long as Queen Elizabeth” (1951:748). But a large part of this Joan’s appeal is her naïve rhetoric, never used in anything but a straightforward, undisguised manner. Like Joan la Pucelle, Shaw’s Joan claims herself to be “so ignorant that [she does] not know A from B” (Shaw 1951:862), but unlike what we see in Shakespeare’s account, this is not false modesty. It is never Saint Joan’s words that convince others to acquiesce to her requests, but, as Polly and so many others contend, “there is [just] something about her” (Shaw 1951:807), something about her character that transcends what she says. Whereas Shakespeare’s Joan’s every word is deliberately used for her intended purposes, Shaw’s stage directions indicate that his Joan is “incapable of seeing the effect she is producing” (1951:858) when she opens her mouth to speak. In place of this reliance on rhetoric that defines Shakespeare’s Joan la Pucelle is Saint Joan’s love of and need for action: action becomes her language, her means of communicating. After the French victory at Orleans and the triumphant crowning of Charles at Rheims, Joan eschews the crowd’s demand for her to address them and, instead, wants to begin plans for her next military endeavor: “I am such a coward: I am frightened beyond words

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before a battle; but it is so dull afterwards when there is no danger: oh, so dull! dull! dull!” (Shaw 1951:853). This Joan would much rather do something than talk about doing something. She does not need words as her metaphorical weapons as Joan la Pucelle does. Shaw makes her a true military heroine who, as prescribed by his standards for recognizing the Superman, combines thought with action in order to effect change. Another striking difference between the Joan of the Early Modern period and the Joan of the early twentieth century is her tormentors — the authorities, both civil and religious, that bring about her downfall — and their reasons for executing her. Because Shakespeare was writing for an audience, as Hardin reminds us, “likely to be as anti–Catholic as it was Francophobic” (1989:31), he had to have the Catholic and French Joan captured and burned by a group both English and anachronistically Protestant. In contrast, Shaw remains ambiguous about where the blame for Joan’s execution lies, indicting specifically neither the French nor the English, the religious hierarchy nor the laity, or, as Frederick Boas argues, “the real protagonists are not the Maid or King Charles but the Church and Feudal System versus Private Judgment and the Spirit of Nationality” (1951:45). Naturally Talbot and York of 1 Henry VI would despise Joan for the military defeats they have suffered at her hands, but Shakespeare goes out of his way to show the main reason for their death sentence of Joan to be her purported devil-worship. Early in the play Talbot promises Joan’s downfall: “Blood will I draw on thee — thou art a witch —/ And straightway give thy soul to him thou serv’st” (Shakespeare 1997:1.5.6–7). Shakespeare then bookends this remark with York’s final verdict in Act 5: “Break thou in pieces and consume to ashes,/ Thou foul accursed minister of hell” (Shakespeare 1997:5.4.92–93). Shakespeare’s motives for the killing of Joan are very straightforward; as Hardin argues, “No Puritan tract could set forth quite as effectively as 5.3 [Joan’s conjuring of evil spirits] the dark truth of Catholic superstition” (1989:31). Forget the fact that Joan undermines the English military authority by besting their forces at Orleans; forget the fact that she undermines the old boys’ club of the aristocracy by so easily convincing Burgundy to switch loyalties. The English want her dead because she represents the idolatry of Catholicism. In Shaw’s telling of the story, the reasons for Joan’s death are not quite so straightforward; indeed, it takes the English Warwick and French Cauchon an entire act of the play to discuss and figure out exactly why Joan is such a threat to them and why she must be punished. In the preface to the play, Shaw contends that as hard as it is to rehabilitate the image of Saint Joan, it is “far more difficult to get rid of ... the mud that is being thrown at her judges” (1951:751). Shaw does not want to create a work that serves

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to exacerbate anti–Catholic or anti–French feelings among his contemporary Englishmen. There are no wholly evil characters among the English, the French, or the clergy. Shaw presents the Catholic Church not necessarily favorably, but at least not unfavorably as Shakespeare did. One of Saint Joan’s most prominent Catholic figures, the Archbishop, at times seems more Shavian than Joan herself. While often pompous and misguided (and thus unintentionally Shavian even in his faults?), the Archbishop hints at traces of Creative Evolutionism in his own philosophy: “There is a new spirit rising in men: we are at the dawning of a wider epoch. If I were a simple monk, and had not to rule men, I should seek peace for my spirit with Aristotle and Pythagoras rather than with the saints and their miracles” (Shaw 1951:823). Shaw can often throughout the play, as here, be sympathetic in his creation of the characters who comprise the Church while at the same time be critical of the actual Church establishment. This ambiguity is part of Shaw’s attempt to elevate Joan not at the expense of her prosecutors and persecutors and to wipe away some of the “mud” that makes the story of Joan one of “good guys versus bad guys,” as Shaw believes it is with the English and French in Shakespeare. While at the same time that Shaw makes his play not wholly anti– Catholic, he also makes it not wholly anti–French. The English and the French are strangely united in their fear of Joan — quite different from the Frenchmen of 1 Henry VI who are some of Joan’s biggest champions. In Shaw, while Warwick sees her as a threat to the power of the English landowners and Cauchon sees her as a threat to the power of the Catholic Church, the two characters acknowledge that at the root of both of their fears about Joan lies the same premise, her idea of the “protest of the individual soul against the interference of priest or peer between the private man and his God” (Shaw 1951:851). The French Cauchon tries to save Joan’s soul, the English soldier gives her a cross to hold as she burns, both French and English alike show up in the Epilogue to regret and repent, and Shaw makes those responsible for her downfall and their reasons behind it stand in contrast to Shakespeare’s portrayal of the men who lead Joan to her execution. So Shaw must have congratulated himself once again on successfully creating an anti–Shakespearean figure in an anti–Shakespearean play. And yet the striking differences between the two Joans give way to similarities that — although it would initially anger Shaw to acknowledge — ultimately endorse Shaw’s hero-worship of Joan by showing that there are perhaps inherent elements of the Superman in her that not even Shakespeare’s attempts to be anti–Catholic and anti–French can debase. One feature that unites the two characters is a shared pseudo-egalitar-

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ian attitude toward class distinctions. For both Joans, anyone may have access to and feel entitled to the respect and the privileges of the upper class. That the aristocracy or men of power should set themselves apart from others seems a ridiculous notion to both Joan la Pucelle and Saint Joan. Both Shakespeare and Shaw make deliberate choices about which episodes from Joan’s life to include in their respective works; so it is significant that both playwrights decide to include the anecdote about her successful identification of Charles after the court had tried to hide him and, without historical corroboration, to show Joan’s peculiar attribute of shunning titles. There is something paradoxically democratic about Joan “miraculously” picking the Dauphin out of the crowd. In Shakespeare and Shaw alike it shows a connection between the uneducated Joan and the privileged future king, an affinity in their statures that allows one to identify the other. Neither Joan seems to have the reverence for or humility before the crown that her class would dictate her to have. In the same vein, neither Joan will acknowledge the titles of respect that accompany these men they so boldly approach. Joan la Pucelle laughs at the exhaustive string of titles used for Talbot and calls them a “silly stately style indeed!” (Shakespeare 1997:4.7.72). And at the first meeting of Saint Joan and Robert de Baudricourt, he admonishes her as “impudent baggage” for daring to call Bertrand de Poulengey Polly to his face.6 The titular accoutrements of class hold no meaning for Shakespeare’s and Shaw’s Joans, and thus they, in their own opinions, can demand the same respect and following as their aristocratic counterparts, even in the absence of titles. As much as Shaw would like to think that there is no ideological agenda in the Bard’s works, he might be surprised to find a bit of the socialist spirit emanating from his Elizabethan counterpart. Another trait common to both Joan la Pucelle and Saint Joan is the way in which each character shows a shift away from medieval warfare. Shaw is not subtle in his portrayal of Joan as a champion of a new style of combat. She criticizes the training of the French army she now heads and admonishes the Bastard of Orleans, “Your art of war is no use, because your knights are no good for real fighting. War is only a game to them ... they make rules as to what is fair and what is not fair... Can’t you see that all the like of that is gone by and done with? What use is armor against gunpowder?” (Shaw 1951: 860). What Shaw misreads in 1 Henry VI, or what he chooses to ignore, is that Shakespeare’s Joan is a similar pioneer of modern combat. It is impossible to ignore the decline of chivalry over the course of the first tetralogy, and the accompanying disintegration of the rules and pageantry and civility of medieval warfare, but very subtly Shakespeare places his Joan at the genesis of this shift. For a playwright not known for his detailed and explicit stage directions, Shakespeare gives Joan two significant ones. She

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engages in one-on-one combat with Charles in Act 1, Scene 2 and again with Talbot in 1.5. This is not the regimented and fair-minded battle style of medievalism; rather, Shakespeare marks the shift to modern warfare in the character of Joan, a clever addition to this progressive female that is not unique to Shaw’s portrayal. Finally, what higher Shavian compliment, and one Shaw would certainly begrudge her, is there than to call Shakespeare’s Joan a historical hero and acknowledge the traces of the Superman in her character.7 Despite their differences, and despite Joan la Pucelle’s evil underpinnings that surface in the fifth act, both Joans emerge as strong, unconventional, and outspoken female characters. In a stage direction for Shaw’s other truly unconventional woman, Ann Whitefield of Man and Superman, the playwright describes her as one who “inspires confidence as a person who will do nothing she does not mean to do; also some fear, perhaps, as a woman who will probably do everything she means to do without taking more account of other people than may be necessary” (1951:531). It is not difficult to transplant Saint Joan into this description; what is difficult, due to a misreading of Shakespeare’s Joan, is trying to see the Bard’s character as a sixteenth-century Superwoman. But as A. L. French notes, whatever the English may say and whatever subsequent centuries of critics may say, “Shakespeare does not present [Joan] as a witch — not, at least until the very end of her career” (1968:427). Too often Joan’s Act 5 conjuring of the evil spirits overshadows her character in the previous four acts and her willful final stand against the English. One way in which Shakespeare and Shaw set their Joans apart as Superwomen is to contrast them with the other women in the plays. In Shaw’s case this is easy: the only other women in Saint Joan are the Duchess who cares for nothing but clothes and the crowd of women who titter at Joan’s short haircut. Immediately the audience loves Joan for being unconventional if “conventional” means caring for such superficialities. In Shakespeare, despite being the enemy to the English, Joan la Pucelle serves as a strong female presence throughout the play; as M. L. Stapleton argues, her “ten scenes ... fuse the continuous clash of 1 Henry VI into a comprehensible whole” (1994:233). Compare this with the single scene afforded Margaret, here somewhat demure and coquettish,8 yet destined, in Hardin’s words, to “inflict far deeper wounds on England than Joan ever did” (1989:34). Shakespeare’s Joan is an “Amazon/ And fightest with the sword of Deborah” (Shakespeare 1997:1.2.104–105), and whether they love her or despise her, the audience cannot ignore her. Shakespeare’s Joan also displays the Superwomanly strength of character in her final showdown with the English before being dragged off for execution. Curiously, Shaw’s Joan declares she will open her mouth no more

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for her inquisitors and sits as a mute presence on the stage until being led away. In contrast, Joan la Pucelle goes out with an explosion of words hurled in the direction of her captors: May never glorious sun reflex his beams Upon the country where you make abode; But darkness and the gloomy shade of death Environ you, till mischief and despair Drive you to break your necks or hang yourselves! [1997:5.4.87–90].

Both reactions to the death sentence are in keeping with the two characterizations, but there seems to be something Shavianly heroic in demanding the last word. Stapleton observes of this final speech, and of many of Joan la Pucelle’s previous boasts, that “many literary heroes account for themselves in a fashion that suggests the miles gloriosus; few women characters indulge themselves in this practice” (1994:245). Joan la Pucelle adopts the male characteristics that Shaw wants in his Joan, and, oddly enough, in his Superwoman. In the context of Shakespeare’s time period and dramatic corpus, she displays the strength and unconventionality that define her twentiethcentury descendant as well. Shaw wants to create a female hero, and in this he succeeds; he wants to create a unique female hero, and here he falters. Although the differences between Shakespeare’s Joan and Shaw’s Joan are many and varied, Shaw fails to give credit to his predecessor for the socialism, progressivism, and unconventionality in Joan la Pucelle’s character that antedate her reincarnation on the twentieth-century stage. Shaw does not create an antithesis of Joan la Pucelle, a complete destruction of all of the “mistakes” Shakespeare had made in fashioning her; instead he unknowingly expands and develops some of the characteristics present since her 1 Henry VI portrayal. RUTGERS UNIVERSITY

Notes 1. See in particular Gary Taylor, “Shakespeare and Others: The Authorship of Henry the Sixth, Part One.” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England: An Annual Gathering of Research, Criticism, and Reviews. 7 (1995):145–205. 2. Hall’s account was first printed in 1569 in Richard Grafton’s Chronicle. 3. Although Shaw did not feel the same external pressures that Shakespeare did, he may have felt a personal responsibility to defend the Frenchwoman, considering France’s long-standing friendliness with Ireland and Ireland’s war with England prior

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to the composition of the play. (My thanks to an anonymous referee from this journal for bringing this to my attention.) 4. See Waltonen’s “Saint Joan: From Renaissance Witch to New Woman” for an excellent discussion of Shaw’s rehabilitation of Joan’s image. 5. For further discussion of this, see Hardin 1989:29. 6. Also note that the character of Ann in Man and Superman, Shaw’s true Superwoman, takes great delight in refusing to call people by their given names and instead invents nicknames for them. 7. Of course Shakespeare would have been unfamiliar with the Nietzschean term, but his female heroes quite often display the Superman characteristics, as Shaw understood them. Indeed, Shaw concedes in the preface to Man and Superman that this is one area of overlap between the two playwrights: the female protagonist who always seems to be the one to take the initiative. 8. Here I confine my claim to the first part of Henry VI; a very different Margaret emerges in parts 2 and 3.

References Cited Boas, Frederick S. “Joan of Arc in Shakespeare, Schiller, and Shaw.” Shakespeare Quarterly 2/1 (1951):35–45. French, A.L. “Joan of Arc and Henry VI.” English Studies 49/5 (1968):425–29. Hardin, Richard F. “Chronicles and Mythmaking in Shakespeare’s Joan of Arc.” Shakespeare Survey 42 (1989):25–35. Shakespeare, William. “1 Henry VI.” The Riverside Shakespeare 2nd ed. New York: Houghton Mi·in, 1997. Shaw, Bernard. Seven Plays of Bernard Shaw. New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1951. Stapleton, M. L. “‘Shine it like a comet of revenge’: Seneca, John Studley, and Shakespeare’s Joan la Pucelle.” Comparative Literature Studies 31/3 (1994):229–250. Waltonen, Karma. “Saint Joan: From Renaissance Witch to New Woman.” Shaw: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies 24 (2004):186–203.

9 Luis Alfaro’s Electricidad and the “Tragedy of Electra” Helen E. Moritz Abstract Luis Alfaro’s Electricidad draws heavily on Sophocles’ Electra in the dramatic dominance of its title character, but in its larger thematic concerns it is a contaminatio of works by all three extant Greek tragedians, Aeschylus and Euripides as well as Sophocles. This paper traces Alfaro’s adaptation of ancient strands, especially concerning religion and revenge, the mother-figure, and the legacy of violence, into his own darkly comic work.

In the version of Electricidad published in 2006 Luis Alfaro changed its subtitle from that of his 2002 “First Draft,” “A Chicano Take on Sophocles’ Electra,” to the broader “A Chicano Take on the Tragedy of Electra.” In so describing his variant on the myth of Electra Alfaro announces his intervention in the more general tradition of individual playwrights presenting the same myth in different ways: indeed, uniquely in extant Greek drama, this particular tale was variously treated by all three ancient tragedians, the plays entitled Electra by Sophocles and Euripides and the Libation Bearers of Aeschylus. Aspects of the larger story of the House of Atreus also appear in Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis and Iphigenia in Tauris and in the other plays of Aeschylus’ Oresteia, the Agamemnon and the Eumenides. In an interview with Cassandra Johnson that accompanies the published version of Electricidad, Alfaro identifies the aspects of the myth that most interest him. First, he explains the immediate inspiration for his play: in working with a youth authority program for teen felons he had met a young girl who had killed her mother and, shortly after, he had read Electra in a collection of Greek plays and realized “it’s basically the same story. Nothing’s changed. Why do we still have a need to avenge?” ( Johnson 2006: 64) Almost certainly the Electra to which he refers is that of Sophocles, and like that ancient playwright’s character, Alfaro’s renamed “Electricidad” keeps 122

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vigil in front of the house from start to finish, lamenting her father and committed to revenge for his death at the hands of her mother (cf. S. El. 86–109).1 In that same interview Alfaro also reports becoming excited about Ifigenia “being long-dead in the Greek version but literally ‘born again’ in [his],” and with the whole idea of resurrection. Alfaro connects the notion of being born again with a “way of avoiding violence” in gang culture, and describes his Ifigenia as “the moral and spiritual voice of the play” ( Johnson 2006: 65); in counterpoint to Ifigenia is Electricidad who “represents the old ways, the indigenous ways” (64). The figure of Clytemnestra excites him, as well, the “idea of the matriarchy taking over the patriarchy, which is something that exists a lot in gang culture,” and the question of whether “the matriarchy become[s] a patriarchy in order to survive” (64). His own creation, Abuela, the grandmother, he characterizes as “the original chola and part of the first generation of the gang, and the three generations of the family” (65). The interplay of notions of rebirth and revenge, the conflicted presentation of the mother-figure, and the multigenerational scope of the play have resonances with portrayals in Aeschylus and Euripides as well as Sophocles. In this paper I shall investigate Alfaro’s manipulations of these themes in light of the ancient sources. To set the stage I will first discuss Alfaro’s use of the context of community embodied in the dramatic chorus.

The Chorus The chorus of ancient tragedy, as the part of the dramatic cast that was funded at public expense, sets the action in its broader frame and voices the opinions and values of the community. The “Griego chorus” of vecinas (67, 1)2 in Electricidad is well-situated to represent this voice.3 The vecinas’ extensive network of chisme or gossip (cf. 67, 1; 68, 1) gives them a quasi-omniscient perspective from which to speak. Their first task is to deliver the prologue, providing the necessary background to the action. They introduce La Casa de Atridas: the mother, La Clemencia, her name assonantally like “Clytemnestra” but highly ironic in its meaning of “mercy”; the daughter, Electricidad; el papa, Agamenón; the sister, Ifigenia; and the son, Orestes. They tell us that Clemencia, though merely “a mujer,” has killed her husband.4 Ifigenia has run off, status uncertain. Orestes is reportedly dead in Las Vegas, the victim of a hit by his mother (67, 3–68, 2). As her neighbors the chorus sympathize with Electricidad (67, 1), but are concerned that the young woman’s particular form of mourning impacts not only herself but the larger community: Electricidad has stolen her father’s shrouded and mutilated corpse5 from the funeral home and placed it on a

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makeshift altar in front of her house (66, 2); to have the rotting “body in [the] front yard/ As if he was a car” “can’t be good for barrio pride” (67, 1).6 During the course of the play the vecinas express foreboding at anticipated violence (74, 2; 79, 3–80, 1), opine about divine response to human actions (80, 3–81, 1), and pronounce the closing assessment (85, 3), very much in the manner of ancient choruses. Most significantly, they tell the communidad what we are to understand as the canonical history of the cholo culture which is the context of the play and in which Agamenón was a rey or king. Their explanation is sociological: the cholos are gang members drawn from the disaffected and dispossessed members of the community who nonetheless provide protection in a culture that mistrusts the police (67, 3, cf. 79, 1). The vecinas’ creation story (“In the beginning/ Before Mayor Bradley...”) denies divine or mythic status to the cholos and ascribes their origins to racismo and “neglectful mamas.” Though “kicked out of the Chicano tribe,” cholos are nonetheless “[t]he dark side of us” (67, 2–3).

Religion, Rebirth, Revenge The members of the ancient House of Atreus are variously driven by individual Olympian gods, primordial gods of vengeance, and problematic solidarity demands for vengeance. Those in La Casa de Atridas are analogously influenced by competing religious views — Christianity, Aztec mythology, and a vague but insistent cholo code. Notions of rebirth are manipulated in both. The staging of Electricidad is borrowed from Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers, where Agamemnon’s tomb in front of the palace was a focus of his children’s actions, especially of their incantation to his spirit and to the gods of the Underworld to effect revenge for his death (306–478). Electricidad, too, tries to get in touch with the gods at her Papa’s altar by recounting her father’s version of cholo origins, an adaptation of the Aztec cosmogonic myth according to which Coatlicue, here styled “the mujer god of human sacrifices,” not only “made the first cholo” but endowed him with switchblade, baggy pants, lowrider, and boulevard; then dismembered her upstart daughter Coyolxauqui and made the pieces into “the four corners cholo world” and Coyolxauqui’s head into the moon which Electricidad tries to see every night, without success (71, 2–3).7 This version accords the cholo an ancient mythic and divine status denied him in the vecinas’ tale, and so, for Electricidad, at least, gives cholo culture a religious imperative. At his altar Electricidad also communes with her father’s spirit and with those ancient gods with a view to vengeance. She vows, “Papa, I am going

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to avenge your death” (71, 3; cf. 69, 1), and, when the time comes, she supports Orestes’ murder of his mother within with an incantation at the altar outside: “I call on the darkness inside the Four Directions. Find the courage. Find the rage. Find the darkness.... Let the gates of hell open. Now!” (84, 3). Greek tragedy was produced at a festival of the god Dionysus, so the pervasive references and invocations to the gods were a natural element of the genre. The gods in question were common to all Greeks. Though they might be in conflict with each other or their will hard to fathom, their existence was universally accepted. In Alfaro’s play, by aligning herself with the ancient Aztec gods Electricidad has separated herself from the rest of the community, for whom the shared religious belief is Catholicism. For most in the play that belief-system is simply part of the wall paper — Catholic school (68, 2; 78, 1), lighting a candle and praying to the Virgen de Guadalupe (80, 1), calling Father Greg in time of trouble (67, 3). When Ifigenia takes religion seriously, joining a convent (72, 3) and striving for forgiveness and even virtue (73, 1–3), her commitment is met with skepticism (Abuela: “Ai, don’t start that alleluia stuff,” 69, 3) and incredulity (Clemencia: “You’re a bornagain chola? Oh, that’s a good one,” 78, 2). That Ifigenia is “born-again” has multiple resonances. Within the play the vecinas had called her running away “spiritual death for sure” (68, 2), which Abuela articulates another way: “we thought you gave up the vida” (69, 3); Ifigenia had indeed, in the Christian sense, died to the old life of crime and been reborn in a new one of striving for goodness. Though Alfaro describes Ifigenia as “being long-dead in the Greek version,” among its variants the Greek tradition had anticipated Alfaro in an Iphigenia who had been “born again” in the sense of having eluded apparent death, and Alfaro plays on some elements of that story, as well. In Sophocles’ and Euripides’ Electras and Aeschylus’ Oresteia Iphigenia had been sacrificed by Agamemnon for fair winds to take his expedition to Troy (S. El. 530–536, E. El. 1020–1029, Ag. 1415–1418). But Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris found the young woman still alive, serving as a priestess at a remote shrine of Artemis whence she had been wafted after the goddess “spared [her] life at Aulis, leaving a deer to bleed instead” (782–784). Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis portrayed the events leading up to the sacrifice and, in particular, Iphigenia’s famous speech accepting her own death in favor of her father’s project and the glory of the Greek army (1370–1403). In Alfaro’s play Ifigenia is born again to elect a life of religious service with the sisters at Immaculate Conception (73, 3), but, unlike her ancient forebear she rejects the destructive consequences of her father’s royal realm among the cholos.

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For Alfaro’s Ifigenia, if their father did not physically shed her blood on an altar of ambition, he did sacrifice his family to the cholo life, and he himself imprisoned all of them: “Don’t forget what he was. Yes, rey of our barrio, but also a mean-ass cholo... Hermana, he gave us these tattoos. But these tattoos are also scars... Look at what he left us. Our own jails... Oh yeah, you. Mama. Me. All trapped” (73, 1–2). In Ifigenia’s case the jails were literal as well as metaphorical, since she had repeatedly served time (72, 2; 76, 1; cf. 78, 2). Rejecting Electricidad’s demand for help in killing their mother, she says, “I am out of my jail. But I see that you have just entered yours....” She strives, though without success, to get Electricidad to escape with her: “The sisters gave me a gift ... ‘forgiveness.’ You should try it” (73, 3).8 At Ifigenia’s exit, the theme of her rebirth is intimated a final time: after a strained meeting with her mother, she flees “as if she is running for her life” (79, 2–3). In Alfaro’s play it is, rather, Electricidad who is willing to promote her father’s glory at the cost of normalcy, even at the cost of her own life. She refuses to leave Agamenón’s corpse even for eating, bathing, or relief, more like a coyote than a human (66, 2; 69, 2–3; 71, 1; 76, 3).9 She keeps her father’s name alive with her constant yelling, “AGAMENÓN ATRIDAS ... VETERANO ... DE LOS EAST SIDE LOCOS” (71, 3). When Abuela tells her, “Te estas killing yourself,” she replies that her grief and anger might last her lifetime (76, 3–77, 1). In the ancient tradition the gods spoke most clearly to Agamemnon’s son Orestes. Initially absent from the paternal home as his sister(s) dealt with the aftermath of their father’s death,10 in all three Greek tragedians he returned under divine mandate from Apollo to avenge his father’s death and assume his birthright (LB 269–297; S. El. 32–37; E. El. 84–89). Though Apollo’s command was unequivocal, it was not unimpeachable. In Aeschylus, Orestes’ obedience to Apollo earned him persecution by his mother’s Furies (LB 1048–1062 and Eum., passim). In Euripides, Clytemnestra’s divine brothers, the Dioscuri, appeared ex machina to absolve Orestes and Electra of guilt in their mother’s murder but to declare, “As for Phoebus... He knows the truth but his oracles were lies” (1245f., cf. 1296f.). And many have found the ending of Sophocles’ play ambiguous, reflected more in the conditional mood of Orestes’ statement after he has killed his mother, “In the house, all is well, if well Apollo prophesied” (1423f.), than in the seemingly more confident final lines of the play.11 Further, though the Greek Orestes carried out the mandate and fulfilled his responsibility to his father, eager to reclaim his patrimony (LB 299–305, S. El. 69–72, E. El. 599), in all three he questioned the necessity of murdering his mother (cf. LB 899, S. El. 1423–1424). The reluctance

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was strongest in Euripides’ fearful Orestes who lurked near the border to facilitate ready escape at a sign of danger (94–97) and inquired nervously about the possibility of support for his cause (601, 631–633). Though ultimately he acquitted himself well in taking revenge on his mother’s paramour Aegisthus (774–858), he was highly resistant to killing his mother and was only driven to it in the end by his sister Electra’s insistence (esp. 962–984).12 In Electricidad Orestes experiences similar exile and a similar expectation that he will reclaim his birthright, but with differences. His mandates come through human sources, not divine, but are ascribed to a cholo code administered as though it were religious dogma; he is ambivalent at best about his destined role in the cholo world; and he does not know until the last minute that loyalty to his father will mean killing his mother, a requirement that nearly paralyzes him. This Orestes is most like that of Euripides.13 Sent to Las Vegas by his father for his safety, Orestes is being hardened up by his godfather Nino to be a worthy successor to Agamenón and “rey of the East Side Locos” (70, 3; 72, 1; 76, 3).14 But when Nino reports forestalling a hit man sent to kill Orestes, the young man confesses that he doesn’t have the “cholo instinct” and despairs of being ready to replace his father when the time comes. Nino rejects any such doubts: “You have to be [ready] ... it’s been like this since the beginning of cholo time. I didn’t make the rules. I just follow them” (76, 2–3). When Orestes finally does return home, Electricidad takes over the instruction. She devastates her brother with the shocking information that his mother had put out the hit on him and that she had killed their father (83, 1)— Orestes had not even known his father was dead — so that he must kill his mother in turn and take the throne of La Casa de Atridas. Electricidad redefines the family relationships and multiplies the values to which Orestes must conform: “She isn’t your mother anymore. She is the murderer of your father.... Where is your loyalty? ... reclaim your father’s legacy.... It is your duty ... don’t disgrace your father!” Orestes isn’t interested in his “father’s legacy” or “kingdom”; he would prefer simply to leave (84, 1–2). Ironically, in her trump card Electricidad reinterprets Ifigenia’s Christian experience in light of the gang imperative and a religious definition of cholohood: “You have been born again, Orestes. You were dead once and now you have come back.... You’re a cholo. Call on the god of human sacrifices, Coatlicue.... Do it.” (84, 3) Ifigenia’s religious rebirth had provided escape from the cholo world, but Electricidad’s words to Orestes have the opposite effect. The notion of Orestes’ “rebirth” also resonates with the Greek tradition. In Sophocles’ Electra Orestes arranged for an elaborate false tale of his own death to lull Clytemnestra into security as her unrecognized son

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returned; when Orestes revealed his identity to his grieving sister Electra, she rejoiced that he was “restored to life again” (1229, cf. 1313–1315), returned in the nick of time to perform the vengeance that she had finally determined to undertake herself, thinking him dead (952–958, 1315–1321). Hence, in Sophocles Orestes used the story of his death to control the circumstances of vengeance and, in the end, Electra only abetted her brother’s deed: when Clytemnestra’s cry, “Oh! I am struck!” was heard from within the house, Electra shouted, “If you have strength — again!” (1415).15 Alfaro manipulates the “nick of time” technique differently. In another irony, Electricidad herself had ostensibly just been “reborn” immediately prior to Orestes’ return. Finally capitulating after her mother incinerated Agamenon’s corpse, she had submitted to a ritual cleansing, agreed to abandon her vigil at her father’s altar, and been welcomed “back to the living” by her grandmother (82, 2–3). She was even on the point of yielding to Ifigenia’s Christian values and was “going to walk away..., going to forgive [Clemencia]” (83, 2), when her brother’s surprising restoration abruptly revives the old instinct for revenge. It must be Orestes, reborn as a cholo and calling on the god of human sacrifices, who fulfills it (84, 3). Thus, in Alfaro’s play it is Electricidad who controls the narrative of Orestes’ rebirth and its implications. From Sophocles Alfaro borrows the staging of Electricidad screaming from the yard, “Orestes! DO IT!” as, within, Orestes hesitates in the face of Clemencia’s pleas for mercy (85, 2). But the spirit is that of Euripides’ Electra goading a much more reluctant Orestes. Alfaro’s stage directions have Orestes emerge from the house “covered in blood, ... laughing. He has gone mad” (85, 2), very much as Aeschylus’ Orestes lost control of his wits when his mothers’ Furies materialized to avenge her (LB 1022–1025, 1048–1062). However, while Aeschylus portrayed and Euripides anticipated Orestes’ ultimate acquittal in a new system of justice (Eum. 734–753, E. El. 1258–1269), the madness of Alfaro’s Orestes is not personified in Furies who will eventually metamorphose into kindlydisposed Eumenides. The gentle nature mentioned throughout the play — by Electricidad (71, 1), Clemencia (76, 1; 85, 1), and Orestes himself (76, 2; 83, 2)— has been permanently traumatized by the deed to which Electricidad’s interpretation of Aztec religion and the cholo imperative drove him. The doubtful morality of Apollo’s command to the ancient Orestes has its resonance here: the vecinas comment, ironically, “Electricidad got what she wanted. The gods answered her prayers” (85, 3), but it was not in the way she envisioned, since Orestes himself has become the “human sacrifice.”

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The Mother The mother-figure in Electricidad is, by his own admission, a strong focus of Alfaro’s attention: he calls her an “interesting evil person.” Alfaro problematizes the maternal instincts of this “matriarch,” especially in noting that this “mother is thinking that the son can be sacrificed” ( Johnson 2006: 65). The complexity of Clemencia’s character, and even her most extravagant ambitions, resonate with the wide range of representations of Clytemnestra in the ancient tragedies. Euripides gives an early cause of Clytemnestra’s hostility toward her husband in Iphigenia in Aulis: Clytemnestra had been forced by her father to marry Agamemnon against her will after he had murdered her first husband Tantalus and her child by him; despite this, she had reconciled herself to her husband, borne him children, and earned the reputation of a good wife (1148–1164). Clemencia was similarly forced into marriage with Agamenón. She tells Electricidad: “you know how I met your sweet papa? On the boulevard. I was thirteen... I flirted... I was an innocent. But he took my girlhood from me. In the back of a car... My father ... called me a tramp ... and he sold me to him. Because he thought I was dirty” (73, 3). Clemencia also did her duty as a wife, making dinner, pouring drinks and giving parties, making love and raising children (81, 3). Despite this, she was subject to domestic abuse: “[Agamenón] beat me.... It was the only way he could control us” (75, 2). In the ancient tradition Agamemnon did not subject Clytemnestra to quotidian violence, but, much more egregiously, repaid her devotion and assaulted her motherhood by sacrificing their daughter Iphigenia for favorable winds for his expedition to Troy. Clytemnestra’s mother-love for this daughter was her express motive for murdering her husband in all three ancient versions of the Electra story (Ag. 1414–1418, 1431–1433; S. El. 526–548; E. El. 1018–1029, cf. IA 1180–1183, 1455), but her maternal instincts were muddied with respect to her other children by her alliance with and dependence on her lover Aegisthus. In Sophocles Clytemnestra and Aegisthus planned to confine Electra in a cave to escape her constant recriminations (El. 379–383), though her mother retained hope of better relations (556–558). In Euripides Clytemnestra had married Electra off to a peasant so that she could not produce a son of sufficient status to take vengeance on herself and her lover (El. 19–53, 60–61, 246–253), yet she cared enough for her daughter to assist at a supposed post-childbirth sacrifice (656–658, 1132–1134). In Aeschylus Clytemnestra herself had sent Orestes into exile (Ag. 877–886; LB 913), but met the news of his death with deeply mixed emotions (LB 691–699). Nonetheless, when confronted with an avenging

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Orestes in Libation Bearers, Clytemnestra manipulated the notion of motherhood from a raw instinct of self-preservation, baring the breast with which she had nursed her son (896–898) but calling for “an ax to kill a man” (888–889, cf. S. El. 1410–1411, E. El. 1165). Clemencia’s maternal instincts are even less in evidence. She not only lacks the grievance of a daughter slaughtered to justify her murder of Agamenón, in fact she didn’t even know Ifigenia had been gone for a year: “Really? I thought you were living in the garage” (78, 2). Though she knows Agamenón sent Orestes away for his safety, she says she doesn’t know where: “Catholic school, I guess” (78, 1). Indeed, she may actually have put out a hit on her son, as she is universally believed to have done.16 Though Clemencia does take credit for keeping the family housed, clothed, and fed when Agamenón “got lost in some City Terrace thighs” (75, 2), by her own admission, she never wanted to be a mother in the first place. She tells Electricidad at one point, “They took being a girl from me and they gave me ‘mother.’ I didn’t ask for it” (76, 1; cf. 75, 3). Less wonder, then, that when confronted by Orestes, Clemencia borrows Clytemnestra’s technique in a desperate attempt to save her life; she says, “You are still mi hijo, right? ... You missed tu mama,” at the same time grabbing a switchblade. (85, 1–2). Clytemnestra had connived with Aegisthus in the murder of her husband and had put him on the throne that rightfully belonged to her son (e.g., LB 299–305, S. El. 266–276, E. El. 8–13). Aeschylus’ Clytemnestra, the lady “with male strength of heart” (Ag. 10–11) had gotten used to the power she held in her own person during her husband’s absence at Troy and declared she would not yield it except to superior force (Ag. 258–260, 1421–1425, 1672–1673). Alfaro concentrates on the theme of ambition and dispenses with the paramour. Though the vecinas say that one of Clemencia’s motives for murdering Agamenón was that “She wants to be single again” (68, 3), Clemencia does not have a lover and expresses no interest in one. This difference between herself and Clytemnestra reflects Clemencia’s extreme feminism: she does not wish to be beholden to or hampered by a man.17 What she does want the chorus of vecinas pinpointed in their introduction: “Something no woman in this barrio can get./ Power/ .../ [to] Be an entrepreneur” (68, 1). Clemencia confirms this repeatedly. She explains the beatings she got from Agamenón in this context: “He made us think that we couldn’t grow and change and make something better than what we are. He ... made me scared of the world.... Like the petty thief that he was, he took our dreams” (75, 2). The one real overture Clemencia makes to Electricidad is to offer her partnership in a business: “Imagine us working together.... These hombres wouldn’t know how to deal with the both of us” (75, 3; cf. 76, 1).18 Later, she exceeds the ascent of Aeschylus’ Clytemnes-

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tra to the power of her late husband with visions of an even larger empire. After cremating the corpse of Agamenón, whose power was limited to the East Side, she tells Abuela, “I am going to do something that none of you ever did.... I am going to bring the Four Directions together and we are going to make it right. I am going to run La Casa de Atridas. Oh yes, I am.... And you know why? Because I am the mother ... THE MOTHER!!” (82, 1) This speech epitomizes Alfaro’s question, “Does the matriarchy become a patriarchy in order to survive?” ( Johnson 2006: 64).

The Ancestral Curse Perhaps the most characteristic aspect of the “Chicano take” in Alfaro’s play derives from the importance in Chicano culture of the family. Already in ancient times Aristotle wrote that the most affecting tragedies take place in families (Poetics 1453b19–23), but the tragic nature of family breakdown is magnified in the Chicano environment.19 What the vecinas long for in their nostalgia for a simpler time is “la familia” (74, 1). For all the anticipated threats from gang members, the corrosion of cholo life is perpetrated within La Casa de Atridas. Both in the ancient tragedies and in Alfaro’s the family dysfunction is multi-generational. As Alfaro observes to Cassandra Johnson, “Violence begets violence begets violence” (2006: 65, 1). In Aeschylus the murder of Agamemnon fulfilled Thyestes’ curse on the House of Atreus (A. Ag. 1577–1603), but a tradition of murder and child-killing could be traced back two more generations.20 In Electricidad, partly through the introduction of the grandmother Abuela and the godfather Nino, forced participation in the cholo life can also be traced over time. Introducing the notion of multi-generational violence, Alfaro says, “The veteranos are really important in this culture. They call the gang wars; the young people are just the soldiers” (64, 2–65, 1). Within Alfaro’s play the older generation embodies the power of an inescapable curse on the younger. We have seen that Nino inculcated the “cholo rules” into Orestes in a manner that brooked no opposition (cf. 76, 2–3). And, when Electricidad plaintively imagines leaving the way of the chola, Abuela discourages her in no uncertain terms: “If only. You can’t... No, you have the soul of an old cholo. This is your life. Learn to live with it” (77, 2). Alfaro also portrays domestic violence and child-neglect as multi-generational. Clemencia’s father abused his own wife: when Agamenón, after taking Clemencia’s virginity, comes to her father to claim her, Clemencia’s mother “hid in a back room to save herself a black eye” (75, 3). Agamenón,

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in turn, beat Clemencia, as we have seen (68, 1; 75, 2). Abandoned to her fate by her mother, Clemencia finds no support from her mother-in-law, either. On the contrary, Abuela sneers that her son “had settled for so little” (77, 2) and tells Ifigenia she “hates that puta” (70, 1). Regarded as an “outsider” by Abuela (70, 1), as well as by her neighbors (68, 1) and Electricidad herself (71, 1), Clemencia is isolated in her household and community.21 As Clemencia’s mother had failed to save her daughter from forcible marriage, if not slavery,22 to Agamenón, Clemencia in turn failed to save her children from the cholo life Agamenón imposed on them. Ifigenia knows whereof she speaks when she remembers her father as a “mean-ass cholo” who “gave them tattoos” that were also scars (73, 1): before she found religion, Ifigenia was “the meanest of them all” (68, 2), a “hard chola” who was in and out of jail (72, 2; 78, 2). When fighting for her life Clemencia tells Orestes that Agamenón had “wanted to beat the cholo” into him and — too late and not entirely credibly — she claims that she had tried to save him from that “vida that surely would have killed [him]” (85, 1). To Electricidad Clemencia admits, “If I did anything wrong, it was that I let him give you too much of his filosofia. I let him try to shape you to his hardness. I let him show you the destructive ways” (75, 1). Just how destructive we learn when Electricidad reminds Orestes of a time when Agamenón brought home a member of a rival gang and forced Electricidad and Orestes, still children, to kick him until he cried, to give them the “animal instinct” (84, 3). In this Agamenón was doubtless only perpetuating the lessons of his own upbringing, since Abuela, his mother, had been “jumped into” a gang at the tender age of nine and “used to shoplift from [her] baby carriage” (77, 3). With some justice, perhaps, but with little self-awareness, Clemencia tells her mother-in-law that in killing Agamenón she was “cleaning up the mess” Abuela had made in letting him “become such a monster,” and the mess Abuela’s mother had made before her (81, 3).23 Though the men in these families warrant a substantial share of the blame, in the circumstances it is somewhat ironic that Clemencia wonders aloud to Ifigenia why “they always blame the mother” (78, 3). Among those who do are the vecinas who attribute the existence of cholos in part to “neglectful mamas” (67, 3). We have seen that Clemencia’s relationships with her children are at best conflicted. Relationships among the siblings are less than ideal, as well. Ifigenia says that she and Electricidad “never acted like we were sisters” and Electricidad too readily suspects Ifigenia of complicity in their father’s murder (69, 3). Electricidad, indeed, measures family loyalty in light of her own view of cholo “rules”: she condemns Ifigenia for leaving her “without backup” when Agamenón was killed (73, 2), and rides roughshod over Orestes’ feelings (84, 1–3).24

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How tragically ironic, then, that at the play’s end, the hope of all the major players is for family. In the midst of her incantation driving Orestes to kill Clemencia Electricidad exults, “Finally, a chance for la familia, to be together again. Without her” (84, 3). Clemencia greets Orestes, “...how good that you came home. Now, we can be a family ... you and I, y Electricidad, if she wants. We can be a family” (85, 1). And the vecinas appear to rejoice, “Peace at last/ Now we can go back to our lives/ .../ The family/ .../ Que bueno” (85, 3). For the setting of his “Chicano take,” Luis Alfaro draws on the material circumstances of modern life: his pervasive use of “Spanglish” and references to such phenomena as government cheese (69, 3), Food4Less (73, 1), and “anytime minutes” (76, 1) help make his play darkly comic. But, unfortunately, the human relationships in his play remain as conflicted and challenging as they were in antiquity, so that Electricidad is still very much the “tragedy of Electra.” Closing the door on La Casa de Atridas, the chorus of vecinas ask and answer the perennial question: “What is to be done?/ What can be done?/ We never learn” (85, 3). SANTA CLARA UNIVERSITY

Notes Acknowledgement. The author wishes to thank the anonymous referees for their astute and helpful comments on an earlier draft of this essay. 1. References to ancient plays are by abbreviated title and line number(s) from the Grene and Lattimore Complete Greek Tragedies series. For convenience all three Electra plays are cited from Greek Tragedies, Volume 2 (1960), as is Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris. Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers is abbreviated LB; Sophocles’ Electra, S. El.; Euripides’ Electra, E. El. Other references to the Oresteia are cited from Aeschylus I: Agamemnon as Ag., Eumenides as Eum. References to other plays are to the appropriate volume of the playwright’s work. 2. References to Electricidad are to page and column number in Alfaro 2006; e.g., “69, 3” indicates page 69, column 3. 3. Melinda Powers (2005: 742) characterizes the vecinas as “like a Greek chorus without the music and dance.” Still, the rhythmic speech of the chorus and their recurrent refrain “Apoco. No me digas. Ai...” approximate a musical element. The accompanying “rhythmic sweeping” (cf. 67, 1) is even a kind of dance. Moreover, each of the play’s 29 scenes is titled after, and introduced by an excerpt from, a popular song. Some notable examples: Scene 8, in which Ifigenia reports joining a religious order, is entitled “Earth Angel” (72, 1); Scene 11, the bristly meeting between Clemencia and Electricidad, “We Are Family” (75, 1); and Scene 23, the reunion of Orestes and Electricidad, “Reunited and It Feels So Good” (82, 3). 4. Killed in an inebriated sleep Alfaro’s Agamenón was as vulnerable as Aeschy-

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lus’ Agamemnon in the bath (Ag. 1126–1128). More impressively than Clytemnestra with encumbering robes and weapon (Ag. 1381–1386), Clemencia used her bare hands (67, 3). Sophocles’ Clytemnestra held a monthly festival commemorating the day she murdered her husband (278–281); Electricidad says Clemencia celebrated the very night of the funeral, serving “tamales and wine coolers” (71, 2). 5. Agamemnon’s corpse was mutilated in Libation Bearers (439–443) and Sophocles’ Electra (445), as well. In antiquity the dead man’s arms were cut off to prevent his ghost from exacting vengeance. In Electricidad Agamenón’s eyes and tongue have been removed (66, 2). Electricidad first vaguely ascribes the mutilation to Clemencia’s fear of the gods (75, 2); later she hints at some fear of vengeance: “If she took his eyes and his tongue, she will need his heart to keep him in silencio forever” (77, 3). She tells Orestes that Clemencia burned the corpse “so that [Agamenón] could not visit us in the after-vida” (83, 2). 6. In addition to its role as the voice of the community, the Greek dramatic chorus is characterized as a group that might credibly interact with the individual characters. When the protagonist is a woman the chorus is typically also characterized as women, with whom the protagonist might converse without scandal; thus, the chorus in the Electra-plays of Sophocles and Euripides represent neighbors of Electra who commiserate with her plight but strive to moderate her excessive grief (S. El. 130–143, E. El. 175–197). Though the vecinas of Electricidad are not merely the protagonist’s neighbors but claim “practically to have raised her,” Electricidad will not even talk to them (68, 1; cf. 69, 2). 7. Since Chicano mythico-cultural history is ignored, if not denied, in American schools, it is less wonder that Agamenón’s version is distorted than that he has any familiarity with the myth at all. Cf. Huerta 2000:5–20. In the traditional myth the moon goddess, Coyolxauqui, whom Electricidad tries to see — with whom she identifies?— also challenged her mother, with less success (cf. Huerta 41). 8. Ironically, her own conversion to Christianity has given Ifigenia an insight into the “religious loyalty” Electricidad has toward “cholo-hood and its ways” (73, 1). 9. Euripides’ Electra also cultivated dirt and squalor in advertisement of her grief and anger (El. 184ff., 304–305). 10. In Sophocles (El. 11–14) and Euripides (El. 16–18) he was rescued by an old family retainer, perhaps the source of the godfather Nino in Alfaro (66, 2). In Aeschylus (Ag. 877–886) Clytemnestra alleged to Agamemnon that she had sent him away for his safety. In Alfaro, on the contrary, it is Agamenón who sends Orestes away for safety (74, 3; 78, 1)— perhaps from his mother. 11. Typical is David Grene’s remark in the introduction to his translation of the play: “There are no Furies; there is no flight of Orestes ... critics are left to come to most various conclusions, including the conclusion that there is no conclusion” (Grene and Lattimore 1960:46–47). 12. Abuela advises Electricidad, “Even cholos have standards. No one kills the mother” (77, 2); compare also the Furies in Aeschylus’ Eumenides, passim, esp. 149–154, 198–212. 13. In his interview with Cassandra Johnson Alfaro notes that his “Orestes is not a warrior” (2006: 65).

