Women, Modernism, and Performance. by Penny Farfan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004; 186 Pp.; Illustrations

Books

Women, Modernism, and Performance. By Penny Farfan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004; 186 pp.; illustrations. $80.00 cloth.

On the cover of Penny Farfan’s Women, Modernism, and Performance is a photograph of the British actress Elisabeth Robins alone in front of a fire- place, clutching pages of text. In her opening chapter on Robins’s critique of Ibsen, Farfan notes that in her portrayal of Hedda Gabler, Robins is “apparently destroying the manuscript” (30). But the image conveys much more than this. Covered in black feathers and crouching like a desperate animal, Robins’s Hedda seems just as likely to consume the pages of text as to burn them. The image is emblematic not only of Farfan’s immediate consideration of women’s representation in the modernist theatre (i.e., Ibsen’s tendency to animalize women), but also of a larger consideration of the role of the text—the material paper and printed words—in feminist performance. This image, one of several that Farfan uses to great effect, implies that the play text is something of a dangerous object for women, and Robins holds it with palpable ambivalence. Although Farfan never says so directly, it is this ambivalence toward text in performance that underlies her study and points to the importance of her methodology. By gracefully posi- tioning modernist texts—both literary and dramatic—as types of feminist performance, Farfan successfully combines both performance and literary analysis to articulate the dynamic role of women on modernist stages and, perhaps more significantly, in modern culture at large. Moving gradually from feminist performance in the theatre to broader notions of cultural performance, Farfan contextualizes feminist-modernist performance primarily as a response to male modernist texts. For example, chapter 1 considers Robins’s play Votes for Women (1907) as a critique of Ibsen, particularly the iconic figure of Hedda Gabler; chapter 2 argues that Ellen Terry’s unpopular interpretation of Lady Macbeth challenges “contemporary gender ideology that made Ibsen’s work so provocatively disturbing to 19-century audiences” (39). In chapter 3, Farfan conflates the textual and the performative in her reading of Virginia Woolf’s response to Terry’s acting within the “limitations of the existing dramatic canon” (63) as justification for Woolf’s literary innovations. In a particularly cogent example of the intersection of feminism, text, and performance, Farfan refers to Djuna Barnes’s article “How It Feels to Be Forcibly Fed” (1914), an article Barnes wrote after allowing herself to undergo forced feeding, a treatment suffered by imprisoned British suffragists. Farfan interprets Barnes’s experience as “an extraordinary suffrage performance” (6), but one that appears to Barnes’s “audience” only in newspaper text. This discourse is not historically contained. Farfan reads the women of her study in dialogue not only with their contemporary (usually male) critics but also in light of recent criticism. For example, in her analysis of Ellen Terry’s lecture on Shakespeare, Farfan considers Terry’s text as a debate with Susan Carlson’s 1991 book, Women and Comedy: Rewriting the British Theatrical Tradition, on the connection between Shakespeare’s comedies and his female characters. At the heart of her what she calls a “maximalist approach” (117), Farfan

engages literary study and performance analysis to link her broad categories of “women,” Books “modernism,” and “performance” and to articulate the cultural resistance by what she calls

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2007.51.2.189 by guest on 29 September 2021 “feminist-modernist discourse.” This useful strategy enables Farfan to read intricate connections among the self-consciously feminist theatricality of actresses Robins and Terry, the public performance of lesbian Radclyff Hall at her obscenity trial, Virginia Woolf’s participation in the 1910 hoax of the Emperor of Absynnia, and the 1927 death of dancer Isadora Duncan within and among her analyses of individual plays. These connections— “a network” (5)—amplify her textual analyses by extending the notion of performance across the boundary of drama into the public lives of women modernists and their critical reception. In her strongest example, chapter four’s “Staging the ob/scene,” Farfan uses Barnes’s play The Dove (1923) as the textual context for larger considerations of obscene performance and the role of the gaze, including both Edith Craig’s performance as the lesbian painter Rosa Bonheur in A Pageant of Great Women (1909) and Radclyff Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928). The scope of Farfan’s analysis in this chapter is far-reaching, and in it she successfully demonstrates that the “previously unscripted gender roles and sexualities in [modernist] theatre and drama” are essential to undermining the public, “hegemonical” gender roles outside the theatre. Farfan continues this notion of resistance in her two final chapters—on Woolf’s novel Between the Acts (1941) and Duncan’s death—though somewhat less convincingly. Not surprisingly, it is the lack of a text (either performance or written) in her final chapter on Duncan that somewhat undermines Farfan’s analytical approach. In her final two chapters, Farfan attempts to inscribe the life of the woman artist as the twin acts of writing and performing by describing Woolf’s novel as “writing/performance” (89) and Isadora Duncan’s dancing as “writing through the medium of her body in motion” (113). But her analysis of Duncan’s “beautiful” death (as one male critic called it) is fundamentally the reception of Duncan’s death, not any of Duncan’s actual performances. Although Farfan ends with a call to “read Duncan’s life in terms of her accomplishments” (114), it is unclear how we are to reconcile this with the popular reception of Duncan’s death as an implied performance. This interpretation of Duncan’s death as antifeminist performance is certainly an intrigu- ing coda, but in the absence of sustained examination of Duncan’s own work, the emphasis on her death feels unbalanced. In spite of this minor digression, Farfan’s study moves convincingly from the modernist stage as a limiting space for women to the liberating potential of feminist texts as performance. Astute and nuanced in the blurred boundaries between these domains, Farfan confronts the apparent dichotomies of text and performance from a perspective that is both fresh and exquisitely researched. Her integration of visual material and careful study of unpublished documents, letters, and notes are corollaries to her textual analyses. As such, this book will be essential to any serious inquiry into feminism and modernism. Most significantly, the book ultimately breaks through the boundary between text and performance by demonstrating that the act of writing—not only for authors like Woolf and Barnes, but also for performers like Robins, Terry, and even Duncan—could become its own kind of freeing performance.

