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Entanglements the Histories of TDR Martin Puchner M189TDR_11249_ch02 2/16/06 9:25 AM Page 13 Entanglements The Histories of TDR Martin Puchner Taking stock of TDR in 1983, on the occasion of the release of T100, Brooks McNamara mused: “How long TDR will continue to exist is anybody’s guess. As little magazines go it is positively ante- diluvian” (1983:20; T100).1 More than 20 years later, TDR is still alive and kicking. Its 50th anniver- sary is a cause for celebration. The journal’s 50 years of continuous publication provide us with a unique record of the profound changes in the world of theatre and performance that have taken place in the past half-century. To be sure, the record is anything but neutral. TDR has been an engaged and, at times, polemical participant in the debates about performance, and has frequently changed its own modes of engagement. Should TDR represent new and experimental theatres or rather focus its attention on changing methods of analysis such as structuralist or performance stud- ies analysis? Should it primarily record and analyze performance practices or seek to intervene and shape these practices as well? Should it be wedded to an antiacademic and antidisciplinary stance or become the official organ of a new discipline with a tradition and canon of its own? Taking into account the complex ways in which TDR has acted as a kind of participant-observer of the theatre scene, I will offer a layered history, isolating four distinct dimensions: 1. A history of the kinds of theatres and performances represented in the pages of TDR, a history of its objects of analysis; 2. A history of the changing methods of analysis that were brought to bear on different objects of study; 3. A history of the different functions the journal wanted to fulfill with respect to the theatrical cul- ture it engaged; and 4. A history of TDR’s changing institutional relations and affiliations. What emerges from this analysis is that the journal was crucially shaped by the conflicts among these four dimensions, conflicts about the relation between objects, methods, functions, and institutional 1. Since the first several volumes of TDR were not assigned T#s, the numbers that most people use to identify the issues, T100 was actually the 107th issue. I would like to thank Arnold Aronson, Philip Auslander, Jon McKenzie, Mariellen R. Sandford, and Richard Schechner for their invaluable help. Martin Puchner is Associate Professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University and author of Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality and Drama (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002) as well as the forthcoming Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Gardes (Princeton University Press, 2006). He has written introductions and notes to Six Plays by Henrik Ibsen (Barnes and Noble, 2003) and to The Communist Manifesto and other Writings (Barnes and Noble, 2005) as well as Lionel Abel’s Tragedy and Metatheatre (Holmes and Meier, 2003). He is coeditor of the forthcoming Norton Anthology of Drama, editor of Modern Drama: Critical Concepts (Routledge, forthcoming), and currently serves as the Associate Editor of Theatre Survey. The Drama Review 50:1, Spring 2006 Copyright © 2006 New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 13 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2006.50.1.13 by guest on 28 September 2021 M189TDR_11249_ch02 2/16/06 9:25 AM Page 14 relations. The debates about these relations are ongoing, which also means that the act of presenting their histories becomes entangled in projections about the future. Such entanglements, however, are precisely the kind of thing TDR has welcomed throughout its existence, and in this sense the histo- ries told here are undertaken very much in the spirit of the journal itself. Objects When read with an eye toward the kinds of theatre and performance practices featured in the pages of TDR, the history of the journal might, in a preliminary way, be divided into four epochs. These epochs roughly coincide with the tenure of its various editors, an indication, certainly, of the crucial role these editors have played in shaping the journal. But, of course, editors need authors and it is the authors who ultimately make a journal into what it is. During the first 10 years or so, under the editorship of Robert Corrigan in the 1950s and early ’60s, TDR was dedicated to three areas: 1. modern drama; 2. the history of Western but also non-Western theatre; 3. engaged and political art. The interest in modernism concerned primarily the modern drama and theatre of the early 20th century, but this was a period of drama whose impact was felt well beyond World War II. The prewar classics of modern drama, including Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard Shaw, Anton Chekhov, and Luigi Pirandello, were debated with respect Thinking about the intertwined political, to such questions as the possibility of modern tragedy, a question explored in formal, religious, social, and