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14. In a modern remake of the lion imagery in Aeschylus (esp. in the “lion cub ode,” Ag. 716–736, but also at Ag. 826ff., cf. 1223–1224, 1259, and LB 937–938), Nino refers to Orestes as “the little lion king” (74, 3). 15. In antiquity, revenge was the responsibility of men, not of women (cf. the chorus to Aegisthus in Ag. 1643–1645; Chrysothemis’ refusal to assist Electra in revenge, S. El. 994–1014). Even Sophocles’ Electra did not consider exacting the revenge until she believed that, with Orestes dead, she had no other option. In Alfaro’s play, Electricidad repeatedly threatened to kill her mother (71, 3; 73, 3; 79, 3; 77, 2; 82, 1); but when Orestes suggests that his sister should kill Clemencia since she’s “the one that’s all eager to get rid of her,” Electricidad responds, “It isn’t our way” (84, 2). 16. The evidence on this point is contradictory. Alfaro says, “[Clemencia] tells everyone that she put a hit out on him” ( Johnson 65); there is no evidence in the play of Clemencia as the source, but the vecinas (68, 2), Abuela (69, 3), and Electricidad (73, 1–2; cf. 71, 1, 3) all believe that she put out the hit. Ifigenia does not initially believe that Clemencia would kill her son (73, 1), but, according to a stage direction, she does not believe that her mother doesn’t know where he is, either (78, 1). Nino does kill a hit man in Las Vegas but is unable to extract the identity of the one who sent him (76, 2). Electricidad’s fanciful belief that Orestes’ body was thrown into a volcano (73, 2; presumably the one at the Mirage) undermines the credibility of the story of the hit. If Clemencia did indeed order the hit, then both the ancient Agamemnon’s child-murder (of Iphigenia) and Clytemnestra’s husband-murder coalesce in Clemencia. The question arises, does such evil, however “interesting,” undermine any tragic quality? 17. Clemencia instructs Electricidad, “hombres are ruthless..., they want one thing.... But when we want a cut. A place in their world. Our fair share. Well ... vas a ver” (75, 2). 18. Alfaro says that, to him, “Clemencia is feminism,” so when Electricidad “kills her mother, in some way she kills off progress” ( Johnson 2006: 64). 19. Jorge Huerta (2000:10) notes that all the plays he discusses in Chicano Drama “are about families, the vast majority of which would be termed dysfunctional ... these writers are all conscious of the fact that happy families do not make good drama.” 20. The primordial ancestor Tantalus had served his son Pelops to the gods at a banquet; Pelops, in turn, won his bride by a double murder (Graves 1955:25, 31–34). In Electricidad Alfaro has shifted the principal emphasis to generations of women ( Johnson 2006:64–65). Powers also makes this point (2005:742). 21. The ancient Greek wife was also regarded as an outsider, since she was not related to her husband’s family by blood. A locus classicus is E. Alcestis 532–33, where Heracles asks his host whether the woman recently deceased in the household was an “outsider” (othneios) or “kindred” (syngenes) and Admetus answers, of his wife, an “outsider.” 22. Clemencia says her father “sold me to him” (75, 3). 23. Aeschylus’ Clytemnestra, with equal futility, claims to have “swept from these halls the murder, the sin, and the fury” (Ag. 1575–1576). 24. We have seen that Electricidad’s goading of Orestes derives from Euripi-

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des; like Electricidad, too, Sophocles’ Electra had demanded that her sister Chrysothemis choose between her mother and her father (341–368).

References Cited Alfaro, Luis. “Electricidad. A Chicano take on Sophocles’ Electra.” First Draft 08/26/02. Typescript. _____. “Electricidad. A Chicano Take on the Tragedy of Electra.” American Theatre 23.2 (February 2006): 63, 66–85. Aristotle. The Poetics, trans. Ingram Bywater. In Aristotle. The Rhetoric and The Poetics of Aristotle, edited by Friedrich Solmsen, 219–266. New York: The Modern Library, 1954. Graves, Robert. The Greek Myths. Volume 2. Baltimore, MD: Penguin Books, 1955. Grene, David, and Richmond Lattimore, eds. The Complete Greek Tragedies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Greek Tragedies. Volume 2 (1960), inc. Aeschylus. The Libation Bearers, trans. Richmond Lattimore, pp. 1–43 (LB); Sophocles. Electra, trans. David Grene, pp. 45–109 (S. El.); Euripides. Electra, trans. Emily Vermeule, pp. 181–242 (E. El.); Euripides. Iphigenia in Tauris, trans. Witter Bynner, pp. 111–179. Aeschylus I. Oresteia (1953), trans. Richmond Lattimore, inc. Agamemnon (Ag.), pp. 37–100; Eumenides (Eum.), pp. 145–185. Euripides I (1955), inc. Alcestis, trans. Richmond Lattimore, pp. 1–58. Euripides IV (1958), inc. Iphigenia in Aulis, trans. Charles Walker, pp. 209–300. Huerta, Jorge. Chicano Drama. Performance, Society, and Myth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Johnson, Cassandra. “Electric Youth. An Interview with the Playwright.” American Theatre 23.2 (February 2006): 64–65. Powers, Melinda. Review of Electricidad. By Luis Alfaro. Directed by Lisa Peterson. Mark Taper Forum, Los Angeles, 6 April 2005. Theatre Journal 57.4 (2005): 742–744.

10 Actresses and the Making of the Modern Hamlet Amy Muse Abstract Sometime between 1770 and 1817, Hamlet became “modern”; that is, he became a psychological figure who transcended the play and reflected the present era, as seen in Hazlitt’s famous pronouncement, “It is we who are Hamlet.” In the process, he was rendered androgynous, a result of his having been abstracted from the play and from his own body as interpretations increasingly focused on his seemingly universal consciousness rather than on the distinctly male revenger plot. The first female Hamlets (Sarah Siddons and Jane Powell) have not yet been fully recognized for their contributions to the making of this modern view of Hamlet. Siddons’ interpretation reinforced the notion of a universal Hamlet as an aesthetic artifact and an exemplary literary character. Powell’s performances initiated the notion of a passionate Hamlet fighting for authenticity in the midst of deceit. They helped transform Hamlet from a Renaissance revenger hero to figure of modern mankind.

Was Hamlet a man or a woman? This question, Catherine Belsey tells us, preoccupied nineteenth- and early twentieth-century critics and artists. The question only occurred to them as one worth asking, I argue, because of late eighteenth-century character criticism and the performances of the first female Hamlets, Sarah Siddons and Jane Powell. In 1775, Siddons, at that time not the star of her generation but just another young actress seeking to make her mark, adopted this role as she played the provincial circuit; it was one of the roles that got her noticed by David Garrick, who issued an invitation to join his company at Drury Lane later that year. In 1796, Powell, a colleague and occasional competitor of Siddons, made her name as the first female Hamlet in London; this role is what keeps her in the theatre history annals to date and distinguishes her from all the other now little-known actresses of the era. Since that time, women “have often aspired to be Hamlet, rather than 137

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Gertrude or Ophelia,” Marjorie Garber observes in Shakespeare After All, “not because Hamlet is a woman, but because ‘mankind’ is Hamlet” (2004:494). Siddons’ and Powell’s performances, I want to suggest, participated in the gradual cultural shifting in the way the character of Hamlet has been interpreted: away from Renaissance revenger to “the figure of consciousness, interiority, and thought” (Garber 2004:494), the exquisitely sensitive and divided figure of modern mankind. When, in the late eighteenth century, the interpretive arts of acting and literary criticism (in conjunction with the development of the novel and autobiography) became particularly interested in exploring ways to externalize or make manifest the interior life of characters, to reveal subjectivity visually and verbally, Hamlet became a favorite text to interpret both on the stage and on the page because it was reinterpreted as a play about consciousness, the unfolding of a mind to an audience through soliloquies and often paradoxical (in)action. Hamlet himself seemed to “possess a personalized interiority,” which made him become one of the most fascinating, and seemingly most realistically human characters (de Grazia 1989:432). This transformation in Hamlet was not sudden but instead progressively created over the course of about half a century through the contributions of actors (most notably Garrick’s first tenderly sensitive — though not hesitating — Hamlet, and later John Philip Kemble’s brooding and Edmund Kean’s tempestuous princes); of literary critics who launched the new “character criticism” and reconstructed Hamlet as a “man of feeling” (Henry Mackenzie noting his “extreme sensibility of mind,” William Richardson reading him as “susceptible of every moral impression,” and Coleridge identifying him as “a man living in meditation”); and of novelists (Goethe in Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship in particular, which re-sees Hamlet as too delicate for this world). Siddons joined this interpretive conversation around 1775, and Powell in 1796; by 1817, Hamlet had emerged as “a reflection of a modern consciousness” (Foakes 1993:19) as seen in Hazlitt’s famous words, “it is we who are Hamlet.” Over the course of these years he had also been rendered androgynous, a result of having been abstracted from the play and from his own body as interpretations increasingly focused on his seemingly universal consciousness rather than on the distinctly male revenger plot. This transformation of Hamlet (paralleling that of his creator) has been well-narrated in studies such as Margreta de Grazia’s Shakespeare Verbatim, Michael Dobson’s The Making of the National Poet, and Jonathan Bate’s Shakespearean Constitutions as well as Gary Taylor’s Reinventing Shakespeare and Anthony Dawson’s performance history of Hamlet. The narratives tend largely to agree with one another, and the same names appear in each; among actors, Garrick and Kean in particular have been credited for their contri-

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butions to the making of the modern interpretation of Hamlet. Dawson points up the larger significance of actors’ work when he argues that Hamlet performance is “an important element of cultural history — not just a passive record, but part of a formative process” that has contributed to “the making of the modern self, that sense of an inner space, protected from the socio-political realm, where the individual finds fulfillment” (1995:8). Sarah Siddons’ and Jane Powell’s Hamlet performances, however, have been more or less passively recorded as having taken place, and having inspired later female Hamlets, but have not yet been fully recognized as participating in the formative process between 1770 and 1817 of creating the modern Hamlet. Within five years of Mackenzie’s and Richardson’s critical works and Garrick’s revision of Hamlet, Sarah Siddons becomes the first female Hamlet. (Actually, the first famous one because there are at least two other actresses who preceded her — Fanny Furnival who played Hamlet at Smock Alley Theatre in Dublin on 28 April 1741, and Charlotte Charke who notes in passing in her autobiography (published 1755) that she played Hamlet in the English provinces; however, it is Siddons who first gained notice for playing the role.)1 Her Hamlet performances began when she was just a young strolling player, and likely contributed to her invitation to come to London, for some of the first correspondence about Siddons as an actress concerns her Hamlet. In the summer of 1775 Garrick wrote to his friend Henry Bate, asking him to scout around for a Mrs. Siddons who was playing the provincial circuit and to report whether she would be suitable for Drury Lane. Bate saw Siddons play Rosalind in Cheltenham and in his response to Garrick on 12 August 1775 concludes that she will “most certainly be of great use” because she plays a “great number of characters” and furthermore “as you have been informed,” he writes, she is “a very good breeches figure.” He goes on to tease Garrick about possible competition when he writes, “nay beware yourself, Great Little Man, for she plays Hamlet to the satisfaction of the Worcestershire Critics.” Her London debut was a disaster, however, and the next year, determined to “shake off this despondency,” she joined up with Tate Wilkinson’s popular Yorkshire circuit (qtd. in Highfill 1973:14:5). It is in these years — between 1776 and 1782 — that she “added the part of Hamlet to her standard repertoire” and played him to great success in the various towns on the circuit (Manvell 1971:47). The role, her official biographer Thomas Campbell wrote later (in 1828), launched her as “the leader of theatrical fashion” (44). Although Henry Bate ventured the opinion that Siddons’ “playing this great part in strolling days was most likely only a girlish freak” (qtd. in

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Highfill 1973:14:26), it could also be interpreted as a deliberate move to associate herself with this character, who was becoming more significant as a Shakespearean character than he had been since his creation in 1600.2 She never played Hamlet in London.3 Years later, in July of 1802, she again took on the role for a special event in Dublin. This situation was quite different from her earlier performances. Now Siddons was the star of her generation. She was also 47 years old, physically much heavier than she had been in her twenties (having borne five children since then), and personally distraught, as she was nearly estranged from her husband and rumors had been circulating that she was having an affair with fencing master Philemon Galindo, who played Laertes in this production. Nonetheless, spectators flocked to this once-in-a-lifetime performance, a highlight of the Dublin season.4 An anonymous Dublin playgoer whose diary has been preserved records that Siddons had become “rather too fat” and that “her voice from long continued exertion has acquired too masculine a tone” but that “the House groaned under the weight of spectators and on the 1st appearance of Hamlet, the applauses were excessive — in this 1st scene she seemed oppressed with the novelty of her appearance.” As a result the diarist “expected a very indifferent performance of the character,” but Siddons ... soon recovered herself and the audience was rapt in admiration of her excellence; her superiority even to her brother was first discernible where the secret of the Ghost’s appearance is disclosed to Hamlet.... The Fencing scene in the last Act was capital; Galindo who is a master of the art, was put into the character of Laertes purposely for an Exhibition and Mrs. S. had practiced under him so successfully that she astonished the cognoscenti of the audience [qtd. in Highfill 14:26].

He found Siddons’ costume distracting, however, and noted that “notwithstanding the very fine acting of the character, the effect was considerably injured by the awkwardness of the dress and the feminine gait, which was sometimes ludicrous — if Mrs. S[iddons] could correct these, she would be an unrivalled Hamlet.” The Dublin spectator’s reaction reveals that Siddons’ acting and understanding of Hamlet made for a “very fine” and occasionally even “superior” portrayal, but that the “awkwardness” of Siddons’ costume “injures” the effect of her Hamlet, perhaps because it makes Siddons look as if she is trying to hide beneath it. The main piece of the costume was the textually-prescribed “inky cloak,” described in the diary as “a kind of black scarf which was very nearly the equivalent of a petticoat” (qtd. in Highfill 1973:14:26). In Mary Hamilton’s sketch, “Mrs. Siddons’ Dress as Hamlet, Act Ist Scene

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II” (Figure 1), Siddons’ Hamlet takes a tall and proud stance, arms folded across the chest, looking noble and defiant. The gender effect of the costume is indeterminate, androgynously militaristic yet feminine, combining classically-draped fabric, ru·es, fringes, and feathers with bold colors, the helmet-like hat, and sword. While the costume threatens to ruin this spectator’s suspension of disbelief in Siddons’ Hamlet, her sartorial decision helps her project the presumed universality of the modern Hamlet in two significant ways. First, her Hamlet presents an androgynous appearance; masking the contours of her body may be in part an attempt to erase the body from the spectators’ gaze and render Hamlet purely a mind (as he tends to become in the literary criticism). Second, because she has not costumed him in the fashions of the moment, her Hamlet has an ageless or “classic” quality. Since 1782 Siddons had become known for her fondness for wearing classical drapery; it flattered her large body, but, even more, it made her appear more like a timeless figure of art than a temporal player who would be out of fashion in a decade.5 In other words, this costume fits her career-long self-representation as a classic artifact. Because Siddons was the pioneer, and played the role almost entirely before she became famous, accounts of her Hamlet are nearly all retrospective, which means seen in the light of what and who she became: the tragic muse. In its afterlife, then, Siddons’ Hamlet becomes the stuff of legend. In Ann Radcliffe’s essay entitled “On the Supernatural in Poetry,” which appeared in The New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal in 1826 (after Figure 1. Mrs. Siddons’ Dress as Hamlet. Act I, Siddons had retired from the Scene II. Watercolor sketch by Mary Hamilton, stage, but while she was still 1802. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

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alive), there is a dialogue between two travelers through Warwickshire, Shakespeare’s home county, who are discussing the power of dramatic illusion and “the fascination of Mrs. Siddons’ influence” in the character of Lady Macbeth. They then suppose that Siddons ... would be the finest Hamlet that ever appeared, excelling even her own brother in that character; she would more fully preserve the tender and refined melancholy, the deep sensibility, which are the peculiar charm of Hamlet, and which appear not only in the ardour, but in the occasional irresolution and weakness of his character — the secret spring that reconciles all his inconsistencies. A sensibility so profound can with difficulty be justly imagined, and therefore can very rarely be assumed [1995: 334].

Their description not only reflects the newly “modern” view of Hamlet, but Siddons’ contribution to having created this role. Siddons reinforced the notion of a universal Hamlet who is less a distinctly male person than an idea, an exemplary literary character. The year 1802 might be seen as a key year in the Hamlet transformation conversation, if only for a coincidence of portraits of two female Hamlets, each representing a different era and style of Hamlet interpretation. In the same year that Mary Hamilton sketches Siddons’ Hamlet costume in Dublin, Jane Powell is painted as Hamlet at Drury Lane in London. Powell never gained the superstar status that Siddons enjoyed, but from all accounts she was the first actress to play Hamlet in London, and by the time of her retirement from the stage she had become better known for Hamlet than Siddons was. In contrast to Siddons, she played the role not just for benefits and other special events but regularly throughout her career. Like Siddons, Powell was known for “heavy roles,” tragic women of substance, and also like her, she didn’t play breeches parts or travesty roles often; she chose such roles carefully, indicating that playing the man was a calculated decision, based on her interest in the character and play, rather than a mere exhibition of skill or desire for notoriety. The first performance of Hamlet for which eyewitness evidence has been found is her benefit at Drury Lane on 12 May 1796, when she was about 35 years old.6 It is a testament to Powell’s fame with the role that there exists this very rare representation of her as Hamlet, a small watercolor sketch attributed to George Henry Harlow (Figure 2). It shows Powell with Mrs. Ansell in the “closet scene,” when Hamlet is saying “Here is your husband,” and forcing his mother to look at the locket and compare the two men. Textually, the scene is one of the most violent in the play. In the painting, the passionate nature of the scene is vigorously depicted, and, long before Olivier cast a very young Gertrude and turned her closet into a bedroom — and even

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years before Kean electrified his audiences with his “Romantic fire” (Dawson 1995:44) in his Hamlet debut in London in 1814 — this scene between Hamlet and his mother is strikingly sexy. Ansell’s draped white dress is clingy and revealing; she looks young, sensuous, feminine. With Ansell’s face covered the viewer’s eyes go immediately to Powell, whose gaze is intense and whose eyes — dark, shadowed, flashing — bore into Ansell’s face. Her dark hair is tousled and curly, her expression is fervent. It appears that she has a small mustache which gives her a more sinister appearance. In general Powell looks darker, younger, sexier than the more neoclassical Garrick or Siddons, or than John Philip Kemble, who was her direct male competition. Her Hamlet takes their melancholy intellectuality and stanch nobility and adds the mercurial fire that Kean will be credited with innovating 12 years later. If Garrick and Siddons shift the interpretation of Hamlet to a dignified man of feeling expressing filial awe and loyalty, Powell (as will Kean) modernizes him as a man of passionate authenticity expressing rage against the falseness of the court.

Figure 2. Jane Powell as Hamlet, with Mrs. Ansell as the Queen. Watercolor by George Henry Harlow, 1802. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

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In addition, because this portrait of Powell’s Hamlet is remarkably unlike other portraits of her in character, it may evoke a sense of revelation in the role. As Bert States observes, when a performance feels realistic, “one might even suspect that the actor’s performance was an open display of a hidden, or at least possible, self.” He continues, “doesn’t the playing of Hamlet, after all, require a dredging up of a Hamlet from somewhere within?” (1985:199). Such a fanciful proposition might be supported by the responses Powell received, which tend to describe her embodiment of the role as something personal or “natural.” The viewers’ responses are also decidedly mixed. On the one hand, in 1804 Thomas Gilliland praised Powell in his Dramatic Synopsis for her ability to give audiences “unequivocal proofs that she is herself under the influence of the passion she counterfeits” and added that “perhaps the vigour of her genius was never so thoroughly shewn as in her performance of Hamlet” (qtd. in Highfill 1973:13:148). On the other hand, this very talent for naturalness could prove problematic for some spectators. For her practice of playing Hamlet around England and Scotland, of working the role into a somewhat regular part of her repertoire, Jane Powell is taken to task by Leigh Hunt. In one of his 1807 essays on contemporary theatre artists Hunt asks, “What honest critic ... could refrain from giving Mrs. Powell some advice on her frequent whim of assuming the character of Hamlet?” He then proceeds into a hyperbolic, even hysterical, account of what seems to him a rather preposterous action on Powell’s part, whereby he undermines the power and influence of Powell’s performance by likening it to madness: I have heard indeed of females, whom the vapours have induced to imagine themselves tea-pots; others have bewailed their transformation into pincushions, shuddering whenever they saw a needle or a bodkin; and there was a lady in Mr. Pope’s time who insisted she was a goose-pye and was ready to fall into fits at the sight of a bishop or an alderman: but we never before knew an instance of a female, who imagined herself so thoroughly a man in habits and in experience, as to be able to represent the most difficult picture of man on the stage [1807:44–46].

This in itself is not atypical for Hunt. As Michael Eberle-Sinatra argues, he introduced a “sarcastic” and “sharply critical” style in his attempt to shift theatrical criticism from its long-held practice of “puffery” to a new “impartiality” (2005:14), and insisted on treating actresses as critically (and ruthlessly) as actors. Hunt was also never a fan of Powell’s; at other times he refers to her as an “inferior” player. Yet there also seems to be considerable anxiety, exaggerated or not, about the cross-dressing. He goes on to recommend that actresses and playwrights avoid it entirely, invoking the familiar fear

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that the cross-dressing will spill over from theatre to life. “It is at all times unpleasant,” he states, “to see a woman performing in the dress of a man even without his character, and authors had better avoid the introduction of such a sight as much as possible ... the manners of women in the dress of the other sex are rendered aukward [sic] by the strange sensation of novelty it must produce in their minds” (1807:45). If Siddons’ performance was perceived as primarily an aesthetic statement, Powell’s, it appears, was taken as a political move, and thus was received and judged differently — an indication, perhaps, of critics’ discomfort with the new so-called “feminine” characteristics of Hamlet. While he may have been thought of as “universally human” in literary criticism, spectators still expected to see an unambiguously male figure onstage. But if Powell’s act of playing Hamlet inspired sarcasm, perhaps even fear, she certainly struck a nerve; Hunt’s act of singling her out reveals how much she had become associated with this role. Hunt’s comments bring to mind the opinions of William Winter, writing in 1911 and reflecting on the past century of female Hamlets, a trend started by Siddons’ and Powell’s performances. He argues that woman have been “encouraged” in the performance of Hamlet “by the critical assurance, which has been mistakenly urged, that the character is more feminine than masculine.... It was a bad day for ‘the glass of fashion,’” Winter concludes, “when some misguided essayists began to call him ‘feminine’ and the ladies heard of it” (1969:427, 431).7 Those late eighteenth-century “misguided essayists” and actors, rather than automatically making Hamlet seem “feminine,” may have made Hamlet a testing ground for questions of gender in each generation, as he has become for questions of modern subjectivity.8 For example, Hamlet’s characteristics are seen alternately as “masculine” or as “feminine” depending on the performer. The same features that made Hamlet “masculine” in 1774 — his delicate nature and sensitivity — had come to seem distinctly “feminine” features by 1881, the year of one of the most peculiar episodes of Hamlet criticism, The Mystery of Hamlet, by Edward Vining, who argues that Hamlet’s nature is not only “essentially feminine,” but that Hamlet is a woman (1881:54). But, as Catherine Belsey points out, female Hamlets didn’t always portray a more “feminine” Hamlet; speaking of later nineteenth-century actresses in the role, she observes, “if ... Hamlet’s nineteenth-century problem was an anxiety about the obligations of masculinity ... it was decisive, dynamic, resourceful women in the role who began the rescue of Hamlet for the stage, by calling in question the image of Hamlet the ineffectual dreamer” (2002:152). In many cases the female players emphasize Hamlet’s masculinity, and the male players his femininity. For instance, Edwin Booth, a famous

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Hamlet from 1859, commented that he “always endeavored to make prominent the femininity of Hamlet’s character and therein lies the secret of my success — I think. I doubt if ever a robust and masculine treatment of the character will be accepted so generally as the more womanly and refined interpretation” (qtd. in Mills 1985:132). Booth not only recognizes that Hamlet is a character whose qualities are both feminine and masculine, but that both women and men see themselves in him. Perhaps what shows most clearly the contribution of female Hamlets to the late eighteenth-century transformation in his character is that by the late nineteenth century, the following words of Edwin Booth could be considered conventional: “Hamlet is the epitome of mankind, not an individual; a sort of magic mirror in which all men and women see the reflex of themselves, and therefore has his story always been, is still, and will ever be the most popular of stage tragedies” (qtd. in Phelps 1890:63). This image of Hamlet — now common, seemingly self-evident — is a consequence of the pioneering work of the first female Hamlets. Siddons’ and Powell’s work demonstrates the influence of actors’ performances as well as critics’ analyses not just on the making of the modern Hamlet, but on the making of the modern self. UNIVERSITY OF ST. THOMAS

Notes 1. By interesting coincidence, later in her career Furnival was involved with Roger Kemble, who would in the future become the father of Sarah Kemble Siddons; she was possibly his first wife, although that is “debatable” according to Highfill, et. al (1973:5:429). For information on Charke’s Hamlet see Fidelis Morgan with Charlotte Charke, The Well-Known Troublemaker: A Life of Charlotte Charke (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1988), 143. 2. This seems to help Siddons to position herself as the queen of tragedy. The playbills for her performances suggest a pattern of playing Hamlet once in each city for benefit performances, an indication that this was a successful venture. While the success may have been primarily due to the novelty of the venture, it may also have planted in viewers’ minds the idea that young Sarah Siddons was fit to be the tragic hero(ine) of the age. By 1782 she had generated so much popularity and press in the provinces that she was again invited to perform at Drury Lane, which was now under the management of Sheridan, Garrick having died in 1779. This time the London audiences’ response to her was acclamation, and the next spring found her posing for Sir Joshua Reynolds, the portrait that became Sarah Siddons as the Tragic Muse. 3. Nor at all, it appears, in the twenty years between 1782 and 1802. Scholars and observers over the years have speculated why she never played Hamlet in London, many concluding either that the provincial theatres allowed for more experimentation than the London stages did, or that Siddons did not want to compete

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with her brother John Philip Kemble, who became a noted Hamlet from his debut in 1783. 4. This alleged affair — one of the rare instances of scandal in Siddons’ life — is discussed in more detail in Russ McDonald, Look to the Lady: Sarah Siddons, Ellen Terry, and Judi Dench on the Shakespearean Stage (University of Georgia Press, 2005); and in Tony Howard, Women as Hamlet: Performance and Interpretation in Theatre, Film, and Fiction (Cambridge University Press, 2007). 5. For more on Siddons’ classical style and the influence of Sir Joshua Reynolds, please see Richard Wendorf, Sir Joshua Reynolds: The Painter in Society (Cambridge : Harvard University Press, 1996); Michael S. Wilson, “The ‘Incomparable’ Siddons as Reynolds’s Muse : Art and Ideology on the British Stage,” in So Rich a Tapestry: The Sister Arts and Cultural Studies, ed. Ann Hurley and Kate Greenspan (Cranbury, NJ and London: Associated University Presses, 1995): 116–50; and Michael Booth on Siddons in Three Tragic Actresses: Siddons, Rachel, Ristori (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1997). 6. She may be the same Mrs. Powell who played Hamlet in Liverpool on 31 August 1795; R. J. Broadbent reports in Annals of the Liverpool Stage that on that date “the town was regaled with a lady Hamlet in the person of Mrs. Powell” (1969:86). Other confirmed performances include other dates at Drury Lane (25 May 1797, 4 June 1804), in Birmingham (7 September 1801 — with her name above the title on the playbill); Liverpool (14 July 1802); then years later in Dublin, Kendal (30 June 1817), and Edinburgh (1February 1816 and 11 April 1818). She was about 59 when she played Hamlet for the last time in 1818. 7. By the 1840s Hamlet had become a popular role for women, and many of the starring actresses of the nineteenth century — Charlotte Cushman, Alice Marriott, Julia Seaman, Millicent Bandmann-Palmer, and most famous of all, Sarah Bernhardt — played him. For the most part female Hamlets were wellreceived, although they had their detractors, notably the critic W. J. Lawrence, author of the 1901 vitriolic article, “The Actress as Poacher on Man’s Shakespearean Preserves,” which declares that the tradition begun by Siddons has been mistaken and taken too far. 8. See this argument more fully developed in Tony Howard, Women as Hamlet: Performance and Interpretation in Theatre, Film, and Fiction (Cambridge University Press, 2007).

References Cited Bate, Henry. Letters to David Garrick . Folger ms. Y.c . 808(1) (4 August 1775). Folger ms. Y.c . 808(2) (8 August 1775), Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC. Bate , Jonathan. Shakespearean Constitutions: Politics, Theatre , Criticism 1730–1830. Oxford and New York : Clarendon Press, 1989. Belsey, Catherine . “‘Was Hamlet a Man or a Woman?’: The Prince in the Graveyard, 1800–1920.” In Hamlet: New Critical Essays, edited by Arthur F. Kinney, 134–158. New York & London: Routledge, 2002.

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Broadbent, R. J. Annals of the Liverpool Stage from the Earliest Period to the Present Time. London, New York: Benjamin Blom, 1969. Campbell, Thomas. Life of Mrs. Siddons. London, 1828. Dawson, Anthony B. Hamlet. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1995. de Grazia, Margreta. “The Motive for Interiority: Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Hamlet.” Style 23/3 (Fall 1989): 430–444. _____. Shakespeare Verbatim: The Reproduction of Authenticity and the 1790 Apparatus. Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press, 1991. Dobson, Michael. The Making of the National Poet. Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press, 1990. Eberle-Sinatra, Michael. Leigh Hunt and the London Literary Scene. New York and London: Routledge, 2005. Foakes, R. A. Hamlet versus Lear: Cultural Politics and Shakespeare’s Art. Cambridge University Press, 2004. Garber, Marjorie. Shakespeare After All. New York: Pantheon, 2004. Hamilton, Mary. Mrs. Siddons’ Dresses and Attitudes in Various Characters. Dublin, 1802. British Museum Print Collection 1876-5-10-816 to 896. Harlow, George Henry. Original Drawings of Contemporary Theatrical Characters. 1802–1806. Folger Art Vol. d47 2(a). Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC. Highfill, Philip H., Jr., Kalman A. Burmin, and Edward A. Langhans. A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers, and Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660–1800. 16 vols. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973–93. [Hunt, Leigh.] Critical Essays on the Performers of the London Theatres by the Author of the Theatrical Criticisms in the Weekly Paper Called the News. London: John Hunt, 1807. Mackenzie, Henry. Criticism on the Character and Tragedy of Hamlet. London, 1770. Manvell, Roger. Sarah Siddons: Portrait of an Actress. New York: Putnam, 1971. Mills, John A. Hamlet on Stage: The Great Tradition. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985. Phelps, Henry P. Hamlet from the Actors’ Standpoint. New York: Edgar S. Werner, 1890. Radcliffe, Ann. “On the Supernatural in Poetry.” In New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal, 16 (1826): 145–152. Reprinted in Women Critics 1660–1800, an Antholog y, edited by The Folger Collective on Early Women Critics, 330–338. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. Richardson, William. Essays on Some of Shakespeare’s Dramatic Characters; to which is added, An Essay on the Faults of Shakespeare. London, 1774. States, Bert. Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: on the Phenomenolog y of Theater. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. Taylor, Gary. Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History from the Restoration to the Present. New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989. Vining, Edward P. The Mystery of Hamlet. Philadelphia: J. P. Lippincott & Co., 1881. Winter, William. Shakespeare on the Stage. New York and London: Benjamin Blom, 1969.

11 Alan Bennett’s The History Boys Education and “The Wherewithal to Resist It” Doug Phillips Abstract Like its many predecessors, Alan Bennett’s recent play The History Boys is yet another interrogation of what it means to educate and be educated. Unlike its predecessors, however, The History Boys refuses to single out and celebrate a subversive, and thus roundly applauded, pedagogue against the usual backdrop of stodg y Gradgrinds who are hell-bent on bringing the Great Teacher down. Instead, Bennett offers nuance and complexity to a subject that is too often dressed up in the easy Great Teacher Myth of, say, Dead Poets Society. To better understand this nuance and complexity, I rely on the work of David Halperin and Richard Rorty, both of whom offer in their respective studies (Saint Foucault and Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity) what I see as a vocabulary for diagnosing the dynamic between subversive and traditional pedagogical practices, a dynamic which The History Boys artfully manages to depict, without demonizing the one or the other.

A sure sign that one’s legacy as a writer is securely in place is not, as one might reasonably expect, to be canonized by Harold Bloom and the rest of the academic community, but rather to see one’s words used as an opening gambit in a personals ad in the London Review of Books. “The transmission of knowledge is in itself an erotic act” (2004: 53), says Hector in Alan Bennett’s award-winning play The History Boys; and so too writes verbatim a self-described professional mid-twenties male in a recent issue of the Review who “seeks intelligent alpha female.”1 Hector’s insight is not of course new, the link between eroticism and education having been well established at least since Socrates. However, the way in which education and eroticism get 149

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coupled in The History Boys— the way in which knowledge gets transmitted — is a major point of contention for characters within the play and critics without. Specifically, some critics have denounced the play for its shameless propagation of gay stereotypes, especially that of the teacherpedophile, by a playwright who is gay himself.2 In addition, one writer argues that the three ostensibly gay characters in the play not only reinforce certain stereotypes of gay identity, but the stereotypical fates of having such an identity: “tragic death, neutered disability, or lonely insanity” (“Bigotry Boys”).3 These depictions in the play exist, most certainly, but not to denigrate and dismiss, nor to reinforce ugly stereotypes; rather, these depictions help to foster, if tragically, a certain positive notion of education, one advocated by the philosopher Richard Rorty who, along with Hector, argues that the transmission of knowledge is indeed an erotic act but also, and perhaps more importantly, an erratic act.4 That is, the transmission of the most important kind of knowledge — knowledge which helps to enlarge our final vocabulary and make room for possibility — must ultimately deviate from traditional, prescribed, or inherited forms of education, which is to say it must deviate from the goal of mere socialization (resulting in the kind of group identity that comes with a shared understanding of historical “truth”) to individualization (in the form of free and critical persons).5 In short, the transmission of the kind of knowledge that allows for self-individualization and self-creation must deviate from a declarative mood of certainty — whether about our self, our world, or historical fact — to a subjunctive mood of possibility. With this deviation in mind, we may see how The History Boys makes clear in two acts that the transmission of knowledge is in itself a queer act. In Saint Foucault, David Halperin defines queer as “whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant” (62). In depictions of subversive pedagogical practices — whether, say, in Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Neil Postman’s Teaching as a Subversive Activity, Peter Weir’s film Dead Poets Society, or, most recently, Bennett’s play The History Boys— there is an implied or overt queering (in Halperin’s sense of the word) of the classroom wherein both instructor and curriculum deviate from conventional patterns of instruction and institutional expectations of what constitutes a so-called “proper” education. What distinguishes the latter in the list above, however, is that Bennett’s play about the queering of classroom practices is, by virtue of the sexual identities (or lack thereof ) of the principal players involved, a more fully realized exploration of both the complexities and consequences of those teachers who, often at the expense of their own livelihood, make a profound difference in the lives of their students. Hector, the hero of the play, is assigned the dubious task of teaching

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his adolescent male charges the titular General Studies, about which can be said, concedes an exasperated Hector, nothing in particular; for it is, as Halperin also says about the word queer, “an identity without an essence” (62). The same might be said of Hector himself, whose name and nickname we are told are one and the same. General Studies then is a course most fitting for someone like Hector, not merely for his own perceived queerness (in matters both sexual and pedagogical), but for his preferred approach to teaching, rooted as it is in the subjunctive, the mood of possibility. In this sense, Hector’s approach, like the course itself, can be further thought queer— a term, argues Halperin, that “describes a horizon of possibility whose precise extent and heterogeneous scope cannot in principle be delimited in advance” (62). What then sounds almost painfully normative —General Studies— is, in the hands of Hector, an opportunity for the self-transformation of his students, a realization in fact of their own “queer potential” whereby, in the words of Halperin, “it might be possible to glimpse and to devise new ways of relating to oneself and to others” (68). Halperin’s notion of one’s “queer potential” is not unlike Rorty’s conception of the “ironist” whose “final vocabulary” is anything but final; that is, for the ironist “nothing has an intrinsic nature, a real essence” (74); and therefore the self is always a potential self, subject to perpetual revision as well as to an ever expanding understanding of both itself and others. Furthermore, to be “queer” or to be an “ironist”— I am here conflating Halperin’s and Rorty’s terms — is to forge a site of resistance against the normalizing effects of socialization; it is, in other words, a resistance to education, which Hector himself will voice throughout the play: “You give them an education,” he tells Mrs. Lintott (a respected teacher known by her students as a force-feeder of facts). “I give them the wherewithal to resist it” (2004: 23). This resistance is also what Rorty has in mind in his book Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, concepts between which the three teachers in The History Boys— Hector, Irwin, and Mrs. Lintott — continually flit.6 Unlike its many predecessors there are no white-hatted or black-hatted figures in The History Boys, no backdrop of evil administrators, crusty educators, or suspicious parents against which the Great Teacher, bearer of Truth, radiantly shines. In fact, the very notion of “The Great-Teacher Myth,” stock material for scripts as recent as Freedom Writers, is subverted throughout the play, not only by dint of three distinct and carefully nuanced instructors who remain collegial throughout, but by the students themselves and their cheeky knowingness of what constitutes such myths in the first place.7 Thus do they refuse to play the supporting role of fawning acolytes or even to offer up one of their own —à la Dead Poets Society —as the predictable turncoat who without fail will rain on everyone else’s educational

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parade. And so it is that Dakin, the most cynical of the eight Oxbridge aspirants, says to Irwin, the hotshot new hire whose task it is to garnish Dakin and the others with a dash of polish and charm: DAKIN: Sir, I know tradition requires it of the eccentric schoolmaster, but do you mind not throwing the books? They tend to fall apart [2004: 18].

Shortly thereafter Dakin tells his classmates: DAKIN: They all have to do it, don’t they? CROWTHER: Do what? DAKIN: Show you that they’re still in the game [2004: 20–21].