—Sarah Bay-Cheng

Sarah Bay-Cheng is Assistant Professor of Theatre and Film Studies at the University at Buffalo/ SUNY. She is the author of Mama Dada: Gertrude Stein’s Avant-Garde Theatre (Routledge, 2004) and is currently working on an anthology of modern poetic drama.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2007.51.2.189 by guest on 29 September 2021 Understanding Adrienne Kennedy. By Philip C. Kolin. Columbia: University of South Carolina, 2005; 192 pp. $34.95 cloth.

Two centuries ago, a former European colony decided to catch up with Europe. It succeeded so well that the United States of America became a monster, in which the taints, the sicknesses, and the inhumanity of Europe grew to appalling dimensions. —Frantz Fanon (1960)

The ubiquitous monster of American racism and violence (Fanon referred to Washington, DC, as the lynching capital of the world) has haunted Adrienne Kennedy’s imagination since childhood. By the time she graduated from Ohio State University in 1953, having been denied a degree in English—black students were forbidden to form clubs or to major in English—resistance to neocolonialism was in full swing in Europe and Africa (15). After an extended trip to West Africa in the early ’60s, a radicalized Kennedy discovered her voice as a playwright through the practice of recording her dreams, and began to dramatize the distorted signifiers of her divided ancestry (31). It is significant that militants such as Fanon, Patrice Lumumba, and Malcolm X populate Kennedy’s plays. Their hallucinatory presence alongside white cultural and historical icons—Beethoven, Bette Davis, Freud, Napoleon, a yellow dwarfed Jesus—puts into relief the degree to which the unconscious is a social and cultural phenomenon. As characters in her plays, they also recall what Harry Elam has termed “the ‘ambivalence’ inherent in the colonial project of mimicry itself” (Elam 2001:289). Since Funnyhouse of a Negro (1964), Kennedy’s political horror plays have continued to brilliantly expose the nightmares of history, and their devastating effects on the psychic life of black women in particular. Over the course of Understanding Adrienne Kennedy’s eight chapters, Philip Kolin offers a detailed overview of Kennedy’s life and career, as well as descriptions and close readings of her plays, smartly clustering his chapters by theme rather than chronology. His main methodological approach to Kennedy’s work is biographical: “Understanding her plays requires an understanding of her family and ethnic background, politics, and nightmares” (xii). Kolin’s first chapter focuses on the richly contradictory sources of Kennedy’s phan- tasmatic characters and apocalyptic settings: the family album from Kennedy’s childhood, a scrapbook of her personal and cultural relatives including such family members as her wealthy white maternal grandfather, and revered artists and movie stars such as Louis Armstrong, Van Gogh, James Baldwin, and Elizabeth Taylor. Her parents’ passionate interest in the affairs of the NAACP, as well as their love of Hollywood movies stars, all combined in Kennedy’s early imagination to stage the already complex battle of identities that permeate her plays. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 address Kennedy’s composite characters—animal selves dehumanized by white theology—in The Owl Answers, A Beast’s Story, A Rat’s Mass, and A Lesson in a Dead Language. In The Owl Answers, “Clara is a young black teacher who is the Virgin Mary who is the Bastard who is the Owl all at the same time” (19). As Kolin later points out, quoting Jeannie Forte, She/Clara “traverses narrative, zigzagging across various systems of signifi- cation […] wherein her persistently elusive subjectivity might be found” (57). And as Kolin sums up A Rat’s Mass: “Black is evil. Historically, rats, brown and black, were thought to carry disease, a point the Nazis made when they metamorphosed the Jews, their racial ene- mies, into swarming rats in Joseph Goebbel’s fascist propaganda of the 1930s” (82). Kolin devotes chapter 5 to a nuanced analysis of A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White. Here, the “real” people from Kennedy’s life and family move into the impossible real

of theatrical representation. The ubiquitous Clara and members of her family speak through Books