cultural functions of theatre and historical terms. Such debates also related the and performance has remained TDR’s largely European prewar playwrights, who domi- nated the journal at this time, to the 20th-century primary interest to this day. What has drama in the United Stages, especially to Eugene changed, however, is the conception O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, and Arthur Miller. of what constitutes engaged art in the But TDR, in this early phase, was not only inter- ested in reflecting on canonical figures. It also first place. introduced its readers to lesser known writers such as Michel de Ghelderode, Oskar Kokoschka, and Ernst Toller by publishing the plays and essays by these writers as well as critical articles dedi- cated to their work. It is important to note, however, that despite this emphasis on modern drama, TDR also valued historical depth. Indeed, Eric Bentley, who played an important advisory role dur- ing this period, warned the editors that TDR should not focus exclusively on modern drama in part because it would then overlap too much with the then new scholarly journal Modern Drama, founded by A.C. Edwards in 1958.2 TDR therefore featured articles on Greek tragedy (including the first contribution by Richard Schechner, in the summer of 1961, on Euripides’ The Bacchae [T12]), but also on other significant moments in theatre history, including essays on Calderòn, noh, Beaumar- chais, and performance history—for example, 19th-century Hamlet productions. This historical scope can serve as a measure for the journal’s subsequent development. Indeed, I will show step by step that all phases of TDR would imply, or even define themselves through, different views and investments in theatre history. The question of the contemporary and the historical is related to a second focus that shaped the journal during this first phase: engaged art. Thinking about the intertwined political, social, and cul- tural functions of theatre and performance has remained TDR’s primary interest to this day. What has changed, however, is the conception of what constitutes engaged art in the first place. In this early phase, the notion of “engaged” emerged in response to such figures as Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, whose existentialist writings of and about drama, theory, and politics corresponded neatly with TDR’s own interests. One consequence of this combination of genres and modes was a 2. William Seymour Theatre Collection, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections. Princeton University Li- brary. Richard Schechner Papers/TDR Collection, box 96, folder 4. Much of the research for this article was done at the Richard Schechner/TDR archive at Princeton University. From Martin Puchner here forward, citations for archive materials will list the box and folder numbers. 14 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2006.50.1.13 by guest on 28 September 2021 M189TDR_11249_ch02 2/16/06 9:25 AM Page 15 particular interest in what Bentley termed “the theatre of ideas,” which was seen as a paradigm of political theatre (Bentley’s book, The Playwright as Thinker [1946; 1967], was the fullest articulation of this paradigm). It is not surprising, therefore, that Martin Esslin’s conception of what he dubbed the “theatre of absurd,” born from a reading of those two playwright-philosophers, Sartre and Camus, appeared in TDR in 1960 (T8). Indeed, existentialism was a philosophical position that frequently veered toward the theatre, often through the plays of the philosophers themselves, for example Sartre’s No Exit and Camus’s Caligula. In particular Camus used the actor to represent the human subject thrown into an ultimately meaningless and inexplicable life, a life marked by masks rather than by essences and resting on trapdoors rather than on firm ground. This theatrical current within existentialism was picked up by other playwrights, ranging from Samuel Beckett to Harold Pinter, who placed human figures in situations devoid of transcendence, giving rise to, in Esslin’s terminology, the theatre of the absurd. This interest in philosophical theatre distinguishes this phase of the journal from all subsequent ones, when such authors as Shaw, Pirandello, or Dürrenmatt disappeared from TDR’s pages and the “theatre of ideas” came to be regarded as quaint if not downright retrograde. This is not to say that other traditions and conceptions of a more overtly engaged theatre did not occasionally appear in the journal’s pages, especially political theatre. Harold Clurman urged the readers of TDR in 1959 (T6) to remember his Group Theatre in their conception of what political theatre should be. And one playwright-director occupied a special place in the journal’s formulation of political theatre: Bertolt Brecht. This place was due, at least in part, to the influence of Eric Bentley, the most impor- tant, though not uncontroversial, translator, interpreter, and popularizer of Brecht in the United States.
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