This is not to imply, however, that the boys in the play do not regard their teachers warmly, even affectionately — they most certainly do — but many of them, the ones whose characters are most fully realized on stage, seem a good bit wiser than their age would suggest (they are between the ages of sixteen and eighteen, presumably). Their precocity in fact is precisely what gives weight to the educational face-off at hand — whether and how their minds might be affected and to what end. Therefore, the game to which Dakin refers above is in actuality one of very high stakes, one which Irwin has indeed come to play, going so far as to assert that the study of history is a game: “You’ve taught them too well,” Irwin tells Mrs. Lintott, the other History teacher. “They can’t see it’s a game” (2006: 42), he continues. Of Rorty’s three concepts — contingency, irony, and solidarity — Irwin is an “ironist” in extremis whose bent toward the teaching of history is utterly rooted in contingency. For Rorty, “ironists” are those people who realize “that anything can be made to look good or bad by being redescribed” (73). Furthermore, they are “never quite able to take themselves seriously because [they are] always aware that the terms in which they describe themselves are subject to change, always aware of the contingency and fragility of their final vocabularies, and thus of their selves” (73–4). In this way, Irwin is a follower of Nietzsche (about whom Irwin’s student Dakin will later inquire) who, Rorty tells us: ... explicitly suggested that we drop the whole idea of “knowing the truth.” His definition of truth as a “mobile army of metaphors” amounted to saying that the whole idea of “representing reality” by means of language, and thus the idea of finding a single context for all human lives, should be abandoned.... The process of coming to know oneself, confronting one’s contingency, tracking one’s causes home, is identical with the process of inventing a new language — that is, of thinking up new metaphors [1989: 27].

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As a History teacher, this is precisely Irwin’s own philosophical position, which is precisely why the Headmaster has hired him to help give the history boys flair, charm, and polish. Thus, Irwin’s first order of business to help prepare his students for entrance exams into Cambridge and Oxford is to inform them that their last set of essays, while not wrong, lacked interest. They were dull, he says; moreover, the “sheer competence was staggering” (2006: 22). When one boy later asserts that the factual content of his essay is “all true,” Irwin responds: “What’s truth got to do with it? What’s truth got to do with anything?” (2006: 27). In the tradition of both Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, Irwin understands truth to be something made, not found. It is strictly the product of a particular language game, and language games, Irwin insists, are to be played: “Find an assumption, then turn it on its head ... find proposition, invert it, then look round for proof.... Take Stalin. Generally agreed to be a monster, and rightly. So dissent. Find something, anything, to say in his defense” (2006: 36). Truth, Irwin and Rorty both argue, is not something “out there” to be discovered, but instead it is something created, something created through language, through sentences. For Lintott, history is anything but a game, and only a man could have the audacity to make such a claim in the first place. “History,” she says, “is a commentary on the various and continuing incapabilities of men.” It is, she says, “women following behind [men] with the bucket” (2004; 80). Lintott then is very much the voice of solidarity in the play, as is Hector, though the two achieve their voices through different means: for Lintott solidarity is achieved through a shared, which is to say memorized, knowledge of historical facts; for Hector, it is a shared, which is to say memorized, knowledge of poetic verse. When, therefore, one of Lintott’s former students tells her that Irwin’s approach to education is, in contrast to her own, “cuttingedge,” she replies by stating that “Other people have lives. That’s what education is about” (2006: 35). While Lintott shares to a point Irwin’s belief about the contingency of history and truth (Hector’s own tragic fate, she argues, may have been radically different had events transpired five minutes earlier or five minutes later than they actually did), she also advocates a shared understanding of historical fact and thus a shared understanding of knowledge and values; for only through such a shared understanding is solidarity made possible, and solidarity, argues Rorty, is a means toward helping us become less cruel. Hector’s Socratically eroticized approach to education, or rather antieducation, is situated between that of Mrs. Lintott who effectively and regularly prepares her students with a mastery of “properly organized facts” (2004: 9) and that of the young Irwin who, like a pre–Socratic sophist or modern day Stanley Fish, has a supreme talent — in the interest of being

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interesting — for turning received ideas onto their head. In the middle of this face-off between the hope for solidarity and absolute contingency, then, is the aging but beloved Hector whose Greek-warrior name belies his rather Falstaff-like figure (“fifty-five and portly” [2006: 5], we’re told) and, like Falstaff, his exuberant embrace of all of life’s possibilities, however tragic, absurd, unpredictable, or ironic those possibilities might turn out to be. About Falstaff, says Harold Bloom, “no other literary character seems to me so infinite in provoking thought and in arousing emotion” (313). Furthermore, Bloom describes Falstaff as a teacher, “a comic Socrates” whose enterprise is “making others wittier” (275). He then adds, “That which we are, that only can we teach; Falstaff, who is free, instructs us in freedom — not a freedom in society, but from society” (276). I can think of no better description of Hector than what Bloom says here of Falstaff. For Hector too instructs us — or rather his students — in freedom, not a freedom in society, but from society. This is the very reason his course in General Studies is largely a study of poetry rather than history, following Aristotle’s insistence upon the superiority of poetry over history. The true difference between the historian and the poet, says Aristotle, “is that one relates what has happened, the other what may happen. Poetry, therefore, is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history, for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular” (13). Together Rorty, Bloom, and Hector argue in favor of a culture that is poeticized, rather than rationalized or scientized. In this way, Hector, like his colleague Irwin, sides with Nietzsche: “Only poets, Nietzsche suspected, can truly appreciate contingency. The rest of us,” Rorty continues, “are doomed to remain philosophers, to insist there is really only one ... true description of the human situation, one universal context of our lives. We are doomed to spend our conscious lives trying to escape from contingency rather than, like the strong poet, acknowledging and appropriating contingency” (28). The subjunctive mood — the mood of possibility, the mood of what may happen — is another way of talking about and expressing contingency. For Hector, contingency — the subjunctive — is the essential mood of poetry, as it is the essential mood for education, which is precisely why for both Aristotle and Hector the two (poetry and education) are in tandem. In both his person and his pedagogy we see in Hector this mood of possibility. Not only does the subjunctive mood constitute Hector’s pedagogical practices but it is also the clearest expression of his own identity, even if, recalling Halperin’s definition of the word queer, that identity is without an essence.8 Rumored, for example, to have what Mrs. Lintott incredulously calls an “unexpected wife” (2004: 41), Hector’s proclivity for “handling his pupils’ balls” (2004: 68) as a sure indication of his sexual preferences is mitigated, in part, by the

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Headmaster’s assurances that this handling — this cradling, as it were — was “more appreciative than investigatory” (2004: 68). Like many plays and screenplays before it,9 The History Boys depicts long-standing concerns about the efficacy of traditional educational practices, whether such practices are merely preparatory for one’s immersion into the workforce or, setting one’s sights a bit higher, admittance into Cambridge or Oxford — as the case is for the students in Bennett’s play. Among the din of voices competing to get a hearing on how best to shepherd a group of sixth-formers into the hallowed halls of England’s most prestigious universities is Hector himself, who seems altogether skeptical of the task, not because he doesn’t believe in the boys’ abilities, but because the efforts required undermine what is to his mind the true spirit of education. As Oscar Wilde was an advocate of art for its own sake, so is Hector an advocate of education for its own sake. In this sense real education is insular, self-directed, almost always poetic, and, like art, perfectly useless in matters of getting ahead: “Useless Knowledge,” Hector says of General Studies. “Nothing that happens here,” he tells his students, “has anything to do with getting on, but remember... All knowledge is precious whether or not it serves the slightest human use” (2004: 5). HILL-MURRAY SCHOOL

Notes 1. The full advertisement (8 February 2007) in the Personals section of The London Review of Books, reads: “‘The transmission of knowledge is in itself an erotic act.’ Resoundingly unsmitten by the ‘charms’ of young womanhood, professional mid-twenties male, Asian, which clearly makes me exotic, seeks intelligent alpha female (was going to say ‘feisty’ but remembered this was the LRB) between 30 and 50.” 2. See, for example, the article “The Bigotry Boys” at The Big Queer Blog (www.bigqueer.com). 3. In The History Boys, these fates correspond to Hector (“tragic death”), Irwin (“neutered disability”), and Posner (“lonely insanity”). 4. In his essay “Education as Socialization and as Individualization,” Rorty maintains that “erotic relationships are occasions for growth, and their occurrence and their development are as unpredictable as growth itself. Yet nothing important happens in non-vocational higher education without them” (1999:125). Furthermore, he says, “the sparks that leap back and forth between teacher and student, connecting them in a relationship that has little to do with socialization but much to do with self-creation, are the principal means by which the institutions of a liberal society get changed” (126). 5. For more on Rorty’s distinction between Individualization and Socialization,

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see his essay “Education as Socialization and as Individualization” in Philosophy and Social Hope. 6. Incidentally, The London Review of Books may be the only place where Bennett and Rorty have together appeared in print, and a contribution from both can be found in an anthology of selected pieces from The Review for which Bennett writes the preface and provides excerpts from his diary of 1995 (indeed, bits of his own history). Rorty too makes a contribution under the subheading “Diaries” with a short essay entitled “Heidegger’s Bad Smell.” “By sketching a slightly different possible world,” Rorty imagines “a world in which Heidegger joins his fellow antiegalitarian, Thomas Mann, in preaching resistance to Hitler” (248–9), rather than becoming the actual supporter he does. Significantly, Rorty here engages in the very mood of possibility — the subjunctive mood of what if— that Hector seems to relish throughout Bennett’s play. 7. For an elaboration of “The Great-Teacher Myth,” see Robert B. Heilman’s article of that title published in the Summer 1991 issue of The American Scholar. 8. In her essay “Sex and Pedagogy: Performing Sexualities in the Classroom,” Didi Khayatt takes issue with Jonathan Silin’s claim that one’s silence in the classroom on the subject of one’s own sexuality is “a denial of pedagogical responsibility” (104). “What,” she asks, “is the pedagogical benefit of coming out in class, particularly through a declarative statement?” (108). She answers her own question, arguing: “Coming out through a declarative statement is pedagogically unsound, it seems to me, for several reasons, not least because one’s identity is continually in flux, and the act of freezing one’s identity in place to render the declarative statement true, even for a moment, does not do justice to the teacher presenting herself or himself in class. What it does is to define the teacher’s persona through an act of oppression and to encourage students to see the teacher as standing in for the entire group” (108). This, to me, seems a reasonable explanation for both Hector’s and Irwin’s relative silence on the subject of their own sexuality. 9. A partial list of such plays and screenplays include: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Browning Version, Dead Poets Society, Stand and Deliver, Finding Forrester, and Freedom Writers.

References Cited Aristotle. On Poetry and Music. Trans. S.H. Butcher. New York: The Liberal Arts Press, 1956. Bennett, Alan. The History Boys. New York: Faber and Faber, 2004. _____. The History Boys: The Film. New York: Faber and Faber, 2006. “The Bigotry Boys.” The Big Queer Blog. 24 Apr. 2006. <www.bigqueer.com/index. php?/archives/137-The-Bigotry-Boys.html> Bloom, Harold. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. New York: Riverhead, 1998. Halperin, David M. Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Heilman, Robert B. “The Great-Teacher Myth.” The American Scholar. 60.3 (Summer 1991): 417–423.

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Khayatt, Didi. “Sex and Pedagogy: Performing Sexualities in the Classroom.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies. 5.1 (1999): 107–113. Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. _____. Philosophy and Social Hope. New York: Penguin, 1999.

12 No Red Blood Clyde Fitch and the Staging of the Neurasthenic Michael Schwartz Abstract Neurasthenia, the disease of “nervousness,” was simultaneously a debilitating ailment and a badge of distinction for the emerging group of “mental workers” that began identifying themselves as experts — the Professional Managerial Class. From 1898 through 1909, American playwright Clyde Fitch presented a compelling series of “neurasthenics” that reflected and embodied the pressures of attaining business success that plagued not only the moneyed elite but also the rising professionals. In Fitch’s plays, the neurasthenics were lawyers or other professionals whose weakness or poor judgment caused the problems that drove the plots. Frequently, the problem entailed stock speculation, a modern variation on the earlier vice of gambling. Fitch’s nervous men helped pave the way for the PMC to recreate “neurasthenia” into one of the great unifying social constructs of the Broadway stage — neurosis. By the time Eugene O’Neill appeared on the scene, PMC critics and audiences were ready to embrace onstage neurosis and to celebrate the beginning of “serious” American drama.

American playwright Clyde Fitch enjoyed a tremendous popularity throughout his career, particularly from the late 1890s until his untimely death in 1909. Along with Fitch’s popularity, however, came a particular kind of personal and professional criticism regarding his supposed “femininity”— a reference to his anxious (and closeted) personal life, as well as an attack on his playwriting abilities.1 Nevertheless, during a time when the Professional Managerial Class, or PMC, was beginning to identify itself in the cities and in the world of American corporate capitalism, Fitch did a great deal of the heavy lifting in terms of bringing the PMC to Broadway. Fitch’s success, as well as the reservations and objections critics expressed, is tied closely to the phenomenon of neurasthenia. Neurasthenia itself was a con158

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dition that gained legitimacy as the emerging Professional Managerial Class strove to legitimize the strain of performing mental, rather than physical, labor.2 While he dressed too flamboyantly and lived too lavishly to fit comfortably within the emerging PMC, Fitch had one more significant trait, “nervousness,” that shared by both the moneyed elite and the PMC. In the editorial notes accompanying his collected letters, friends Montrose Moses and Virginia Gerson write of “a shorthand quickness which suited his impulsive and nervous nature,” which is borne out by Fitch’s frequent use of italics and hurried abbreviations (Moses & Gerson, “Introduction,” xiv). Fitch and his friends were all too aware of this neurasthenic quality that they shared, as evidenced by this 1904 letter to Fitch from Maude Adams: “We live so much among people of morbid tendencies, neurasthenics (I can’t spell it), and the like — that we begin to think they are real, and they are real of their kind but it isn’t a red blood kind.” Adams not only spelled the word correctly, but she put her finger on a key PMC problem.3 Nervousness and neurasthenia would prove significant in Fitch’s work, in future PMC selfidentity, and in the future of “modern” American drama. Fitch’s place in the “PMC-ing” of Broadway consists of three elements, or perhaps, three overlapping stages: anti-model, posthumous super-model (the triumph of his final play, The City), and unconscious and largely unheralded pioneer in staging a distinctly PMC type — the neurasthenic. The first stage, Fitch as anti-model, is the one with which his contemporaries were most familiar. While Fitch claimed that he did not, and did not care to, write for specific actresses,4 he nevertheless created several winning roles for, among others, Effie Shannon, Ethel Barrymore, Maxine Elliott, Elsie deWolfe, and the unfortunate Clara Bloodgood, who would shoot herself in a theater in Baltimore before a performance of Fitch’s The Truth.5 Fitch occasionally wrote male-driven vehicles, most notably his first play, Beau Brummell, for Richard Mansfield, as well as Nat Goodwin’s successful historical piece, Nathan Hale. Until The City, however, critics primarily characterized Fitch and his plays as facile, artificial, superficial, and distinctly feminine.6 Fitch’s great subject through the bulk of his career was, in Edith Wharton’s words, “humorous exhibitions of human vacuity”— more specifically, the vacuity exhibited by a particular set of New York society. (Wharton 160–161, qtd. in Loney 22).7 For the most part, the Fitch hero (or more often, heroine) could rise above the deadly pettiness to attain a happy ending — a pattern not always to the liking of Fitch, but he would generally bow to either a producer’s demands (usually Charles Frohman’s) or his own sense of what an audience wanted. His output was large, regular (in terms of his plays being performed each season), and generally welcome. This was the

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Fitch — the “Hustling Histrionicus”— that the New York Sun playfully celebrated in verse: “...out of the glittering social grot,/ Of the very Fitchiest, fetchingest lot,/ Stirred in the scorching society pot,/ Hot,/ He plucks a wild, weird name and plot” (qtd. in Atkinson, 55–56). Fitch, for his part, maintained his breakneck schedule of writing, rehearsing, and traveling. By his early 40s, he had shocked Broadway with his frank depiction of a seduction/near-rape in Sappho, and had started to show audiences more social unpleasantness than “good taste” allowed.8 He had not, however, convinced critics or general audiences that he could write a “masculine” play. With The City, the story of the rise and moral corruption of a young, hustling politician, Fitch was able to create the play that at last earned him the “capital” of manhood. He did not live to enjoy it. As a Fitch character, George Rand, Jr. was a relative anomaly — a young, striving male with “the New York bee in his bonnet” who held the center of the play and drove the plot (454).9 Whether or not Fitch realized this would be his final play, he nonetheless deliberately presented the audience with many distinctly “masculine” signifiers. As Rand Jr. rises in politics, the local newspapers refer to him as “Teddy Jr.” (512). Audiences of 1909 immediately knew that “Teddy” could only refer to Theodore Roosevelt, a proponent of vigorous exercise whose character was readily identifiable as manly. The public saw him, in Howard Zinn’s words, as “the great lover of nature and physical fitness, the war hero, the Boy Scout in the White House” (Zinn 351). Strength and masculinity, for Roosevelt, were integral in the fight for Anglo-Saxons to avoid “race suicide”— decadence and effeminacy left the superior races vulnerable to “inferior immigrant stock” (Lears, 30). Fitch’s appropriation of the “T.R.” persona was a direct signifier of manliness, and this was lost on neither audiences nor critics. Nor did Fitch stop there. He not only had the villain curse (earlier in the play, we also see the drug-addicted villain shooting up), but he included what apparently was the first time the Lord’s name was taken in vain on stage. “You’re a God damn liar!” character actor Tully Marshall uttered as the drugaddicted villain.10 The line was enough to draw astonished gasps from male and female theatergoers alike.11 Before the audience had a chance to fully recover from this blasphemy, the villain shoots Rand’s younger sister just as she is about to discover that she has married her half-brother. It could be said that Fitch would overpower the Broadway audience with brute strength, or die trying. As it happened, he did both — Fitch died at age 44, following an emergency appendectomy. What is particularly significant about The City, aside from its considerable commercial success, is the rush of “manly” (and posthumous) cultural capital the play brought to the approval-hungry Fitch:

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For “The City” was to be a challenge to those who had persisted in saying that Fitch was strictly a “feminine” dramatist. It was to be the proof that he could be strong and forceful, fearless and almost Greek in theme. “The audience roared its approval,” said one paper; cheers swept the house from orchestra to balcony. There were combined on that evening the power of the playwright, who was not there, and the power of the actors who at every moment seemed to feel his presence. Another paper declared, “It seems tame to say merely that the play was strong, for in its strongest scene it is tremendous. The play is strong as a raging bull ... a hungry tiger.... This is a play to shudder at....” There is no exaggeration in saying that hysteria moved that vast audience. Women were removed fainting, and men shouted as the curtain went up and down in response to repeated calls. It was an unprecedented night in the theater [Moses & Gerson “Introduction,” 385–386].

Indeed, Fitch was “deeply conscious of the fundamental truths of life, and he was eager to put strength into his dialogue in order to offset the delicacy and feminine flashes which the public always considered Fitchean. ‘The City’ was his first, as it proved to be his last, effort in that direction” (Moses 1925, 326). This record of audience response to The City, along with the testosterone-loaded metaphors of strength that the critics employed, bears some analysis. The Broadway audience, which included a number of nervous Professional Managerial men, seemed hungry (even starved) for manly displays from the stage heroes and powerful, shocking scenes that made wives and girlfriends faint. Here were no conventional matinee idols to attract “matinee girls” of all ages, nor were there last-minute rescues or intrusions that saved the characters from impropriety and bad taste. The City gave the audience an identifiable “nervous” hero, placed the hero in the depths of degradation heretofore unheard of on Broadway, and certainly unheard of from Fitch himself, and finally, allowed the hero to show the requisite strength to attain a moral (if not material) victory. One can practically hear the young George Rand Jr.’s of the audience, along with the middle-aged men who felt they had once been young George, shouting a rousing, manly cheer of “Bully for Fitch!” shortly before attending to their unconscious spouses and escorts. While Fitch struggled with, and perhaps at last attained, his own playwriting “manhood,” critics at the time of his death gave him credit for doing almost as much for the American drama.12 Although, as Moses admitted, by the 1920s Fitch’s plays would already fall out of favor,13 the claim is not entirely inaccurate. Nevertheless, it was not so much Fitch’s final display of “masculinity” that paved the way for what the PMC would first acknowledge as “modern American drama,” but rather his display of the male neurasthenic, and the strong females who were arguably more PMC than the men.

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The Moth and the Flame, from 1898, represents Fitch’s first major depiction of a fundamentally weak, excitable (i.e., nervous) male figure who, while in many ways well-intentioned, nevertheless causes the key crises that the plucky Fitchean heroine must solve and/or overcome.14 The heroine, Marion Wolton, has the earmarks of American fin-de-siècle modern womanhood — she’s been to college (and studied sociology), and works earnestly with settlement houses and the Y.M.C.A., or, as one of her less enlightened companions calls it, “that Christian thing-a-may-gig” (568). Marion’s natural bent toward “saving” the unfortunate leads her to make an ill-considered love-choice in the wastrel Fletcher, who, it turns out, has not acknowledged his child to a woman he has not married. The unfortunate young woman, Jeanette, stops the wedding between Fletcher and Marion with the sort of dramatic confrontation Fitch and his audience reveled in: “No! You shall not write Bastard on the forehead of my child!” (576). The cowardly Fletcher reveals his true colors by striking Jeanette in the church, in front of God and everybody. In the rather calmer final act, Marion prevails upon Fletcher to marry Jeanette, and the man Marion should have been with all along, Douglas, appears to take on Marion’s debts, and presumably, Marion herself. While the play had a respectable 10-week run in New York (cut short by the summer) and a happy touring future, the critical response proved rather ambivalent, particularly regarding the character of Fletcher. As Gerald Bordman comments: “One much voiced complaint ... was that none of the characters truly enlisted sympathy. The most interesting figure was Fletcher, who seems genuinely willing to put his ugly past behind him and reverts to his baser self only when the woman whom he sees as his sole chance for salvation spurns him” (Bordman American Theatre, 424). This overview is confirmed by Edward A. Dithmar’s examination of the play about a week after the opening: We are interested in their [the characters’] actions, but we do not feel heartily for them, nor do we ever even detest them. Perhaps we are all a little sorry for Fletcher when he loses his temper in the church, because that is such a “bad break” for a man of his kind. I think we feel sorry for him, too, when he starts for Europe and Asia just before the last curtain.15

What makes Fletcher so interesting as a character, and the critical response to him of equal interest, is that despite his “baser” actions, he is not (nor was he considered) a “villain.”16 The (limited) “pity” that is evoked in the wedding scene is not for the “meddlesome” (in Dithmar’s words) fallen mother, but for the “bad break” that Fletcher receives in the process. The existence of the double standard regarding men who make impulsive, unfor-

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tunate mistakes and “fallen” women is evident17, but there is something else at work as well. The identification of Dithmar and others with Fletcher as a young man attempting to put his past indiscretions behind him and assume a new life, only to be trapped by fate and circumstances, evidences considerable commonality with later, “deeper,” psychologically conflicted heroes of Eugene O’Neill — that is, of “mature” and “modern” American drama. Nor is Marion Wolton without further interest as a character. Her work with settlement houses, for example, puts her in the midst of the contemporaneous urban reform movement. Marion’s undergraduate sociology degree further aligns her with the PMC “experts” who spearheaded many of the Progressive reforms of the era.18 Fitch’s Marion, drawn to the unfortunate “like the moth to a flame,” could be considered something of a PMC hero(ine). Nevertheless, if PMC hero(ine) she is, Marion’s methods and mindset are frequently called into question. When, as noted earlier, Marion’s friends chat about her Progressive leanings (and the “Christian thing-a-may-gig”), the joke seems equally upon Marion as it is upon her less well-read (and less socially conscious) friends. Further, Marion’s (motherly?) impulse to reach out to fallen characters almost leads her to a disastrous marriage. For Fitch, as for many playwrights of the period, issues of social consciousness touched upon in his plays would inevitably give way to individual responsibility, as would be the case with The City. Nevertheless, Fitch was acknowledging the presence of a PMC kind of expertise and social consciousness, even as he gave his version of such consciousness feminine embodiments. Fitch was by no means finished with the neurasthenics. The Climbers, produced in New York in early 1901, provided the Broadway theatergoers with another “nervous” type, once again supplying the obstacle to the heroine’s happiness.19 Fitch gives a detailed description of the neurasthenic Sterling, the heroine’s husband: he “is handsome and distinguished. His hair is grayer than his years may account for and his manner betrays a nervous system overtaxed and barely under control. At the moment that he enters he is evidently laboring under some especial, and only half-concealed, nervous strain” (Fitch, v. 2, 512).20 Fitch contrasts the fatally flawed husband with a more ideal male: Edward Warden, Blanche’s best friend and soul mate. “He is good-looking, practical, a reasoning being, and self-controlled,” Fitch writes. “He is a thorough American, with the fresh and strong ideals of his race, and with the feeling of romance alive in the bottom of his heart” (Fitch v. 2, 522–523). Once again, however, it is the less “practical, reasoning, and self-controlled” male who commands more interest. Warden, a lawyer (fitting within a Professional Managerial Class position), and like a number of Fitch characters, an unsuccessful Wall Street speculator, pays for this lack of control by taking his own life — the price of nervousness run amok.

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“Nervousness” would beset many of Fitch’s male characters throughout his career. In Her Own Way, first presented in 1903, Fitch again presented a weak man whose rash actions precipitate a crisis, who openly displays his nerves: “his voice and body almost vibrating with nerve,” (Fitch v. 3, 473) the stage directions read. In contrast, the man worthy of the heroine has “No finicking about him, no nerves. Just a sane, healthy, fine fellow” (Fitch v. 3, 488–89). That he is also a bit of a dull fellow once again reflects Fitch’s greater interest in, and facility for creating, not only a fairly complex heroine, but also a fairly complex neurasthenic man.21 Nevertheless, the condition of nervousness in Fitch’s supporting male characters is not insignificant. Many of Fitch’s nervous men were professionals, agitated due to business deals gone wrong. Sterling, for example, is a lawyer, trying unsuccessfully to emulate the “killings” of the stock market. Steven Carley, in Her Own Way, is another misguided speculator, although (with the heroine’s help), he is able to give up his penchant for bad investments and become a respectable business manager, one who will only buy or sell on the word of his client. In turn, Geoffrey, in Fitch’s Clara Bloodgood vehicle The Girl with the Green Eyes, is described as “a young, good-looking man, but with a weak face”— his weakness manifests itself in a shameful, drunken marriage.22 And finally, Fitch’s most “manly” hero, George Rand, Jr., of The City, could be said to be his ultimate man of nervousness — he and his family are all too nervous to stay in Middleburg. Rand, Jr.’s nervous energy is of such magnitude that only “The City” can contain it. Fitch’s depictions of nervousness were very much in line with the culture of the era. As Tom Lutz writes in his anecdotal study of nervousness and neurasthenia, there were “numerous texts ... which link nervousness and success, nervousness and social mobility, as well as nervousness and divorce or any other disruption of the gender system” (Lutz 3). There was, in fact, a certain amount of cultural capital to be gained by suffering from the “disease” of nervousness: “Nervousness ... was therefore a mark of distinction, of class, of status, of refinement. Neurasthenia struck brain-workers but no other kind of laborer” (6). Just whose disease neurasthenia was is a matter for debate; while the moneyed elite feared modernity (and thus became nervous), neurasthenia was also linked with more progressive responses to cultural change.23 The question arises: could not gentlemen (and women) also be nervous? And the answer is that they certainly could, and they often were. The quality of nervousness tended to unite, rather than separate, the moneyed elite from the cultured elite, or the gentlemen from the PMC. It would soon fall to the PMC “experts,” with a healthy assist from Freud, to “spin” neurasthenia into something more universal — namely, neurosis. At any rate, nervousness was inevitably making its mark on Broadway

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bodies and their audiences, and the strain of neurasthenia would keep physical and psychological experts busy for the next generation. What Fitch had done was to place characters on stage that straddled the gap between the cultures of character and personality. With the vestiges of 19th century notions of honor, morals, manners, and integrity, Fitch continued to insist on character. Nevertheless, Fitch was also keenly aware of more modern notions of personality, described by adjectives such as “stunning,” “attractive,” and “magnetic”— his characters are frequently striving to “be Somebody.”24 What Fitch accomplished, finally, was to place on stage a modern psychological Professional Managerial habitus that anticipated O’Neill. UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH

Notes 1. Fitch’s sexuality has been mostly a “hinty” subject until fairly recently. There were “whispers” of Fitch having “a hint of lavender” about him during his lifetime (Andrews 48–57), and there existed what might be called a preponderance of circumstantial evidence, i.e., his lifelong bachelorhood, his flamboyant dress, his affinity for acting out the female characters of his plays, etc. Kim Marra, in her article “Clyde Fitch’s Too Wilde Love,” cites letters exchanged between Oscar Wilde and Fitch as reasonable proof of Fitch’s (secretly) gay orientation (in Staging Desire: Queer Readings of American Theater History). 2. While a strong case could be made for Ibsen introducing neurasthenic PMC men to the modern drama (especially in A Doll’s House, or A Doll House), it is my contention that Fitch, as a successful American playwright operating firmly in the Broadway mainstream of the early 20th century, did the most to introduce the American city-dwelling neurasthenic to the Broadway audience. 3. Adams and Fitch shared Charles Frohman as their principal producer. Frohman and Adams, in particular, would achieve great success inverting and complicating the male body, with Adams playing such roles as Peter Pan, Joan of Arc and the rambunctious rooster Chantecler. See especially Kim Marra, Strange Duets: Impresarios and Actresses in the American Theatre, 1865–1914, pp. 106–141. Marra’s analysis is an informative “queer” approach to the issues of male bodies and masculinity. 4. See Clyde Fitch and His Letters, p. 311. 5. Ibid., pp. 353–54. 6. One critical exception to pigeon-holing Fitch was William Dean Howells. In an exchange during January 1904, Howells received Fitch’s letter with: “May I say that I do not know how it [your letter] could be manlier?” (Letters, pp. 257–258, author’s emphasis) 7. Fitch would collaborate with Wharton on a dramatization of Wharton’s The House of Mirth, which opened on Broadway in 1906. While the play only enjoyed a brief run, Wharton and Fitch remained friends. See Glenn Loney’s introduction to Fitch and Wharton’s The House of Mirth: The Play of the Novel.

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8. See Bordman, 1994, p. 457, and Atkinson, p. 6. As Atkinson reports, “...the police closed Sapho after the first performance, although they permitted it to reopen later by popular demand. In New Haven, the police had been more constructive. They closed Sapho until Mr. Revelle could learn how to carry Miss Nethersole [i.e., the lead actor and actress] upstairs ‘in a chaste and orderly manner’ in which the implication of sin would be totally eliminated.” 9. All references to The City are taken from Plays by Clyde Fitch in Four Volumes, vol. 4, with introduction by Montrose J. Moses and Virginia Gerson, Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1915. The play was first performed December 22, 1909. 10. Theatre historians tend to cite the line “You’re a God damn liar!,” which the villain Hannock says in Act II (580), as the ultimate shocker. Nevertheless, in Fitch’s script, Hannock also uses the epithet earlier in Act I when he threatens to reveal Rand, Sr. as “a God damn whited sepulchre” (479). The second “God damn” comes at a much stronger moment in the play, as the hero has just revealed that Hannock has married his half-sister. It is not inconceivable that the first “God damn” was cut before the performance. See Gerald Bordman, The Oxford Companion to American Theatre (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 145–46. 11. Fitch had tried to introduce some “manly” cursing before, notably in the 1899 Nat Goodwin-Maxine Elliott vehicle, The Cowboy and the Lady. The dudecowboy hero played by Goodwin introduces a “swear jar” at his ranch, and those who swore were obliged to sacrifice a quarter. The Goodwin character, after a couple of stray “damneds,” contributes the first fifty cents. At the time, he was criticized by The New York Dramatic Mirror for exercising poor taste: “By actual count there are nineteen violent outbreaks of cursing in the first act alone.... This sort of thing is not amusing...” (“Knicker-bocker — The Cowboy and the Lady,” New York Dramatic Mirror, 6 January 1900, p. 16). 12. William Lyon Phelps, writing in 1921: “when he began to write, American drama scarcely existed; when he died it was reality.... He did more for American drama than any other man in our history” (qtd. in Andrews, 48–57); also, “Walter Prichard Eaton said that modern American playwriting began with Clyde Fitch” (Ibid.). 13. See Moses, The American Dramatist, 314, as well as a contemporaneous review of Fitch’s Letters from the Times: “Yet will he [Fitch] live by his plays? When one thinks of the best of them, ‘The Truth,’ ‘The Girl with the Green Eyes,’ and ‘The City,’ the dust of time seems to be slowly settling upon them” (“‘Letters’ of Clyde Fitch and ‘The Truth at Last’ About Charles Hawtrey,” New York Times, Book Review, 2 November 1924, p. BR7). Once “modern American drama” had made its (PMC-endorsed) entrance onto the world stage, a recurring theme of criticism was to put as much distance between the present and the past as possible; thus were plays less than 20 years old often dismissed as “old” and “antiquated.” 14. References to The Moth and the Flame are taken from Representative Plays by American Dramatists, ed. Montrose Moses (New York: Benjamin Blom, Inc., 1921). 15. Edward A. Dithmar, “The Week at Theatres,” New York Times, 17 April 1898. 16. By striking the mother of his child in church (and onstage), Fletcher went

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beyond nearly all of the era’s stage villainy in terms of vile actions. Indeed, at the end of the 1950s, directors were still reluctant to stage the striking of a woman (e.g., Inge’s The Dark At the Top of the Stairs, wherein the audience hears the husband violently slap his wife offstage). 17. That the “double standard” was accepted by Broadway audiences and “experts” (including the PMC) was also borne out by the later responses toward Rachel Crothers’ A Man’s World (1910) and Augustus Thomas’ “answer” play, As a Man Thinks (1911). While critics respected Crothers’ skill and thoughtfulness in presenting the injustice of the double standard from the “feminist” perspective, it was Thomas’ play, with the pro–status quo message that “upon the golden basis of woman’s virtue rests the welfare of the world,” that found wider acceptance (see Quinn, Arthur Hobson. A History of the American Drama: From the Civil War to the Present Day, vol. 2. New York: F.S. Crofts & Co., Publishers, 1945; also Bordman 1994, p. 669, 687–88). There is no evidence, however, that Fitch himself believed in the double standard; to the contrary, as a writer who wrote and directed with great empathy toward and identification with his heroines, Fitch would most likely not have adopted such a standard as his own. 18. Women such as Jane Addams (Hull House, Chicago) and Lillian Wald (Henry Street Settlement, New York), would have been well known to Fitch and his audience. The budding professional field of social work began with these attempts to understand and alleviate the problems of new immigrants. 19. The Climbers found its way to Broadway without the help of Fitch’s usual producer Charles Frohman. Frohman objected not only to the last-act suicide of the repentant but weak husband (which allowed the dutiful, heartbroken wife and the loyal best friend to get together), but also to the spectacle of the opening family catfight on the heels of a funeral (Andrews 48–57). See also Letters, p. 174. 20. Fletcher, in The Moth and the Flame, is described on his entrance only as wearing “dark sailor clothes” (544). In all probability, this is because Fitch did not publish Moth himself— Montrose Moses published the play especially for his collection. 21. “Anti-hero” would not be an inapt description, except that these characters acted as catalysts, rather than leads. 22. In Fitch, The Girl with the Green Eyes (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1905), p. 18. 23. See Lutz, Tom, American Nervousness, 1903: An Anecdotal History. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), pp. 14–15, as well as Jackson Lears and Richard Wightman Fox, introduction to Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1800–1980 (New York, 1983). 24. See Susman, 273–274, and 277.

References Cited Andrews, Peter. “More Sock and Less Buskin.” American Heritage Magazine 23 (April 1972): 48–57. Atkinson, Brooks. Broadway. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1974. Bordman, Gerald. American Theatre: A Chronicle of Comedy and Drama, 1869–1914. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

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_____. The Oxford Companion to American Theatre. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984. Dithmar, Edward A. “The Week at Theatres.” The New York Times, 17 April 1898. Fitch, Clyde. The City: A Modern Play of American Life in Three Acts. In Plays by Clyde Fitch in Four Volumes. v. 4. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1915. _____. Clyde Fitch and His Letters. Eds. Montrose J. Moses and Virginia Gerson. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1924. _____. The Girl with the Green Eyes. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1905. _____. The Moth and the Flame. In Representative Plays by American Dramatists. Ed. Montrose Moses. New York: Benjamin Blom, Inc., 1921. “Knicker-bocker — The Cowboy and the Lady.” The New York Dramatic Mirror, 6 January 1900. Lears, T.J. Jackson. No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture 1880–1920. New York: Pantheon Books, 1981. _____, and Fox, Richard Wightman. “Introduction.” Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880–1980. New York: Pantheon Books, 1983. “‘Letters’ of Clyde Fitch and ‘The Truth at Last’ About Charles Hawtrey.” The New York Times, Book Review, 2 November 1924. Loney, Glenn. “Introduction.” In The House of Mirth: The Play of the Novel. Rutherford, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1988. Lutz, Tom. American Nervousness, 1903: An Anecdotal History. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991. Marra, Kim. “Clyde Fitch’s Too Wilde Love.” In Staging Desire: Queer Readings of American Theater History. Edited by Kim Marra and Robert A. Schanke. Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 2002. _____. Strange Duets: Impresarios and Actresses in the American Theatre, 1865–1914. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2006. Moses, Montrose J. The American Dramatist. New York: Benjamin Blom, 1925. _____, and Gerson, Virginia. “Introduction.” In Clyde Fitch and His Letters (see above). Quinn, Arthur Hobson. A History of the American Drama: From the Civil War to the Present Day, vol. 2. New York: F.S. Crofts & Co., Publishers, 1945. Susman, Warren. Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984. Zinn, Howard. A People’s History of the United States, 1492–Present. New York: Harper Collins, 2003.

13 Antigone in Pre-Wall and Post-Wall German Theatre Bertolt Brecht’s and George Tabori’s Power Plays Margaret Setje-Eilers Abstract The day after his hearing before the House Un-American Activities Committee, Bertolt Brecht returned to Europe with his wife, Helene Weigel, who had not performed in ten years. He adapted Hölderlin’s translation of Sophocles’ Antigone to see if she could still act. Her performance in Brecht’s Antigone (1948) was outstanding, and she soon made theatre history as Mother Courage. Brecht and set designer Caspar Neher compiled Antigonemodell 1948 (1949), a book whose commitment to the notion of a production model develops Walter Benjamin’s 1936 assertion that the mechanical reproducibility of a work of art dispels the sense of its uniqueness. George Tabori’s 2006 staging at the Berliner Ensemble gently resists Brecht’s model. Whereas Brecht’s undertones recall the Nazis, Tabori’s themes address the plight of wasted youth in senseless, endless wars. Brecht’s play initiated Weigel’s reentry onto the stage and renewal of German theatre during post-war reconstruction; Tabori’s staging recasts the character of epic theatre as a theatre of irony.