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2007.51.2.189 by guest on 29 September 2021 and with female movie stars from the ’40s and ’50s. However, rather than speaking lines from specific movies, they instead “star” in the bit parts of their own lives. Kolin explores the ways in which self-representation becomes a traumatic process of imitation and self-erasure, through borrowing the “sanitized spectacle” of Hollywood aesthetics and wryly concludes, “spectatorship does not ensure freedom” (103, 100). Kennedy’s “Alexander Plays” (She Talks to Beethoven, The Film Club, Dramatic Circle, and Ohio State Murders) are the focus of chapter 6. In these highly confessional works—and as if trying against all odds to rewrite the scene of her earlier trauma—Kennedy takes on the identity of Suzanne Alexander, an English professor at Ohio State whose infant twin daughter is murdered by an English professor. Kolin succinctly analyzes the intrapsychic connection between Kennedy, Suzanne Alexander, and Suzanne’s twin daughters, and looks at the ways in which the wounds of racist history multi- ply in the psyche, creating alter egos through new generations of women. In what Kolin calls her “Political Morality Plays” he groups Kennedy’s testimonial dramas devoted to black men: Sun: A Poem for Malcom X Inspired by His Murder, An Evening With Dead Essex, Sleep Deprivation Chamber, and Motherhood 2000. In these works, Kennedy celebrates the power of collective memory; she creates a kind of sympathetic mythology out of generations of young black men who have been victimized or murdered—including Kennedy’s own son, racially profiled and brutally arrested in 1991, and to whom Sleep Deprivation (which he also coauthored) and Motherhood 2000 are devoted. In a final chapter entitled “Lasting Reflections on Kennedy’s Art,” Kolin explores June and Jean in Concert, a musical adaptation of Kennedy’s 1987 autobiography, People Who Led to My Plays. According to Kolin, the play is a “crucible for Kennedy’s art” (172) and June and Jean should be regarded as “representatives of Kennedy’s psyche and imagination, […] two sides of one person—the author as a young girl—and June’s ghost, a side that Jean, for one reason or another, kills off” (173). Kolin concludes, “[d]ramatizing her memories, Kennedy discloses the process by which she became a writer who (re)created herself” (181). Kolin’s is an exceptionally useful guide to Kennedy’s life and plays and will certainly pro- vide uninitiated readers with excellent information on Kennedy’s structure, characterology, and synchronic use of time. If Understanding Adrienne Kennedy has any shortcoming, it is that while Kolin provides a good general critical overview of her life and plays, he relies almost entirely on biography as his sole methodological approach to Kennedy’s work, to the detri- ment of some very interesting theoretical claims. For instance, Kolin does not develop his provocative early notion of Kennedy’s theatre as an “enacted metaphor” (31). Nor is his sense that “Kennedy takes audiences into a new world of post-identity, crossing and collapsing racial, gender, ethnic, political, and historical boundaries” (39) consistently borne out in his analysis of individual plays. While Understanding Adrienne Kennedy is a thorough and thought-provoking introduction to Kennedy’s complex cannon, readers may wish to seek further studies on Kennedy to help elucidate broader theoretical questions about the relationship between representation, spectatorship, and performance in Kennedy’s work.

—Gabrielle Cody

References Elam, Harry J., Jr., and David Krasner, eds. 2001 African American Performance and Theater History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fanon, Frantz 1963 [1961] The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press.

Gabrielle Cody is Professor of Drama and Chair of the Department of Drama and Film at Vassar College. She concentrates her areas of teaching in twentieth-century dramatic literature, theory, and criticism, and performance studies. Dr. Cody is the author of Impossible Performances, Books

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2007.51.2.189 by guest on 29 September 2021 Duras As Dramatist (Peter Lang, 2000), the editor of Hardcore From the Heart: Annie Sprinkle Solo (Continuum, 2001), and the coeditor of Re:Direction, A Theoretical and Practical Guide (Routledge, 2001). She is also the co–General Editor along with Evert Sprinchorn, of The Columbia Encyclopedia of Modern Drama (Columbia, forthcoming).