In only a few months, Bertolt Brecht adapted Sophocles’ Antigone after returning to Europe from the United States in 1947, and at the same time, urged by his wife Helene Weigel, he articulated his theory of epic theatre in “A Short Organum for the Theatre,” finished by summer 1948. The experimental production was performed only twice again in the Swiss provincial city of Chur after the premiere on 15 February 1948, once in a matinee in Zurich, and one more time in Germany during Brecht’s lifetime (1951) (Brecht 1994b: 496, Hecht 2007:76). After the straightforward titles of The Threepenny Opera and The Mother, this one is intricate: The Antigone of Sopho169

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cles: A Version for the Stage after Hölderlin’s Translation (Die Antigone des Sophokles. Nach der Hölderlinschen Übertragung für die Bühne bearbeitet). George Tabori’s 2006 title intensifies Brecht’s peculiar references to authorship: The Antigone of Sophocles: After Hölderlin’s Translation by Bertolt Brecht (Die Antigone des Sophokles. Nach der Hölderlinschen Übertragung von Bertolt Brecht). In the following, I will argue that Brecht adapted Hölderlin’s translation for epic theatre according to his own emerging aesthetic of models and copies, and that Tabori’s production recasts epic theatre as a theatre of irony. For Brecht, the staging involved a number of first time events. Helene Weigel as Antigone played her first role in ten years at forty-seven with actors half her age, evidence that Brecht considered age and beauty not attributes, but producible by actors (Neubert-Herwig 2000a:217). In the production, he debuted as director and collaborated with set designer Caspar Neher for the first time again after the war. Their work led to the Antigonemodell 1948, the first of the model books to be completed, with photos, verse, and directorial comments documenting particular productions. Earlier in 1947, a preliminary version of a model book took the form of a simple folder of photos and notes to record the staging for Life of Galileo (Kugli 2006:189). The model books show what the printed text does not: groupings, distances between figures, and socially motivated movements. In short, they are visual records of gest. Published in August 1949, the Antigonemodell 1948 was used for the production in 1951, but the book sold few copies. However, the notion of model books generated debate and gave Brecht opportunity to explain how his aesthetic differed from Third Reich theatre and German theatre after the war, where one could stage anything, he said, “because it lacks any style of its own” (Brecht 1964:222). Brecht adapted Friedrich Hölderlin’s translation of Sophocles’ fifthcentury B.C. tragedy mainly to have a role for Weigel’s reentry onto the German-speaking stage before he cast her in the weighty role of Mother Courage upon their return to Berlin in 1949. Director Kurt Hirschfeld did not give her a part in Mr. Puntila and His Man Matti at the Zurich Schauspielhaus, and Brecht needed a role to see if she could still act. Before the war, Brecht had worked with Hans Curjel, who was theatre manager in Chur when Brecht arrived in Switzerland. Curjel immediately offered him his theatre and recommended several plays, including Antigone. Neher had recently designed a set for Antigone in Hamburg (Brecht 1994b:489). He suggested using Hölderlin’s translation, a text that particularly pleased Brecht, who found the flavor of Hölderlin’s Swabian German as radically different in 1947 as at its publication in 1804 (Brecht 1994d:258). Its strangeness fit well into his agenda of epic alienation. Brecht’s reentry into the German-speaking theatre world thus led him

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to engage enthusiastically with Hölderlin’s linguistically revolutionary text. The day after the House Un-American Activities Committee asked if he had ever written any “very revolutionary” works (“sehr revolutionär[e] Gedichte, Stücke und ander[e] Schriften”), he left the U.S. on 31 October, 1947, and arrived in Switzerland by way of Paris (Hecht 1975:61). Ruth Berlau, who joined Brecht and Neher only months later, found them in the midst of work on Antigone. Their collaboration involved copying on many levels. While Brecht talked about the play, Neher made sketches that Brecht consulted to jog his memory, using them like storyboards to “copy” the drawings into text. Berlau reports that Neher’s sketches later recorded rehearsals in image form as a kind of minutes of the meeting (Hecht 1988:184). The model book includes Neher’s visual notes, Berlau’s rehearsal photographs, Brecht’s directorial notes, the text of the play, and so-called “bridging verse,” hexameters used to train the actors not to identify with but to show their roles (Neubert-Herwig 2000b:227). The actors waited on benches along a semicircular screen and delivered these texts during early rehearsals before entering the brightly lit stage area. In later rehearsals, the prompter read the verses, and finally, they appeared as captions to the photos in the model book. The visual-textual project of Antigonemodell 1948 was familiar to Brecht. For the book they called War Primer (finally published in 1955), Berlau and Brecht had collected images during the war from print media, and Brecht had accompanied each photo with a critical epigram. These photo-text montages, or photo-epigrams as they called them, were supposed to teach people how to read images, as Berlau explains in the preface: “This book wants to teach the art of reading images. For it is just as difficult for an untrained eye to read an image as any hieroglyphics” (my translation) (“Dieses Buch will die Kunst lehren, Bilder zu lesen. Denn es ist dem Nichtgeschulten ebenso schwer, ein Bild zu lesen wie irgendwelche Hiergoglyphen”) (Brecht 1994e: preface). One could also call the model books epic theatre primers, for they show how epic theatre works. Brecht insists they are not prescriptive; on the contrary, they are supposed to inspire imagination. Productions that show social relationships in new ways become new models (Brecht 2003b:206). In general, the model books encourage the reader to rethink examples of authority. These include the reception of Sophocles’ Antigone by prominent figures from Hölderlin to Hegel. Hegel, who never tired of comparing classical to romantic art, singled out “the heavenly Antigone, that noblest of figures that ever appeared on earth” (Paolucci 2001:360) (“die himmlische Antigone, die herrlichste Gestalt, die je auf Erden erschienen”) (Hegel 1996c: 509). He placed Sophocles’ play at the apex of all art: “Among all the fine creations of the ancient and the modern world ... the Antigone of Sopho-

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cles is from this point of view in my judgment the most excellent and satisfying work of art” (Paolucci 2001:74) (“Von allem Herrlichen der alten und modernen Welt ... erscheint mir nach dieser Seite die Antigone als das vortre·ichste, befriedigendste Kunstwerk”) (Hegel 1996b:550). Furthermore, he calls the play the “supreme and absolute example of tragedy” (Paolucci 2001:325) (“für mich absolute[s] Exempel der Tragödie”) (Hegel 1985:557). Antigone is “one of the most sublime, and in every respect most consummate work of art human effort ever produced” (Paolucci 2001:178) (“[eins] der allererhabensten, in jeder Rücksicht vortre·ichsten Kunstwerke aller Zeiten”) (Hegel 1996a:60). In a 1948 journal entry, Brecht criticizes Hegel’s enthusiastic reception of classical antiquity: “It is no longer adequate just to hold up ancient Greek culture as the ultimate standard.... Antigone in its entirety belongs with the barbaric horses’ skulls” (Brecht 2003b:199). He refers to Neher’s set, in which a horse skull was suspended from each of four posts located in the brightly lit center area of the stage. According to a journal entry in 1948, Brecht wants to show that every endeavor that requires much violence fails easily, and that cruelty emerges from stupidity (Brecht 1994d: 267). To develop the provocatively barbaric, experimental staging for his Antigone, Brecht used Hölderlin’s translation of Sophocles’ tragedy as a model of inspiration to rewrite the play within his theoretical framework of epic theatre, famously based on the possibility of enacting change. He explains in a letter to his son Stefan that he made changes to “get rid of the Greek moira (destiny); in other words, I try to uncover the underlying popular legend” (Brecht 2003b:201). Brecht abandons Hölderlin’s subdivision into acts, completely cuts Eurydice’s role, and adds a prolog that takes place in 1945 Berlin, perhaps thinking of the implicit reference to the Nazis in Jean Anouilh’s Antigone, staged in occupied Paris in 1944. He makes Antigone into a seer who denies the existence of fate, while he downgrades Tiresias to the status of an astute observer, who lacks divine foresight, is complicit with the ruler, and at the most, imagines trouble ahead. Antigone predicts the downfall of Thebes and laments not only her brother’s death, but also the plight of the living who will have to see their city destroyed: “I weep for you, the living/ What you will see/ When my eyes are already filled with dust” (Brecht 2003a:37) (“Euch beweine ich, Lebende/ Was ihr sehen werdet/ Wenn mein Auge schon voll des Staubs ist”) (Brecht 1994b:227). The model book reiterates: “The living:/ You are the ones that I mourn” (Brecht 2003b: 213) (“Lebende,” rief sie, “Ihr seid’s, die ich beklage”) (Brecht 1994c:129). And while Brecht scholars fault his play for lacking a true revolutionary proletariat, and the only changes brought about are the off-stage suicides of Antigone and Haemon and the immanent downfall of Thebes caused by its

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cruel leader, the work contains the potential for an uprising. As the daughter of a king, Princess Antigone belongs to the ruling class. Nevertheless, in the context of a lost war being kept secret, her comment that “others” think similarly is more ominously significant than in Sophocles’ text (Brecht 2003a:21, 1994b:212). Antigone’s fiancé Haemon likewise tells Creon that the city is full of dissent, “inner disaffection” (Brecht 2003a:29) (“Wisse, die Stadt ist voll von innerer Unlust”) (Brecht 1994b:220). The situation in Brecht’s play is transferable to the US today, where one can relate Creon’s successful cover-up of the fated war to the contemporary political scene. Finally, the Elders join Antigone’s critique of “Creon’s” war waged against Argos to obtain metal for weapons (Brecht 2003a:42, 1994b:233). After admitting her deed, Antigone blames the Thebans for believing the rulers’ threats that the city will fall. The citizens allow themselves to be subjugated, she says, further weakening the city’s position: “For bowing the neck nobody sees what’s coming/ But only the earth and, alas, the earth will have him” (Brecht 2003a:23) (“Denn es siehet der Mensch, den Nacken gebeugt, nicht, was auf ihn zukommt./ Nur die Erde sieht er, und ach, sie wird ihn bekommen”) (Brecht 1994b:214). Because Brecht’s Creon is wholly cruel and unjust, his actions are not subject to the moral debates on divine and state law that engaged Hegel. Creon plans a purge of subversive citizens, and he is also incriminated in the death of Polynices, whose death does not confirm the existence of fate. In the events preceding the play, he does not die in mutual fratricide, fighting for Argos against his brother Eteocles. Instead, Creon observes him fleeing, murders him, and takes his position as the new king. Haemon sides with Antigone against “Creon’s” war. Although Thebes’ destruction is certain, Creon insists on defending the city against Argos, whose women and children join the war efforts. Thus, Thebes is easily recognizable as another Stalingrad. Although Brecht’s far-reaching changes to the mythological material suggest the title Brecht’s Antigone, he nevertheless chooses to name his two sources, Sophocles and Hölderlin. Among these weighty alterations, Brecht introduces the theme of forgetting and recreates the figure of Antigone, a seer who not only mourns the dead, but becomes a source of memory. Brecht’s poem “Antigone” was first published in the 1948 theatre program (Hecht 1998:813). Implicitly connecting Weigel and the character of Antigone, the poem pays homage both to Weigel’s ability to reenter the German-speaking stage from the twilight of exile and to her determined remembrance of the atrocities of the war:

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The German poem closes with the word “Salut!”1 However, one can read the French exclamation as a greeting, rather than a “salute” with the military overtones of the English translation. As part of the theatre program, “Salut” appears to welcome Weigel back to the stage and out of the darkness of the past, a time in which she refused to give in to the “confusers” and never forgot “an insult.” In an interview, she dismisses self-pity as superfluous and incorrect, and stresses that she performed meaningful tasks in the exile years, ensuring Brecht a place to work and bringing up their two children (Hecht 1988:182). However, the three stanzas of the poem echo the themes of remembering as seeing, coming into the light, and forgetting as blindness, or choosing not to see. In the play, the last speech of the chorus reports Creon’s flight, but dwells on Antigone’s power of sight: “But she who saw everything/ Could help nobody but the enemy who now/ Is coming and quickly will wipe us out” (Brecht 2003a:51) (“Aber die alles sah/ Konnte nur noch helfen dem Feind, der jetzt/ Kommt und uns austilgt gleich”) (Brecht 1994b:241). Early on, Antigone opposes the Bacchus festival, a sham that celebrates and forgets a war not yet over. Whereas Hölderlin’s Antigone feels deeply sorry that she must go to her grave “unwept by loved ones,” Brecht highlights her determination to remember, in contrast to other citizens’ eagerness to forget the war in the Bacchus festival (Harrison 2003:63–65, Constantine 2001:96–97). He suggests there is also a false way of remembering by mythologizing literary texts, as the Nazis did with works such as Hölderlin’s, and by perpetuating false myths. Brecht shows how easy that is by hiding his invented myth of Lachmeus’ sons among familiar ones, and giving the mythological hero Pelias a new role (Brecht 2003a:27, Brecht

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1994b:218, Brecht 2003b:222). Remembering, Pelias inspires his brothers to rise against their enemies. Brecht’s text stages the act of forgetting as a manipulated cover-up. While Sophocles and Hölderlin both call for a forgetting of wartime devastation, Brecht’s elders hide behind masks on long sticks to announce, “And after the war/ Now let there be a forgetting” (Brecht 2003a:12) (“Und nach dem Kriege hier/ Macht die Vergessenheit aus! ”) (Brecht 1994b:203). To downplay Antigone’s death, Brecht’s Creon orders it to coincide with these drunken festivities, whereupon the intoxicated Elders praise wine as the “drink of forgetting” (Brecht 2003a:33) (“Trank des Vergessens”) (Brecht 1994d: 224). Even Brecht’s title links his name with Sophocles’ and Hölderlin’s in a dialectic of remembrance. The model book’s foreword stresses this age-old notion of intertextual response: The act of creation has become a collective creative process ... in which the original invention ... has lost much of its importance.... If the variations are undertaken in the right way they too take on the qualities of a model ... the model is not set up in order to fix the style of performance.... The emphasis is on development [Brecht 2003b:206].

According to the model book, the concept of adaptation therefore takes on more significance than original invention. While his frequent use of ideas from his collaborators still generates debate in Brecht scholarship, he freely admits to having often copied, also from the Greeks: “It is no disgrace, but an art. Or rather it needs to be developed into an art, to the point where there is no question of routine and rigidity” (Brecht 1964:224) (“Es ist nicht eine Schande, sondern eine Kunst. Das heißt, es muß zur Kunst entwickelt werden, und zwar dazu, daß keine Schablonisierung und Erstarrung eintritt”) (Brecht 1994c:388). He had written many successful adaptations before theorizing his comments on copying, for example reworking John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (The Threepenny Opera, 1928), Friedrich Schiller’s Die Jungfrau von Orleans (St. Joan of the Stockyards, 1931), and Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen’s Mutter Courage the Vagabond (Mutter Courage and her Children, 1941). In the Antigonemodell 1948, Brecht formally advanced his aesthetic of copies, and continued reworking existing texts until near the end of his life with his play Turandot or the Whitewasher’s Congress, 1953. The best way to use a model, he writes, is to change it (“So töricht eine Nichtbenutzung des Modells (etwa aus Ehrgeiz) wäre, so klar sollte es doch auch sein, daß man ein Modell am besten benutzt, indem man es verändert”) (Brecht 1994c:394). In 1951, Brecht states that one needs imagination not only to modify, but also to accept a source (“Sie sind nicht gemacht, das Denken zu ersparen, sondern es anzuregen; nicht dargeboten, das künstlerische Schaffen zu

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ersetzen, sondern es zu erzwingen. Nicht nur zur Abänderung der Vorlage, auch zur Annahme ist Phantasie nötig”) (Brecht 1994c:398). In Sophocles’ play, he observes, the masks, chorus, and reporting roles of messengers are suited to epic theatre. Brecht’s commitment to the notion of production models recalls Walter Benjamin’s 1936 argument that the mechanical reproducibility of artworks dispels the sense of aura or uniqueness of the so-called original: “the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition” (Benjamin 1985:221). Critically expanding Benjamin’s thoughts on how exact reproduction affects aesthetics, Brecht believes that working from a model, as opposed to starting from scratch, unleashes creativity. According to Brecht, changes made to a model, in other words the “negation of the data” do not allow one to forget the original (Brecht 1964:225) (“eine Negation von Vorhandenem”) (Brecht 1994c:389). On the contrary, imaginative copying generates a dialectic with what one might call negative space — what is omitted is also expressive. Brecht’s title, Die Antigone des Sophokles, evokes the Aristotelian aesthetic, but classical Greek theatre is present in his play only as the tradition that epic theatre seeks to dethrone. About fifty years after the Brechtian premiere in Chur, George Tabori’s imaginative copy of Brecht’s multi-layered adaptation enters a new sphere of irony familiar to Tabori audiences, long accustomed to dealing with scenes that undermine themselves and each other until they are indistinguishably tragic and comic. Tabori recalls that meeting Brecht in US exile and helping him translate part of his Galileo Galilei with Charles Laughton in 1947 inspired him to turn from prose to writing for the theatre (Tabori 2004:94– 95). Soon thereafter, Tabori translated a number of Brecht’s texts into English, and made theatre history in his Holocaust play, The Cannibals (New York 1968; Die Kannibalen, Berlin 1969), a response to Theodor Adorno’s famous remark about the barbarity of writing poetry after the Nazi years (Feinberg 2003:78, Adorno 1981:34). At age 92, his adaptation, Die Antigone des Sophokles. Nach der Hölderlinschen Übertragung von Bertolt Brecht premiered at the Berliner Ensemble’s Brecht Festival (25 August 2006). Shortly thereafter, Tabori received the German Theatre Prize for his lifetime work (12 September 2006). On his 93rd birthday (24 May 2007), the theatre celebrated him with a reading of his memoirs Autodafé, a film made for him by Michael Verhoeven, and his play Jubiläum. In the last several months before his death on 23 July 2007, the Berliner Ensemble also performed his latest play, Gesegnete Mahlzeit, his productions of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Die Juden and Samuel Beckett’s Warten auf Godot, and the theatre also hosted a guest performance of his Mutters Courage by the Hamburger Kammerspiele. Even Tabori’s titles reveal his provocative responses to source texts

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and to the past. For example, Mutters Courage recalls Brecht’s Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder (1949). In 1948, Brecht’s Antigone sought to renew postwar German-speaking theatre; Tabori’s staging explores in great depth many ways in which irony expresses the spirit of contradiction and conflict between “the elements” of image, text, and music in epic theatre. Although he also uses techniques that recall the Brechtian aesthetic, for instance direct appeal to the audience and frontal speeches instead of face-to-face dialog, Tabori singles out the potentially alienating ironic effects of incongruity. His creative copying builds on the contrarieties already present in his source texts. While Brecht’s adaptation maintains the basic situation of the Greek tragedy, showing that Creon destroys his family and seriously weakens the state precisely by upholding the state, Brecht also teases out the potentially pacifist message of Sophocles’ play. Tabori continues Brecht’s imaginative interfacing with previous versions of the play by forging new oppositions between what characters say and mean, their actions and their consequences, and other situational inconsistencies on stage, and thereby establishing an ironic relation to Brecht’s text. In Tabori’s Antigone, for example, forgetting is simply a sign of old age, not a manipulated cover-up of the past as in Brecht’s play. Although Tabori adds several scenes, texts, and songs, he does not show the scene in which Antigone buries Polynices. What is missing from Brecht’s play shines through a palimpsestic layering in Tabori’s staging. In other words, his changes allow earlier versions of the play to surface as negative space in a theatre of irony. As in Brecht’s adaptation of Sophocles’ play, Tabori’s version of Brecht’s text presents an Antigone who refuses to follow Creon’s orders that Polynices remain unburied. Both Brecht and Tabori twist the plot of the Greek text so that Creon, ruler of Thebes, plans victory celebrations to cover up the true situation — the city will lose the war. Brecht’s prolog of 1948 specifically recalls the Nazi era (and the impending defeat of Thebes suggests the losses at Stalingrad). In contrast, Tabori’s blind seer Tiresias (Traugott Buhre) delivers Brecht’s 1951 prolog, a timeless critique of war. The temporal abstraction of Tabori’s production is atypical; it does not directly refer to or make provocative jokes about the Third Reich and past or present anti–Semitism. Instead, Tabori expands the message of his play, accusing the perpetrators of meaningless political conflicts that wipe out young generations. At a time when corrupt and unjust politics surprises no one, Tabori focuses on human elements — the sacrifice and hopeless attempts of young people to defy authority, try as they may. Toward the end of Tabori’s version, Creon (Gerd Kunath) leaves the stage, seemingly ready to succumb to invading troops from Argos. As a Father Courage, he loses his two sons and his sister’s four children to the war. Of the other characters, only the ancient

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Tiresias, the elderly messenger maid (Ruth Glöss), and the two senile elders of the chorus (Ursula Höpfner and Martin Seifert) are still alive. During the course of the play, the Thebans virtually cross out their own city and their young people. The sparsely stylized set — two slightly elevated white walkways slanted toward the audience — represents the annihilation as a visual metaphor. The walkways intersect in the shape of a giant X that suggests not only the Theban streets, but also the imminent deaths of the characters. At one end, a white doorway serves as the entrance to the palace; at the far end a sword has been driven into the walkway. A toppled armchair and two overturned benches suggest war and dissent. They also predict the confusion to the storyline of ironies that Tabori adds in his adaptation. Surprisingly, Tabori brings Creon’s son Haemon (Alexander Doering, later Jörg Thieme) on stage a second time in a new scene that ambivalently recasts the role of the messenger maid, challenges our task of remembering Sophocles’ and Brecht’s texts, and generates much bewilderment in the audience. Before Haemon reappears, a wounded messenger reports that Creon’s son Megareus has been killed, possibly by Theban troops, and, moments later, dies at Creon’s feet. As in Brecht’s adaptation, a messenger maid soon arrives to tell Creon that Haemon committed suicide after discovering Antigone’s corpse. But in Tabori’s play, the elderly maid does not notice that at the same time she reports Haemon’s death, he saunters onto the walkway, sits down, and becomes absorbed in a book, deaf to her words. The scene delights in the irony it creates through these inconsistencies. The incongruities not only reinforce the artificiality of the stage events in Tabori’s rethinking of epic theatre, but they also become his production signature. The action exposes the messenger maid as an unreliable narrator, thereby undermining the general the status of truth in oral news reporting. We wonder if the story of Megareus’ death is also questionable. The maid exits, Haemon stands up, and — another unexpected addition — he recites the poem, “Antigone.” He threatens Creon with a gun, but shoots himself instead. Haemon is politically motivated to confront Creon, and is prepared for suicide, should he fail to change his father’s decision to continue the war: “The suicide is already planned as a last resort if he does not win over his father” (“Der Selbstmord ist als letzte Lösung schon geplant, wenn der Vater nicht umzustimmen ist”) (Doering 2007). In light of Haemon’s suicide, the last word of the poem is a leave-taking: “I speak the ‘Salut’ at the end of the poem as a farewell” (“Das ‘Salut’ am Ende des Gedichts spreche ich als Abschiedsgruß aus”) (Doering 2007). Embedded in this context, the poem points to darkness not only as the realm of the dead, but also as the nebulous nature of history and memory of the past. Where Brecht included the poem in the 1948 theatre program; Tabori inserts it strategically into his play. Here,

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instead of welcoming Weigel back to the theatre, the poem appears as a sort of ironic suicide note spoken to Creon. Likewise breaking with Brecht’s play, but nevertheless in the spirit of epic alienation, Ismene ( Judith Strößenreuter, in fall 07 Franziska Junge) reappears in the last scene and brings the play to a close. The SophocleanBrechtian Ismene reminds Antigone they are mere women and not fit to argue with men: “we are women/ And must not make a quarrel against men” (2003a:11) (“Weiber sind wir/ Und dürfen so nicht gegen Männer streiten”) (1994b:202). Turning out to be a much stronger character than Brecht’s, Tabori’s Ismene finally chooses to commit suicide like her sister, rather than assume the throne and its power structures. After stabbing herself with Creon’s sword, she flings it aside and utters the last words of the play as she climbs onto Antigone’s coffin to die, “Das Ende.” It is actually the end of Thebes, the royal family, and the young generation in the play. Ernst Schumacher, prominent German theatre critic and Brecht scholar who knew both Brecht and Tabori, evaluates the reappearances of Haemon and Ismene in Tabori’s production as more positive than negative (“Das würde ich zu den Versuchen rechnen, die ich eher positiv als negativ einschätze”) (Schumacher: 2007). Along with Haemon’s and Ismene’s second entrances, Tabori’s adaptation employs other techniques of epic alienation that comment ironically on the action, particularly in songs, music, and additional texts. Where Brecht inserts a new myth, Tabori injects several of his own poems, tragicomic texts about aging and dying with his own particular style of humor. While Antigone crouches behind him, Creon recites the first poem frontally to the audience: “Time is running out” (my translation) (“Die Zeit wird immer knapper”). He explains apologetically, “My dick keeps getting limper” (my translation) (“Der Schwanz wird immer schlapper”). After Haemon’s suicide near the end of the play, Creon picks up Haemon’s book and reads the poem “Travel light” (my translation) (“Reise leicht”) as he slowly leaves the Theban streets, asking himself, “What will you pack for your last trip?” (my translation) (“Was packst du für die letzte Reise?”). He has nothing to take with him, having lost his power, his people, his family, and his sexual prowess. In contrast to her uncle’s waning sexuality, Tabori’s Antigone (Christine Drechsler) is characterized by the presence of her desire. Weigel’s cool character was specifically designed to prevent audience identification, but instead of simply being taken captive as in Brecht’s version, Tabori’s Antigone falls for the sentry’s flirtatious advances. She sings along with his Italian love song, and he proceeds to tie her up in a dance that combines power, violence, and sexuality. When the dance is over, the white, wide band binding

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Antigone’s shoulders and arms echoes the familiar white X of the set. She will die. In another Tabori addition, Ismene sings “Plaisir d’amour,” a comment in French on Antigone’s plight, after watching the short seduction from Creon’s throne-like armchair. According to the lyrics, the pleasure of love lasts a moment, but unhappy love lasts a whole lifetime. However, in keeping with Tabori’s penchant for the ironies of the situation, and in light of Antigone’s imminent death, her sorrow will not last much longer than her love. Antigone’s death is staged for four different audiences on four sides of the stage as a short moment of melodrama. Brecht does not show this scene; in his play, the messenger maid tells the story of her suicide by hanging. Tabori’s production brings Antigone’s death scene as a staged event that reinforces both Brechtian awareness of theatre as a theatrical event and the playful contradictions of Tabori’s production. Three musicians (trombone, bass clarinet, clarinet) sit on two benches at the back of the stage, as musical accompaniment and witnesses to all the play’s action, occasionally standing up and stepping forward, playing joyful music at the beginning and mournful music at the end. During Antigone’s last moments, the musicians watch from the rear, the elders and the sentry from benches on stage right and left, and the theatre audience from their house seats. Antigone finds red carnations and a lily in the black coffin, and takes the drink offered by the sentry. Is it Brecht’s “drink of forgetting” (2003a:33) (“Trank des Vergessens”) (1994b:224)? After drinking, she climbs into the coffin, waves and smiles at the theatre audience before shuddering briefly and closing the lid. Instead of being disguised in the midst of the Bacchus Festival in Brecht’s version, her death becomes a public event in Tabori’s play, but no one seems to care, let alone protest. The sentry is part of Creon’s power politics, the musicians are onlookers, and the feeble elders are sympathizers. Tabori’s characters are not defined by their resolute, goal-oriented strength as in Brecht’s version, but instead by human weakness, particularly in Antigone’s seduction scene. Nevertheless, despite their fragility, by choosing death in this production, Antigone, Ismene, Haemon, and possibly Creon, ironically deny the workings of Greek fate, one of the main changes Brecht made to Sophocles’ play. Antigone is a compassionate and emotional woman who succumbs to her sexuality, and who tearfully and directly asks for help from audience members, suddenly lit by house lights. Creon is not merely the cruel leader of Brecht’s play who hides the loss of the war from Thebes’ citizens. He is a depraved and inept man with no more power than his overturned chair. Although he tries to cover his weakness with lies and brutality during the play, he seems to reflect for a moment on the devastation in the royal house before he exits for the last time, presumably to die.

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The general human weakness in Tabori’s characters extends to his chorus, two doddering stooped-over elders in heavy make-up, unsteady on their feet. Their fragility even precludes hiding behind the masks on long sticks that Brecht’s chorus used to represent the Bacchus festival. Excessive alcoholic consumption would be too much for them, and indeed, Tabori’s production refers only obliquely to the Bacchus festival. Instead of the austere stylization of Brecht’s adaptation, Tabori reduces the wisdom of the Brechtian-Sophoclean chorus to the senility of two solitary elderly people that correct, contradict, and bicker with each other. Similar to the messenger maid’s report, the banter of this couple casts doubt on the credibility of their statements. Delivering the famous speech of the chorus in the Sophoclean-Brechtian version, the male partner in Tabori’s play announces, “Monstrous, a lot” (“Ungeheur ist viel ”) and explains in wonder that man travels “[i]n winged and whirring houses” (“[i]n geflügelten sausenden Häusern”), whereupon his female companion translates for the audience matter-of-factly, as “ships” (“Schiffe”) (1994b:208, 2003a:17). She interrupts him after he speaks of “das Gäulegeschlecht,” apologizing for his flowery expression. He means “horses” (as in the English translation) (“Pferde”). She dismisses “Pontus’ nature that thrives in salt” (“des Pontos salzbelebte Natur”) as “fish” (“Fische”), deflating her partner’s poetic and eccentric descriptions (1994b:208, 2003a:17–18). Thus, in Tabori’s production, one of the most well-known speeches in Sophocles’ and Brecht’s plays turns into the minor dispute of an ancient couple. When the pair reappears on stage a while later, the male partner again launches into the text. It is apparently his favorite story. This time, his companion seems dimly aware that he doesn’t remember having delivered the speech, and she merely puts up with it. Forgetting is not only manipulated cover-up of the past as in Brecht’s play, but also part of human frailty. Through repetition and contradiction, the old couple adds the dimension of memory to the play’s gentle but persistent questioning of authority — news reporting, political power, the notion of destiny, and models. In the gaps between Sophocles’ and Hölderlin’s texts, Brecht created a copy of Antigone from his models; in the performed play and in the model book, Weigel’s copy became the new model. Her Antigone is the seer who denies fate and who remembers the past by coming out of the shadows. Tabori’s Antigone resists the Brechtian model of the play, recasting epic theatre as an ironically humorous study of power and weakness. Tabori adopts those techniques of epic theatre that help him develop a tragicomedy of incongruity and contradiction, with the exception of one strong gesture of alienation. During the premiere in the Probebühne, a small, intimate theatre at the Berliner Ensemble, Tabori sat in his conspicuous red plush wing chair at the edge of the stage, smiling approval. During the next twenty perfor-

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Figure 1. George Tabori’s signature wing chair: Presence in absence.

mances, the throne-like chair was empty, but as negative space it remained visible to the audience, evoking both Tabori’s presence and Brecht’s absence (Figure 1). On 11 April 2007, after eight months at the Probebühne, when the production was moved to the main theatre, the “Tabori chair” remained behind. Several weeks before his death, when George Tabori asked to visit the Berliner Ensemble, admirers quickly brought the chair from the Probebühne down into the beer garden for him, where he greeted many theatre colleagues (Stadelmaier). Tabori’s chair is empty again. We find him in his Antigone, chuckling next to an afterimage of the Brechtian aesthetic and remembering Brecht’s comment that one best uses a model by changing it (“daß man ein Modell am besten benutzt, indem man es verändert”) (1994c:394). VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY

Notes 1. Brecht’s poem “Antigone” (1948): “Komm aus dem Dämmer und geh/ Vor uns her eine Zeit/ Freundliche, mit dem leichten Schritt/ Der ganz Bestimmten, schrecklich/ Den Schrecklichen./ Abgewandte, ich weiß/ Wie du den Tod gefürchtet hast, aber/ Mehr noch fürchtetest du/ Unwürdig Leben./ Und ließest den Mächtigen/ Nichts durch, und glichst dich/ Mit den Verwirrern nicht aus, noch je/ Vergaßest du Schimpf und über der Untat wuchs/ Ihnen kein Gras./ Salut! ” (Brecht 1994a:191).

References Cited Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund. “Cultural Criticism and Society.” In Prisms, 17–34. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981. Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, 217–251. New York: Schocken Books, 1985.

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Brecht, Bertolt. “Antigone.” In Werke: Grosse kommentierte Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe, Volume 15, edited by Werner Hecht et al., 191. Frankfurt a. M.: Aufbau, Suhrkamp, 1994. (1994a) _____. “Die Antigone des Sophokles. Nach der Hölderlinschen Übertragung für die Bühne bearbeitet.” In Werke: Grosse kommentierte Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe, Volume 8, edited by Werner Hecht et al., 193–242, 488–505. Frankfurt a. M.: Auf bau, Suhrkamp, 1994. (1994b) _____. “The Antigone of Sophocles.” In Bertolt Brecht: Plays, Poetry and Prose. Collected Plays, edited by Tom Kuhn and David J. Constantine, translated by David J. Constantine. 1–51. London: Methuen, 2003. (2003a) _____. “The Antigone of Sophocles: Texts by Brecht,” edited by Tom Kuhn and David J. Constantine, translated by David J. Constantine. In Bertolt Brecht: Plays, Poetry and Prose. The Collected Plays, 197–218. London: Methuen, 2003. (2003b). _____. “Die Benutzung des Modells.” In Werke: Grosse kommentierte Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe, Volume 25, edited by Werner Hecht et al., 386–398. Frankfurt a. M.: Auf bau, Suhrkamp, 1994. (1994c) _____. “Does Use of the Model Restrict the Artist’s Freedom?” In Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, edited by John Willett, 222–226. New York: Hill and Wang, 1964. _____. “Journal Berlin. 22.10.48–20.2.49.” In Werke: Grosse kommentierte Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe, Volume 27, edited by Werner Hecht et al., 277–300. Frankfurt a. M.: Auf bau, Suhrkamp, 1994. (1994d) _____. Kriegsfibel. 5th (first expanded) ed. Berlin: Eulenspiegel, 1994. (1994e) Constantine, David, ed. Hölderlin’s Sophocles: Oedipus & Antigone, translated by David Constantine. Northumberland: Bloodaxe, 2001. Doering, Alexander. “E-Mail Correspondence.” 2007. Feinberg, Anat. George Tabori. München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2003. Harrison, John, and Judith A·eck, eds. Sophocles: Antigone. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Hecht, Werner, ed. Brecht im Gespräch: Diskussionen, Dialoge, Interviews. 1st ed. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1975. _____, ed. Brechts Antigone des Sophokles. 1st ed. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1988. _____, ed. Brecht Chronik: 1898–1956. 2nd ed. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1998. _____, ed. Brecht Chronik 1898–1956 Ergänzungen. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2007. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. “Die alten Götter im Unterschiede zu den neuen.” In Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik II, edited by Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel, 52–62. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1996. (1996a) _____. “Die konkrete Entwicklung der dramatischen Poesie und ihrer Arten.” In Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik III, edited by Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel, 538–574. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1996. (1996b). _____. “Die Religion der Schönheit oder die griechische Religion.” In Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion: Teil 2, edited by Walter Jaeschke, 534–60. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1985. _____. “Schicksal des Sokrates.” In Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie I, edited by Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel, 496–516. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1996. (1996c).

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Kugli, Ana, and Michael Opitz, eds. “Modellbücher.” In Brecht Lexikon, 189–190. Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 2006. Neubert-Herwig, Christa. “Antigone 1948: Helene Weigels Weg zurück auf die Bühne.” In Helene Weigel 100: The Brecht Yearbook 25, edited by Judith Wilke. Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000. 215–218. (2000a). _____. “Gespräch über das Antigone-Projekt mit Valeria Steinmann, Ettora Cella und Olga Gloor.” In Helene Weigel 100: The Brecht Yearbook 25, edited by Judith Wilke, 218–229. Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000. (2000b). Paolucci, Anne, and Henry Paolucci, eds. Hegel on Tragedy. Smyra, DE: Griffon House, 2001. Schumacher, Ernst. Interview with the author. 4 July 2007. Stadelmaier, Gerhard. “Sein letzter Auftritt.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (25 July 2007). Tabori, George. Mein Kampf, edited by Thomas Kopfermann, translated by Ursula Grützmacher-Tabori. Leipzig: Ernst Klett Schulbuchverlag, 2004.

14 Shaw’s St. Joan (1923) 1

A Platonian Tragedy? P. S. Sri Abstract The critical assessment of St. Joan ranges from seeing it as an Aristotelian tragedy with a difference to dismissing it as “a comedy, with more than a dash of melodrama.” Curiously, the play has been examined and judged by looking at it solely through the lens of Aristotle’s Poetics. An alternate view is possible if we apply Plato’s famous Myth of the Cave to St. Joan. Prisoners inside a cave see shadows on the wall and hear echoes; they mistake the shadows and the echoes for reality. One who is fortunately freed from the cave moves out into the real world of bright sunlight outside. What would happen if one were to go back into the cave? Inevitably, there would be a tragic outcome. St. Joan is, therefore, tragedy à la Plato. “This shows how dangerous it is to be too good.” —Apocryphal comment of Shaw on the Assassination of Mahatma Gandhi in Edmund Fuller’s George Bernard Shaw: Critic of Western Morale, 1950, p. 72.

In his detailed Preface to St. Joan, Shaw argues that “an irresistible force” in Joan met “an immovable obstacle” in the Church and “developed the heat that consumed poor Joan.” (Shaw 1946:29) Further, he states that he has tried to maintain his drama “at the level of high tragedy.” He classifies Joan’s burning as one among “judicial murders, pious murders” and points out that “this contradiction at once brings an element of comedy into the tragedy: the angels may weep at the murder, but the gods laugh at the murderers.” (Shaw 1946:44) Interpretations of St. Joan are legion. At one end of the spectrum, we find Louis L. Martz who, in his classic essay, “The Saint as Tragic Hero,” maintains that a “double vision” of tragedy has been set forth by Joyce in his Portrait of the Artist (Martz 1955:153). At the other end of the spectrum, we find critics dismissing St. Joan as “a comedy, with more than a dash of melo185

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drama in the scene describing Joan’s martyrdom” (Allison and others 1986: 586). Harold Bloom disparages the play as “overwhelmingly Protestant” and asks plaintively if Joan is “anything except an embodiment of the Life Force” (Bloom 1987:6–7). Louis Crompton applauds St. Joan as “one of the supreme statements of religious faith in a post–Christian world,” but stops short of plumbing its essential tragic undercurrents (Bloom 1987:51). Charles A. Berst maintains that the play “incorporates both tragedy and comedy,” but does not underscore the poignancy and the universality of the tragicomedy (Bloom 1987: 73–99). William Searle suggests merely that in tackling the sainthood of Joan, Shaw the skeptic evolved “a highly original mystique of the role of imagination in history” (Bloom 1987: 114). In his meticulously researched book on Saint Joan, Arnold Silver delves into the “Literary and Historical Context” of the play, gives an exhaustive scene-by-scene analysis of the play, appends copious notes and selected bibliography. However, he does not explore the tragic dimensions of the play and contents himself by extolling Shaw for creating out of “divergent emotions” as well as personal and historical “conflicts,” “one of his most deeply felt and enduring masterpieces” (Silver 1993:108). Feminist critiques of St. Joan abound. Let me give just a couple of examples. Allison, Carr and Eastman point out that “Shaw makes a large point of his pro-feminism in portraying Joan as a forerunner of emancipated women” (Allison and others 1986:586). Ellen Gainor takes great pains to establish that Shaw dramatizes in Joan “a character of both androgynous personality and masculine action” (Gainor 1991:137–138); she even goes so far as to hint that Joan was Shaw’s “Superwoman” (Gainor 1991:209). In her bird’s eye review of the politics embedded in all the major plays of Shaw, Judith Evans echoes Shaw’s contention in his Preface that Joan was “an early Protestant martyr” and postulates that Joan’s voices, in “the secular language of Shaw,” become “the voices of her own inspiration,” or, “in terms of creative evolution, the voice of the will or the Life Force” (Evans 2003:151). Indeed, if one adopts a post-colonial stance, it is quite possible to see Joan as a champion not only of Nationalism, but also of anti-colonialism. Clearly, St. Joan is a play with multiple facets, a veritable treasure-house of ideas and perspectives. Nevertheless, the nub of the play, as Shaw underscores in his Preface, is the tragic conflict between “an irresistible force” in Joan and “an immovable obstacle” in the Church (Shaw 1946:29). It is worthwhile, therefore, to re-examine St. Joan and try to understand the exact nature and scope of the tragedy embedded in the play. Martz’s view is worth reviewing at some length. He quotes Stephen

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Dedalus from Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Aristotle has not defined pity and terror. I have. Pity is the feeling, which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the human sufferer. Terror is the feeling, which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings, and unites it with the secret cause [Martz 1955:153].

Martz construes this somewhat cocky statement of the young Stephen to mean that tragedy demands “both the human sufferer and the secret cause” (Martz 1955:153). He goes on to argue that in order to see plays such as St. Joan as tragic, “we must abandon the concept of a play built upon an ideal Aristotelian hero, and look instead for a tragic experience that arises from an interaction between a hero who represents the secret cause [God?], and the other characters, who represent the human sufferers” (Martz 1955:158). Dismissing “Joan’s apparent resemblance to the Aristotelian hero: her extreme self-confidence, her brashness, her appearance of rash impetuosity” as “a piece of Shavian irony,” Martz proceeds to stand Aristotelian tragedy on its head: And so the hubris is not Joan’s but Everyman’s. The characters who accuse Joan of pride and error are in those accusations convicting themselves of the pride of self-righteousness and the errors of human certitude [Martz 1955:160].

We cannot but wonder whether Martz, in his enthusiasm for Aristotle, has not stretched his discourse on tragedy beyond its parameters and twisted St. Joan itself in the process. Moreover, despite his moving testimony to the power of Shaw’s play, Martz ends on a rather disparaging note. He concludes that “if we will not demand an Aristotelian hero, and if we may view the area of tragedy as a sort of scale or spectrum ranging between the two poles of doubt and affirmation,” we might “even find a place for Bernard Shaw,” “perhaps hanging on by his hands to the very rim of tragedy” (Martz 1955:176–177). Thus, the critical assessment of St. Joan ranges from distorting it as an Aristotelian tragedy with a difference (Martz 1955:150–177) to dismissing it as more or less a comical farce (Allison and others 1986:586). What is curious though is that the play has been examined and judged by looking at it solely through the lens of Aristotle’s Poetics. Shaw does evoke Aristotle in the coronation scene. The Archbishop admonishes Joan for her “sin of pride”: “The old Greek tragedy is rising among us. It is the chastisement of hubris” (Shaw 1946:106). One suspects, however, that Shaw’s allusion to Aristotle is heavily ironic and that he is merely setting up the Aristotelian vision of tragedy to supplant it with his own. At

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any rate, it is useful to review the salient features of Aristotelian tragedy and to apply them to St. Joan to see if the play measures up to Aristotle’s vision. Aristotle considers tragedy to be the dramatic representation of serious action, “something that matters, done by people who count (e.g., King Oedipus’ discovery that he has killed his father and married his mother) (Barnet and others 1981:3). At its centre, it has the tragic protagonist, who towers heads and shoulders above the rest of humankind, due to character and achievement. The internal cause of the protagonist’s tragic downfall is that the protagonist’s character has a tragic flaw (hamartia), which usually takes the form of pride (hubris). The external cause(s) of tragedy are the ironic reversals of fortune (peripeteia) in the life and career of the protagonist. In combination, the internal and external causes — pride and ironic reversals of fortune — not only bring about the downfall (nemesis) of the protagonist, but also precipitate a catastrophe in the protagonist’s milieu. Before the tragic end, however, the protagonist usually experiences a moment of self-knowledge (anagnorisis), which enables the protagonist to kick against the pricks, as it were, and triumph morally or spiritually over his misfortune. The audience witnessing the tragedy undergoes a therapeutic purging (catharsis) of the emotions of pity and terror — pity due to their identification with and sympathy for the protagonist experiencing a tragic downfall and terror due to the feeling that “There but for the Grace of God go I!”2 It is possible to make a case for reading St. Joan as an Aristotelian tragedy by applying these criteria. Joan, though she is a simple country lass, does stand out above all others due to her honesty and humor. She has tremendous faith in her “voices” which, she is convinced, convey God’s commands to her. Her faith remains unshaken — except for her brief recantation during her trial — through all her “miracles,” victories and ordeals. Ironically, the other characters who interact with her accuse her of pride. “The old Greek tragedy is rising among us,” warns the Archbishop. “It is the chastisement of hubris” (Shaw 1946:106). “And how can you say I am disobedient when I always obey my voices, because they come from God?” asks Joan brusquely (Shaw 1946:110). The Archbishop declares, however, that “all the voices that come to you are the echoes of your own wilfulness,” and rails against her, thundering, “You stand alone; absolutely alone, trusting to your own conceit, your own ignorance, your own headstrong presumption, your own impiety” (Shaw 1946:110–111). Cauchon believes the girl to be “inspired, but diabolically inspired” (Shaw 1946:92). Even Dunois, her sole friend, thinks she is “a bit cracked” (Shaw 1946:103). Joan’s simple faith challenges the established Institutions — the Church and the State — so that they rise up against her in outrage and proclaim that this girl is insufferable (figure 1).

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Figure 1. Joan crushed by the Church.

Archibald Henderson comments penetratingly on this phenomenon: In this play, the greatest forces of the age tensely clash over the Maid. The Catholic Church, the Inquisition, the Holy Roman Empire, Feudalism and Nationalism, Protestantism and Ecclesiasticism: these mighty institutions and faiths, embodied as stage figures, wage war to the death over the devoted head of a gallant girl. “What more do you want for a tragedy as great as that of Prometheus?” Shaw observed to me. “All the forces that bring about the catastrophe are on the grandest scale, and the individual soul on which they press is of the most indomitable force and temper” [Henderson 1956:603].

There are ironic reversals of fortune in Joan’s life and career. After she raises the siege of Orleans and succeeds in crowning Charles in the cathedral at Rheims, she wants to press on to Paris and drive every Englishman out of France. One by one, however, everyone condemns or abandons her, so that her greatest moment of victory turns into one of bitter defeat. Much later, during her trial, worn out in body and spirit, she trusts the Church rather than God and signs her recantation, confessing “to the sin of disobedience, to the sin of pride and to the sin of heresy” (Shaw 1946:136). She expects to be set free (figure 2 on page 190). Ironically, she is condemned “to eat the bread of sorrow and drink the water of a·iction” and to spend the rest of her life in prison (Shaw 1946:137). Outraged, she rises up in protest, tears up her recantation, realizes the

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Figure 2. Joan on trial.

Church’s counsel is “of the devil,” and reaffirms her faith in God (Shaw 1946:138). Not surprisingly, she is condemned as a heretic and burnt at the stake. Apparently, then, Joan’s pride, along with the ironic reversals in her life, bring about her nemesis and has a catastrophic effect on all who witness her martyrdom. True, our hearts are wrung with pity as we see her being abandoned and destroyed step by step. We may even exclaim in awe or terror, “There but for the grace of God go I!” Nevertheless, as we watch the conflict between Joan’s simple faith and the worldly power of the Church and the State, we are not quite convinced that Joan is guilty of pride. Rather, those who accuse her seem to be on an ego trip. Moreover, she is so full of innocence, energy and charm that we are compelled to echo the words of the French captain in the opening scene: “There is something about her... Something... I think the girl herself is a bit of a miracle” (Shaw 1946:56–57). Moreover, the ironies surrounding her terrible end are not wholly tragic. With grim satisfaction, Warwick observes laconically “that it is all over.” Ladvenu replies, with pungent irony, that “It may have only just begun” (Shaw 1946:142). Later, when the Executioner declares, “You have heard the last of her,” Warwick is compelled to remark wryly, “The last of her? Hm! I wonder!” (Shaw 1946:143). The truth of the matter is that though Joan is burnt at the stake and her earthly life may be over, by a sublime irony, her career as a divine saint has just begun. This is borne out in the Epilogue, in

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which everyone who abandoned her or accused her, bow before her apparition and acknowledge her to be a divinely inspired saint. Henderson quotes Shaw’s comments in his program “Note” on “the indispensability of the Epilogue”: The Epilogue is obviously not a representation of an actual scene, or even of a recorded dream; but it is none the less historical. Without it the play would be only a sensational tale of a girl who was burnt, leaving the spectators plunged in horror, despairing of humanity. The true tale of Saint Joan is a tale with a glorious ending; and any play that did not make this clear would be an insult to her memory [Henderson 1956:600].

However, the Epilogue ends on a satiric note, for no one wants Joan to return to life. The world, it seems, has no use for live saints; it prefers dead saints. So, the curtain closes, with Joan’s poignant cry ringing in our ears: “O God that madest this beautiful earth, when will it be ready to receive Thy saints? How long, O Lord, how long?” (Shaw 1946: 159). We discover, therefore, that Shaw’s St. Joan is not quite what it seems. It is not tragedy, as Aristotle envisioned it. Should we then dismiss it as a failed tragedy? Or should we, like Martz, superimpose Joyce on Aristotle and distend Aristotle’s definition of tragedy like India rubber, in order to force St. Joan into the Aristotelian mould? Not necessarily. An alternate view, which is simple and straightforward, is possible, if we bring Plato’s famous Myth of the Cave to bear upon St. Joan. To dramatize his idea that the awareness of the Good is distinct from the perception of the shadowy appearances of this mundane world, Plato’s Socrates has recourse to an allegory. Prisoners inside a cave see on the wall in front of their eyes the shadows of objects behind them and hear echoes, not real voices. Mistaking the shadows and the echoes for reality, they become quite skilled in dealing with their illusory world. One who is fortunately freed from the cave moves out into the real world of bright sunlight outside. What would happen if he were to go back into the cave? Coming suddenly out of sunlight into the cave, would not his eyes certainly be “filled with darkness”? Inevitably, there would be a tragic outcome: He might be required once more to deliver his opinion on those shadows, in competition with the prisoners who had never been released, while his eyesight was still dim and unsteady; and it might take some time to become used to the darkness. They would laugh at him and say that he had gone up only to come back with his sight ruined; it was worth no one’s while even to attempt the ascent. If they could lay hands on the man who was trying to set them free and lead them up, they would kill him [Cornford 1941: 230–231].

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Plato’s Socrates points out that those who have attained a vision of Good would be “reluctant to manage the affairs of men,” for their “souls long to spend all their time in the upper world.” He proceeds to probe further: “Nor, again, is it at all strange that one who comes from the contemplation of divine things to the miseries of human life should appear awkward and ridiculous when, with eyes still not dazed and not yet accustomed to the darkness, he is compelled, in a law-court or elsewhere, to dispute about the shadows of justice or the images that cast those shadows, and to wrangle over the notions of what is right in the minds of men who have never beheld Justice itself ” (Cornford 1941:231–232). We have here then a recurrent human problem. What is the world to do with men or women of vision whose apparently supernatural ability to detect blindness born out of ignorance bring them into conflict with the views and practices of the Establishment? If these rare individuals persist in behaving according to their personal vision, they are inevitably on a collision course with the collective judgment of the race. So, they must be poisoned like Socrates, enslaved like Plato, crucified like Jesus, or burnt like Joan. As a further defense against their penetrating insights into Truth, society can always canonize them! Thus, society ensures that the spiritual wisdom of those who have been destroyed in body may be posthumously revered, but never followed. Joan is a heretic in the eyes of both the Church and the Feudal Structure. By claiming that she receives instructions directly from God, Joan sets herself up in opposition to the awesome authority of the Church. Ironically, it is Warwick who underscores this threat and gives religious heresy a name: It is the protest of the individual soul against the interference of priest or peer between the private man and his God. I should call it Protestantism if I had to find a name for it [Shaw 1946:98–99].

By insisting that she has been divinely empowered to elevate the king above the feudal barons and to make the French-speaking people a nation, Joan is a threat to the self-serving feudal structure. Ironically, it is Cauchon who highlights this threat and names what Warwick calls “The Maid’s secular heresy”: Call this side of her heresy Nationalism if you will: I can find you no better name for it [Shaw 1946:99].

By a stroke of sheer dramatic genius, Shaw makes Warwick and Cauchon voice each other’s fears. In other words, because of her extraordinary vision and her eminent common sense, Joan is a woman very much in advance of

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her time. She has seen the Light. Hence, she threatens those who not only prefer to dwell in the darkness of their “cave,” but also seek to perpetuate the status quo. The world has no choice but to get rid of her. Yet another intriguing aspect of St. Joan is that there are no base villains. Once again, Henderson’s observations are noteworthy: One of the salient features of the play is Shaw’s pre-eminent fairness, his unprejudiced presentation of the trial as just and legitimate. “There were no villains in the tragedy of Joan’s death,” Shaw has stated. “She was entirely innocent, but her excommunication was genuine act of faith and piety; and her execution followed inevitably” [Henderson 1956:603].

With his keen perspicacity, Shaw has discerned that the tragic story of Joan would be devoid of meaning altogether if it is read as one in which an innocent “Lamb” is slaughtered by evil ‘butchers.’ Instead, he presents Cauchon, the Bishop of Beauvais, the Inquisitor and all those with them in the long drawn-out sham of a trial as fools who act out of ignorance born of selfimportance or pride. They are all, as Joan comments penetratingly in the Epilogue, “as honest a lot of poor fools as ever burned their betters.” (Shaw 1946:148) In terms of Plato’s myth, they are prisoners who are so caught up with and certain of the shadows on the wall of their cave that they simply cannot see the Light, even when it comes down to them from above. This is supported by a point discussed by Shaw himself in his lengthy Preface. He argues that inborn genius provokes fear and hate, whereas shallow abilities, especially in the realm of military leadership and politics, are welcomed and even praised. We readily reward and elevate the soldiers, while we gladly get rid of the rare seers and the saints in our midst. Or, as Shaw says more pithily, “it is far more dangerous to be a saint than to be a conqueror” (Shaw 1946:9). “But Plato is employing allegory,” cry the voices of dissent. “He is not expounding tragedy.” Not so. Plato is simultaneously exploring a philosophical idea and delineating a tragic action. Plato might almost be relating in metaphor what happened to his beloved master, Socrates, thereby prefiguring and forecasting what would happen to a Christ or a Joan on the illusory stage of the world centuries later. In short, even though he does not call it tragedy, Plato is projecting his own vision of tragedy — a vision that is penetrating by its very simplicity. Specifically, then, St. Joan is tragedy à la Plato. It is tragedy, under the aspect of eternity, as God sees it: the characters act out their different roles simultaneously, the Inquisitor, Cauchon, Ladvenu, Warwick and the others are all sinning in egotistic ignorance, the common people are all suffering in silence and Joan is martyring herself. The blindness in the play, therefore,

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is not mundane, but spiritual. The blindness is not in Joan but in Everyman, who fails to recognize the Word when it becomes flesh. “Must then,’ cries Cauchon in the Epilogue, “a Christ perish in torment in every age to save those that have no imagination?” (Shaw 1946:154). Such a reading places St. Joan squarely in the tradition of religious drama in English Literature, a worthy successor to Milton’s Samson Agonistes and a stunning predecessor to Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral. Also, it makes St. Joan universal and perennial. Wherever humans entertain, like Hamlet, the notion of a divinity that shapes our ends, the play is valid. As long as humans puzzle, like Eliot of the Four Quartets, over the “intersection of the timeless with time” (Eliot 1952:136), the play is relevant. The Platonian notion of tragedy, it might be further argued, frees the entire genre of tragedy from a narrow and confining Aristotelian formula and takes it beyond the mundane world of appearances into an eternal dimension. ROYAL MILITARY COLLEGE OF CANADA

Notes 1. I have, in the puckish Shavian tradition, coined the word “Platonian” to accord with “Aristotelian.” 2. For this version of tragedy, refer to Types of Drama, 3–9.

References Cited Allison, Alexander W., Carr, Arthur J. and Eastman, Arthur M. ed. Masterpieces of the Drama. Fifth edition. N.Y.: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1986. Barnet, Sylvan, Berman, Morton and Burto, William ed. Types of Drama, Third Edition. Toronto: Little, Brown and Co., 1972. Bloom, Harold, ed. George Bernard Shaw’s “St. Joan.” N.Y.: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987. Cornford, F.M., tr. The Republic of Plato. London: Oxford University Press, 1941. Eliot, T.S. “The Dry Salvages,” Four Quartets. In The Complete Poems and Plays 1909–1950. N.Y.: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1952. Evans, Judith. The Politics and Plays of Bernard Shaw. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co., 2003. Fuller, Edmund. George Bernard Shaw: Critic of Western Morale. London: Charles Scribner’s Sons Ltd., 1950. Gainor, J. Ellen. Shaw’s Daughters: Dramatic and Narrative Constructions of Gender. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1991. Henderson, Archibald. George Bernard Shaw: Man of the Century. N.Y.: AppletonCentury-Crofts, Inc., 1956.

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Martz, Louis L. “The Saint as Tragic Hero: St. Joan and Murder in the Cathedral. In Tragic Themes in Western Literature, ed. Cleanth Brooks, 150–178. London: Oxford University Press, 1955. Shaw, Bernard. St. Joan. Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin Books Ltd., 1946. Silver, Arnold. St. Joan: Playing with Fire. N.Y.: Twayne Publishers, 1993.

15 Adapting an Internet Comic Strip for the Stage James Utz Abstract This paper examines the fall 2006 touring production of Get Your War On by the Austin, Texas–based company Rude Mechanicals. Get Your War On originally appeared in 2001 in the form of a web-based comic strip written by David Rees. Its images consisted almost entirely of public-domain clip-art figures who would adopt the same pose in frame after frame of the strip. The paper examines the Rude Mechanicals’ dramaturg y and the challenges inherent in adapting a static, two-dimensional artwork for the stage, also drawing comparisons between this recent production and the group’s most widely known work, 1999’s Lipstick Traces. Lipstick Traces is a 1989 book written by Greil Marcus that examines what he terms the “Secret History of the Twentieth Century,” a history where Dada, the Situationist International, and Punk Rock comprise a tradition wherein art attempts to resist its own commodification. One of the Situationists’ tactics was that of détournement, which involved the appropriation of images and text and negating this material with added or rewritten commentary. Frequently the Situationists would rewrite the text in the speech bubbles of comic strips. There is a connection between Situationist art and what Rees is attempting with Get Your War On, a strip where bland, innocuous office-workers trade profanity-laced statements of anger and panic as a response to the Global War on Terror. This paper examines the Rude Mechanicals’ seeming interest in Situationist techniques, and how this interest corresponds with Situationist stances on politics and art in general.

In the fall of 2006, and the winter of 2007, the Rude Mechanicals (or Rude Mechs), an Austin-based theatre company, toured a play entitled Get Your War On, staging performances of the play in Marfa, Texas, as well as Houston, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and New York. The play itself is the product of the usual “collective dramaturgy” and “text wrangling” that the Rude Mechanicals practice (Lynn and Sides 2003:111), but Get Your War On originates from a source that is highly recognizable to some: the 196

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internet comic strip of the same name, from which the play’s dialogue is taken verbatim. Both the strip and the company that produced it for the stage bear traces of the influence of an obscure 1960s Parisian group called the Situationist International; this paper examines the implications and limitations of these connections. In 2001, David Rees was posting sporadic editions of two different comic strips on his website. One, called My New Fighting Technique is Unstoppable, featured clip-art martial arts images augmented by ironic dialogue. A spin-off, My New Filing Technique Is Unstoppable, utilized clip-art images of office workers engaging in occasionally foul-mouthed banter about day to day working life. These images, according to Rees, were taken from a public-domain collection of images offered by Dover Publications (Rees 2006). The collection in question is titled Ready-to-Use Office and Business Illustrations. In October, 2001, when the United States invaded Afghanistan, Rees began posting a new strip on his website. Entitled Get Your War On, this strip featured the office-workers from Ready-to-Use Office and Business Illustrations discussing the World Trade Center attack, landmines, anthrax, and the larger implications of the war on terror, but in highly charged and irreverent language. Images of white-collar workers speaking to one another on the phone, gazing at spreadsheets, and sharing donuts in the break room were juxtaposed with dialogue that sounded like anything but business as usual around the office: MAN SEATED

MAN

MAN

DESK: You know what I love? I love how we’re dropping food aid packages into a country that’s one big fucking minefield! That’s good! STANDING IN OFFICE: Well, it turns the relief effort into a fun game for the Afghan people — a game called “see if you have any fucking arms left to eat the food we dropped after you step on a landmine trying to retrieve it!” SEATED AT DESK: Right! Or maybe they could play “See if, when you step on the landmine, the food package flies into your fucking decapitated head as it sails through the air!” [Rees 2001]. AT

With these words, the strip established a tone that it has maintained throughout the five years of its existence. Increasing popularity has led to publication in Rolling Stone and the release of two books, and ultimately to Rude Mechs’ adaptation of the work into a play in the fall of 2006. When asked in an interview why the company was drawn to Rees’ work,

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Kirk Lynn, a co-creator and performer of the piece, answered that the prefabricated, innocuous quality of the images and their subversion by the dialogue was an attraction. “I don’t think the strip would work as well if it was hand-drawn,” Lynn said. “There’s this office where all these people get along, and they’re hard-working and they’re good people,” he continued, adding that it was very affecting “to put our real language in the mouth of these idealized people. ‘I am in a suit, I am a good person, I represent everything that’s good ... [and] all I can say is, fuck, I’m scared, I don’t know what the fuck is going on’” (Lynn 2006). Rees’ idea of combining disparate, found elements to enact critique in a popular medium is nothing new. The Dadaists did it, and more recently this tactic was the preferred method of the Paris-based anti-art group Situationist International. The Situationist International, which existed between 1957 and 1972, and whose ideas provided fuel for the Paris riots of 1968, was a group of artists and theorists who abandoned traditional artistic practices and instead urged the public to resist what it called “the spectacle.” Spectacle was the Situationist International’s term for consumer society’s “unending discourse about itself.” It is the term for mediated rather than direct existence; in its simplest form, it is human agency represented rather than experienced. In fact, Raoul Vaneigem, a member of the Situationist International, wrote that: “The spectacle is a museum of images, a showroom of stick figures. It is also an alternative theatre” (1967:128). Since artistic activity can easily fall under the influence of the spectacle, or even be complicit with it, traditional methods of making art had to be abandoned in favor of something called détournement. Détournement was a method of creating propaganda by altering found images or images of pre-existing art works. It was, as Greil Marcus writes, “the theft of aesthetic artefacts from their contexts and their diversion into contexts of one’s own [design]” (1989:168). Détournement literally means diversion, and seeks to turn spectacular language upon itself to create a nonsensical but highly seductive language of revolt. It removes messages from their original contexts and juxtaposes them with other re-contextualized elements so as to force the reader or viewer to doubt ideas that the spectacle would otherwise attempt to portray as certainties. As a tool, détournement could be utilized by anyone. In the hands of the Situationist International, it was deliberately lowbrow in its treatment of content as well as craft. Often it manifested itself as comic strips with the speech bubbles rewritten. The Situationists intended to use détournement as an accessible and popular means of disseminating theory. When asked if Rude Mechanicals acknowledged the Situationists as an influence on the group’s work, Kirk Lynn answered, “absolutely” (Lynn

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2006). This should come as no surprise, since in 1999 the Rude Mechanicals had attempted a staging of one of the definitive works on the Situationist International, Greil Marcus’ Lipstick Traces, an ambitious, 500-page attempt to link the Situationists to the Dadaists who had gone before them and the English punk rockers who came later. But the plays themselves exhibit significant differences. Lipstick Traces stages inherently presentational situations. As Patricia Ybarra writes, “most of the events that the Rude Mechs chose to stage ... were performances: auditions, cabaret acts, public lectures, movie screenings, and TV appearances” (2005:8). On the other hand, Get Your War On transforms non-dramatic dialogue and non-performative situations into a stage play. At the same time, this transformation refuses to capitulate to the illusionistic demands of the theatrical medium. In Get Your War On, Rude Mechanicals attempt to expose the mechanics of theatre and to subvert the expectations we bring to a representational staging. The company performs Get Your War On with a minimal set. At the Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in Washington, D.C., for example, the fly rail was visible at the side of the stage. Three long folding tables comprised the bulk of the set. On these folding tables sat five overhead projectors and five microphone stands. Upstage of the tables there was a white screen onto which Rees’ clip-art characters were projected from the overheads. All of the wiring — the sound cables from the microphones and the power cables from the overhead projectors — was plainly visible. The overhead transparencies were mounted and manipulated by the actors themselves. Kirk Lynn explains that the motivation behind the presentational setting was simple. At first, he says, the company thought, “We’ll just get cubicle stuff and pretend we’re in an office.” According to Lynn, though, the company quickly came to the conclusion that its approach was inappropriate. “It was just horrible....We went and saw David Rees read, he just has an overhead projector, he doesn’t use PowerPoint, he just slaps [the images] up there, and there’s something in that. The overhead does a lot of work, in terms of being a lighting instrument and having a frame” (Lynn 2006). On this evidence, Rude Mechs’ decision to take a different direction with the play’s staging seems spontaneous. However, once the minimal, barebones approach was agreed upon, the company committed to it. “We had a little tiff here (and in Houston) about whether we were going to be allowed to show our power cords,” Lynn said, referring to discussions held with the technical staff of the two theatres in question. “To us, it’s important: You’re ruining our set, it doesn’t look like that, it looks like this” (Lynn 2006). In these choices — overhead projections as set devices rather than cubicle walls, visible cables rather than masking — one can see a pattern of theatricality being privileged over illusion.

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For Lynn, the juvenile tone of the play’s language is a similar evasion of conventions. He refers back to the food aid packages in Afghanistan, mocking the commonplace compromises embraced by “responsible” political discourse: “‘Well, you have to send humanitarian aid even if you don’t go in militarily’— you know what, humanitarian aid just means people get gang-raped on a full stomach.” According to Lynn, dialogue expressing such views “ignores the real gravity of the world, which is okay, because it breaks through that clip art [political solution] of ‘having to send humanitarian aid.’” He adds, “this play is not the grown-up in the room. It’s the truthteller in the room.” Additionally, Lynn balks at the postmodern notion that a play should shrink from such ambitions: I hear contemporary playwrights say all the time that plays shouldn’t answer questions, they should ask questions. That’s the lamest fucking shit I’ve ever heard in my life. I really love to go back to Jarry and the notion of “Pataphysics,” that you can engage in an imaginary science, and create imaginary solutions. That’s both more fun and to a certain extent our job [Lynn 2006].

Another aspect of the Rude Mechs’ adaptation of Get Your War On is the acting style, or, perhaps more accurately, the lack of it. Lynn maintains that the performers in the show are being themselves onstage rather than engaging in impersonation. “The material resists being three-dimensional,” he says. “They’re not characters that have consistent philosophies, they’re just clip art. Instead of characters having a story, you watch an idea sort of grow and change.” Despite this emphasis on abstract idea rather than concrete action, Lynn insists, “there was nothing we came up against [where we thought,] that’s un-performable” (Lynn 2006). At the same time, in adapting the two-dimensional strip for the stage, the Rude Mechanicals augmented Rees’ dialogue with two musical numbers: “Telephone Line” by the Electric Light Orchestra, inspired by the fact that many of Rees’ characters are pictured having phone conversations with each other, and David Bowie’s “Life on Mars,” inspired by President George W. Bush’s 2004 call for a human expedition to Mars. When asked how the group decided to incorporate these new elements into a production that already required the whittling-down of five years’ worth of comic strips, Lynn replied that personal investment and random connections guided the process. “We didn’t have ... other things to make it personally belong to people,” he answered. The personal attachment between reader and fan of David Rees, as each of the actors are, and the text that they wanted to say, was a really strong indicator of what was going to stay. We locked ourselves in the theatre for 10

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days....When you’re working on something fanatically, things start to make sense in a way that they don’t make sense in the real world. Some of it has to do with not having much sleep, being really tired, and playing ELO. It’s the logic of the moment, not the logic of the “is this good theatre?” sort of game [Lynn 2006].

Incidentally, we can see in this process the influence of the Situationist concept of the dérive. The derive was an activity that entailed wandering aimlessly through an urban area and responding to the forces of attraction or repulsion that one experienced through proximity with certain streets, buildings, and neighborhoods. On the other hand this very attraction, particularly the initial attraction to the Get Your War On comic strip, underscores the fact that the group is representing détournement rather than using this method to create a piece. Rees’ work actively subverts pre-existing material, whereas the intentionally two-dimensional staging of two-dimensional work is a re-presentation of the initial subversion. The question, in adapting this work for the stage, becomes: how does the staging augment what is already present in the original comic? For Lynn, the answer lies in the medium of speech: the mere voicing of the strip’s content, the breaking of its silence, creates or reinforces community. “You can feel the audience feel relief,” Lynn says, “that someone is saying these things out loud” (Lynn 2006). If producing “relief ” seems an insufficient embodiment of the Situationists’ ideas, which eschewed the creation of artworks and instead espoused the creation of situations, Lynn suggests that the play provides a further sense of empowerment. “This comic strip doesn’t at all pretend that making comic strips is hard,” he says. “It sort of just suggests, ‘Hey, look, I made a comic strip, it’s easy.’ I hope the play seems like that too. Obviously, [the] acting’s not that hard, we don’t have any set, this is really easy to do, you can do this yourself, it’s easy to go forward, here are all the tools, it’s really simple” (Lynn 2006). Thus the Rude Mechanicals seem to attempt not only direct political satire and theatrical experimentation, but also recruitment, perhaps conversion. It remains to be seen what the effect of adapting Get Your War On or staging the events described in Lipstick Traces might be. We have not seen a rush to stage Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle or Raoul Vaneigem’s The Revolution of Everyday Life, two major Situationist texts, for example. Nor have we seen an outpouring of low-tech adaptations of underground comic strips (and the planned Broadway production of Spiderman could not be considered as such an attempt). Patricia Ybarra, writing about Rude Mechs’ production of Lipstick Traces, makes a relevant point about the limits of generating true subversive or revolutionary energy within the theatrical confine. To represent certain actions, however rebellious they might have been, is not

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to recreate the incidents themselves or to re-ignite the spirit of anarchy that gave birth to them in the first place (2005:9). Marcus writes, It is worth attending to a version of the performing space as a place where revolution goes to die, where its spirit, to use a favorite situationist word, is recuperated, where the shout of what should be is absorbed into the spectacle of what is, where the impossible demand is brought back into the fold of expectation and result, where the disease of collective vehemence is cured [1989:151].

Lynn himself is ambivalent about the end result of these performances, which, on tour, have been presented in such established venues as the Woolly Mammoth in D.C. and 59 East 59th in New York. “You cannot create the revolution where people pay 28 dollars for a ticket,” he admits (Lynn 2006). In Get Your War On the company even cracks an ironic joke on this topic. Lana Lesley, introducing the play, informs us that the Cato Institute is one of its corporate sponsors, saying that this partnership provides the company “the rebranding necessary to reposition ourselves in the agit-prop theatre market” (Rude Mechanicals 2006). In an important sense Get Your War On, like Lipstick Traces before it, is much closer to a conventional piece of theatre than to the “situations” that the Situationists envisioned. In the performances, there is no improvisation, no embracing of chance elements, and no indication that the audience is welcome to become co-creators of the event. Additionally these performances take place in dedicated theatre spaces as opposed to found or created environments where they might be taken as something other than theatre. Richard Huelsenbeck, one of the original dadaists, and as such, a creator of the sort of practices in which both the Situationist International and Rude Mechanicals have engaged, once stated that “Dada attacked culture with all the instruments of satire, bluff, irony, and finally violence” (Marcus 1989:115). We have seen the satire, the bluff, and the irony in the work of Rude Mechanicals. But we may also be seeing the recuperation of these tactics, both in the necessities of presentation and in the sort of critical acknowledgement in which papers like this one play a part. Perhaps one of the best examples of violence in an attempt to break the traditional boundaries of art was the release of Guy Debord’s 1952 film, Hurlements en faveur de Sade (Howls for Sade). Five years after the film’s initial screening, Debord would become a founding member of the Situationist International and would go on to become its most notorious figure. The film itself consisted of no images at all: simply passages of black screen, coupled with silence, and intermittent white screen, augmented by fragments of banal conversation and occasional slogans. This was an anti-movie, per-

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haps showing that cinema, and all other art as well, was a mere trick, a sham. The last line, Debord’s statement that “like lost children we live our unfinished adventures,” comes 24 minutes before the film ends, during which time the audience sees a blank screen (Debord 1952). The screening of the film caused riots at its first showing in Paris, but Debord considered these to be a “situation,” his own creation, as much a work of art as the movie itself. One can imagine a theatre company attempting something like this, utilizing light, darkness, silence, bursts of stolen dialogue, clichés of everyday speech, and advertising slogans, and an overall refusal to represent or portray. One can even imagine these practices already being latent in what the Rude Mechanicals describe as their creative and productive process. But if there is a meaningful divide between entertainment and confrontation, not simply in the content of a piece but in its manner of engagement with the audience, Get Your War On, like Lipstick Traces before it, remains on the “entertainment” side of that barrier. It is worth reiterating here the Situationists’ suspicion and disavowal of art: it could not be protected from recuperation. Perhaps what Rude Mechanicals have demonstrated with these two Situationist-inspired productions is that the Situationist International’s ideas pose to theatre a similar challenge as did the ideas of Artaud. They are, in the words of Peter Brook, “the carrot in front of our nose, never to be reached” (1968:54). The Rude Mechanicals have staged, in Debord’s words, “unfinished adventures,” leaving us to wonder whether their chosen medium, the theatre, will allow them to complete a similar adventure in the future. ITHACA COLLEGE

References Cited Brook, Peter. The Empty Space. New York: Athaneum, 1968. Debord, Guy. Howls for Sade [film soundtrack]. Translated by Ken Knabb. Bureau of Public Secrets. 2003. http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/debord.films/howls.htm (accessed March 1, 2007). Lynn, Kirk. Interview by the author. 6 October 2006. _____, and Shawn Sides. “Collective Dramaturgy: A Co-Consideration of the Dramaturgical Role in Collaborative Creation.” Theatre Topics 13/1 (2003): 111– 15. Marcus, Greil. Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989. Rees, David. Get Your War On. MNFTIU.CC. 9 October 2001. http://www.mnftiu. cc/mnftiu.cc/war.html (accessed March 1, 2007). _____. Post-play discussion. Get Your War On. Wooly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington, D.C. 6 October 2006.

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Rude Mechanicals. Get Your War On. Live performance. Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington, D.C. 6 October 2006. Vaneigem, Raoul. The Revolution of Everyday Life. 1967. Trans. Donald NicholsonSmith. London: Left Bank Books/Rebel Press, 1994. Ybarra, Patricia. “‘The Whole Thing is over by Nine O’Clock’: The Rude Mechs’s adaptation of Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces.” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 19/2 (2005): 7–30.

16 Antigone and Terrorism Seamus Heaney Sends a Letter to George W. Bush Kelly Younger Abstract The Irish have a love-affair with Greek tragedy in general, and the Antigone in particular. Their adaptations highlight Antigone’s defiant nature toward a distinctly British Creon and canonize her as a martyr for the Irish Republic. With an end to the Anglo-Irish troubles, however, why did the Abbey Theatre — in order to mark one hundred years of seminal Irish drama — commission Seamus Heaney to translate yet another Antigone? His The Burial at Thebes is not only a revision of Sophocles’ text, but also of the Irish Antigones that populated the stage in the mid–1980s. Moreover, Heaney’s Antigone is no longer a stock–Irish character battling against the stock–English Creon. Rather, she is a global protestor who objects to the argument that you are either for state security or an advocate of terrorism. In other words, Antigone is still quite Irish, but Creon is now distinctly American.

The Irish have a fascinating and long history of adapting Greek tragedies for the Irish stage. In the last century alone, over twenty Irish writers have produced more than two dozen versions of ancient Greek tragedies, or plays based on Greek themes (Younger 2001). What makes these Irish productions of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides particularly interesting is that they all cross the footlights with a distinctly Irish quality. Hiberno-English colloquialisms, stock–Irish characters, Irish landscapes, and contemporary allusions to Irish social, religious, and cultural issues abound. Moreover, these revisions all, in one way or another, comment upon and question the political and economic instability of twentieth century Ireland. Of all the Greek tragedies available for translation and adaptation, one in particular offers an insight into the Irish perception of self and nation simply for its overwhelming ubiquity. The Antigone arises again and again in 205

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Ireland, beginning with Yeats and the early Abbey Theatre and reaching “Antigone-fever” in 1984 when four different writers created Irish Antigones within months of one another. Some writers translated the dramas as exercises in poetics, while most others did so as a commentary on the “troubled” Anglo-Irish relationship, often highlighting Antigone’s defiant nature toward a distinctly British king and canonizing her as a martyr for the Irish Republic. In the spirit of George Steiner’s famous question, “Why a hundred Antigones after Sophocles?” (1984: 108) we may ask “Why so many Antigones on the auld sod?” In other words, why are the Irish drawn to her in particular, and why have they given preference to the Antigone over all other tragedies? In an earlier article, I argued that the Irish were drawn to this dutiful daughter because of their familiarity with her predicament (Younger 2006: 148–162). By predicament I refer to Judith Butler’s description: “Antigone appropriates the stance and idiom of the one she opposes, assumes Creon’s sovereignty, even claims the glory that is destined for her brother, and lives out a strange loyalty to her father, bound as she is to him through his curse” (2000: 23). The Irish, similarly, have appropriated the “stance and idiom” of the one they opposed (i.e., England) while simultaneously living out a “strange loyalty” to the English, bound as they were through a common language and a colonized past. This past, consisting of futile attempts to overthrow the colonizer, explains why the Irish were not drawn toward productions of, say, the Oedipus. For nearly eight-hundred years of English colonization, political patricide had proven impossible. The Antigone, therefore, becomes a symptom of this failure to decolonize. Moreover, it changes the course of Irish drama in the twentieth century by taking on two forms: first, a kind of analogue deferral of actual productions of the Oedipus play (resolving into an affinity for melancholy comedies, especially where patricide is attempted and failed as in Playboy of the Western World ) and second, the symptomatic staging and re-staging of the Antigone as a rebellious, political, and anti–Oedipal drama for a politically and economically impoverished twentieth century Ireland. Twenty-first century Ireland, however, is a dramatically different nation. It is currently the richest country in the European Union after Luxembourg (Humphreys 2005:1). In the New York Times article “The End of the Rainbow,” Thomas Friedman writes: “Yes, the country that for hundreds of years was best known for emigration, tragic poets, famines, civil wars and leprechauns today has a per capita G.D.P. higher than that of Germany, France and Britain” (2005: A23). Friedman credits Ireland’s rise “from the sick man of Europe to the rich man in less than a generation” to its successful embrace

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of globalization (2005: A23). In addition, an end to the Troubles with the 1998 Good Friday Peace Agreement and the more recent announcement from the Provisional IRA that they have ended their armed campaign in Northern Ireland highlight the fact that never before has Ireland experienced such economic and political stability and never before has Ireland had such little reason to identify with the tragic daughter of Oedipus. It would follow that in 2004, to mark the centenary of the Abbey Theatre, the National Theatre of Ireland would have commissioned a new Irish playwright to write a new Irish play for a new century of Irish drama while celebrating the past one hundred years of Irish drama on the national Irish stage. Instead, they commissioned Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney to translate yet another Antigone. Why? Is it because the Irish are unwilling and unable to part with their stock–Irish version of Antigone — the fiery, loquacious, rebel/victim — who not only takes pleasure in her irresistible suffering but also in the colonial matrix that no longer exists? In other words, is it just too difficult for the Irish Antigone to stop licking her wounds? If Heaney were a lesser writer, I think the above would sadly be true. What he gives the Abbey Theatre, however, in his play titled The Burial at Thebes: Sophocles’ Antigone is a version of the tragedy that both revises past depictions of Antigone in Ireland and celebrates a future Irish drama for a global audience. But he did not find that an easy endeavor. Heaney struggled to begin his translation, it should be noted, because of the very same question we raised earlier: Why another Antigone? He writes in an article for The Guardian titled “Search for the soul of Antigone”: For weeks, I had been reading desultorily about the play in various essays and introductions, my eyes glazing over as again and again the familiar topics came swimming up: individual conscience versus civil power, men versus women, the domestic versus the public sphere, the relevance of the action at different times of crisis in France, in Russia, in Poland, in Northern Ireland — of course, of course, of course. But why do it again? Indeed, how do it again, if there was no tuning fork? ... [A]11 of a sudden I heard a note being struck in my head and inside seconds I had the pen in my hand and had done a number of the opening lines. Purchase on a language, a confidence amounting almost to a carelessness, a found pitch — all arrived in a breath.... What had got me going was not study of the text or of the criticism surrounding it, but the words and rhythms of another work entirely [Heaney 2005].

Heaney goes on to quote the opening lines of this other work, an early Irish poem:

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Spoken by a grieving wife for her murdered husband, these opening lines, according to Heaney, “gave me the note I needed for the anxious, cornered Antigone at the start of the play” (2005). His play thus opens with: Ismene, quick, come here! What’s to become of us? Why are we always the ones? [Heaney 2004: 1].

Heaney also admits that this Irish poem inspired his metrical choices for the play. Antigone and her sister speak in three-stress lines, the Chorus speaks in Anglo-Saxon meter, and Creon the king speaks in blank verse, but “blank verse that was dramatic and suited to the character of Creon rather than simply a metronome” (Heaney 2005). While these admissions by the playwright reveal that his inspiration did not come from the previous depictions of Irish Antigones, it also reveals that his inspiration did not come from the original Greek text. It came, in fact, from the most famous poem in the Irish language Eíbhlin Dhubh Ní Chonaill’s Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire, or The Lament for Art O’Leary. Heaney’s answer for “why do it again” and “how do it again” are still deeply rooted — if not more deeply rooted than all the other Irish Antigones before it — in Irish culture and language. Heaney halfexplains why: “Antigone is a poetic drama, but commentary and analysis had turned it into political allegory. What I wanted to point up was the anthropological dimension of Sophocles’ work: I didn’t want the production to end up as just another opportunistic commentary on the Iraq adventure, and that was why I changed the title” (2005). The reason I say “half-explains” is that while he points out his attempt at returning the play to an anthropological emphasis, he contradicts himself when making a comparison to, as he puts it, the “Iraq adventure.” In his appearance at the Oxford Literary Festival, Heaney “quipped that the book [sic] could have been called ‘An open Letter to George Bush’” (Eyre 2004). He justifies this remark when he writes: Early in 2003 we were watching a leader, a Creon figure if ever there was one: a law and order bossman trying to boss the nations of the world into uncritical agreement with his edicts in much the same way as Creon tries to boss the Chorus of compliant Thebans into conformity with his. With the

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White House and the Pentagon in cahoots, determined to bring the rest of us into line over Iraq, the passion and protest of an Antigone were all of a sudden as vital as oxygen masks [Heaney 2005].

In an interview, Heaney adds: “Just as Creon forced the citizens of Thebes into an either/or situation in relation to Antigone, the Bush administration in the White House was using the same tactic to forward its argument for the war on Iraq” (Wills 2004). Creon, the Greek tyrant who in so many Irish Antigones prior had been portrayed as an English — specifically Thatcherite — oppressor has here been revised into an American — specifically presidential — politician. To illustrate this point, let us look at an excerpt from Creon’s opening speech, as written by Heaney: Until a man has passed this test of office And proved himself in the exercise of power, He can’t be truly known — for what he is, I mean, In his heart and mind and capabilities. And then, because his nerve fails, fails to act In accordance with it, as a leader should. And equally to blame Is anyone who puts the personal Above the overall thing, puts friend Or family first. But rest assured: My nerve’s not going to fail, and there’s no threat That’s going to stop me acting, ever, In the interests of all citizens. Nor would I, Ever, have anything to do With my country’s enemy. For the patriot, Personal loyalty always must give way To patriotic duty [Heaney 2004: 9–10].

Like many speeches delivered by Bush at this time, Heaney’s Creon employs the language of blind resolve, bullying arrogance, and blatant patriotism through guilt and fear. There is a distinctly American quality to the language, and Heaney even pointed out that he had the Patriot Act in mind when choosing his words here (Brazelton 2004). Heaney uses similar language throughout the play. When Creon argues with Antigone about her dead brother, for example, he exclaims that “He terrorized us” (2004: 24). Creon threatens such terrorists when he decrees, “I’ll flush ’em out.... Whoever isn’t for us/ Is against us in this case” (2004: 3). Since Heaney himself admitted to the Creon/Bush connection, the critics gladly perpetuated the comparison. Most referred to the last quotation in particular, and added

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that the Chorus was “either for state security or an advocate of terrorism” (Billington 2004). Another comments that “A similar remark underlines George W. Bush’s idea on how to deal with the threat of global terrorism” (McMahon 2004). One critic points out that: ... both [Creon and Bush] were authoritative rulers who forced their people to make an absolute moral decision without full understanding of the moral ambiguity of their situation. ‘The chorus and the people of Thebes know that something’s going on, that something’s not right; but they’re not sure what, exactly,’ Heaney says. The same, he implies, could be said for the American people before entering the war in Iraq [Brazelton 2005].

As a final example, one reviewer notes that “The poet whose political attitude was once defined as ‘whatever you say, say nothing’ appears to be saying — in the best chosen words — that he stands against the global tyranny of Bush and against those who fail to speak against it” (Clancy 2004). Objectively, Bush and Creon have a great deal in common. Both leaders are suddenly forced into aggressively defending their people and their states from foreign attack; both take this grave responsibility seriously with a “big picture” agenda; both sacrifice individual rights for the common good believing these rights will no longer matter if their state, their people, and their way of life is jeopardized. Subjectively, Heaney is clearly and creatively using the text as a platform for his opinions on American foreign policy. What is of most interest to the study of Irish drama, however, is the fact that Heaney’s recasting of Creon alters the traditional, Irish casting of Antigone. The Irish Antigones that came before represented the Irish Republican cause — sometimes even the Irish Republican Army’s cause — and opposed the English despot, but she was often tainted by her stock–Irish portrayal as quick to anger, violent-tongued, and begrudging in her refusal to engage in any kind of peace talk. With Heaney’s Americanized Creon, however, “The result is a black-and-white picture, with Antigone all purity and Creon sheer taint” (Wills 2004). Yes, this ‘black-and-white picture’ returns the play to the more traditional, Hegelian reading, but it also transforms this particular brand of Antigone from an Irish rebel/terrorist into a peaceful antiwar protestor. She “assist[s] with love,” while Creon “set[s] at odds” (2004: 24). The idiom of the play is still strikingly Irish, with expressions like “You have me scared,” and “Somebody’s after attending to it,” and “It was [Antigone]/ Who put herself beyond the pale” for example (Heaney 2004: 2, 13, 40). The feckless Guard (the Irish word for police officer) especially, speaks in a lower-class Irish accent using expressions like “What will be, says I, will be” and “Somebody’s after attending to it right” (2004: 12, 13). One critic

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called him a “jobsworth Dubliner happy to acquiesce in any toadiness his masters decree — up to and including, one imagines, offering the use of Shannon Airport as a stopover for bombers”— a reference to the controversy over allowing USAF bomber planes to refuel in Ireland while on their way to Iraq (Clancy 2004). The play, however, thanks to Heaney’s revision of Creon as an American imperialist rather than an English colonist, and his revision of Antigone as a global protestor rather than an Irish rebel, finally breaks the cycle of tired depictions of Irish Antigones and sets the stage for a more global audience. While Irish playwrights before him transformed the Antigone from a Greek to an Irish tragedy, Heaney succeeds at transforming it from an Irish tragedy into a global one. This opening up of the play leads to a larger, more global understanding of both Heaney’s text and the original play itself, but it also opens it up to newer archetypes with terribly high stakes and post-tragic consequences. While Heaney’s Antigone is now the peaceful protestor in the war on terrorism, Creon is unrelentingly the new America as seen by the majority of the world. One critic of the play apocalyptically mused, “I wonder if suicide bombers too might perceive themselves as Antigones. Although she makes her protest by non-violent civil disobedience, her god, as Creon insists, is Hades, the god of death. How might she behave if she stayed alive and Creon never relented?” (Corcoran 2004:25). Neither Sophocles nor Heaney provides an answer, but that does not mean the answer is not coming. LOYOLA MARYMOUNT UNIVERSITY

Notes Acknowledgments. The author would like to thank Mr. Robert Y. Rabiee for his research assistance on this project, as well as the anonymous reviewers for the comments.

References Cited Billington, Michael. “The Burial at Thebes.” The Guardian (7 April 2004). URL: http://arts.guardian.co.uk/reviews/story/0,,1187101,00.html. Brazelton, Mary A. “Heaney’s Poetry Makes Past Present: New translation of Antigone hints at modern political woes.” The Harvard Crimson (29 October 2004). URL: http://www.thecrimson.com/printerfriendly.aspx?ref=504165. Butler, Judith. Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000.

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Clancy, Luke. “The Burial at Thebes.” The Loy. (6 April 2004). URL: http://www. theloy.com/2004/04/reviewthe-burial-at-thebes-abbey.html. Corcoran, Neil. “The state we’re in.” The Guardian (1 May 2004): 25. Eyre, Ben. “He that is not with me is against me.” The Oxford Student (22 April 2004). URL: http://www.oxfordstudent.com/tt2004wk0/books. Friedman, Thomas. “The End of the Rainbow.” The New York Times. (25 June 2005): A23. Heaney, Seamus. The Burial at Thebes: Sophocles’ Antigone. London: Faber and Faber, 2004. _____. “Search for the soul of Antigone.” The Guardian (2 November 2005): http:// books.guardian.co.uk/departments/classics/story/0,6000,1606770,00.html Humphreys, Joe. “Ireland ranked as second wealthiest country.” The Irish Times (8 September 2005): 1. McMahon, James. “The Burial at Thebes.” RTÉ Guide: Entertainment (8 April 2004): http://www.rte.ie/arts/2004/0408/burialatthebes.html. Steiner, George. Antigones. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984. Wills, Gary. “Antigone: beauty over propaganda.” Village Magazine (15 December 2005): http://www.village.ie/Books/Fiction/Antigone :_beauty_over_propa ganda/. Younger, Kelly. Irish Adaptations of Greek Tragedies: Dionysus in Ireland. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2001. _____. “Irish Antigones: Burying the Colonial Symptom.” Colloquy: Text, Theory, and Critique 11 (2006): 148–162.