Susan Glaspell: Her Life and Times. By Linda Ben-Zvi. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005; xvi + 476 pp., illustrations. $45.00 cloth.

Susan Glaspell (1876–1948) was a founder of the Provincetown Players, a Pulitzer Prize–winning dramatist, an accomplished actress, a successful novelist and, in her later years, Director of the Midwest Playwrights Bureau of the Federal Theatre Project. Yet by the middle of the 20th century, Glaspell had been reduced to a theatrical footnote, primarily remembered, when remembered at all, as the author of Triﬂes (1916) and the “discoverer” of Eugene O’Neill. Linda Ben-Zvi’s biography joins a growing roster of scholarly works that reassess Glaspell’s place in American drama and theatre history. Ben-Zvi’s book moves gracefully among biography, cultural history, theatre history, and dramatic criticism. Glaspell’s creative world is inex- tricably bound up with her private life and Ben-Zvi demonstrates that she was at once a true heir of her Midwestern pioneer ancestors and a rebel who chafed against the social restrictions of her conservative milieu. The Midwest remained the setting of many of Glaspell’s best dramas and novels, but it was in the bohemian East, especially with the Provincetown Players, that her career flourished. Her husband, George Cram (Jig) Cook, was the inspiration behind the Players, while Glaspell was a vital part of the engine that kept it running. Ben-Zvi is more generous to Cook than several other scholars have been. She acknowledges that Cook was a mercurial, hard-drinking man who lived primarily on Glaspell’s earnings yet argues that the two were remarkably compatible. Not surprisingly, the longest chapter in this biography is devoted to the Provincetown Players, this nation’s seminal Little Theatre. The Players produced 11 of Glaspell’s works— a number surpassed only by the 16 O’Neill dramas they presented. In the matter of this famous colleague, Ben-Zvi doesn’t simply cast Glaspell as one of the first to recognize O’Neill’s genius but detects ways in which her work likely inspired his. Even if the similarities between Glaspell’s The Verge (1921) and O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape, for example, are not quite as “striking” as Ben-Zvi suggests, she identifies an array of motifs and stylistic devices that O’Neill might well have adapted from Glaspell’s drama when he created his expressionist classic. Ben-Zvi also argues convincingly that O’Neill borrowed elements of The Verge’s Claire Archer when he created Nina Leeds in Strange Interlude. The Provincetown Players was a tightly knit company in which influences ran in all directions; O’Neill was a part of that group, not an isolated genius who happened to land on their doorstep. Glaspell and Cook left the Provincetown Players in early 1922 largely over artistic differences with members who sought to take the theatre in a more commercial direction. Cook died two years later in Greece; Glaspell returned to the United States. While her last years were primarily devoted to writing fiction, Glaspell did complete a small number of plays, including Alison’s House, which earned her the 1931 Pulitzer Prize for drama. Ben-Zvi navigates deftly through the furor that followed this honor—many critics were outraged by the choice—pointing out that

reviewers were so fixated on the similarities between Glaspell’s heroine and Emily Dickinson Books that they ignored the play itself.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2007.51.2.189 by guest on 29 September 2021 The canonization of the successful O’Neill at the expense of his Provincetown colleagues was part of a larger pattern. The initial impetus for Ben-Zvi’s biography was feminist in the broadest sense: while researching an unrelated project at the Library of Congress in 1980, Ben-Zvi responded with “shock and anger” when she first recognized the range of Glaspell’s work and “the extent of her erasure from the American dramatic and literary canons” (x). Feminist scholarship has always stressed that literary works are deeply embedded in their respective cultures. Accordingly, Ben-Zvi analyzes the ways in which social and political events framed Glaspell’s plays, particularly in relation to such issues as domestic oppression, Freudian psychology, birth control, and war. Ben-Zvi approaches Glaspell’s life and work in the context of the volatile early years of the 20th century without naively assuming that the plays are simple political tracts. She notes the “feminist agenda underlying the humor” (199) in Woman’s Honor (1918), for instance, while also acknowledging the complexity of Glaspell’s presentation: the male demand for female chastity has deep and tangled roots. Susan Glaspell: Her Life and Times is the result of decades of meticulous scholarship. In the time-honored tradition of biographers, Ben-Zvi visited every place Glaspell lived and interviewed hundreds of people who knew her. (Since Glaspell died 59 years ago, this is an opportunity future scholars will not have.) Ben-Zvi is able to spot connections between, for example, a botanical metaphor Glaspell employs in an early newspaper column and the central trope of her most radically experimental play, The Verge. This is an important, eminently readable biography of a woman whose dramas—as the recent Metropolitan Playhouse production of Inheritors testifies—are as vital today as they were nearly a century ago. —Judith E. Barlow

Judith E. Barlow is Professor of English with joint appointments in Women’s Studies and Theatre at the University at Albany, SUNY. She is the author of Final Acts: The Creation of Three Late O’Neill Plays (University of Georgia Press, 1985) and editor of Plays by American Women, 1900– 1930 (Applause, 1985) and Plays By American Women, 1930–1960 (Applause, 1994).