17 The Future of Dramatic Literature in the Academy A Roundtable Discussion Verna Foster First of all, as the organizer of this roundtable at the 31st Comparative Drama Conference, I want to emphasize that our topic is not about text versus performance. Since its inception in 1977, the Comparative Drama Conference has encouraged the discussion of both dramatic texts and theatrical performances. This policy is stipulated in the CDC Calls for Papers, is evident in the CDC Programs and Abstracts, and is reflected in the title of the CDC annual official publication, Text & Presentation, the Comparative Drama Conference Series. The Comparative Drama Conference is the only major interdisciplinary conference characterized by this degree of openness. One has to scrutinize the program to find the panels on drama at MLA, while ATHE and ASTR feature relatively few papers focusing on dramatic texts. For these reasons I am profoundly grateful for the Comparative Drama Conference, which, since I am interested both in drama as literature and drama as performance, I think of as my intellectual home. This conference is also particularly well-suited to address the topic of our roundtable: The Future of Dramatic Literature in the Academy. My belief that the profession as a whole (scholars, teachers, and students of drama in both literature and theatre departments) needs to think about the place of dramatic literature in higher education arises in the first instance from my sense of my own liminality in the profession (between MLA and ASTR) and in my own English department, where, apart from our Shakespearean scholar, I am the only member on the faculty specializing in drama. I also find that most of our graduate students (with some striking exceptions who have presented their work at CDC) have relatively little 213

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knowledge of dramatic literature, suggesting that the subject has not been a major part of their undergraduate education. Conversations with colleagues have indicated that I am not alone in perceiving the marginality of drama in, at least, English departments and also the increasingly problematic place of dramatic literature in theatre departments. In his review of W. B. Worthen’s Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance, published in Text & Presentation last year, David Bevington notes that, apart from Shakespeare, “plays are substantially less a part of the curriculum” than fiction, poetry, discursive prose, and criticism in the departments of English and Comparative Literature of which he is a member at the University of Chicago. He attributes this marginalization of drama to the “anti-theatrical prejudice” defined several years ago by Jonas Barish. By contrast, Shannon Jackson, discussing the relation between theatre and performance studies, comments in her book Professing Performance that “Dramatic theatre and oral interpretation are aligned with the dominant, with the canonical, and with disciplinary singularity while performance studies is aligned with the marginal, with the anti-canonical, and with disciplinary multiplicity.” Professor Jackson observes the irony that dramatic literature, construed as “dominant” and thus to be subverted in departments of theatre and performance, itself has only “marginal canonical status in the humanities.” Two obvious questions then arise. Will dramatic literature continue to be taught? If so, under whose auspices? It seems certain that the answer to the first question will be “yes.” The answer to the second one is more problematic. It is unthinkable that in Classics and Modern Literature departments the work of major dramatists will not be taught along with non-dramatic genres. In English departments Shakespeare will pull along in his wake other early modern dramatists; medievalists will continue to teach and even to specialize in drama. It is, however, rare even now for specialists in Restoration and eighteenth-century literature to be centered in drama, and improbable that anyone today would be hired to teach nineteenth-century literature because of his or her expertise in, say, Victorian melodrama. Many English departments include a faculty member who teaches modern drama, but advertisements for such positions seem to be relatively rare. Anecdotally, a friend of mine interested in applying for a job in modern literature but uncertain whether modern drama would count called the chair of the relevant department to inquire. The chair seemed surprised by the question but after some hesitation agreed that it would. The sense that drama is not literature in the same way as fiction and poetry may militate against the hiring of specialists in drama unless drama is specifically advertised for. Specialists in modern drama (from Ibsen to Suzan-Lori Parks) are in a pecu-

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liar position since they could belong equally to literature or theatre departments but find themselves marginalized in either, as professing drama in a literature department or literature in a theatre department in which the most cutting-edge work is being done in performance studies. But even among scholars and teachers in literature departments who specialize in the drama of earlier periods, the status of plays as literature or theatre or both depends very much on the training and interests of the individual scholar/teacher, who will need to make choices as to whether his or her work belongs to a literary or theatrical culture, whether it should be presented at MLA or ASTR or indeed CDC. The question of whether dramatic literature is to be taught primarily in literature or theatre departments (and concomitantly of where the jobs will be) has important implications for the advice we give to our students, both undergraduate and graduate. Should an undergraduate from a literature department who is interested in, especially, modern drama be advised to apply for graduate study in another literature department or in a theatre department? Should a graduate student in a literature department be advised to specialize in drama per se or rather only in dramatic literature as a literary product like any other of a particular period and culture? Realizing that my perspective on the future of dramatic literature in American colleges and universities is necessarily limited to my — doubtless partial — sense of my own discipline (English), I invited six colleagues to respond to my concerns from the perspectives of their own various disciplines. It is my hope that this roundtable will initiate a broader conversation about the future of dramatic literature among all those who are interested in drama/theatre/performance. Loyola University Chicago

Miriam Chirico When Verna Foster invited me to participate in this roundtable discussion, I was surprised by the topic. Initially, I did not perceive a problem with the status of dramatic literature within the academy. I was too busily managing a four/four teaching load to give much thought to the genre’s status in my department or at the university. But pausing for a moment, I could recall certain incidents in my day-to-day teaching life that did challenge the significance of dramatic literature. I remembered the semester my drama class was cancelled due to under-enrollment because, as I was told by the sympathetic Chair of the Department, “students are just more interested in poetry and fiction.” Similarly, another incident came to mind when the Asso-

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ciate Dean of Continuing Education asked me to change my summer class from drama to poetry because “students would be more apt to enroll in a poetry class.” Before hearing comments like these, I had never realized I was teaching a genre that was less popular than others. Thinking more about the place of dramatic literature within an English Studies department, I became conscious of the number of comments colleagues have made in passing about how difficult it is to teach drama. They hinted that reading page after page of dialogue uninterrupted by a single narrative description was perplexing for the students and required in-class activities or certain techniques on the part of the instructor to help students understand the genre. While I concurred, again, it made me pause momentarily: I had never realized I was teaching a difficult genre. I have not worked out the first point regarding the genre’s “leastfavored” status among students. I do not know why my colleagues assumed that this genre is unpopular, since most students, when I do a quick survey in class, have seen some form of live theatre, whether it was a high-school play or a musical on a trip into New York City. In fact, the relative brevity of the genre and its immediate connection to film and television should make this genre more popular — not less — with students. But the second point is something I have considered at length. The difficulties my colleagues perceive in teaching the genre originate, I believe, in graduate school. The discomfort my colleagues feel teaching A Doll’s House or Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead rather than teaching, say, The Great Gatsby or “Apple Picking” is more than likely due to the greater experience they had with the novel and poetry in graduate school. While I was fortunate enough to have pursued a Master’s degree in England that involved classes at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and to have attended countless theatre productions, I don’t believe this kind of intense training is necessary to teach dramatic literature. Simply drawing attention to how we might read dramatic literature differently than poetry or a novel might help graduate students and future professors be better equipped to teach this literary art form. This issue, the teaching of dramatic literature, taps into a long-standing concern of mine. I maintain that as literature teachers we should create more ways of analyzing and teaching plays that go beyond the basic literary tools of “plot, character, and setting.” I am not suggesting introducing acting exercises into the classroom or moving immediately into New Historicism or cultural studies, but rather discovering ways that emphasize close, textual analysis. For example, the web site for The Bedford Introduction to Drama by Lee Jacobus offers questions that stimulate a student to interpret a play both visually and aurally based on textual cues. One exercise that

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encourages imaginative thinking asks the student to design the costume for the protagonist of Medea based on specific textual lines for support. Another exercise examines which character holds the power at the beginning of the play and who holds it at the end, asking the student to determine the shift in power based on commands and speech acts. Thus, as teachers of dramatic literature, we could do more to create a body of critical and analytical skills that train students to perceive the visual and auditory sign systems of a text, to get them to think about conflict and power shifts, or to show them how speech acts elicit certain responses. Our goal is to teach drama in such as way that students can sense a play unfolding and moving through time; otherwise the play seems like undifferentiated lines of speech upon a page. I readily admit that I frequently and unthinkingly focus on the particular issues within the play rather than tease out what might be called “the director’s version.” In other words, it is sometimes easier to discuss Nora’s biographical details or her limited access to economic power rather than consider how Torvald’s choice of words instructs Nora (one could say “interpellates” her) to behave as the child-like wife. Furthermore, if these kinds of semiotic or rhetorical exercises appeared in Introduction to Literature anthologies, not just drama anthologies, I would have fewer colleagues perplexed about teaching the genre. Consequently, more colleagues might approach the genre as an opportunity to practice a different set of critical thinking skills instead of turning immediately to filmed versions of the plays as alternatives to textual analysis. Unfortunately the marginalization of dramatic literature does not stop here, at the level of pedagogical concerns. I believe the problem extends to the lack of a significant body of theoretical literature about drama. There does not exist a cohesive body of theory aimed at drama of the same magnitude and interrelatedness as the theory that poetry and the novel possess. Recently, I pored over the anthology of literary theory I have had since my undergraduate education, now in its third edition. I refer to David Richter’s comprehensive anthology entitled The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends (Bedford/St. Martin’s 2007), which is touted as including “a core of documents from the Western critical heritage and an array of selections diverse enough to do justice to the current range of literary studies.” The book’s liner notes bear repeating: an array of selections diverse enough to do justice to the current range of literary studies. This book, taught in many colleges and universities, begins with classical texts written by Aristotle and Longinus and ends with a section on “Theorizing Postmodernism.” I focused only on Part Two, “Contemporary Trends in Literary Criticism,” which comprises over eighty different theorists and over 1000 pages. While skimming each essay, I looked not only for references to litera-

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ture, but for places where the authors draw upon literature as the basis for their theorizing. As I had suspected from the start, I found absolutely no references to dramatic literature. To say that I found “absolutely no references” is slight hyperbole; saying “next to nothing” is closer to the truth. However, in light of the miniscule number of references to dramatic texts, the exaggeration is warranted. An excerpt from Stephen Greenblatt’s work on Shakespeare is included among the 1000 pages, The Tempest is mentioned in an article on post-colonialism, and Walter Benjamin refers to Pirandello before moving onward to film. There is an essay by Bertholt Brecht, in which he discusses, not Epic Theater, as one would expect, but the realist novels of Tolstoy and Balzac. Accordingly, the message this distinguished volume resoundingly conveys is that any serious theorizing about literature since the New Critics onward has been in response to poetry or the novel. Dramatic literature promotes no philosophical systems of thought or interpretive models. Now clearly that previous statement is not true. We know of the theoretical writings by Antonin Artaud, Eric Bentley, Keir Elam, Martin Esslin, Bert States, Patrice Pavis, J. R. Searle, J. L. Styan, Anne Ubersfeld, Jerzy Grotowski, Peter Brook, and Augusto Boal. But why are they not included in this volume? Very few theorists of dramatic literature are included in David Richter’s The Critical Tradition, and when they are, such as Raymond Williams or Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, these particular excerpts are not the pieces that discuss dramatic literature, but refer instead to other forms. The index to the anthology contains no entries for either “drama” or “theatre.” While it does not have an entry for “novel” or “fiction,” it has entries for “narrative,” “narrative analysis,” “narrative categories,” “narratology,” and “narrator.” “Poetics” and “Poetry” likewise stand firm with reference to several essayists and discussions. In preparation for this roundtable discussion, I had time to examine only this one volume of literary criticism, but I invite you to open the volumes of literary theory located in your offices and confirm whether what I have said holds true. To be perfectly fair, out of the eighty theorists collected in the second half of this volume, only forty percent of them made any reference to literature at all. And those theorists happen to be in the fields of New Criticism (poetry), Structuralism and Deconstruction, Reader Response theory, Feminist and Post-Colonial theory. Much of what comprises the “critical tradition” is not theorizing about literature at all, but about historical tracts, Hustler magazine, and shopping malls. So Verna Foster’s initial question about the status of dramatic literature is really part of a larger issue about the relevance of literature on college campuses. But that is too large a topic for today’s discussion.

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On a closing note, we could consider the marginalization of dramatic literature as a challenge to its practitioners rather than simply a hindrance. There is something to be said for being an illegitimate genre. When Edmund questions aloud his bastard status in King Lear, he comes to the conclusion that to be a bastard, composed “in the lusty stealth of nature,” offers more quality and liveliness than the legitimate heirs, begotten in a “dull, stale, tired bed.” Maybe the place of dramatic literature betwixt-and-between literary and performance studies enables us to transgress productively and promisingly disciplinary boundaries. Perhaps the interdisciplinary quality of dramatic literature allows us the freedom and creativity to choose between theoretical lenses and interpretive models. But before we joyfully proclaim, “Now, gods, stand up for bastards!” we must realize that much work needs to be done in taking a stand and regaining a foothold in both English literature and performance departments. Eastern Connecticut State University

Jan L. Hagens Foreign language departments most often are departments of language and literature. For example, I, at Notre Dame, am in the Department of German and Russian Languages and Literatures. What this means is, that, as a member of a department of language and literature, I will have to consider our roundtable’s question from multiple angles: 1) What is the future of dramatic literature in the instruction of undergraduate and graduate students in German language programs in the United States? (We should distinguish between various kinds of institutions like community colleges, residential colleges, education- vs researchoriented universities, etc.) 2) What is the future of dramatic literature in the instruction of undergraduate and graduate students in German literature programs in the United States? (Again, we should distinguish various kinds of academies). 3) What is the future of dramatic literature for researchers of German drama in the United States? 4) What is the future of dramatic literature in the German-speaking countries themselves? 5) What is the future of theatre and performance in those countries? If I have counted correctly, we now have at least five, if not more, questions for the field of German Studies alone — and we would have to answer each and every one of these questions for the other fields of foreign language

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and literature study as well. Faced with this many-headed monster of a question, I will phrase my response in terms of two general, and related, phenomena: the dominance of theatrical performance over the reading of texts; and the dominance of culture, especially visual culture, over literature. Verna Foster is right when she states that “this roundtable is not about text versus performance.” This is also apparent from Bevington’s analysis (see Verna Foster’s introduction), because the anti-theatrical prejudice can be responsible for the marginalization of drama in literature departments only if dramatic texts and theatrical performances are seen as allies, as supporting closely related values. And, indeed, there is a plausible pull from literary drama to performed drama — as I tried to argue in an article published in Text and Presentation (1998). For the general public, drama is not even a stand-alone enterprise, but merely a deficient product, a potential, a script calling for its own realization as play or film. Teachers of literature like Verna and myself emphasize the value of drama as literature — a value that cannot simply be subsumed, sublated, expressed, or grasped on the stage — but we also acknowledge that drama has its natural telos in performance. Most of our colleagues in academia, whether in the United States, in Germany, or elsewhere, seem to sense this inherent pull of drama toward theatre. It is my impression that in German Studies less research is directed at the literary and aesthetic dimension of dramatic texts than at these texts’ historical, social, and institutional contexts — such as authorial and theatrical production, or audience reception. Of course, even more research is devoted to prose literature. This may reflect the fact that most German-language literary publication happens in the field of prose, with far less happening in drama and poetry. At least it can be said there are many German poets (some of them excellent) writing poems, and, when compared to their Anglo-American counterparts, the sales of their poems are relatively high. The same cannot be stated for the field of dramatic literature, neither in quantity (there are not as many authors focusing their efforts on drama) nor in quality (since the famous ones are mostly in prose and poetry). In Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, the field of drama today receives energy and innovation primarily from the work of directors, from experimental theatre and provocative stagings. Once again, the performance of drama outruns the reading of drama. This falling behind of drama vis-à-vis theatre is only an instance of a greater movement toward visual culture. Not only is drama losing out against theatre and performance, but the study of literature as an aesthetic object is losing ground to studies that focus on culture, history, society, and everyday life. The topics that dominate our journals and conferences are: photography, film, illustrations, architecture and urban planning, event analysis.

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Even a bastion of literary criticism like Princeton University (from whose Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures I received my Ph.D. in 1993) has radically re-made itself over the course of the past decade, by replacing its literary scholars with a group of experts on not only literary but also visual culture: medieval illustration, painting, photography, film. To mention one more signal of literature’s diminished status: just as I was writing down these notes, I received a message from James Rolleston (Duke University), the new editor of North America’s most prestigious journal in the field of German, the German Quarterly, inviting all members of the American Association of Teachers of German to contribute to an online discussion of the question, “Is literature still central to German Studies?” The predominance of approaches drawn from cultural studies and, if literature is studied at all, then prose literature, can be seen on the teaching side of the academy as well. Not only are there few searches for specialists in drama, but neither my colleagues nor the students seem to be clamoring for the topic. In ten years at the University of Notre Dame, I have taught the “Survey of German Drama 1750 to the Present” only twice, to classes of 12 or 14 undergraduates. Due to the linguistic difficulty of nearly all of the most worthwhile dramatic texts in the German tradition, I have had to radically limit the number of dramas to be read, to about five for the entire semester. The students cannot master dramas from earlier than 1750, that is, especially Baroque plays by Gryphius and Lohenstein. Even just for Lessing’s Nathan the Wise, we need at least five weeks. Kleist’s syntax poses an almost insurmountable hurdle for undergraduate readers. It is only when we advance toward twentieth-century authors, like Brecht, Hochhuth, Bernhard, or Handke, that the students’ reading gathers speed. In other words, the late establishment of German as a standardized language (as compared, for example, to English, Italian, French, and Spanish) makes all dramatic literature from before 1750 inaccessible as texts, and even texts from between 1750 and 1880, simply as German-language texts, present a formidable obstacle to comprehension. What this means for the reality of the classroom is that by now I teach, in various first-year and sophomore seminars outside of the German Department, more comparative drama in translation than strictly German-language drama, more Sophocles and Shakespeare and Beckett than Goethe or Schiller. More encouraging, however, is the fact that all of Notre Dame’s language programs have benefited greatly from the widespread interest in performance. Russian, French, Italian, and Spanish have all developed successful courses that read, then stage, dramatic texts. Thus, the trend toward theatre can be employed in the service of foreign language learning. As students not only read dramatic literature, but speak, embody, and perform these texts,

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it is the pragmatic dimension of dramatic texts that reinforces the language acquisition, the cultural appropriation — and the literary learning. My colleague in Notre Dame’s Italian program, Colleen Ryan-Scheutz, has recently co-edited a book entitled Set the Stage: Teaching Italian Language, Literature and Culture through Theater (forthcoming with Yale University Press). In a recent edition of the on-campus publication ND Works, Ryan-Scheutz formulates the relation between foreign-language dramatic literature and theatre this way: “The play gives [the students] a chance to study, in depth, a piece of literature. They do character analysis, literary analysis. We focus on one piece, but study the author in a time period and examine socio-economic conditions presented in the play.”1 So, after all, there is something that bodes well for the future of dramatic literature in the academy, as far as foreign language and literature departments are concerned. That these successes of the combination of drama and theatre in the teaching of language are not unique to Notre Dame is apparent, for example, from the recent founding of Scenario —according to its self-description — a “new, peer-reviewed bilingual German-English online journal for Drama and Theatre in Foreign and Second Language Education.” Even more generally, as is evident through the work of people like Harvard’s Nancy Houfek, education studies and pedagogy are now beginning to frame the entire activity of teaching as a performing art. Much of what I have said will have to be put in perspective by colleagues in the audience who are also working in foreign language departments, be it in German Studies like me (such as Julie Klassen) or in other languages like French (such as Les Essif ). I look forward to those comments. University of Notre Dame

Note 1. ND Works. 4:13 (8 March 2007): 2.

Karelisa Hartigan In Classics programs it is almost a given that Greek (and Roman) drama will always be taught: no one doubts the importance of reading the texts of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes. Indeed, the works of the playwrights provide virtually the only literature from 5th century BC Athens. There is history, there is poetry, there is (somewhat later) philosophy, but it is in drama where the myths and ideas are given form and expression. The

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ancient plays are also echoed in many modern dramas, where the classical myths are given new expression relevant to the contemporary world. Every spring I teach Greek Drama in Translation, limiting the class to just under 50— with many students begging for admission. As we summed up the semester at the last class hour this year, the students eagerly explained why these texts are still read at the beginning of the 21st century: their themes are timeless, they give insight into the Greek culture, they offer examples of both heroic and anti-heroic behavior, they warn against various temptations and the dangers of giving in, too easily, to persuasion; in short, the Greek plays are rich in ideas that resonate in today’s world. As founder of Text & Presentation, I have always emphasized the importance of reading the ancient plays as pieces for performance. Class discussion addresses how the texts would be staged as well as what the lines mean. Since there is very little action on the ancient tragic stage, some might wonder why I do that (after all, the ancient audience listened to the words of the main characters, the chorus, and the messengers) and everyone who reads Greek drama knows that all the real action lies in the words of the messengers. I insist the students in my Greek Drama class consider what happens on stage as well as what is said because I think that the staging underscores the meaning and/or heightens the tension. Consider, for example, the end of Oedipus Tyrannos: how should the final scene be played? Should Oedipus listen to Creon and return to the palace? Or should he go out, led by Antigone, to whatever destiny now awaits him? I have seen it played both ways; I ask my students how they would direct it, and why they decided as they did. Even earlier in that play: when does Oedipus enter the palace after his exchange with Tiresias? Translators who do not understand staging imagine the king standing in reflective and (apparently distracted) silence while the Seer spells out the details. Our belief in the King’s power and intelligence would be greatly weakened if the scene were thus staged. He must exit on his last line; Tiresias throws his taunts to a closed door. Staging is again important in Euripides’ Hippolytus. When Hippolytus is proclaiming his tirade against women, where is Phaedra? In the most common version the translator inserts that “we must imagine Phaedra standing at the door within listening to his words.” Surely not! When the young man burst upon the stage, Phaedra would have sought hiding behind a statue of one of the goddesses — and which one provides interesting discussion. It is clear from the text that Hippolytus knows she is there: they never exchange words, but if the action is so directed that they exchange glances, how much more meaning is given to Phaedra’s decision to take action, how much more to the prince’s not to speak.

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On a regular basis I have students read certain scenes aloud: the words mean so much more when spoken. The performance, even if it is just reading, brings the text to life. Finally, at the end of the term, all students must take part in performing a small segment of one of the plays. All they have to do is read with enthusiasm, but most bring in props, create masks and costumes; often they memorize their lines. After 30 years of teaching this class, I have memories of many fine scenes: Philoctetes with a bright red stocking, Agamemnon arriving in a cleverly fashioned chariot; various stuffed animals beheaded to provide Agave’s prop at the close of the Bacchae, while at the moment I have in my office three thyrsoi from past performances of that play. Those who choose to do a comedy have provided long-remembered humor (especially the Kinesias scene from Lysistrata, where costumes sported everything from sausages to broomsticks) and one year I had to stop one young lady from stripping too far. But there have been enactments which brought the class near tears: Agamemnon’s speech to Iphigeneia in the Aulis or Theseus’ last words to his son in Hippolytus. Between what the texts say and how they are finally enacted, the Greek drama class is one which all students say is one of their best at UF and the one they claim to long remember. The interest in Greek drama is not limited to the undergraduate taking the in-translation course. At the graduate level, I teach Greek Tragedy in Greek about every other year. Last year (2006) I had 12 students reading Euripides’ Hippolytus and Hecuba. In the spring 2007 term the graduate students read Aeschylus’ Agamemnon; these students and previous ones remember the course for the concepts of the play and the rich language in which they are expressed. In the graduate classes the students engage in a critical examination of the text, but they always remember that drama means “thing done” and theatre means thing seen: the plays of the 5th century Athenian dramatists were texts for the living stage. The future of Greek dramatic literature, it seems to me, is secure in Classics Departments, and will always be a standard part of the Classics curriculum. I also believe the plays will continue to be considered as texts for presentation. Whether they are staged on their own merits or in updated versions, the Greek dramas are continually revived on the modern stage, both on campus and in commercial theatres. University of Florida

Rush Rehm What is the future of dramatic literature? More than an interesting conundrum with no easy answers, the question poses a problem, at least in

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many university theatre departments. Does anyone read plays anymore, and why should they? As a scholar who works primarily on Greek tragedy, I can say confidently that the future of ancient dramatic literature (the surviving texts of Greek and Roman playwrights) within Classics departments is secure and strong. Dramatic literature remains a central part of the classical corpus, a proud colleague with other literary/performance genres, including epic, lyric poetry, the ancient novel, history, philosophy, Hellenistic poetry, rhetoric, and so on. One doubts that will change, as long as ancient Greek and Latin continue to attract students. For those who don’t read Greek and Latin, dramatic literature provides a key primary source for myth courses taught in translation, offering the fullest extant treatment of such foundational stories as Oedipus, Heracles, the house of Atreus, the end of the Trojan War, and so on. In terms of scholarship, interpretations of dramatic texts — along with traditional philological conjectures about the actual text to be printed — continue to find their way into classical journals and university presses. As a professor of drama, however, I admit that the picture becomes cloudier. Many of our Ph.D. students in the Stanford University Department of Drama find themselves far more interested in literary and performance theory than in dramatic literature per se. Oddly, the current passion for rezeptiontheorie and production history also serves to de-emphasize dramatic literature, replacing plays as read and discussed with productions reimagined and interrogated, with directorial and visual influences tracked and disentangled. Frequently primary texts get lost in the meta-discussion, as if so much skin discourages attention to the bones that lie beneath. Our graduate studies committee some years ago decided that the most efficient way to familiarize our graduate students with the basics of dramatic literature was to require a comprehensive examination early in their first year, based on a reading list provided them in the summer, after their acceptance in the program. The list varies from year to year, and suffers the problems of any “canon,” but the realities are that many students drawn to the discipline of drama and performance studies do not have a sufficient background in dramatic literature, whether western or non-western. A basic list of plays and foundational secondary works (Poetics, Brecht, Artaud, etc.) provides a start, and one has to start somewhere. Some years ago the Stanford Drama Department could boast that it was the only place at the university where a graduate student could take a seminar on such seminal European authors as Brecht, Beckett, Pirandello, and Ibsen; these authors were not taught in any systematic way in the traditional foreign language departments. Although still true in part, fewer and fewer graduate seminars take playwrights and their plays as their starting point.

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Performance studies and performance theory seem to have displaced indepth concentration on the body of work written specifically for the theatre. As a consequence, dramatic literature has fallen on hard times in a department that still takes its name from the idea of drama. However, the name itself may suggest a less remedial, more hopeful future for dramatic literature. Drama derives from the ancient Greek verb drô, meaning “I do” or perhaps better “I [choose to] do.” In a famous set of essays, Kenneth Burke put forward his “dramatistic” theory of language, suggesting that human language carries with it the implication of choice and direction. A noun asks you to think or see or imagine what it refers to; a verb frequently involves a call to action; the “negative” indicates that every affirmation must deny some other possibility (“Language introduces the negative into nature”). Burke distinguishes between motion and action, the former instinctual or a form of inertia, the latter a matter of choice (not in speech per se, but in what someone decides to say). His dramatistic view of language emphasizes both the action that language implies, and the choices it requires. Anyone familiar with working with actors in the theatre immediately understands how relevant Burke’s views are for bringing a dramatic text to life. But what does it tell us about the future of reading plays? It strikes me that “dramatism” operates two ways in suggesting a future for dramatic literature. The first — to adopt an old manner of speaking — involves the content of that literature, visiting time and again the issues of human agency and choice. “What shall I do?” (ti drasô?), Orestes asks, as he hesitates to kill his mother, Clytemnestra, in Aeschylus’ Choephoroi. Antigone, Hamlet, Hedda, Vanya, Shanka (in Tsegaye Gabre-Medhin’s Oda Oak Oracle), Tshembe Matoseh in Hansberry’s Les Blancs— almost every interesting character in drama faces that question. Dramatic literature remains unparalleled in forcing the issue of choice to the foreground: not description, not nature, not character as something given, but the human being caught in the nets of agency, decision, and action. Drama offers an incomparable body of work that explores the difficulties and consequences of the need to choose when, how, and why to act. The future of plays depends on recognizing the importance of human agency, hardly a given in the contemporary world (academic and otherwise). The second — predictably — follows from the form of dramatic literature, which points toward its realization in the theatre. Here abides both the past and future of dramatic literature, which consists (with rare exceptions) of plays written to be performed. Actors, dramaturgs, artistic directors read scripts to choose which ones to do, to get a sense of the tradition, to keep current with new writing, to find that older play that speaks to modern audiences. In a non-trivial way, the future of dramatic literature depends on

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the vitality of the theatre. Interesting, isn’t it, that the question before us takes us back to the world of living social experience, and not simply to the idea of literature as something consumed in private, silent reading. The future of play texts — whether read and studied “on their own,” or rehearsed and staged for the public — depends on live theatre. And theatre that is built on drama — not spectacle — faces almost insurmountable obstacles in a world given over to private consumption and maximized profit. But this is an old battle, and many of us will continue to fight it. So, as often, the choice is ours. What future do we want, and what will we do to secure it? Stanford University

Reference Cited Burke, Kenneth. Language as Symbolic Action. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966).

Jon D. Rossini The difficulty of placing dramatic literature in the academy stems from a disciplinary and departmental divide that has now stretched beyond the already yawning space between theatre and drama that has often divided departments of Theatre and English, to incorporate the increasingly prevalent language of performance manifest in the space of Performance Studies. In some spaces in the field of Performance Studies, the resistance to theatre as a paradigmatic genre for the study of performance leads to a potential devaluation or revaluation of the text. Dwight Conquergood, for example, critiques the theoretical assumption of the world as text, arguing that this textual bias is symptomatic of a reductive tendency to contain the world within the familiar, middle-class space of academic privilege. Still, the problem is less a question of the text itself, since as W. B. Worthen has demonstrated, the text itself can be understood as a performance, than of the cultural and conceptual frames and historical and intellectual attachments that come along with the idea of dramatic literature. Even the very phrase exposes the incessant displacement of drama as a literary genre. Do we talk about poetic literature or novelistic literature, two other primary genres? Not typically in the intellectual and disciplinary conversations I am familiar with. Of course, the issue with dramatic literature is that it is what it does if we take a traditional notion of the idea. Dramatic

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assumes the adjectival position precisely because drama also references for many a sense of action, of doing. While the predominance of the adjectival form hints at a marginalization that many have experienced in various institutional settings, this sense of action, of doing becomes the very means through which dramatic literature can be reframed as a central site of intellectual engagement. In a cultural moment in which the processual and the performative are central to multi- and inter-disciplinary conversations, dramatic literature should be recognized as a textual object of study in which all of these issues become highly visible and innovatively negotiated. Still, the naysayers against dramatic literature are many and varied, and articulating the centrality of drama texts within cultural conversations necessitates thinking through the conflation of two disparate complaints lodged against the dramatic text, especially the contemporary dramatic text: it is bad literature and it is not theater. First, there is an assumption that drama is increasingly distanced from tragedy and poetry and thus implicitly distanced from the literary. While the works of Sophocles and Shakespeare, for example, retain their unquestioned importance as literary artifacts, they are easily accepted as poetic and tragic, adjectives rarely applied without significant controversy to contemporary theatre. Second, the idea of drama’s “impure status” based on the collaborative labor that often characterizes the work of the playwright (it is important here to remember the “wright,” the artisanal maker absent in other forms of writing) removes it from the space of the romantic tradition of a single author inspired by some transcendental vocational impulse — the Gods, the Muses, Genius. This sense of an impure text is further troubled by the theatrical dismissal of the text that emerges from two sources. On the one hand, this dismissal comes from a director-centered theatre and a generation of playwrights who choose for various reasons to minimalize stage directions as a part of the text, partly because of directorial willingness to dismiss stage directions that do not fit the vision of the “auteur.” Simultaneously, there is a pedagogical crisis emerging within the use of dramatic texts in acting contexts, where the acting edition is less a record of the playwright’s labor and more a record of a particular production narrated by the interventions of a stage manager and/or a production notebook. Because of this genealogy students are taught to read past stage directions, erroneously learning that these directions are never part of the text, even when they often are the product of the playwright herself. In addition, the bias towards theatre argues that the dramatic text is at best a partial work only fully realized in performance. Of course, part of this emphasis within the U.S. academy is a product of the sustained anti-theatricalism within U.S. culture, since it is clear that any lit-

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erary genre must be activated by performance — at a minimum the act of reading, whether silent or out loud. This sense of incompleteness and collaboration that has haunted dramatic literature, placing it in a dangerous liminal ground between disciplines, is in fact ironically the same space that is celebrated within theoretical studies of performance as the space from which transformation can occur. In the study of identity politics and the practice of theatre, the assertions of liminality and marginalization as sites of interest and transformation have perhaps reached the status of exhausted intellectual clichés even as they are still performed. Ironically, however, this same move is not made often enough with the dramatic text itself. If we are still in a postmodern moment, then it is worth arguing that dramatic literature is the postmodern literary genre, an overstatement intended in all of its proselytizing glory. Already containing within itself a range of multiplicities, from the polyphony of characters, to the tensions between what is spoken and what is embodied, to the proliferation of scripted versions, drama’s status as an always collaborative form offers the possibility for scholars to free themselves from anxiety about the sanctity of a protected manifestation of a text and instead indulge in the study of text in a necessarily rich and multivalent context. While the reading of a novel is most often a solitary enterprise, the reading (staging/performance) of a piece of dramatic literature can also be a highly public and communal activity whose manifestation leaves cultural traces that can themselves be studied. While one might say this becomes one more way to decentralize the dramatic text in lieu of focusing upon its cultural effects, it is easy to reverse this thinking through a shift of emphasis. If drama offers a blueprint for an embodied presence in the world, then teaching dramatic literature is a central activity that must continue to be practiced in order to engage the world in complex ways. Dramatic literature invites in its form a communal staging that engages multiple intelligences — emotional, kinesthetic, and visual — in the process of teaching literary skills. And, in another pedagogical context, it functions as a literary form deeply and explicitly embodied in the material conditions of its production. This conceptual richness — the clear mapping of embodiment, materiality, and community — has not been fully realized in part because of the gap between theatre and performativity, the latter a language that allows for the performance of identity through a philosophical and grammatical focus on the thinking of doing. Ironically, the coiner of the term performative, J. L. Austin, considered theatrical language parasitical on ordinary language, and though many scholars have commented on this passage in his How to Do Things with Words, as well as the many valences of the performative, one non–Austinian distinction that seems to emerge in scholarly practice between

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the performative and the theatrical is the shift between attention to an individual liberal subject and a more collaborative, ideally communal activity. If this distinction is sustainable, then it is worth considering that drama itself is the ideal text for thinking of doing beyond the individual. What we must remember as scholars is that a close attention to the doing in a dramatic text and the potential for a rich contextual understanding of the material circumstances of production and consumption need not be framed in opposition to a practice of close reading and a “literary” attention to text. If we attempt to “protect” dramatic literature from those who understand it to be incomplete, we fall into the trap of always justifying a practice. Instead, we should embrace the multiplicity and messiness inherent in the dramatic text as literature and continue to propound its centrality as an exemplary document for negotiating the complexities of being, and doing, human. University of California at Davis

References Cited Austin, J. L. How to Do Things with Words. J.O. Urmson and Marina Sbisá, eds. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975. Conquergood, Dwight. “Performance Studies: Interventions and Radical Research.” In The Performance Studies Reader, edited by Henry Bial, 311–318. New York: Routledge, 2003. Worthen, W.B. Print and the Poetics of Modern Drama. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Tony J. Stafford In attempting to assess the present and future of the teaching of dramatic literature in higher education, I have approached the subject by debating the pros and cons of the situation. On the one hand, there are, what I call, the Agents of Adversity and, on the other, the Causes for Optimism. Let me deal with the Agents of Adversity first. 1) First is the textbook situation for dramatic literature, which is very frustrating. We have seen anthologies, such as Jacobus’ American Drama and Cornish’s two-volume anthology of British drama, go out of print. Recently, our bookstore called me to tell me that The Glass Menagerie, which I had ordered for the fall semester for my American Drama course, is no long in print as well as Sam Shepard’s Seven Plays. This is a rather common occurrence. There are also no collections of Mamet’s plays, and,

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aside from the sophomore-level introduction to drama anthologies, there are not a lot of special-area anthologies. Part of the problem lies with agents and the other part with publishers. 2) Another problem is the attitude of our literary colleagues in English Departments. Many of them have the attitude that if it is not fiction or poetry, it is not literature, except perhaps for the plays of Shakespeare. It is partly a matter of numbers in that there are not enough of us in English Departments; commonly, in most departments, there is found just one specialist in dramatic literature. Many colleagues have the attitude that drama belongs in the Theatre Arts Department, not realizing that what we do to a dramatic text is quite different from what the theatre folks do. 3) Another problem rests with the conditions of the modern theatre. Theatre has not now the cultural presence it once had in the pre-electronic era. Some have referred to it as a “giant invalid” while others have read its last rites, even though we know that it is the most vital of all art forms, in and of itself. 4) Another factor which harms the widespread pursuit of dramatic literature is that the dramatic text itself, without exposition and narration and depending solely on dialogue, presents a difficult challenge to some people, especially inexperienced students. Of course, it is our job to deal with that issue, which is what we are all doing. There is, on the other hand, a brighter side to the situation, a little silver lining in these dark clouds of dramatic adversity. a) First of all, the nature of the beast itself is to our advantage. Drama is a most powerful form of literature characterized by immediacy, in the here and now, always in the present tense. Drama lives in the present moment from the moment when the first line of dialogue is read, not in the past tense as with most fiction. Because of this, drama is the most accurate gauge or mirror of a society and the way it lives its daily life. As we all know, people go to the theatre to see themselves, and reading a play is like living through an experience and becoming acquainted with new people. b) Another positive in all this is that dramatic literature has as its support those of us who are in the classroom (witness this roundtable discussion), dedicated to teaching young minds how to approach a dramatic text and stressing that this acquired skill is something that they can take with them after college and into a world in which they are literally surrounded by dramatic forms, such as movies, television, and so on. c) Another advantage is that the dramatic form lends itself to using film clips in the classroom to demonstrate how the dramatic text gets trans-

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lated into the performance, and we can approach the dramatic text as both a piece of literature and, by applying performance theory, a text that is intended for performance as well. This is largely beyond the scope of poetry and fiction (even if a piece of fiction is adapted to the screen, much gets lost, but not so with dramatic literature). There are additional attendant considerations that can lend support to the study of dramatic literature. Students can be assigned “parts,” character roles, and allowed to read aloud certain scenes or passages. In this way, students get very involved in the dramatic text and get a feel for the form. It is unnecessary to block scenes or have elaborate settings and costuming in order to get involved in a part. A text-in-hand reading, with interaction between students, helps them to better appreciate what the text and actors do. I feel that it is so necessary to get students into a theatre to see a live production that I am willing to give some extra credit (within reason) for attending a theatre performance. Not only will the student learn to appreciate the form, but there exists the possibility that a student may become a life-long theatregoer. Dramatic literature faculty members might want to push their departments to add, if not a complete major, a concentration or sub-specialty in dramatic literature. A number of students in my classes have requested to take more such classes, special topics courses, and senior seminars, and several of my graduate students have presented papers in dramatic literature at conferences and have developed research projects and opted to write theses in the area. We as dramatic literature specialists ought to propose to our departments, on a regular basis, courses and special topics in dramatic literature. Over the years, I have taught special topics courses, aside from Shakespeare, in such subjects as The Business World as Portrayed in Drama, Miller and Williams, Eugene O’Neill, European Post-Modern Drama, Shaw, British Nobel Playwrights (Shaw and Pinter), The History of Dramatic Comedy, and so on. Currently I am planning (having already spoken to the Director of English and American Literature about it) a course in August Wilson and African-American Drama. We as dramatic literature specialists have to recognize that we bear the burden of engaging in activities that promote the study of dramatic literature by proposing special sessions at conferences, joining organizations supportive of our cause, and taking leadership roles in areas wherein we can encourage, promote, and proliferate the study of dramatic literature. It is in our hands. University of Texas at El Paso

18 Asian Theatre A Review Essay Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei Conceison, Claire. Significant Other: Staging the American in China. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004. Pp. xi + 297. Hardcover. $55.00. Eckersall, Peter. Theorizing the Angura Space: Avant-Garde Performance and Politics in Japan, 1960–2000. Leiden, The Netherlands and Boston: Brill (Brill’s Japanese Studies Library), 2006. Pp. xix–240. Hardcover. $125.00. Leiter, Samuel L., editor. Encyclopedia of Asian Theatre. Westport, Ct. and London: Greenwood Press, 2007. Two volumes. Pp. xxxvi–979. Hardcover. $225.00.

The three books considered here are but drops in the growing tsunami of exciting new materials on Asian theatre that will enlighten not only specialists, but theatre scholars of every persuasion. My hope is that these and other such studies will make obsolete my many, long years of Cassandralike laments, the most recent of which, “The State of Asian Theatre Studies in the American Academy,” appears in Theatre Survey (47:2, Fall 2006): 217–223. These laments focus on the absurd marginalization of Asian theatre and performance in American academia, and the persistent Euro-centric bias of most theatre programs. It would seem that theatre departments have only grudgingly and in small doses internationalized their offerings, even as the world’s most innovative theatre artists and presenting organizations have embraced Asian or Asian-influenced performance. We love Mnouchkine, Suzuki, and Ninagawa, we thrill at (or agonize over) four radically disparate, competing productions of The Peony Pavilion, we analyze the intercultural signs in Brook and Brecht, we applaud Ping Chong and Sankai Juku, we may even send our students to visiting productions of kabuki, kunqu, or kathakali. But how often do we read and teach plays or theories by Asian (as opposed to Asian American) authors? How many acting or directing teachers can analyze Asian masters and apply their methods? How many students can write a cogent comparison of the all-male acting traditions of 233

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kabuki and Elizabethan performance and discuss how they reveal cultural imperatives in their chronologically convergent societies? The most common excuses for not teaching Asian materials are the professor’s fear of revealing her own lack of training, and her fear of misrepresenting or not fully understanding the material or the culture. These are valid concerns, but the last decade has seen a mini-tsunami of publications in English that offer play translations, encyclopedias, and cogent, contextualized analyses of theatre history, literature, theory, and acting methods from many Asian cultures. With a little work, anyone can learn enough to enhance her undergraduate courses, at least. Whenever someone exhibits skepticism at such a remark, I point out that no one is asking you to get another Ph.D. We are all already teaching way beyond our narrow realms of expertise. The specialist in ancient Greek tragedy or Shakespeare must be able to deal with contemporary feminist theory, and the specialist in American musicals must also teach Molière, Chekhov, Brecht, and Stoppard. If non–Greek, non–German speakers can learn to pronounce Verfremdungseffekt and explain on a fundamental level the key concepts of Aristotle’s Poetics, surely they can do the same with hanamichi, Mei Lan-fang or the basic ideas of rasa and bhava. An easy way to begin educating oneself (or for the expert to expand her knowledge) is the brilliantly conceived Encyclopedia of Asian Theatre, edited by Samuel L. Leiter, the 2006 recipient of ATHE’s inaugural Award for Excellence in Editing. If anyone doubted that he deserved such an honor, this monumental, two-volume tome should silence them once and for all. The Encyclopedia comprehensively covers both traditional and modern theatre from South, South-East, and Far East Asia. It is four times the size of the only other similar publication, the 1993 Cambridge Guide to Asian Theatre, and is therefore considerably more complete. In addition, its organization is so intuitively logical and user friendly that it should become a model for all future reference works. Over ninety contributors from Asia, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia and the USA wrote articles ranging from about 250 words to several thousand. Beyond the alphabetical listings of countries, artists or genres, there are long entries (called headwords) that cover major areas of interest and are subdivided to include selected nations and periods. Typical headwords include Women in Asian Theatre, Actors and Acting, Censorship, Directors and Directing, Dramatic Structure, Experimental Theatre, Folk Theatre, Festivals and Theatre, Puppet Theatre, Scenography, Playwrights and Playwriting, Theatre Companies, Religion in Theatre, Politics in Theatre, Training, Western Influence, Theory, and so on. Although one can use the book like a dictionary, it is not necessary to know in advance the name

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of a specific artist or genre or even what country they are from. Rather, you may begin with large ideas and find cross-references to more specific ones. Entries are also easily accessed via two guides at the beginning of Volume 1, one alphabetical and one topical. Many articles include references for further reading, as well as photographs. The use of headwords fosters comparative and cross-cultural thinking, fruitful browsing, and unimagined discoveries. This arrangement is especially useful for teachers wishing to include Asian material into pre-existing courses, or for scholars seeking Asian examples relating to their research. It may even inspire the creation of entirely new courses or avenues of study. How about offering a class or writing an article that considers censorship, female playwrights, religion, politics, actor training, or costume design in various historical moments in countries as diverse as Britain, France, Germany, China, India, and Japan? Do you have a student from Burma? One whose parents came from Cambodia? Or one who is just fascinated by Bali? This work could help you guide them towards research that might enhance their understanding and appreciation of those cultures, while avoiding the pitfalls of Wikipedia and other questionable sources. No library should be without this extraordinary resource. Although the two other books reviewed will appeal primarily to specialists, non-specialists intrigued by contemporary Chinese or Japanese culture and politics (not to mention theatre) will also find them enlightening. Claire Conceison’s Significant Other: Staging the American in China focuses on China’s shifting political climate as it plays out in divergent representations of America and Americans by some of the nation’s most innovative playwrights and directors. Beginning with a perceptive historical and theoretical overview of China’s complex relationship to the West, Conceison examines fluctuating notions of nationalism and identity from official, intellectual, and popular perspectives. The view of America swings back and forth from adulation to condemnation, depending on both internal and external events. In this story, we see intriguing similarities to Japan’s equally see-sawing perceptions of America and the West, as well as to America’s own dizzyingly shifting views of Asian Others. Especially useful is Conceison’s carefully nuanced argument regarding the evolving concept of Occidentalism. This hotly debated term began as a response to Said’s Orientalism, and was initially conceived as a reverse perspective practiced by various non-western and/or postcolonial cultures. Conceison explicates the varieties, reassessments, and transitions of both terms, noting that up till now, Occidentalism “has not been sufficiently defined or articulated” (29). Her definition is both specific to her project and openended, “an altogether intentional invitation to others to respond, refashion,

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and reexamine its construction and possibilities” (30). She suggests that “...Occidentalist ‘othering’ is only part of a fluid process of cross-cultural transnational contact that ultimately points beyond itself toward the potential for more complex models of representations and the possibility of increased understanding” (39). She urges readers to “...consider Occidentalism as a self-defining oppositional strategy that is as global as it is domestic and as hegemonic as it is retaliatory” (231). The book continues with a lively investigation of seven huaju (spoken drama) plays produced in China between 1987 and 2002. Conceison is a sharp-eyed viewer who guides her readers on a lively tour into the world of Chinese theatre making. She considers not only texts, but how producers, directors and actors transform, enhance, or (in the case of one American actor who sees himself as “China’s Brad Pitt”) deform these playwrights’ works. Her personal relationships with many artists gave her incredible access. For the most part, she retains an objective stance, though occasionally her loyalties peek through. Nevertheless, she is keenly aware of her unique position. We learn how Americans are viewed and how they are embodied on stage, from the Chinese actors in “white face” with red or blond wigs to the radical casting of American and Polish actors speaking (sometimes mangled) Chinese. The 15 production photos, plus the cover photo, are especially helpful. Chinese concepts of cultural “authenticity” and national identity are interrogated and briefly related to American ethnic identity politics. What happens when Chinese students come to America, or Chinese Americans study in China, or Chinese and Americans marry? Although her analyses are often quite brilliant, I wish that she had considered in greater depth the complexities of Chinese anti–Semitism and the gender dynamics that encourage portrayals of Chinese women as sympathetic victims, while American and Jewish women are seen as loud, vulgar and aggressive. Unfortunately, only a few of the plays considered are available in English translation. This fascinating study should help encourage the translation of more modern Chinese drama. While Conceison’s book suggests that Chinese artists are attempting to understand their relationship to the Other, Peter Eckersall’s Theorizing the Angura Space: Avant-Garde Performance and Politics in Japan, 1960–2000 paints a portrait of relentless Japanese self-scrutiny. He proposes “...a new understanding of subjectivity (shutaisei) as a politics of experience and action and as a cure for social malaise...” that is exhibited “...in the link between the avant-garde and the social world. This in turn extends into other cultural dimensions and is a corollary to Japan’s transformation after the 1960s” (xii–xiii). Eckersall begins with an historical overview of modern Japanese theatre that many readers will find extremely helpful. He then presents his the-

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oretical position in regard to subjectivity, and analyzes a number of productions, artists and companies in an attempt to prove his thesis. The book concludes with a fine translation of Kawamura Takeshi’s 2000 Hamletclone, an intriguing response to Heiner Mueller’s Hamletmachine. Eckersall’s title is somewhat misleading in two respects. First, the term angura (from the English “underground”) refers to the experimental theatre that flourished in Japan from the 1960s to the mid–1980s. Eckersall, however, attempts to expand the genre to include later works that rebelled against and disdained angura. He suggests assigning the label to all experimental performances since the 1960s that overtly or covertly embraced political intentions. While such a project is provocative, I fear it paints too broad a canvas. I am also troubled by the fact that “space” is neither defined nor treated consistently. As used by Eckersall, “space” usually suggests not physical locale or theatrical staging, but a kind of cultural zeitgeist; sometimes, however, he uses the term in its more concrete, traditional meaning. This slipperiness in terminology results in confusion. Much of this book is thoughtful, and there is no question of its value in presenting and analyzing a wide range of recent non-realistic performances. However, Eckersall’s goal in expanding the meaning of angura from its historical context seems disarmingly utopian; it appears that he is attempting to rescue post-angura theatre from the very subjectivity that he assigns it. Despite evocative descriptions, the lack of production photographs makes it difficult to visualize these often stunning works. In addition, the key concepts of subjectivity and political agency sometimes fade away. Chapters emphasize the body, anti-political sentiments, feminism/anti-feminism, humanism, and consumerism. While subjectivity and politics are implicated in these issues, the arguments presented do not always clarify how. Disappointingly, Eckersall’s bibliographic references sometimes omit or improperly cite crucial material. For example, despite insightful commentary on Kishida Rio’s Woven Hell, nothing in the text, footnotes, or bibliography alerts the reader that Thread Hell, listed in the bibliography, is the same play in English translation. Despite such shortcomings, Eckersall has provided a welcome addition to the literature, introducing significant artists and practices that are little known beyond Japan. The three books reviewed here are a small sampling of the riches that are becoming available. It is no longer feasible (if it ever was) to maintain that studying “other” cultures and traditions is a luxury reserved for those who have mastered “the basics.” What was once “other” has become central. Only those who live in blissful cocoons could even begin to justify the practice of theatrical isolationism. UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, LOS ANGELES

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Review of Literature: Selected Books “then and now” is: who is the audience? Reasonably priced ($25.00 for hardcover), the book seems directed towards a popular or undergraduate student audience, similar to that targeted and constructed by Marjorie Garber’s Shakespeare After All, Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, and Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World. Aside from two references embedded in the text, there are no notes in Bevington’s study. A limited, carefully-selected list of “further reading” (about ten per chapter) takes the place of a bibliography. Clear explanations accompany critical terms (such as “metonymy” and “synecdoche”) and historical entities (such as London’s Liberties). An initial chapter introduces readers to Shakespeare’s theatrical environment, discussing the physical structure and material origins of London’s playhouses, charting the emergence of the named acting companies, and reproducing images of Richard Burbage, Edward Alleyn, the Swan, the London “long view,” and such. In subsequent chapters, Bevington groups the plays generically and approaches Shakespeare’s career chronologically. While gesturing to all the plays and tracing the playwright’s development as an experimental dramatist, the book offers sustained readings of representative comedies, histories, “problem

David Bevington. This Wide and Universal Theater: Shakespeare in Performance Then and Now. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Pp. 242. Hardcover $25.00. The theatrical world that David Bevington creates in This Wide and Universal Theater: Shakespeare in Performance Then and Now is filled with and by the imagination. Its alternative reality, created and controlled by the playwright, takes its shape from the physical space of the theatre and hinges on a “presentational” rather than “representational” mode of production (4). Instead of a realistic set, the dramatic characters, costumes, props, gestures, and dialogue create locations, leaving room for the spectators to fill in the gaps with their imaginations and respond to the illusion with their passions. In play after play, Shakespeare teaches us “to believe in, and be transformed by, the selfeffacing contrivance of dramatic art” (48). In the end, his metadramatic magic fosters a reality at times more real — and timeless — than our own. “How could one not ‘believe’ in Puck?” Bevington asks; a character who will “endure long after we are dead and forgotten,” he is, finally, “more real than we” (48). The first question one must ask in coming to this lively survey of Shakespeare’s plays and their performance 239

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plays,” tragedies, and romances. In some cases, the readings take the shape of elegant, interpretive guides through the plots. In others, they provide a provocative blocking of selected scenes or a detailed scrutiny of the settings. For example, Bevington makes especially vivid the differences between sieges, open battles, and parleys by mapping out their particular moves in Shakespeare’s histories. He invites his readers to visualize the Forest of Arden as a thinly treed compendium of “several places all at once” (53), some topical, some legendary, some around the corner from Shakespeare’s house. In displaying the use of space in Romeo and Juliet as selfconsciously “versatile” (130), he places the physical action inventively on the stage. Knowing Bevington’s extensive accomplishments as an editor, I would have liked the book to address the origins and authority of the stage directions it uses in such blockings. Still, by situating “Shakespeare’s plays in [their] original theatrical space,” Bevington fulfills his expressed purpose: to “illuminate numberless dramatic situations inherent in the dialogue” (1). In addition, the book couples the treatment of each play to a discussion of a historically and theatrically diverse array of productions, illustrated vividly by drawings, photographs, and other stills, and representing characterizing trends in AngloAmerican theatre, cinema, and television. What this book attempts to foster in its audience is, first and foremost, a sense of play — an appreciation for the “theatrical dimensions” of Shakespearean drama as well as for the imagination itself (1). In offering rich juxtapositions of text and performance, Bevington hopes to demonstrate how “the physical theater, in Shakespeare’s day and ever since then, shows itself capable of con-

veying multiple possibilities of philosophical, social, psychological, and political meaning” (39). This dramatic flexibility is most apparent in the book’s descriptions of productions (from the Restoration to the present) that variously adapt or revise the Shakespearean text. It is in twentieth-century films of Othello, for instance, that “marital and racial conflicts” become “the center of attention” (156), and in the Guthrie theatre, in 1985, that A Midsummer Night’s Dream emerges as a “dark comedy about sexual warfare and defiance of paternalistic authority” (52). As Bevington presents intriguing glimpses of such recreations, he points suggestively to the social and political contexts that seem, then, to penetrate the theatre’s walls. Restoration performances of King Lear and Coriolanus display the strain of “new constitutional crises” (167). In the twentieth century, Triolus and Cressida turns into the perfect vehicle for “a world increasingly disillusioned about war and rapidly changing social mores” (122). As for Shakespeare’s own textual and theatrical worlds, the book presents them as insistently self-referential. While showing how Shakespeare “fitted the plays to the playing conditions that were thrust upon him” (39), Bevington reads the texts in terms of their “fascination with theater and acting” (192). From The Taming of the Shrew (the first play which the book takes on) to Henry VIII (the last), Shakespeare is preoccupied with “the art of performance” (158), not only calling but also commenting on the power of the imagination. There is some restriction, some circularity, in the book’s conception of what the imagination is called on to do. If the imagined is taken too far, as it has been, Bevington implies, in the hands of some “revisionist” directors (116), the

Review of Literature (Eleni Bozia) resulting performances may seem no more than the “grinding of some particular political ax” (188). Though Shakespeare enlists the spectators to fill in the gaps of his presentational staging with their imaginations, they “must take care not to confuse theatrical art with real life” (206). Figures such as Prospero or Duke Vincentio may be “manipulative, authoritarian, and patriarchal” (206). But ultimately they “do what dramatists do” (206), releasing us from “the real world” (106) and turning our attention rather to “the power and veracity of theatrical illusion” (204). Indeed, for Bevington, the value of “the theatrical experience” is that it can take us magically beyond “the ordinariness of our own lives” and “transform” us, “even though the daily lives to which we return go on as before” (224). I might challenge the book’s attempt to cordon off the theatre from “the real world”— not only because, as an historicist, I see the theatre as that “world,” but also because the separation threatens to take fantasy and fascination out of our “daily lives” and turn the extraordinary process of “going on” into an unimaginative ordinary. Still, I think This Wide and Universal Theater is especially valuable as an introduction to Shakespeare because it urges new Shakespeareans to think beyond the presumption that the drama will necessarily play out in verisimilar terms — that its characters are people, its actions straightforward depictions of events, its settings simply places where both just happen to be. Bevington urges us, as spectators and readers, to “follow the dramatist’s lead in imagining [a] scene in its fullest dimensions” (224). But he wants those imaginings to lead us past the trees to an unusually “complex and multifaceted” forest, where “vividly strange” wild things are (54). To look at

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Shakespeare “in performance then and now” through Bevington’s eyes is to let go of the literal. And even if what we are to imagine is simply the power of the imagination, as a starting point into the study of Shakespeare this book guides its readers towards the important recognition that “anything can happen” on the stage (64) and, in performances of Shakespeare, routinely does. EMILY C. BARTELS Rutgers University C. W. Marshall. The Stagecraft and Performance of Roman Comedy. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2006. Pp.336. Hardcover $90. C.W. Marshall provides a skeleton of the information required for someone who wishes to understand how Roman theatre works. This is not just a history of Roman theatre, but a refreshing perspective from which one can reconstruct the circumstances of performance in the Roman world. Marshall’s contribution to the bibliography is that he writes from the perspective of the director. Although he works closely with primary sources, he nevertheless manages to eschew merely technical and philological approaches, and he continuously reminds the reader that a performance is a live event. A production is the result of the coordination of the actors, the audience, the music, and the rehearsal time. His method gives a new insight on problematic passages of Roman comic writers, mainly Plautus, while reconstructing them for his readers to see. In the introduction Marshall makes it clear to the reader that he intends to discuss Roman stagecraft on the basis of Plautine plays and productions. He argues that Plautus did not just blindly imitate Greek New comedy, but

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he introduced new material in his plays. Marshall then gives a list of other genres which he considers to be possible sources for Plautus. His overview of the basic characteristics of fabulae Atellanae, Hellenistic mime, Old and New comedy as well as other earlier forms of Roman comedy gives the reader an idea of the elements that will be discussed in the next chapters. There is only a brief reference to Terence at the end of the introduction, which does not shed any light on the latter’s techniques, and indeed Terence does not seem to be a part of Marshall’s argumentation or his efforts to reconstruct the circumstances of performance in Rome in the rest of the book . In chapter one Marshall presents the elements that constitute a performance: the people, except for the actors, who participate in the preparation, the performance spaces, the set, the costumes, and the stage properties. He mentions the times of the year when theatrical events were taking place and their connection to religion, the procedure which precedes the performance day, and the people who were responsible for the organization of the event. He emphasizes the political significance as well as the economic variants which affected the playwright, the ownership of the manuscript, and even the actors’ script, and he elaborates on the role of the choragus and the praeco. Another issue Marshall addresses is the performance space. Basing his argument on primary literary sources and artistic representations, he shows the evolution of the Roman theatre: how it evolved from having no specific venue to the standardization of theatres in Rome; how, for instance, plays were first performed in front of the Temple of Magna Mater or in the Forum Romanum until an actual theatre was constructed. Marshall

discusses the set, the exits, and the number of doors and succeeds in helping the reader picture the performance space by providing examples from primary sources. He also argues that even the costumes serve the purpose of relative visibility, which works well on two levels, what the audience sees and what the characters of the play perceive, and he suggests that political events and specifically Lex Oppia had an effect on what the actors wore on stage. His discussion of the stage properties presents the different perspectives from which one can view props and the fact that they are not just inanimate objects, but that they create “relationships between characters” (68). Marshall concludes with the audience’s reception of all these theatrical elements. He refers to the uncertainty of the number of spectators and then he talks about the segregation of the audience on the basis of status and how this may have affected the Roman spectators. Chapter two is about the actors, the size of the troupe and how this relates to the performance and the perception of the audience. Marshall discusses the actors in the affinity of the group to which they belong as a way to distinguish the Roman way from the Greek. Once more he deals with the preparation of the performance, with what happens behind the ‘curtains’ by elaborating on the human factor. First he discusses the economic benefits to the author as well as to the manager until the script reaches the hands of the troupe. He shows also that performances were the source of income for the troupes and the latter had to make as many contracts as possible every year in order to survive. The remainder of his discussion can be divided into three sections. The

Review of Literature (Eleni Bozia) first presents the low social status of the actors and the comic possibilities that open when one considers the roles they play as well as the status of the spectators. The second is about the size of the troupes. Marshall, instead of giving only assumptions, discusses Plautine plays and possibilities of performances, namely role doubling, lightning changes, and general backstage activity. This way, he argues, the troupe had a core of actors and then they, according to the needs of the play, could hire more actors. In the third section Marshall, using some of Plautus’s plays, suggests the way the roles could be distributed among the actors. Throughout this discussion Marshall shows the magic and mystique of a production, since he never argues that there is only one way of performing a play. Finally, he just hints at Terence, merely suggesting that, although more obscure, his plays work basically in a manner similar to those of Plautus. In chapter three Marshall discusses the use of masks, arguing against those who believe that masks are only a standardized prop which makes the actors’ performance more difficult. He argues that the mask works in relation to the actor and the character he plays. Its efficiency depends on the way it is employed and on the acting skill of the person who wears it. After having differentiated Athenian from Roman masks, the author says that in Roman theatre masks were not stereotyped. While there are a number of basic categories, each play and script has its own needs and there seems to be a flexibility in the creation of the masks. Marshall presents his views based on the presentation of Plautine pimps on stage. He shows that judging from the content of the plays, it seems that Roman mask makers were influenced by Classical

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Greek and Hellenistic as well as by Atellan masks, and they combined those characteristics with the image they wanted to present on stage. There is, however, the possibility, Marshall argues, that there were even individualized masks, combining standard characteristics with new creations, intended to emphasize or produce a comic effect: confusion, as in Miles Gloriosus or the Bacchides, where twins are presented, irony as in Captivi, where Tyndarus is supposedly a slave pretending to be a freeborn man and dressed as one, while all along the audience is aware that he is a long-lost freeborn son. Finally, Marshall somewhat abruptly argues against the proposition that in Phormio and Asinaria there was no need for the use of masks. He suggests that the change of facial expressions suggested in lines 209–212 and 837–41 can as well be a visual joke where the audience is called on to see something which does not exist. Chapter four is about the stage action, but from the director’s point of view, and that is what renders Marshall’s presentation most interesting and valuable for the understanding of Roman comedy. Marshall discusses elements of a performance which, although crucial, are not usually considered. He divides the chapter in three sections. The first entitled “focus” gives an overview of the visual effect, one of the most crucial parts of theatrical performances. Marshall argues that, according to the needs of the play or the intentions of the director, the attention of the audience may be directed to the actor who is speaking or to someone who is not, or even to the eavesdroppers. Stage properties split focus, and gestures may change the audience’s focus several times during a scene. The second section looks to the pace of a performance. The

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actors, the characters they play, and the audience need to realize that there are two different times, the actual time of the performance, and the dramatic time. Time passes on both levels not only during speaking parts of the performance, but also when the stage is empty. What Marshall emphasizes in bringing modern scholars closer to a real Roman performance is that the handling of both ‘times’ by the actors affects the development of the play. The tone of the play is developed in the third section, where the author discusses Plautine comedy. What he does here, however, is to present another aspect of a play, namely the way people are presented as well as the customs and ethics of a particular society and time period. Finally Marshall presents the existence of routines, which undoubtedly affect stage action even before the play goes on stage. Comic routines as well as the lazzo of a person reading or writing for another, deceiving or even employing writing as a means of blocking the plot, are motifs which when employed need to be completed and thus cover a part of the performance time. Chapter five is a very explicit and step-by-step description not only of the meter but also of the way meter becomes melody and music and its relation to the performance itself. The author gives a detailed overview of the different kinds of meters used in Roman comedy. He emphasizes how and when these meters are employed, how they affect the tone of the performance and the audience. He goes through all the Plautine plays offering an analysis of the accompanied and the unaccompanied parts and what this means for the play. Next in the chapter comes the role of the tibicen, the provider of the music. Marshall, however, does not leave the relation of the tibicen to the play to luck and he does

not limit himself to theory. By that I mean that he emphasizes the role of the tibicen in the performance, but not in the dramatic action. He also refers to the tibicen’s setting of musical structural patterns, the accompaniment of onstage musicians and the imitation of other instruments. Marshall then relates this figure to the other live factors of the performance, namely the actors and the way they can communicate onstage. Marshall argues that it is not the melody that needs to be the same in every performance of a single play, but the tone, the basic notions of the play. That makes the tibicen talented and every performance unique. The last chapter is on improvisation. Marshall argues that there was not a full script for the plays on which the rehearsals and the performances were based. He suggests instead that the basic parts of the play were pre-outlined and then the actors built on that during every performance. At the end of the performances the actors dictated the script in its entirety to someone. Therefore, what we now have cannot be what Plautus wrote. Marshall opens his chapter with a definition of improvisation, the different kinds of improvisation as well as its different degrees. He also discusses the different kinds of scriptedness and their opposites. He argues against Eckard Lefèvre, saying that the elements he considers to be evidence of improvisation are just motifs found in previous comic plays and playwrights, and he insists on distinguishing between improvisatory techniques in the scripting process, literary imitation of improvisation, and the actual improvisation on stage which Plautus’s troupe is doing. Finally, Marshall presents what he considers proof of improvisation on stage, the existence of doublets, gags and modular units.

Review of Literature (Dorothy Chansky) This book deserves a place alongside histories of the Roman theatre since it adds to what we already know about performances and it brings the reader closer to a production and what it meant to the Roman theatrical world. Finally, the reader of Plautine comedy can certainly benefit from what can be considered to be director’s notes on the plays. ELENI BOZIA University of Florida David Krasner. American Drama 1945–2000: An Introduction. Malden, MA and London: Blackwell Publishing, 2006. Pp. 216. Hardcover $74.95, paperback $29.95. How refreshing to find an introductory text that packages the lesser known part and parcel with warhorses. David Krasner offers the scrappy, the off beat, and the rarefied among American playwrights alongside the canonical in the interest of demonstrating how cultural trends show up throughout an art form and not merely among the commercially visible. Krasner’s project in this book is to discuss dominant and recurrent dramatic concerns in five broadly conceived eras in twentieth-century American history. Because he is a student not just of dramatic literature but of jazz, visual art, and politics, Krasner’s examples as well as his means of interpretation are generally interdisciplinary in conception and provocative even at their most traditionally literary. Krasner lays the foundation for his main study in the introductory chapter, “Politics, Existentialism, and American Drama, 1935–1945.” Dramatists’ efforts in that decade to capture the hardships of economic deprivation resulted in two types of plays: those that directly challenged adverse social conditions (think Clifford Odets, Langston Hughes, and

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Lillian Hellman) and those that trafficked in an American existentialism which, for Krasner, is far less bleak than the European variety. (Main exemplars are William Saroyan and Thornton Wilder.) These concerns — the desire for a fair shake (or a new deal) and a concomitant sense that life is not fair but also not unendurable — color the four succeeding eras that make up the bulk of the book. “Money Is Life: American Drama, 1945–1959” stakes its claim on the notion of “protagonists seeking mainstream acceptability” (28). Krasner’s primary playwrights are, unsurprisingly, Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller, William Inge, and Lorraine Hansberry. The chapter turns out to be more interesting and nuanced than its premise, though, as it is not entirely clear that the many outcast characters Krasner discusses really do aspire to mainstream acceptance. Does Laura really want to get out of the house and away from her menagerie? Does Tom aspire to the middlebrow? Krasner is, I think, closer to what makes this play (and several of the others in the chapter) resonant when he points out how the playwrights are, in fact, critiquing a world of unbridled capitalism that has little use for the very individuals who so captivate us as readers and as playgoers. Mitch may want Blanche to conform, but I’m not sure that her forced conversion is what either Williams or Blanche herself sees as desirable. Willy Loman goes to his grave craving mainstream success, but his greatest legacy to Biff may be showing him that the game is rigged and possibly not even all that interesting. The plays in “Reality and Illusion: American Drama, 1960–1975” do address the hollowness of consumerism, the irrationality of existence, and the value of a political stance vis-à-vis bour-

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geois values. Albee, Sam Shepard, the Black Arts Movement playwrights (most notably Ed Bullins, whom Krasner correctly credits with the concept of “twentieth-century cycle plays” later picked up by August Wilson [91]) make appearances here. Chapter four, “Mad as Hell: American Drama, 1976–1989” is the clearest with regard to an incontrovertible throughline and examples from across a spectrum of styles and genres. If David Mamet and Sam Shepard (again) are the most obvious angry young (and middle-aged) playwrights, Marsha Norman and Maria Irene Fornes are fellow travelers. So are Karen Finley, Eric Bogosian, Anna Deavere Smith, and Eric Overmyer. “The Body in Pain: American Drama, 1990–2000” discusses the social ills scripted onto characterological bodies by Tony Kushner in Angels in America and by Moisés Kaufman in The Laramie Project. Krasner is also lucid and elucidating about work by Kia Corthron (as he discusses the crippled abortionist in Come Down Burning), Paula Vogel (with her AIDSstricken character in The Baltimore Waltz and child abuse victim in How I Learned to Drive), and Margaret Edson, whose cancer-ridden English professor in Wit stunningly embodies the physical pain of disease and treatment as well as the pain of being a brainy woman in a world that still prefers a medical reduction of the body to its treatable parts over holistic respect for the whole woman as thinker. The book is not without speedbumps, and many of the problems stem from what feels like very hasty editing. Constance Congdon’s first name is not Constant. Kia Corthron’s first name is not Kai, nor is her last name Corthorn (as it appears in the index under the listing for Come Down Burning). Karen

Finley is not a lesbian, and Israel Horowitz’s play is The Indian Wants the Bronx, not The Indians Want the Bronx. If the latter mistake at least emerges grammatically, numerous instances of intransitive verbs showing up with direct objects and vice versa as well as misplaced modifying phrases do not inspire confidence. It is also not entirely clear who the target audience for this book is, although Krasner’s introduction names “researchers, directors, actors, designers, and playwrights” (2). Antonio Gramsci is helpfully identified as an “Italian political philosopher” (139), but readers are on their own with regard to Walter Benjamin’s angel of history and with Henry Wallace. An average researcher in American history might not need help with the latter; an average actor might appreciate taglines for all three. Krasner’s individual readings of plays are strong and engaging. If I will probably not sit down again to read this entire book at once, I can say that it is a fine resource for some clear thinking about and good interconnections between plays and playwrights. Even those only mentioned in passing are contextualized in a way that a reader can use as a guide to further historical and thematic thinking. DOROTHY CHANSKY Texas Tech University John Patrick Diggins. Eugene O’Neill’s America: Desire Under Democracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Pp. 305. Hardcover $29.00. In this ambitious meditation, intellectual historian John Patrick Diggins examines Eugene O’Neill’s struggle to dramatize the essentially tragic nature of American history. Diggins reflects

Review of Literature (Kurt Eisen) throughout the book on a persistent dialectic of “desire” and “freedom” as the warring, decidedly Nietzschean forces driving O’Neill in the period bounded by two world wars. Drawing frequently on the writings of Nietzsche, Emerson, Thoreau, Jefferson, T. S. Eliot, and Tocqueville, Diggins embeds O’Neill’s life and work within the nation’s intellectual history, with occasional jabs at more recent theoretical practices such as poststructuralism and postcolonialism. In contrast to conventional psychoanalytic readings of O’Neill’s plays and, conversely, to cultural-studies approaches such as Joel Pfister’s 1994 Staging Depth with its skeptical take on psychoanalysis, Diggins reads O’Neill’s family psychodramas as allegories of America’s national destiny, finding the very meaning of “America” in the playwright’s confrontation with his personal and familial demons. Identifying himself as a newcomer to O’Neill scholarship, Diggins is certainly no upstart in the field of American history. His books over the past four decades have covered such diverse figures as Thorsten Veblen, Max Weber, Abraham Lincoln, Arthur Schlesinger, and Ronald Reagan, and in general have pondered the complex fate of western liberalism. In many respects Eugene O’Neill’s quest for the meaning of American history makes him a kindred spirit to Diggins. When O’Neill left Broadway and moved to the west coast in the mid–1930s he was clearly trying to gain some distance from the Broadway establishment that he had himself become part of after multiple Pulitzer Prizes and best-selling play volumes in the previous decade. Particularly in the doomed project of an eleven-play cycle of historical plays that O’Neill composed during this period of exile from Broadway, Diggins astutely locates the

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characteristically tragic view of America that most draws him to O’Neill’s art. Diggins organizes each chapter around a featured play or set of plays, along with a theme or problem that connects those works to America’s national identity. One chapter, for example, deals with race in The Emperor Jones and All God’s Chillun, with Diggins praising O’Neill’s courage in creating a strong black male protagonist and for perceiving race as a defining feature of the national psyche, while another chapter usefully traces O’Neill’s ambivalence toward the anarchism embraced by his Greenwich Village contemporaries during the First World War. Along the way Diggins also tries to rescue O’Neill’s work from what he sees as the prevailing but shallow theoretical currents now dominant in academic discourse, and to apply instead the more time-tested ideas of Tocqueville and Nietzsche. One’s sympathy for this project will depend largely on whether one endorses Diggins’s argument that recent poststructuralist critiques of truth as a “social construction” (176) are inadequate to deal with such weighty notions as moral consciousness, history, and tragedy; or, conversely, if Diggins’s own framework for understanding O’Neill’s plays itself seems an excellent example of the very constructedness of such concepts. To some readers, pronouncements such as “The ultimate theater of desire is democracy itself ” (94) will seem trenchant and profound; to others, grandiose. Diggins’s argument depends heavily on the reader’s acceptance of a conceptually unified notion of “America,” with Tocqueville’s writings serving as a kind of master text. For all of its acumen, erudition, and probing reflections on O’Neill’s obsession with the meaning of American history, this book is likely also one of

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the least reliable major analyses of O’Neill’s work. This may be inevitable given the lofty intellectual plane from which Diggins generally surveys the drama. Missteps are conspicuous especially in the early chapters, as when he misquotes Emerson’s “Self-Reliance,” changing “Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string” to “Know thyself. Every heart vibrates to that string” (1). Self-knowledge and self-trust are related concepts, certainly, but selfknowledge was not quite the iron vibration that Emerson had in mind there, and in any case not what he actually wrote. Later in the book Diggins cites the title of a nineteenth-century book that introduced the young O’Neill to non-western thought as “The Path to the Light” (12), whereas the actual title of the book is The Light on the Path, and he refers to the Modern Library imprint under which Random House published O’Neill’s drama as the “Modern House Library” (159). In another odd mixup he recounts a morbid event late in O’Neill’s life when his wife Carlotta left him one night outside their seaside home in Marblehead, Massachusetts, lying injured in the snow, apparently having considered pitching himself into the nearby icy waters (28–29). Diggins moves this event south to Boston, assumes the water is that of the Charles River instead of the Atlantic, but notes, accurately, that O’Neill was eventually found and rushed to the hospital in nearby Salem — an odd choice for emergency care if O’Neill were indeed in Boston and not in fact much closer to Salem in Marblehead. Several other examples of editorial carelessness might be noted, but all are symptomatic of an approach committed less to documentary rigor than to a broadly conceptual, intertextual examination of how O’Neill’s dramatic art ex-

presses America’s national destiny. In this spirit, Diggins cites no page numbers from standard editions (such as the definitive three-volume 1988 Library of America edition) for his quotations from O’Neill’s plays, apparently deeming this an unnecessary bit of fussiness. He is more scrupulous about documenting the work of other scholars, but often cites a single source as if it summed up a broad critical consensus on a particular issue, as when he notes the opinion of “classical scholars” on Mourning Becomes Electra while citing only the introduction to a 1977 Penguin volume of the plays of Aeschylus (48). Diggins’s recurring straw-man critiques of recent theoretical practices also undermine his interpretive reliability, and when he claims that O’Neill’s play Marco Millions (a satirical romance about Marco Polo) actually “set out to deconstruct the Western imperialist mind” well before Edward Said, as Diggins puts it, “started a school of thought called ‘post-colonial studies’” (84–85), one must assume that Diggins’s intended audience shares his disdain for the new-fangled and trendy in academic discourse. This does not, however, prevent Diggins from fully utilizing certain ideas that until recent decades had themselves been considered trendy, such as Freudian psychoanalysis (he even refers once to Lacan), Sartre, Trilling, and Niebuhr. Interestingly, his assertion that O’Neill “deconstructs” Western imperialism in Marco Millions suggests that Diggins has absorbed the interpretive vocabulary of post-structuralism even as he discounts its value. Despite these shortcomings, and they are not trivial, Diggins is masterful when exploring the sociopolitical valences of such works as The Personal Equation (an obscure early work about anarchist revolution), The Hairy Ape, and especially The Iceman Cometh, plays

Review of Literature (Katharine B. Free) that best reveal the profound mix of cynicism and idealism of O’Neill’s political sentiments. Long Day’s Journey into Night is usually considered O’Neill’s greatest work and perhaps the best play ever written by an American, but Diggins quite rightly looks to Iceman, the brooding masterpiece that conspicuously flouted the postwar tide of American triumphalism when it premiered in 1946, as the fullest expression of O’Neill’s dark view of modern history and especially his belief that revolutionary action is ineffectual against the tragic undertow of that history. If Diggins often betrays his background as an intellectual historian rather than a careful critic of dramatic literature, Eugene O’Neill’s America nonetheless offers a powerful example of how one might come to grips with O’Neill’s relevance to the historical, ideological, and moral consciousness of modern America. KURT EISEN Tennessee Tech University J. Michael Walton. Found in Translation: Greek Drama in English. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2006. Pp. 320. The well-known scholar and translator, J. Michael Walton, has produced an engaging, comprehensive, and rewarding journey through the quagmire of English translations of ancient Greek drama. A subject that in less able hands may have been bogged down by the tedium of critical jargon and deconstructivist abstractions is wonderfully illuminated in Walton’s treatment. This is in part because of his lucid style and also because he approaches the subject of translation with the congenial view that translation should lead to performance. His is not an elitist position that translations should be as literal as possible

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renditions of Greek and meant only for study. On the contrary, he prefers that the translator should be a partner with directors, actors and scenic artists for an audience of a specific time and place. Walton repeatedly recommends leaving “open the performance door” and says that “the issue of writing with performance in mind is the constant factor in this book” (15). As a consequence, what results is both a history of the English language through the prism of four centuries of renderings of Greek texts, and a history of the performance of Greek drama in the English-speaking theatre. The book is divided into three parts. First is the history and theory of translation of Greek drama. The second deals with specific aspects of the translation of Greek drama and focuses on four plays: Agamemnon, Oedipus Tyrannus, Medea and Alcestis. The third discusses the differences between the translation of tragedy and comedy and also distinguishes between translations, versions, and adaptations. The first part begins with a survey of critical views and theories of translation beginning with the Romans and continuing to the present day. Excerpts from various periods are offered as illustrations of the tendency of translators to make selections reflective of the political and social concerns of their own times. In material that might at first seem antiquarian, there is much of interest here. Attention is drawn to long-forgotten achievements by women from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries who pioneered translation of Greek drama. Walton approaches translations of the earliest periods not as curiosities, but as achievements worthy of respect. The second part of the book begins with comparison and analysis of various renditions of Agamemnon, beginning with that of Robert Browning

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and continuing to the more recent versions of Ted Hughes and others. Walton recommends that Aeschylus is better off in the hands of a playwright/poet as translator rather than an academic and suggests, in place of translation, the use of the word “transubstantiation” to describe works in which there is a change of substance or essence by the translator (51). Renderings of the carpet scene are juxtaposed with descriptions of stagings of the scene in recent productions. Walton draws attention to the problems of finding equivalencies in modern culture for the richly emotive, non-verbal interjections of Greek drama. Inarticulate sounds, which some translators may be tempted to ignore, Walton rightly identifies as punctuation marks for key dramatic moments and turning points in the action. He relates these to the gesture-driven performance style of the ancient Greek theatre that was informed by the convention of wearing masks. Walton turns his attention to stage directions and the lack thereof in the Greek texts. He favors minimal help from the translator so that theatre artists are free to invent appropriate movement and stage effects. In his discussion of Oedipus Tyrannus, Walton deals in particular with the problem of the meaning of two key Greek words, tï rannos and daímon, an understanding of which drives any interpretation of the play. Various translations of the words and their impact on the over-all impression of the work are discussed. The only improvement to be offered here would be a consideration of the political connotations of the word tï rannos in the post–Peisistratus, democratic Athens of the fifth century B.C. The difficulties of verse translations are discussed. Walton prefers renditions that retain the metaphorical ideas of the original but that do not attempt metri-

cal complexities or the introduction of rhyme schemes. He illustrates the effectiveness of this idea by resetting a prose translation into verse and a verse translation into prose showing that the prose rendition is just as effective poetically when set in lines as the intentionally poetic rendition. Walton goes onto a discussion of subtext as two aspects of Greek drama: the simple act of deception and the unearthing of stage dynamics. He finds it unacceptable of translators not to give actors guidelines about tone and motivation (122). In his analysis of translations of Medea and Alcestis, he draws attention to the influence of modern feminism on translations of these plays. Today, infanticide is softened by an appreciation of male oppression. By killing her sons, Medea strikes Jason in the most damaging way possible. In Alcestis, the sacrifice Admetus requires of his wife puts him in an ambiguous light in the scene with his father. Walton brilliantly identifies the relationship of fathers and sons as the key to both plays (139). Walton also examines the various ways in which translation of the sexual language in Medea has changed through the last century. The last part of the book begins with a history of the translation of the works of Aristophanes and The Cyclops, the sole completely surviving satyr play. Translations of Aristophanes and Menander preoccupy the twentieth century. Walton writes about the need for vitality and force in translations of comedy which he relates to the imperative of Julius Caesar for comic vis. Although he finds more freedom to update comedy for contemporary audiences, Walton laments the dearth of important productions of Aristophanes in the modern theatre (164). He establishes a list of seven categories of translation ranging from literal translations (cribs) to trans-

Review of Literature (M. Beth Meszaros) locations to another culture (O’Neill, Eliot, Soyinka). He asks difficult questions. Why should any playwright feel obliged to be faithful to an original? Must dues be paid to the past in a theatre that is necessarily concerned with the present? Walton discusses versions of Greek drama by Jean-Paul Sartre, Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, and others. He reflects on the relationship between independent artists and their classic points of reference. Walton concludes that “[a] legitimate engagement with the text as handed down, at least insofar as such engagement is possible : that is surely the responsibility of the translator” (194). Ultimately translators and directors have to answer to today’s theatre artists and audiences (196). Finally, the inclusions of a comprehensive list of all Greek plays in English translation, an index of translators, and an extensive bibliography make Found in Translation an invaluable resource as well as fascinating and entertaining reading. KATHARINE B. FREE Loyola Marymount University Andrew Stott. Comedy. New York : Routledge, 2005. Pp. viii + 168. Hardcover $90.00, Paperback $19.95. Verna A Foster. The Name and Nature of Tragicomedy. Aldershot, UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004. Pp. xii + 217. Hardcover $99.95. Any theatre scholar who thinks that genre study is passé or preciously literary needs to read Comedy and The Name and Nature of Tragicomedy. Genre studies make us think and re-think our culture, our work, and our profession. In Comedy, Stott argues against an apprehension of comedy as a distinct literary form “most properly applied to drama,” instead urging a consideration of comedy as a mode, tone, or set of

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connected themes that may manifest itself just as readily in non-dramatic literature and indeed in non-literary media. This thesis allows him wide latitude in his choice of illustrative examples; Comedy is enlivened throughout by discussion of television sitcoms and comic film classics. In the carnival world of comedy, Bugs Bunny shares the stage with Ben Jonson. The opening chapter traces the fortunes of comedy as a subject of intellectual discourse, noting that comedy has seldom been accorded serious consideration by the literary establishment. Affiliated as it is with popular culture, with physicality, with nature, and the lower orders, most theorists prior to the twentieth century have dismissed comedy as a temporary (albeit sometimes useful) lapse in good taste and high seriousness. Seeking to provide a “genealogy of comedy” (14), Stott touches on early assessments offered by Aristotle and Sidney. With the advent of anthropologically inflected literary criticism in the early-twentieth century, comedy came to be affiliated with fertility and the “élan vital.” The chapter closes with a consideration of Bakhtin and New Historicism’s contributions to a theory of comedy. Stott concedes that comedy enjoys more legitimacy today than it ever has but maintains that the academy still regards comedy as merely “the working-class cousin of aristocratic tragedy and other ‘serious’ forms” (39). Chapter two turns to the notion of comic character and comic style, noting that in traditional comedy, character is usually subordinate to plot. The traditional comic identity is one-dimensional, unchanging, incapable of true introspection. Stott proffers the fool and the trickster as examples of traditional comic identity. The chapter also