The Theater of Transformation: Postmodernism in American Drama. By Kerstin Schmidt. New York: Rodopi, 2005; 230 pp. $64.00 paper. Expressionism and Modernism in the Modern Theatre: Bodies, Voices, Words. By Julia A. Walker. New York: Cambridge, 2005; 300 pp. $85.00 cloth.

Trying to understand the world, especially the world through its theatres, ought to be—it seems to me—a difficult business. Like the theatrical enterprise itself, paradigms keep changing, frames keep shifting, and theorists with any sort of philosophical inclination often end up choosing between writing styles that either try to enter the transformative flows or operate against them; that is, opting for either more clarity or more den- sity. Ideas often suffer in the exchange; elusive and allusive captivations by liquid identities, political uncertainties, ideological aporias, and bifurcating flows are either embedded in the most impacted of prose styles, or reduced to simple formu- lae and unexplored terminologies. Younger scholars, I fear, increasingly choose to work in Books

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2007.51.2.189 by guest on 29 September 2021 easier, if somewhat more reductive, fields of inquiry rather than submit to the rigors of, say, continental philosophy or theory. Homi K. Bhabha and Judith Butler, though also writing in turgid style, are nonetheless a lot easier to “get,” in the end, than Martin Heidegger, Jacques Lacan, or Gilles Deleuze. This is not to suggest that difficult writing indicates difficult and thus somehow superior content (note Bhabha and Butler), but it is an indication that theory and its philosophies have, in recent years, often become repetitive and thin or have simply turned away from the implications of their own conclusions. It is rare for authors to balance the complexities of theory with the demand for clarity and engaging exposition. Witness two recent books on theatre history, The Theater of Transformation: Postmodernism in American Drama by Kerstin Schmidt and Expressionism and Modernism in the Modern Theatre: Bodies, Voices, Words by Julia A. Walker. The first might have been a book of passing interest if written in the 1970s or ’80s (the period when most of the research materials were published); the second is an excellent, well-researched, clearly written, and valorous attempt to redeem the intellectual impoverishment of modern American theatre. In some sense, both books try to resituate an American theatre that has often been anti-intellectual, superficial—even obtuse— within a philosophical tradition that has largely been hostile to it by choosing fairly minor examples from its canon; Joseph Chaikin is hardly the intellectual that Schmidt might imagine him to be, and the plays analyzed in Walker’s book are not really indicative of any larger intellectual trend in the American theatre. Nonetheless, the difference between research that skims postmodern surfaces and critique that argues with depth and conviction is noteworthy. The Theater of Transformation is an attempt to delineate a type of American theatre, largely from the 1960s and ’70s, which emphasizes a postmodern ethos over a modern or even post- structural one. Developing the techniques of Chaikin’s Open Theater, these playwrights favored the fragmentary, surface play of theatre. They used the shifting registers of character identity, the author claims, to institute a theatre of transformation—characters, situations, spaces, and time change and shift under the gaze of audience and actors (the author does not seem to be aware that many critics—among them, Ihab Hassan, whom she frequently cites— have suggested that Western theatre, at least, has always been a space of transformation). These transformations indicate, according to Schmidt, the very kernel of what Jean-François Lyotard called “the postmodern condition” (1979). After presenting the idea of transformation, Schmidt goes on to read through a selection of playwrights—Jean Claude van Itallie, Megan Terry, Rochelle Owens, and in a leap through time, Suzan Lori-Parks—showing how the issue of transformation plays itself out through the playwrights’ works. The problem here is twofold: we have no sense of the postmodern as a period and why the author is revisiting it, or rather if she is revisiting it or simply assumes it is ongoing. Does she think, along with Jürgen Habermas, that postmodernity ended when the supposed con- tradictions in Michel Foucault’s work appeared (a rationalist methodology used to dismiss rationalist methodologies)? Or is she presuming that we still live in a postmodern world? We have no sense, in other words, of how the author is situating the postmodern in relation to the present. Secondly, the issues she raises are not really new, and lack the kind of extruded theoretical worrying that constitutes, in my estimation, the best critical work. What, exactly, is the meaning and import of transformation? Is the transformation between characters in, say, Chaikin’s theatre, resonant with other ideas of transformation: revolutions, transferences, comings-to-be, contingencies, or any of the other ideas of transformation currently extant? The book sets the stage for deeper and more profound discussion of transformation and its possibilities in the theatre, but Schmidt, for whatever reason, has chosen not to investigate them, or at least not to delve as deeply and with as much complexity as I might have liked. In this sense at least, the study reflects the drawbacks of the very postmodernity it seeks to address: an unwillingness to engage in the difficult, subterranean expeditions beneath the surface features of the theoretical landscape. Walker’s Expressionism and Modernism in the Modern Theatre, presents a different set of

questions. As mentioned above, this is a very nicely researched, deftly written book that Books argues for the presence of an American expressionism in the work of Eugene O’Neill, Elmer