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offers a discussion of wit, camp, and bathos as comic techniques. Chapters three and four are companion chapters, devoted to both the physical world of things and the comic human body as it struggles with that world. Chapter three presents a comparative analysis of As You Like It and Some Like It Hot as a vehicle to discuss cross-dressing, “a familiar motif in the comic exploration of sexuality” (63). Stott contends that “‘real’ women” are excluded from this motif, represented by traditional comedy only in terms of their “suitability for marriage” (77): female sexuality in comedy is limited to “a handful of stereotypes” (82). Not surprisingly, “Women have systematically been denied the power to be funny” (99). The comic body is clumsy, “exaggeratedly physical” (83), undisciplined, and, in the case of slapstick comedy, at war with a world of objects. Such is not the idealized female body. Stott concludes that comedy does indeed reflect “dominant ideological codes” (102). Ideological codes and the relationship of comedy to politics is the focus of chapter five. The central question with which it wrestles is whether comedy is essentially a subversive or a liberating force: “...comedy can be the site of manifest ideological struggle” (105). In his discussion of political comedy, Stott once again ranges freely: the chapter features discussion of Aristophanes’ The Frogs, Swift’s parodies, and Dr. Strangelove. Stott’s discussion of Trevor Griffiths’s Comedians, as well as his meditations on the Holocaust as a subject for comedy, leads him to conclude that comedy has its limits: “Perhaps it is true that comedy has nothing to offer politics when the project requires something more than simple derision” (126). Stott’s final chapter, “Laughter,” attends to the causes of laughter and its

uses. Some theorists of laughter have located its origins in a sense of superiority, while others have pointed to incongruity, or the need to release nervous energy. Early Christianity had no use for laughter; on the other hand, medieval laughter was “redemptive, inclusive” (133). Bakhtin regarded laughter as palliative, easing “the tensions of official ideology” (131). Eighteenth-century notions of propriety interpreted it as a sign of plebian vulgarity, inimical to a person of breeding. Marxists, like those early Christians, are suspicious of laughter, regarding it as a placebo that distracts, thus suppressing critical thought. Stott’s brief conclusion points the way toward Verna A. Foster’s The Name and Nature of Tragicomedy in that Stott’s final assessment is that comedy is “a troubled form” (147), capable of manifesting itself as both conservative and “antithetical to the maintenance of the status quo” (147). He reiterates his point that comedy is not strictly a dramatic genre; moreover, as he points out, various non-dramatic contexts of twentiethcentury comedy have often allowed it to “mingle with other modes” (148). Unlike Stott, Foster insists on distinct dramatic genres; thus, she regards tragicomedy as a defined dramatic genre, thereby rejecting a definition of the form as simply two modes (comic and tragic) that co-inhabit a single play. She takes great care in distinguishing tragicomedy from other forms with which it has often been confused, such as black comedy. The notion of persistent “family resemblances” or “recognizable likenesses” (2) in dramaturgy is sturdy enough to permit her to distinguish tragicomedies from “other plays in which serious and comic elements coexist” (10) yet flexible enough to allow for differences between individual plays. Key to understanding Foster’s thesis is

Review of Literature (M. Beth Meszaros) the notion that in tragicomedy, tragic and comic elements work in concert (as opposed to simply co-existing), modifying one another so as to produce effects that are distinct from those of either comedy or tragedy. Foster would likely agree with Stott that comedy certainly has the potential to be troubling, but she would probably go on to argue that dissonance, disturbance, discomfort is tragicomedy’s métier: tragicomedy offers a more nuanced understanding of the human condition than either comedy or tragedy alone can provide. It is, paradoxically, as Shaw argued, a “much grimmer entertainment than tragedy” (123). Foster believes that not all periods have been equally hospitable to tragicomedy; she identifies the Renaissance and the modern periods as eras particularly receptive to the genre. Thus, the bulk of her text is devoted to these periods, with three chapters allotted to Renaissance tragicomedy and two to modern tragicomedy. Two other “bridge” chapters are useful in their own right in that they establish how the form can be and has at times been subsumed by other genres. The reader emerges with a clearer understanding of the nature of tragicomedy through her sustained discussion of plays that are not tragicomic, for example, the drame. Foster acknowledges that tragicomic theory as such has tended to be “fragmentary” (16), not surprising for such a “slippery” (2) genre, but she utilizes what commentary is available to good advantage, arguing that “certain theoretical conceptions” (15) have persisted, this despite the fact that the name and nature of the genre have always been supremely controversial. “A more precise perceptual framework for the genre tragicomedy” (1)— Foster’s stated goal — is promoted by discussion of the-

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orists such as Guarini, Sidney, Dryden, Shaw, Dürrenmatt, and Ionesco. Arguably, one of the most interesting “family resemblances” that Foster discusses is tragicomedy’s predilection for metatheatre. Foster claims that tragicomedy’s concerns tend to be metaphysical (more than political or social) and that metatheatre is particularly adept at “evoking a spiritual universe” (115). Metatheatre also contributes to producing tragicomedy’s characteristically “mixed emotional effects”: the overt artifice of metatheatre “blocks without entirely destroying our emotional participation in the characters’ experiences” (125). Thus, for example, while an audience may be “moved” by Tennessee Williams’s Blanche Dubois, the “theatricality of her behavior” creates “the critical distance needed for a comic response” (151). In the case of Beckett, however, metatheatre instead heightens both the comic and the tragic response. Foster is attentive to fine distinctions such as these, as well as broad similarities, the so-called “family resemblances.” Although both texts will be of interest to theatre scholars, The Name and Nature of Tragicomedy offers extended analysis of individual plays, whereas Comedy does not, instead opting for a sweepingly global approach, cutting a wide swath but offering less detail. The result is that discussion of individual comedic plays is necessarily compressed, more evocative than sustained. Indeed, examples drawn from dramatic literature jostle for place with examples drawn from media, popular culture, and narrative. Given Stott’s thesis that comedy is “a series of more or less connected effects, traditions, and modified themes” (148), rather than merely a formal category of drama, diminished attention to individual plays seems inevitable and

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unavoidable. In contrast, Foster’s allegiance to the notion of dramatic genre as both “mode of perception” and formal category permits her to consider tragicomic effects on an audience as well as tragicomic dramaturgy. Another significant conceptual difference between the two texts is epitomized by their approach to Waiting for Godot. Stott reads it as a species of comedy, while Foster resolutely classifies it as tragicomedy. Stott accounts for the notion “that laughter is the close cousin of pain” (146) by arguing that while comedy can be comforting, it is equally capable of expressing aggression, anxiety (even fear) and that such has always been the case: “...incidences of comedy and humor always harbor a darker, serious impulse, whether they be manifestations of psychological darkness or a spiritual recognition of human imperfection” (147). Stott sees comedy as a supremely capacious, elastic mode, capable of expressing all manner of discord and distress. Foster, on the other hand, explains the darkness of a text such as Godot by arguing that modern tragicomedy is “no longer a form of comedy” (13). Modern tragicomedy, she claims, “has subsumed tragedy” (13). In

an epoch that has witnessed “the decline of tragedy as a dramatic genre” (13), our “sense of the tragic” (13) is best expressed by tragicomedy. Thus, she explains the “darkness,” a darkness that both she and Stott apprehend, quite differently. Finally, and most forcibly, while Foster acknowledges the decline of tragedy, she does argue for the vitality and significance of tragicomedy as a dramatic genre, thereby tacitly validating the ongoing power of dramatic texts and their enactment. Stott is not so sure. He is not at all sanguine about the fortunes of drama as a field of literary study or as a force in popular culture. In fact, he associates the migration of comedy from theatre to “new media and contexts” with the decline in the popularity of theatre itself: “Traditional generic definitions belonged to the theatre and, as its popularity has declined over the course of the twentieth century, different types of comedy have emerged in new contexts and media...” (148). If Stott is correct, then Comedy, its title notwithstanding, is indeed the “grimmer entertainment” of the two. M. BETH MESZAROS Independent Scholar

Index 180–182 The Antigone of Sophocles: After Hölderlin’s Translation by Bertolt Brecht (Die Antigone des Sophokles. Nach der Hölderlinschen Übertragung von Bertolt Brecht) (Tabori) 169–170, 176–182 The Antigone of Sophocles: A Version for the Stage after Hölderlin’s Translation (Die Antigone des Sophokles. Nach der Hölderlinschen Übertragung für die Bühne bearbeitet) (Brecht) 169–182 Antigonemodell 1948 (Brecht, Neher) 169–171, 175 anti-masque 35, 36, 37, 38, 41 anti–Semitism, Chinese 236 Apollo 126, 128 Archbishop on Joan’s hubris 187, 188 Argos 173, 177 Aristophanes 222, 250, 252 Aristotelian formula 194 Aristotelian tragedy 187, 188–191; catharsis 188; salient features 188 Aristotle 154, 185, 187, 188, 191, 251, 234; evoked in the coronation scene 18; Poetics 131, 136, 185, 187 Arrizon, Alicia 20 art, artifice 33, 36, 38, 39, 41 Artaud, Antonin 203 Artemis 125 As You Like It 252 Asia 234 Asian Theatre 233–237 Asinaria 243 Astington, John 42, 43 ASTR 213 ATHE Award for Excellence in Editing 234 August 29th 16 Austin, J.L. 229 Australia 234 Austrian drama 220 Autodafé (Tabori) 176 Autolycus 42 Aztec lore 124–125, 128

Abbey Theatre 205–207 absoluteness 64 Abuela 123, 125, 131–132, 134–135n acting, Elizabethan 234 acto 7, 9, 10, 11 actors: American in China 236; Polish in China 236 Adams, Maude 159 Addams, Jane 167n Admetus 135n Adorno, Theodor Wiesengund 176 Aegisthus 127, 129–130, 135n Aeschylus 123, 130, 136, 205, 222, 250; Agamemnon 122, 129–131, 134–135nn, 224, 249; Eumenides 122, 126, 128, 134n Afghanistan 80, 82, 86, 90 Agamemnon 124–126, 128–129, 131, 134– 135n Agamenón 123–124, 126–127, 129–133, 134n agents of adversity 230 Albee, Edward 6, 246 Alcestis 249 Alfaro, Luis 11, 122–123, 129, 131, 134–135nn; Electricidad 122–136 All God’s Chillun Got Wings 247 Allison, Alexander W. on St. Joan 186 American Association of Teachers of German 221 American Drama 230 American Drama 1945–2000: An Introduction 245–246 American dream 13 American Theatre Magazine 11, 14 Angels in America 92, 246 Angura 233, 236–237 Animation of statues 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41 Anouilh, Jean: Antigone 172 Antigone 205–212 Antigone 205–209, 211–212 Antigone (Brecht, poem) 173–174, 178–179, 182n Antigone (Sophocles) 169–173, 175–179,

255

256

Index

Aztlán 18, 19, 25 Bacchae 224 Bacchides 243 Bacchus 174, 181 Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 42, 43, 45–47, 50, 52– 54, 56, 91, 93–105, 251, 252 Bali 235 The Baltimore Waltz 246 Barish, Jonas 214 Barkan, Leonard 42, 43 Barnet, Sylvan 194 Barrymore, Ethel 159 Bartels, Emily C. 239–241 Baudrillard, Jean: America 63; L’Esprit du Terrorism 64, 71; The Gulf War 61; Simulations 62, 63, 64, 66 Beaumont, Francis 29, 30, 35, 36, 38, 40, 43 Beckett, Samuel 176, 221 The Bedford Introduction to Drama 216–217 The Beggar’s Opera (Gay) 175 Beijing 52 Belsey, Catherine 41, 43, 137, 145 Benjamin, Walter 169, 176 Bennett, Alan 149–156 Bergeron, David 30, 43 Berlau, Ruth 171 Berliner Ensemble 169, 176, 182 Berman, Morton 194 Bernhard, Thomas 221 Berst, Charles A.: on St. Joan 186 Bevington, David 214, 220, 239–241 Billington, Michael 210–211 Black Arts Movement 246 Blade to the Heat 11, 16 Bloodgood, Clara 159, 164 Bloom, Harold 149, 154, 239; George Bernard Shaw’s “St. Joan” 194; on St. Joan 186 Boas, Frederick 116 Bogosian, Eric 246 Booth, Edwin 145–146 Bordertown 11 Bordman, Gerald 166n Bowers, Fredson 36, 43 Bowie, David 200 Bozia, Eleni 241–245 Brace, Marianne 107n Bradby, David 65 Brantley, Ben 81–91 Brazelton, Mary 209–211 Brecht, Bertolt 12, 52, 93, 96, 99, 169–182, 221, 233, 234; Antigone (poem) 173–174, 178–179, 182n; The Antigone of Sophocles: A Version for the Stage after Hölderlin’s Translation (Die Antigone des Sophokles. Nach der Hölderlinschen Übertragung für die Bühne bearbeitet) 169–182; Antigonemodell 1948 169–171, 175; Galileo Galilei (Galileo, Leben des Galilei) 170, 176; Mr. Puntila and His Man Matti 170; The

Mother 169; Mother Courage and Her Children (Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder) 169–170, 175, 177; St. Joan of the Stockyards 175; A Short Organum for the Theatre 169; The Threepenny Opera 169, 175; Turandot or the Whitewasher’s Congress 175; War Primer 171 Brecht, Stefan 172 Britain 206, 235 Brook, Peter 233 Brooks, Cleanth: Tragic Themes in Western Literature 195 Browning, Robert 249 Bugs Bunny 251 Buhre, Traugott 177 Bullins, Ed 246 The Burial at Thebes: Sophocles’ Antigone 205, 207–209, 211–212 Burke, Kenneth 226 Burma 235 Burto, William 194 Bush, George W. 205, 209–210 Butler, Judith 206, 211 Caesar, Julius 250 Caldwell, Ellen M. 29–44 Cambodia 235 Cambridge Guide to Asian Theatre 234 campesino 12 Campion, Thomas 29, 30, 32, 34, 35, 37, 40, 43 Canada 234 The Cannibals (Tabori) 176 Captivi 243 Carleton, Sir Dudley 29 Carlson, Marvin 78, 90, 92 Carnivalesque 29, 31, 39, 41, 42 Carnivalism 45–47, 50, 53, 54, 56 Caroline, or Change 85 Carr, Arthur J. on St. Joan 186 Casa de Atridas 123–124, 127, 131, 133 Casket of Prince Henry 30 Catholic Church 189 Cato Institute 202 Cauchon 188, 192, 193, 194; on the “Maid’s secular heresy” 192 CCP 57, 59 Chamberlain, John 29, 40 Chansky, Dorothy 245–246 Chapman, George 30, 42 character roles 232 Charke, Charlotte 139 Chavez, Cesar 8 Chavez Ravine 11, 17, 18 Che, Xiao 45 Chekhov, Anton 234 Cherry Orchard 86 Chiang, Kai-shek 59 Chicago Latino Theatre 10 Chicana/o 24, 25, 26, 122, 124, 131, 133,

Index 134–135n, 136; definition of 6–8 Chicano Moratorium 16 Chicano Secret Service 21 China 45, 49–54, 56–59, 235–236 Chinese theatre, modern 235–236 Chirico, Miriam 1, 215 chola/cholo 123–127, 131–132, 134n cholos 11 Chong, Ping 233 choragus 242 Chorus 123–124, 130, 133, 133–135n Christ 193, 194; see also Jesus Christ chronotopic 45, 47 Chrysothemis 135–136n Chur 169–170, 176 Church “an immovable obstacle” 185, 186, 189, 190, 192 Clancy, Luke 210–212 classical Chinese theater 45, 53, 54, 56 Clemencia 123–125, 128–133, 134–135n clip art 196, 197 Clytemnestra 123, 126–130, 134–135n Coatlicue 124, 127 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 138 Comedians 252 comedy 46, 50, 251–254 comedy 251–254 commedia 12 La Compañía de Teatro de Albuquerque 10 comparative drama 221 Comparative Drama Conference 213, 215 Conceison, Claire 233, 235–236 Conquergood, Dwight 227 Constantinidis, Stratos E. 2, 3 Contaminatio 122 Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity 149, 151 Coppola, Francis Ford: Apocalypse Now 62 Corcoran, Neil 211–212 Coriolanus 240 Cornford, F.M. 192, 194; The Republic of Plato 194 Cornwallis, Sir Charles 30 Corthron, Kia 246 Coryat’s Crudities 30 Counterfeited corpse 30, 31, 41 Coyolxauqui 124, 134n Crane, Susan A. 47 creative evolutionism 117 Creon 173–175, 177–180, 205–206, 208–211 The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends 217–218 Crompton, Louis on St. Joan 186 cross-cultural thinking 233–235 cross-dressing 252 Crothers, Rachel 167n Cultural Revolution 45, 46, 48, 51, 54, 56, 57 culture clash 11, 17, 91 Cupid 51, 52

257

Curjel, Hans 170 curse, ancestral 131–133; cf. 122–123, 127, 135n The Cyclops 250 Dada 196, 198–199, 202 The Dark at the Top of the Stairs 167n Davis, Joel 34, 43 The Dawn Here Is So Quiet 51 Day of the Swallows 10 Debord, Guy 201–203 Dementia 11 Deng Xiaoping era 57 Denton, Kirk A. 56, 59 derive 201 Deterrence (machine) 63, 64, 69, 70, 71, 72 détournement 196, 198, 201 deWolfe, Elsie 159 Difference (différance) 64 Diggins, John Patrick 246–249 Dionysus 125 Dioscuri 126 Disneyland 62–63, 64, 74 Dithmar, Edward A. 162 Dr. Strangelove 252 Doering, Alexander 178 Dolan, Jill 8, 9, 78, 85–84, 92 A Doll House 165n Dostoevsky, Feodor 103 drama versus theatre 220 dramatic literature 213–232; and agency 226; and classics 225; and myth 225 dramatic text 232 dramatic theory, under-represented 218 Drame 253 Drechsler, Christine 179 Drury Lane Theatre 137, 139, 142 Dryden, John 253 Duke University 221 Dunois 188 Dürrenmatt, Friedrich 253 East Side Locos 126–127 Eastman, Arthur M. 186 Eckersall, Peter 233, 236–237 Eco, Umberto: Travels in Hyperreality 63 Edson, Margaret 246 effigy 29, 30, 31, 34, 39, 40, 41 Eisen, Kurt 246–249 Elector Palatine, Prince Frederick 29 Electra 122, 126–129, 133, 133–136n, 136 Electric Light Orchestra (ELO) 200–201 Electricidad 11, 122–136 Eliot, T.S. 247, 251; “The Dry Salvages” 194; Four Quartets 194; Murder in the Cathedral 194 Elizabeth I 115 Elliott, Maxine 159, 166n Emerson, Caryl 96–100, 104 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 247, 248 The Emperor Jones 247

258

Index

Encyclopedia of Asian Theatre 233, 234–235 England 206 English departments 231 English literature 194 Entheus 33 An Epicede of Funerall Song... 30 Epicoene 42 Erlich, Victor 96, 106n Esperanto 77, 87–88, 91 Essif, Les 61–76, 222; “Dialectical Representations” 75n; “Lost in Space” 75n Eteocles 173 Eugene O’Neill’s America: Desire Under Democracy 246–249 Eumenides 128 Euripides 123, 128, 136, 205, 222; Alcestis 135n; Electra 122, 125–130, 134–136n; Iphigenia in Aulis 122, 125, 129; Iphigenia in Tauris 122, 125 European Union 206 Eurydice 34, 172 Evans, Judith: The Politics and Plays of Bernard Shaw 194; on St. Joan 186 Everyman 187, 194 Ewans, Michael 2 experimental theatre, Japanese 236–237 extra credit 232 Eykhenbaum, Boris 95 Eyre, Ben 208, 212 Fabulae Atellanae 242 Farfan, Penny 1 Farley-Hills, David 42, 43 Felperin, Howard 41, 43 Fennario, David 91 Fernandez, Evelina 11 feudal structure 192 feudalism 189 59 East 59th 202 Finley, Karen 246 Fish, Stanley 153 Fitch, Clyde 158–165, 165–168n; Beau Brummell 159; The City 159–161, 163–164; The Climbers 163; The Cowboy and the Lady 166n; The Girl with the Green Eyes 164; Her Own Way 164; The Moth and the Flame 162–163; Nathan Hale 159; Sappho 160; The Truth 159 Foley, Helene P. 2 foreign language and literature departments 219–222 foreign language teaching and drama 221– 222 forgiveness 125–126, 128 Fornes, Maria Irene 20, 246 Forum Romanum 242 Foster, Verna A. 1, 2, 213, 220, 213–215, 251–254 Found in Translation: Greek Drama in English 249–251

Four Directions 125, 131 France 189, 206–207, 235 Frederick, Elector Palatine 29 Free, Katharine B. 249–251 Freedom Writers 151 French, A.L. 110, 115, 119 French captain 190 Freudian psychoanalysis 248 Friedman, Thomas 206, 212 The Frogs 252 Frohman, Charles 159, 165n, 167n Fuller, Edmund: George Bernard Shaw: Critic of Western Morale 185, 194 Funerals of the High and Mighty Prince Henry 40 Furies 128, 134nn Gainor, J. Ellen: on St. Joan 186; Shaw’s Daughters: Dramatic and Narrative Constructions of Gender 194 Gang(s) 123–124, 127, 131–132 Garber, Marjorie 137, 239 Garrick, David 137–139, 143 Gatti, Armand: V like Vietnam 64–69, 72 Gay, John: The Beggar’s Opera 175 genre 251–254 German drama 219–222 German Quarterly 221 German theatre 219–222 Germany 206, 235 Gerson, Virginia 159, 166n Gesegnete Mahlzeit (Tabori) 176 Get Your War On 196, 197, 199, 201–203 Giuliano, Mike 107n The Glass Menagerie 230 Glöss, Ruth 178 God 191, 193 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 221 Golding, Arthur 43 Gomez-Peña, Guillermo 91 González Deena 1 Good Friday Peace Agreement 207 Goodwin, Nat 159, 166n Gounaridou, Kiki 2 Graves, Robert 136 Great Northern Wasteland 45 Greek drama 222–224, 249–251 Greenblatt, Stephen 239 Greg, Walter Wilson 41, 43 Grene, David 134n; and Richmond Lattimore 133–134nn, 136 Griffiths, Trevor 252 Grimmelshausen, Hans Jakob Christoffel 175 Gryphius, Andreas 221 Guadalupe 10 The Guardian 207, 211–212 Guarini, Giambattista 253 Haemon 172–173, 178–179, 180

Index Hagens, Jan Lüder 1, 219 The Hairy Ape 248 Hall, Edward 110, 120 Halperin, David 149–151, 154 Hamartia 188 Hamburger Kammerspiele 176 Hamilton, Mary 140–141 Hamlet 29, 194 Hamlet 137–146 Hamletclone (Kawamura) 237 Hamletmachine (Mueller) 237 Hanamichi 234 Handke, Peter 221 Hansberry, Lorraine 245 Hardin, Richard F. 110, 114, 116, 121 Harlow, George Henry 142–143 Hartigan, Karelisa 1, 2, 222–224 Harvard University 222 Hassel, R. Chris 42, 43 Hazlitt, William 147 Headwords 234–235 Heaney, Seamus 205, 207–212, 251 Hecuba 224 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 55; Antigone 171–173 Heidegger, Martin 156 Heilman, Robert B. 156 Hellenistic mime 242 Hellman, Lillian 245 Henderson, Archibald: on the Epilogue 191; George Bernard Shaw: Man of the Century 194; on “the Maid” 189; on “Shaw’s pre-eminent fairness” 193 Henry, Prince 29, 30, 38, 42 1 Henry VI 109–121 Henry VII’s Lady Chapel 29 Henry VIII 240 Heracles 135n Hermione’s statue 29, 30, 31, 33, 37, 38, 41, 42, 43 Heroes and Saints 11 Hiberno-English 205 Hippolytus 223, 224 Hirschfeld, Kurt 170 The History Boys 149–157 Hochhuth, Rolf 221 Hölderlin, Friedrich: Antigone 169–176, 181 Hole, William 30 Holmberg, Arthur 94, 100, 103, 105, 106n Holy Roman Empire 189 Homebody/Kabul 77–80, 83, 85, 90–92 Homosexuality, in Latino theatre 17 Höpfner, Ursula 178 Houfek, Nancy 222 House of Atreus 122, 124, 131 The House of Mirth 165n House Un-American Activities Committee 169, 171 How I Learned to Drive 93–106, 246 Howells, William Dean 165n

259

Huaju 236 hubris 188 Huerta, Dolores 8 Huerta, Jorge 1, 5, 13, 24, 26, 27, 134–135nn, 136 Hughes, Langston 245 Hughes, Ted 250, 251 Humphreys, Joe 206, 212 Hunt, Leigh 144 Hurlements en faveur de Sade 202–203 Huxtable, Ada Louise: The Unreal America 75n Hyperhistory 67 Hyperreality (American) 62–65 I Don’t Have to Show You No Stinking Badges! 11 Ibsen, Henrik 165n, 214 The Iceman Cometh 248, 249 idolatry 31, 33, 39, 42 Ifigenia 123, 125–128, 130, 132, 133–135n India 51, 235 Inge, William 167n, 245 Ionesco, Eugène 253 Inquisition 189 Inquisitor 193 Iphigenia 125, 129, 135n Iphigenia at Aulis 224 Iraq 208–211 Ireland 205–207, 211–212 Iris 35, 37 Irish drama 205–207, 210 Irish Republican Army 210 Irony 47, 53, 57 Ismene 179–180 Jackson, Shannon 1, 214 Jacobus, Lee 216 Jaffe-Berg, Erith 77, 92 Jakobson, Roman 106n Japan 235, 236–237 Japanese theatre, modern 236–237 El jardín (The Garden) 10 Jarry, Alfred 200 Jefferson, Thomas 247 Jesus Christ 49, 192 Joan: “a bit cracked” 188; catastrophic effect of her martyrdom 190; a champion of not only of Nationalism, but of anti-colonialism” 186; “a character of both androgynous personality and masculine action” 186; condemned as a heretic and burnt at the stake 190; condemned “to eat the bread of sorrow and drink the water of affliction” 189; condemned to spend the rest of her life in prison 189; confessing “to the sin of disobedience, to the sin of pride and to the sin of heresy” 189; crushed by the Church (Figure 1) 189; “diabolically inspired” 188; “an early Protestant martyr” 186; “a forerunner of emancipated women” 186; her apparent resemblance to the Aristotelian hero 188; her career as a divine saint 190; her character 188; her faith in her “voices” 188; her ironic reversals of fortune 189; her “miracles”

260

Index

188; her pride and her nemesis 190; her protest and tearing up her recantation 189; her reaffirmation of her faith in God 190; her realization that the Church’s counsel is “of the devil” 189–190; her recantation 189; her “voices” “the voices of her own inspiration” 188; a heretic 193; herself “a bit of a miracle” 190; insufferable 188; “an irresistible force” 185; Shaw’s “Superwoman” 186; on trial (Figure 2) 190; a woman very much in advance of her time 192–193 Joan la Pucelle 109–121 Johnson, Cassandra 122–123, 131, 134–135n, 136 Jones, Inigo 30, 31, 39 Jonson, Ben 42, 251 Joseph Papp Public Theatre 17 Journey to the West 56 Jove 34, 41 Joyce, James: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 186, 187 Jubiläum (Tabori) 176 Die Juden (Lessing) 176 Julio Romano 36, 38, 39 Junge, Franziska 179 Die Jungfrau von Orleans (Friedrich Schiller) 175 Juno 35 Jupiter 35, 38 Kabuki 233, 234 Die Kannibalen (Tabori) 176 Kathakali 233 Kaufman, Moisés 246 Kaula, David 42, 43 Kawamura, Takeshi 237 Kean, Edmund 138, 143 Kemble, John Philip 138, 143 Khayatt, Didi 156 Kimbrough, Andrew 93 King, Annie Papreck 109 King Lear 240 King’s Men 37 Kishida, Rio 237 Klassen, Julie 222 Kleist, Heinrich von 221 KMT 56, 57, 59 Knowles, Dorothy: Armand Gatti 67–68 Krasner, David 245–246 Kristeva, Julia 106n Kubrick, Stanley: Dr. Strangelove 68 Kunath, Gerd 177 Kunqu 233 Kushner, Tony 77–79, 83, 85–86, 90–92, 246 Lacan, Jacques 248 Lachmeus 174 Ladvenu 190 The Lament for Art O’Leary 208

The Laramie Project 246 Las Vegas 63, 74, 123, 127, 135n Latin America 8 Latina 11, 13 Latina/o 24 Latino Lab 11 laughter 252 Laughton, Charles 176 Lavey, Martha 90–91 Lazzo 244 Leben des Galilei (Galileo) (Brecht) 170, 176 Lefèvre, Eckard 244 Leguizamo, John 7 Leiter, Samuel L. 233, 234–235 Lent 29, 31 Leontes 32, 33, 40 Lepage, Robert 91 Lesley, Lana 202 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim: Die Juden 176, 221 Lévy, Bernard-Henri: American Vertigo 68, 72 Lex Oppia 242 Li, Longyun 45–51, 54–58 Life of Galileo see Leben des Galilei The Light on the Path 248 Limon, Jerzy 42, 43 Lipstick Traces 196, 199, 202–203 Lohenstein, Daniel Casper von 221 London 80–81, 90 London Review of Books 149, 155 London Theatre Record 14 Loney, Glenn 165n Long Day’s Journey into Night 249 Loomer, Lisa 2 López, Josefina 11, 15 The Lord Mayor’s Show 38 The Lords’ Masque 31 LORT Theatres 11, 15 Los Angeles 63, 64, 66 Los Angeles Times 16 Luminarias 11 Lutz, Tom 164, 167n Luxembourg 206 Lynn, Kirk 198–202 Lysistrata 224 Mackenzie, Henry 138, 139 Magna Mater 242 Mamet, David 246 Mamiliius 40 Mann, Thomas 156 Mansfield, Richard 159 Many Deaths of Danny Rosales 10 Maoism 48, 49, 57 Marasco, Ron 1 Marco Millions 248 Marcus, Greil 196, 198–199 Mardi Gras 29, 31, 39 Margolin, Deb 85

Index Mark Taper Forum 2, 17 Marra, Kim 165n Marrero, Maria Teresa 15 Marshall, C.W. 241–245 Marshall, Tully 160 Martz, Louis L. 185, 186, 187; “double vision” of tragedy set forth by Joyce 185; on “the human sufferer” and “the secret cause” 187; quotes Stephen Dedalus on pity and terror 187; “The Saint as Tragic Hero” 186 Masks 243 Masque of the Inner Temple 35, 41 masques 29, 30 Masterpieces of the Drama 194 Matriarch(y) 123, 129, 131 Mayer, Oliver 1, 11, 17 McFerran, Virginia 15 McMahon, James 210, 212 Mechicana/o 24 Medea 249 mediated society 64 Megareus 178 Mei Lan-fang 234 memory 45–50, 52, 54, 58 Menander 250 The Merchant of Venice 104 Mercury 35, 37 Messianism 68 Meszaros, M. Beth 251–254 metaphor 47, 48, 50, 52, 53, 55 metatheatre 56, 57, 253 metonymy 47, 49, 59 Mexican Flag 25 A Midsummer Night’s Dream 240 Miles Gloriosus 243 Miller, Arthur 232, 245 Milton, John: Samson Agonistes 194 Mise en abyme 64 The Mission 11 Mr. Puntila and his Man Matti (Brecht) 170 MLA 213 Mnouchkine, Ariane 233 Modern theatre 231 Moliere 234 Monji, Jana J. 18 Montoya, Richard 16 Moraga, Cherrie 11 Moritz, Helen 2, 122–136 Morson, Gary Saul 96–100, 104 Morton, Carlos 10; Brown Baby 26 Moses, Montrose 159, 161, 166n Mother (Mother-figure, Motherhood) 122–123, 125–132, 134–136n The Mother (Brecht) 169 Mother Courage and Her Children (Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder) (Brecht) 169–170, 175, 177 Mother Courage the Vagabond (Grimmelshausen) 175

261

Mourning Becomes Electra 248 Mueller, Heiner 237 multilingualism 77–78, 88–90 multiplicity 64 Mummified Deer 11 musical animation 31, 32, 33, 36 Mutters Courage (Tabori) 176–177 The Mystery of Hamlet 145 The Name and Nature of Tragicomedy 251– 254 Najera, Rick 21 Nathan the Wise 221 national and cultural identity 236 nationalism 189 nature 34, 41 NDWorks 222 Neher, Caspar 169–172; Antigonemodell 1948 169–171, 175 Neill, Michael 43 nemesis 188 Nericcio, William 17 neurasthenia, neurasthenic 158–159, 161, 163–165 New comedy 242 New Historicism 251 New York Times 206, 212 Nichols, John 29, 40, 44 Niebuhr, Reinhold 248 Nietzsche, Friedrich 152–154, 247 Ninagawa, Yukio 233 9/11 64; see also September 11; Vinaver, Michel Nino 127, 131, 134–135nn No saco nada de la escuela (I Don’t Get Anything Out of School ) 7 Norbrook, David 42, 44 Norman, Marsha 246 Northern Ireland 207 Notre Dame, University of 219–222 Occidentalism 235–236 O’Connor, James 8 Odets, Clifford 245 Oedipus 207 Oedipus Tyrannus 206, 223, 249 Old comedy 242 O’Neill, Eugene 158, 163, 165, 232, 245, 246–249, 251 Orestes: in ancient myth 126–130, 134– 135nn; in Luis Alfaro’s Electricidad 123, 125, 127–128, 130–133, 133–135n Orientalism 235 Orleans 189 Orpheus 31 Orpheus and Eurydice 34 Osborn, M. Elizabeth 14 ostraniene 107n Othello 240 Overmyer, Eric 246

262

Index

Ovid 30, 39 Oxford Literary Festival 208 Palacios, Monica 91 panoptic space 66 Paris 189 Parks, Suzan-Lori 214 Parry, Graham 42, 44 Pataphysics 200 Paulina 32, 33, 38, 39, 40 Pavis, Patrice 72, 90 Pelias 174–175 Pelops 135n The Peony Pavilion 233 performance of drama versus reading of drama 220, 222 performance studies 214, 226 performance theory 232 performative 229 The Personal Equation 248 Pfister, Joel 247 Phelps, William Lyon 166n Philadelphia Constantinidis Essay in Critical Theory Award 2 Phillips, Doug 149–157 Phillips, M. Scott 83–84 Phormio 243 Pike, Christopher 106n Pinter, Harold 68, 75n, 232 Pitt, Brad 236 PLA 56, 59 Plaisir d’amour 180 Plato 97; Myth of the Cave 191–194 Platt, Peter G. 42, 44 Plautus 241–245 Playboy of the Western World 206 The Poetics 234 Poland 207 Polynices 173, 177 Pontus 181 Portillo-Trambley, Estela 10, 13 Postman, Neil 150 Powell, Jane 137–138, 142–147 Powers, Melinda 133n, 135n, 136 Praeco 242 The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie 150 Princeton University 221 Professing Performance: Theatre in the Academy from Philolog y to Performativity 214 professional managerial class (PMC) 158– 159, 161, 163, 165n Prometheus 31, 32, 34, 189 Protestantism 189 Pruner, Michel 75n Pygmalion 30, 32 Quinn, Arthur Hobson 167n La Quinta Temporada 11

Radcliffe, Ann 141–142 Ramirez, Elizabeth Cantu 10 Rasa and bhava 234 La Raza 12 Real Women Have Curves 11, 15, 16 reality awareness 64 rebirth 123, 125–128 Rees, David 196, 197, 199–201 Rehm, Rush 1, 224 religion 122, 124–128, 130, 132, 134n religious drama 194 representation of America and Americans 235–236 Restoration 33, 35, 40 Revel, Sandrine: Le onzième jour 64 revenge 122–129, 134–135nn Revolution of Everyday Life 201 Rheims 189 Richardson, William 138, 139 Richter, David 217–218 Roach, Joseph 54 Rolleston, James 221 Roman comedy 241–245 romance 46, 48, 49, 51 Romeo and Juliet 240 Roosevelt, Theodore 160 Roosters 14 Rorty, Richard 149–156 Rossini, Jon D. 1, 227 Rude Mechanicals (Rude Mechs) 196–203 Russia 45, 46, 49–51, 207 Russian Formalism 93–96 Rustication policy 53 Ryan-Scheutz, Colleen 222 Said, Edward 248 Saint Foucault 149–150 Saint Joan 109–121; an Aristotelian tragedy 187, 188, 189, 190; “a comedy” 185; a failed tragedy? 191; feminist critiques 186; no base villains 193; a Platonian tragedy? 185 St. Joan of the Stockyards (Brecht) 175 St. Valentine’s Day 39 Salazar, Ruben 17 Salinas, Ric 17 San Francisco Mime Troupe 91 Sanchez-Scott, Milcha 11, 13, 14 Sankai Juku 233 Santos & Santos 11 Saroyan, William 245 Sartre, Jean-Paul 248, 251 satire 47, 57 Savran, David 93, 106n Scenario (journal) 222 Schalkwyk, David 42, 44 Scharffenberger, Elizabeth 2 Schiller, Friedrich von 221; Die Jungfrau von Orleans 175 Schumacher, Ernst 179

Index Schwartz, Michael 158 Searle, William: on St. Joan 186 Seifert, Martin 178 September 11 78–79, 84 Setje-Eilers, Margaret vi, viii, 169 Seven Plays 230 Shakespeare, William 69, 104, 109–121, 214, 221, 228, 234, 239–241 Shakespeare After All 239 Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance 214 Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human 239 Shannon, Effie 159 Shapiro, I.A. 32, 43 Shaw, George Bernard 109–121, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195, 232, 253; apocryphal comment on Mahatma Gandhi 185; heavily ironic allusion to Aristotle 187; St. Joan 185, 186, 187, 188, 191, 193, 194, 195; on seers, saints and soldiers in his Preface 193 Shepard, Sam 246 Sher, Benjamin 107n Shiomi, R.A. 91 Shklovsky, Viktor 93–100, 107n A Short Organum for the Theatre (Brecht) 169 Shrove Sunday 39 Shrove Tuesday 39 The Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa 10 Shutaisei ( Japanese subjectivity) 236–237 Siddons, Sarah 137–142, 145–147 Sidney, Sir Philip 251, 253 Significant Other: Staging the American in China 233–237 Sigüenza, Herbert 17 Silver, Arnold: St. Joan 186; St. Joan: Playing with Fire 195 Simply Maria 11 Situationist International 196–199, 201–203 Smith, Anna Deavere 246 Smith, Bruce R. 41, 44 Smock Alley Theatre (Dublin) 139 Socialist realism 45, 51, 54 Society of the Spectacle 201 Socrates 149, 192 Sokol, Barnett Jerome 38, 44 Solis, Octavio 11, 91 Some Like It Hot 252 Sophocles 123, 128, 136, 205–206, 208, 211, 221, 222, 228; Antigone 169–173, 175–179, 180–182; Electra 122–123, 125–130, 133–136n Sorgenfrei, Carol Fisher 233 Soyinka, Wole 251 special topics 232 Sri, P.S. 185 Stafford, Tony 1, 230 The Stagecraft and Performance of Roman Comedy 241–245 Staging Depth 247

263

Stalingrad 173, 177 Stapleton, M.L. 114, 119, 120 “The State of Asian Theatre Studies in the American Academy” 233 States, Bert 144 Statues 35, 36 Steiner, George 206, 212 Stevenson, Catherine 86, 91–92 Stoppard, Tom 234 Stott, Andrew 251–254 Strößenreuter, Judith 179 Strong, Roy 43, 44 Su Teatro 10 Subjectivity, Japanese (shutaisei) 236–237 Susman, Warren 167n Suzuki, Tadashi 233 Swift, Jonathan 252 Swiss-German drama 220 Synecdoche 47, 49, 50, 52, 53, 59 Tabori, George 169–170, 176–182; The Antigone of Sophocles: After Hölderlin’s Translation by Bertolt Brecht (Die Antigone des Sophokles. Nach der Hölderlinschen Übertragung von Bertolt Brecht) 169–170, 176–182; Autodafé 176; Gesegnete Mahlzeit 176; Jubiläum 176; Die Juden (Lessing) 176; Die Kannibalen 176; Mutters Courage 176–177 Tagore, Rabindranata 51 Taking Tiger Mountain by Strateg y 56 The Taming of the Shrew 240 Tantalus 129, 135n Taoism 55 Taylor, Diana 8 Taylor, Gary 120 teaching drama 216–217, 219–222 Teatro(s) 9–12, 20 Teatro Campesino 7, 9, 10 El Teatro Campesino 91 Teatro Dallas 10 Teatro de la Esperanza 10, 11, 12; La víctima 26–27 Teatro Libertad 10 Teatro Urbano 10 Teatro Vivo 13 The Tempest 31, 37, 44 Terence 242, 243 Terrorism 205, 210 Text & Presentation 213, 214, 223 textbooks 230 Theatre Arts Department 231 Theatre of Crisis: Drama and Politics in Latin America 8 Theatre Survey 233 Theatricality 65 Thebes 172–173, 177, 179, 180 Theorizing the Angura Space: Avant-Garde Performance and Politics in Japan, 1960–2000 233–237 Thieme, Jörg 178

264

Index

This Wide and Universal World of Theater: Shakespeare in Performance Then and Now 239–241 Thomas, Augustus 167n Thompson, Ewa 95, 96, 99, 106n, 107n Thoreau, Henry David 247 Thread Hell (Kishida) 237; see also Woven Hell The Threepenny Opera (Brecht) 169, 175 Thyestes 131 Tibicen 244 Tiresias 172, 177–178 Tocqueville, Alexis de 247 Transformation 31, 34 Traditional Chinese culture 47, 52, 54–56 Tragedy 46, 51, 52, 54, 55, 234 tragedy à la Plato 194 Tragicomedy 251–254 Translation 223, 249–251 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo 9 Trilling, Lionel 248 Troilus and Cressida 240 Troy 125, 129 truth 192 Turandot or the Whitewasher’s Congress (Brecht) 175 Types of Drama 194 UCLA see University of California, Los Angeles The United Kingdom 234 United States Air Force 211 University of California, Los Angeles 237 utopia (achieved) 62, 63 Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater 8 Utz, James 196 Valdez, Luis 8–13; Mummified Deer 26 Valenzuela, José Luis 16 Van Steen, Gonda 2 Vaneigem, Raoul 198, 201 Vecinas 123–125, 130–133, 134–135n vendido 7 Venturi, Robert 63 Verdecchia, Guillermo 91 Verfremdungseffekt 234 Verhoeven, Michael 176 La víctima 11, 12 Vinaver, Michel: 11 September 2001 65, 70– 73

Vining, Edward 145 visual culture 220–221 Vogel, Paula 93–106, 106n, 246 Waiting for Godot 254 Wald, Lillian 167n Walton, J. Michael 249–251 Waltonen, Karma 111, 121 War on Terror 197 War Primer (Brecht) 171 Warten auf Godot (Beckett) 176 Warwick 190, 192, 193; on religious heresy 192 Wasteland and the Human Being 25–59 Weigel, Helene 169–170, 173–174, 179, 181 Weir, Peter 150 Wharton, Edith 159, 165n White, Hayden 47, 48, 50, 53, 57, 59 “White face” 236 Wickham, Glynne 41, 44 Wikipedia 235 Wilde, Oscar 55, 165n Wilder, Thornton 245 Will in the World 239 Williams, Tennessee 232, 245, 253 Wills, Gary 209–210, 212 Wilson, August 232, 246 Winter, William 145 The Winter’s Tale 29, 30, 31, 36, 37, 38, 44 Wit 246 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 153 Wolfe, George C. 17 Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company 199, 202 World War I 111 Worthen, W.B. 214 Woven Hell (Kishida) 237; see also Thread Hell Yeats, W.B. 206 Younger, Kelly 2 Zacharia, Katerina 2 Zengotita, Thomas de: Mediated 73–74 Zinn, Howard 160 Zizek, Slavoj 58 Zoot Suit 9, 11, 13, 14 Zoot Suit Riots 13