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2007.51.2.189 by guest on 29 September 2021 Rice, John Howard Lawson, and Sophie Treadwell. Focusing on a fairly small number of plays, Walker suggests that these works are not merely expressionist in form, but are examples of an American expressionism distinct from its German counterpart. This American expressionist tactic was more centered on the corporeal effects of industrialization—the ways that the alienating results of industry produced a kind of agon or passion in the body. This, she claims, is distinct from German expressionism’s tendency to concentrate on the machinery of economic exploitation. In making this distinction, the author sidesteps a key issue—expressionism is in itself a problematical category. Some critics would claim that dramatic expressionism is merely the name given to modern drama in Germany. For Walker, however, this expressionism was not simply the recapitulation of the idiom of German modernism, nor was it a mere side trip within the development of American modernism either; expressionism was the very origin of American modernism. While I find Walker’s overall analysis engaging, I am not convinced by this particular point of the author’s argument simply because none of these writers, most notably O’Neill, produced a compelling body of experimental or avantgarde work beyond the relatively few plays discussed here. O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape and The Emperor Jones, the most significant examples she cites, are, as a matter of fact, usually viewed as mere blips on the screen of O’Neill’s larger realist project, to which he quickly returned. Nonetheless, Walker makes a compelling argument for the uniqueness of an American expressionism, no matter how minor a form it may have been, and does a number of adroit close readings that will, hope- fully, generate a reevaluation of these plays as examples of an early—if abortive—“classical” avantgarde theatre in America. These abortive attempts at an avantgarde, in fact, suggest that the author might have employed a different tactic here: rather than try to make rather grandiose suggestions that these plays represent the origins of American modernism, she might have asked why these experimental, confrontational forms never took hold in the American theatre. American theatre’s flirtations with expressionism and experiment were, I would argue, largely devoid of the kind of intensity, complexity, and development that we see in Strindberg, or even Ernst Toller; American expressionism, I would suggest, shows a lack of sustained acumen that needs, somehow, to be taken into account. Strindberg, for example, produced a huge body of work that evolved formally in remarkable ways throughout his life. I think the author’s suggestion that there exists a subset of American drama that is peculiarly American and expressionist in flavor is largely correct and well seen, but I am still interested in what the differences between American and European expressionism might suggest beyond the analysis given here, especially in light of the fact that there never was a viable avantgarde in early modernist theatre in America. The author does not speculate, and so here, as is too often the case in the American academy, the presumed demands of history trump the thrill speculative analysis. —Anthony Kubiak

Anthony Kubiak is Professor of Drama at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of Agitated States: Performance in the American Theater of Cruelty (University of Michigan, 2002) and Stages of Terror: Terrorism, Ideology, and Coercion as Theatre History (Indiana University Press, 1991). His current project is an interconnected series of meditations on art, nature, and the Unconscious.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2007.51.2.189 by guest on 29 September 2021 Unspeakable Acts: The Avant-Garde Theatre of Terayama Shuji and Postwar Japan. By Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2005; ix + 335 pp.; illustrated. $48.00 cloth.

Judging by the small number of English-language books on contemporary Asian artists and forms, Western interest in Asian theatre remains rooted in the traditional. Japan is a paradigm for this state of affairs. Despite a recent spurt of play translations, apart from occasional essays in anthologies, journals, or general surveys, books in English about modern Japanese theatre and its practitioners are rare. Until now, the only non-playwright, non-but exemplar examined in detail has been director-producer Suzuki Tadashi. Thus the appearance of Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei’s long-awaited tome on prolific director- producer-playwright-tanka poet-theorist-filmmaker Terayama Sh ji is of great significance. Sorgenfrei’s vastly rewritten version of her 1978 dissertation offers an insightful analysis of this multifaceted, notorious genius. Terayama, who died of liver disease at 48 in 1983, came to prominence in the 1960s and ’70s, during the heyday of international avantgardism; in the spirit of that era’s most challenging work, his cutting-edge productions either thrilled or angered audiences. Terayama’s theatre expressed his deepest anxieties, which Sorgenfrei closely inspects according to specifically Japanese approaches and terminology, demonstrating why Terayama remains an icon of the Japanese avantgarde. Terayama broke boundaries and fused multiple genres from Japan and the West—traditional and modern—in staging his idiosyncratic, ambiguous plays, which frequently exemplified the Japanese aesthetic called zankoku no bi (the cruelty of beauty). Sorgenfrei calls on theories derived from anthropology, psychoanalysis, aesthetics, and gender studies to explain how these works inevitably concerned a search for the artist’s identity. Although she occasionally cites the work of various Western theorists, Sorgenfrei depends for her principal arguments on the work of Japanese psychoanalysts Kosawa Heisaku and Doi Takeo, and philosopher- aesthetician Sakabe Megumi. She demonstrates how Terayama’s art reflected such Japanese dyads as omote-ura (outside-inside), soto-uchi (public-private), tatemae-honne (outside the self-inner feelings), omote and kage (mask or face–shadow or reflection)—appropriate for an artist who viewed himself as an outcast in a hermetically sealed society. The concepts of omote-ura and tatemae-honne, for example, are rooted in Doi’s attempts to modify Freudian theory to suit the specific needs of Japanese patients undergoing analysis. His terms reflect how people put on “masks” in public to hide their true feelings (ura), which are revealed only to intimates. According to Sorgenfrei (55-55), this leads Doi to note “a twofold consciousness” in Japanese behavior, often perceived by non-Japanese as “confusing, contradictory, or even ‘hypocritical’” (54). While omote-ura and tatemae-honne reflect personal behavior/feelings, soto-uchi concerns the complex relationships sustained on the “shifting continuum of relationships from the most intimate of groups to which one belongs [...] to the most extended of groups (such as school, employment, city, nation, race, or even ‘human being’)” (55). Among a number of other conceptions Sorgenfrei employs—such as amae (dependency) and tenkô (ideological reversal)—considerable space is occupied with examining Terayama within what Doi calls, in contradistinction to the Oedipus complex, the Ajase complex. Derived from the Buddhist legend of Prince Ajase, this holds that children, because of excep- tional maternal devotion, become totally dependent on their mothers, especially when fathers are absent or impotent. Terayama’s deeply ambivalent relationship with his mother allows Sorgenfrei to apply the Ajase theory to an exploration of his plays. Scandal and controversy accompanied much of Terayama’s work. Art, he insisted, was to

be worshipped, not used for political purposes, a position that gained him the enmity of the Books politically committed. Still, he sought to revolutionize society (or, at least, the way society

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2007.51.2.189 by guest on 29 September 2021 used its imagination), with plays criticized for being perverse and vulgar; his actors were often transvestites, porn stars, and freaks. Terayama sought to erase the difference between reality and unreality, as in his “city dramas”—partially improvised, Happening-like events that trans- pired across neighborhoods. He experimented with devices also being employed by Western artists, such as staging different actions simultaneously in multiple rooms, varying the actor- audience arrangements from play to play, using site-specific environments, isolating the audience in total darkness, employing chance to set off dramatic encounters, breaking down the barrier between “actor” and “audience,” disdaining the script as literature, and so on. Unspeakable Acts covers this material within a two-part structure, the first being a five- chapter overview and analysis of Terayama’s life and accomplishments. Part two provides invaluable translations of three major plays: The Hunchback of Aomori (Aomori-ken no semushi otoko, 1967), La Marie-Vison (Kegawa no Mari, 1967; rev. 1970; both translated by Don Kenny), and Heretics (Jashûmon, 1971; translated by Sorgenfrei). The main text provides excellent discussions of each. Also translated are substantial excerpts from Terayama’s provocative and highly readable theoretical treatise, The Labyrinth and the Dead Sea: My Theatre (Meiro to Shikai: waga engeki, 1976; translated by Sorgenfrei). Nearly 30 black-and-white and a half- dozen color images illustrate the text. Apart from several typos and spelling errors, editorial distractions are few. These include Sorgenfrei’s initial comment that the musical style of naniwabushi is accompanied by the biwa (incorrect) and then, on the same page, by the shamisen (correct), and her attribution to Martin Esslin of “A Pseudoclassical Tragifarce in a Bastard French Tradition,” the famous subtitle of Arthur Kopit’s play Oh, Dad, Poor Dad, Momma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feeling So Sad (127). Slightly more problematic is her provision of two indexes, one for the main text, and one for the translation of The Labyrinth and the Dead Sea, which may—as it did me—confuse those expecting to search only one index at the end of the book. Regardless, Unspeakable Acts is important not only because it succeeds in revealing an outstandingly innovative artist, but because it underlines how much the West remains ignorant not only of the achievements of Japan’s modern theatre artists, but of others elsewhere in Asia’s vast- ness. Sorgenfrei’s book is thus a signal contribution to the field. —Samuel L. Leiter

Samuel L. Leiter recently retired as Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Theater Department, Brooklyn College, CUNY. He has published two dozen books on New York theatre and Japanese theatre, especially kabuki, served as Editor of Asian Theatre Journal (1992–2004), and is Editor of the Encyclopedia of Asian Theatre (Greenwood Press, 2006).

Modern Japanese Theatre and Performance. Edited by David Jortner, Keiko McDonald, and Kevin J. Wetmore Jr. Lexington Books, 2006; 289 pp.; illustrations. $85.00 cloth.

These 19 essays deal with various aspects of modern Japanese theatre (shingeki) from its origins in the 19th century to its present-day practices. There is even an essay on why 17th century sewamono (colloquial-language theatre also known as domestic-drama theatre) did not develop into shingeki. Fourteen of the authors are Western scholars, a number of whom have worked in Japan for many years. Books

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2007.51.2.189 by guest on 29 September 2021 Jortner notes in his introduction that since the arrival of Admiral Perry in 1854 and the resultant “opening” of Japan, the abiding cultural issue “was and remains the continued dialogue between Japan and the West. [...] The plays and artists discussed in this book illustrate a variety of attitudes toward this disciplinary change [how Western forms impacted Japanese theatre], as [...Japanese artists] explore Western politics, art, and ideals through imitation, adaptation, and resistance” (xii–xiii). Modern Japanese Theatre and Performance does not attempt a balanced overview or anything approaching comprehensivity. Jortner makes it sound as if the Japanese only took from or resisted the West, when in fact the balance of trade in ideas has not been so lopsided. Japan has impacted the West in terms of basic industry (how to design, manufacture, and market automobiles), electronics, popular culture (manga and video games), and experimental performance (butoh and performance art). The book is divided into three sections: “Shingeki History,” “Experimental Theatre(s) and Border Crossings,” and “Specific Plays and Productions.” The preponderance of essays deals with post-WWII theatre; several authors also discuss Japanese theatre in the 21st century. Among the artists considered in some detail are Akimoto Matsuyo, Hijikata Tatsumi, Terayama Shuji, Mishima Yokio, Abe Kobo, and Miyagi Satoshi. Included also is the translation of one complete short play, Umehara Takeshi’s Mutsugoro (Mudskippers), a “super-kyogen” performed at the National Noh Theatre in 2002.

—Richard Schechner

Archaeology of Performance. Edited by Takeshi Inomata and Lawrence S. Coben. Altamira Press, 2006; 339 pp,; illustrations. $36.95 paper.

Takeshi Inomata and Lawrence S. Coben’s approach, though academically sound, radically departs from mainstream archaeology. The overall attempt is to apply some well-known performance theories to archaeology. Case studies in Archaeology of Performance range from ancient Egypt and Anatolia to both the “prehistoric” (an unfortunate word) and contemporary ritual dances of the Pueblo peoples in the American southwest; the relationship of politics and theatricality among the Mayans during the classic period (250–900 ce); the Inka’s domain in the Andes; and the 18th-century rituals of the Merina royals of Madagascar, some of which continue to the present day. The authors—archaeologists, anthropologists, and an Egyptologist—share an interest in performance and ritual. They want to transform archeology from a science of stones to one of performance. They take into account the (by now largely canonical) thought of Goffman, Hymes, Austin, Derrida, Butler, Bauman, Taylor, Schechner, and others even as they probe the ruins that mark what once were vital performance spaces, connecting these to contemporary performances and performance spaces. The essays in Archaeology of Performance frequently move between reconstructing long- vanished enactments and describing contemporary performances, drawing on archeology, history, anthropology, and performance studies. The book supports its editors’ assertion that “Archaeology should be able to make significant contributions in the study of performance and power through the analysis of theatrical space, iconography, and material objects by plac- ing theatrical events in specific social and historical contexts” (33). From the theatres of Inka power and Egyptian ceremony to the Anatolian “festival of death and consumption,” the Archaeology of Performance is an important work integrating performance theory, forensics, and classical archaeology to describe and analyze not a “dead past” but pasts that continue to operate as rich repositories of living behaviors. Archaeology of Performance can profitably be read along with Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks’s Theatre/Archaeology (Routledge, 2001), a more speculative and wilder ride authored by a theatre director/performance studies professor and a professor of classics/cultural anthropology. Calmer and more meticulous, Archaeology of Performance will have the longer shelf life.

—Richard Schechner Books

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