The Dissertation Committee for Mark Hunter certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: THEATRICAL WONDER Committee: ___________________________ Jill S. Dolan, Supervisor ___________________________ Oscar G. Brockett __________________________ Suzan L. Zeder __________________________ Pauline T. Strong __________________________ Kimberley B. Marra THEATRICAL WONDER by Mark Hunter, B.A.; J.D.; M.F.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May, 2005 THEATRICAL WONDER Publication No. __________ Mark Hunter, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2005 Supervisor: Jill S. Dolan This dissertation theorizes about a phenomenon of theatrical reception, which I call theatrical wonder. I hypothesize that on certain occasions theatrical spectators experience a sense of awe and an appreciation of possibility, together with deep emotion. This phenomenon results from an impulse to understand a novel theatrical metaphor in a perceptual field that is informed by an empathetic engagement with a character represented theatrically. Moreover, in its apprehension of possibility, theatrical wonder is implicated in utopian thinking. In analyzing a performance of Mnemonic by Theatre de Complicite, and in theorizing about my own directorial experiences in professional productions of Harry’s Way by Keith Huff, Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare, and The Goat, or Who is Sylvia?, by Edward Albee, I develop an autoethnographic and phenomenological investigation of theatrical wonder. iii Table of Contents Chapter One. Pathways to Wonder ……………………………………….. 1 Chapter Two. Theatre de Complicite: Purveyors of Wonder …………… 55 Chapter Three. Harry’s Way: Searching for Wonder in Retrospect .… … 93 Chapter Four. Verona in Jerusalem: Empathy and Compassion … …… 145 Chapter Five. Tragedy and Wonder: Albee’s The Goat … … … … …… … 183 A Postscript: Looking Back and Thinking Forward … … … … … … … … .… .242 Appendix: Production Photographs … … … …… … … … … … … … … … … … 247 Bibliography … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … 267 Vita … … … … … … … …… … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … ...286 iv Chapter One Pathways to Wonder Introduction There are times, sitting with others in a darkened theatre, when my powers of perception, my very senses are heightened, and I feel myself expanding with a sense of possibility, a sudden alertness to that which is, to that which will – or might – be. I see. I hear. And my seeing and hearing is linked to my breathing – and to my awareness of the breath that charges me. Inhale. Oxygen bubbles ride my bloodstream to a synaptic fireworks display. Colors are more vivid, vibrating. Emotions seem full and fleshy. Vision is a paradoxical portal – broadening the field before me while refining the focus at the center in the darkness. My skin is alive, bristling, prepared. My fingers flex. I hear the insistent murmurs of coded communications, full of nuance and the pleasures of subtlety. I hear the underscoring of ambient sound. Exhale. Astonishment fills the cavities left vacant by air expelled. Associations flash; connections link; juxtapositions jostle for attention and compete for primacy. I am immersed in complex layers of conjured collages, some burning brightly onto a plate of memory, others effervescent, that will resist recall or replication. Neural pathways are bright with activity, and I glide on tiny ripples of rapture. I am on the edge of my seat. I watch and listen and breathe some more. For me, this is the experience of theatrical wonder. And while some of its physical manifestations may be peculiar to me, I believe it is an experience whose fundamental characteristics I share, at least on occasion, with other spectators. 1 I define theatrical wonder as the experience by a theatrical spectator, during a performance, of a sense of awe and aesthetic appreciation that is coupled with deep feeling and a sense of expanded possibility. It is a phenomenon that, for me at least, happens rarely, but is always accompanied by an acknowledgment that in the experience of it, I have engaged something profound and powerful beyond the confines of its temporal boundary. What follows is a personal attempt to explore the phenomenon of theatrical wonder: to understand and theorize about the conditions of its experience; to investigate its utility as an instrument of social and political engagement; and to describe the means by which the experience might be made available to spectators of my own work as a theatrical director. My focus on my own experience and my own practice has led me both to a philosophical perspective about the epistemological dimension of my project and a methodology for writing about my thinking and research. Theatrical wonder is a personal experience, and the process of developing knowledge about it must include an intellectual reckoning of that experience. I have been drawn, almost inexorably, to an intellectual strategy that privileges the primacy of fully embodied experience, to a phenomenological perspective in other words, and I am indebted to the phenomenological probing of theatre scholars like Stanton Garner and Bert O. States. In my analysis of performance, I have been profitably drawn to the phenomenological work of Wilhelm Sauter (who has, in turn, relied heavily on the phenomenological hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer), and I have found it useful to refer to some of the ideas of Paul Ricoeur about interpretation. 2 I have undertaken my research with a hypothesis: that theatrical wonder involves the perception of theatrical metaphor in an empathetic field, where a spectator experiences both a sense of pleasure in apprehending the metaphor and an emotional identification with a character as performed in a particular moment. Accordingly, my work has led to both a consideration of empathy in theatrical reception and the workings of metaphor. I have relied upon scholarship in diverse fields, especially psychology, neuro-science, anthropology and cognitive linguistics. The largest part of my work, however, has involved a critical scrutiny of my own practice in selected instances, and my practice is, of course, necessarily linked to who I am. Like most people, my various identity markers represent a welter of description, a chaotic jumble of indicators of age, class, ethnicity, sexuality, and political orientation. I am a white, middle-aged, middle-class, heterosexual man of Jewish background, with a decidedly leftist inclination and a stubborn affinity for humanistic values, even given a scholarly immersion in feminist theory and an ardent appreciation of a broadly representative collection of theoretical signposts (decentered, all of them) of our postmodern moment. I am a spouse and a father, a teacher, a critic, and an administrator, a lover of dogs and of food, music, film, and literature. But above all, I am a theatre practitioner. By any measure, my work in the theatre has been, still is, and will likely continue to be that aspect of my being that consumes the largest portion of my waking (and sometimes sleeping) hours. It has been, and is, the single source of my most profound satisfaction and pleasure. It is a site of passion and 3 commitment in my life that is rivaled only by my family. I began my sojourn in theatre as a professional actor at the age of eight, and long after my abandonment of acting as a profession and a variety of various vocational detours, I returned to a life as a director, without any formal education in that field, but possessing a considerable accumulation of experiential knowledge. I began my graduate education in theatre, after a decade or so of experience as a professional director, because I wanted to teach as well as direct, and I needed the validating credential of a graduate degree. While working on my MFA in directing at the University of Iowa, however, I made a discovery that changed the direction of my life. I discovered that the “academic” courses I encountered as part of that program, courses in theatre history and performance theory, had a significant impact on my work as a practitioner, serving as sources of insight and inspiration, suggesting avenues of artistic exploration that I would not have otherwise undertaken. Following my completion of that degree, I continued to work as a director while teaching as an adjunct lecturer at several Midwestern institutions. After several years, I decided that both my teaching and my directing would profit from a more intensive immersion in history, theory and criticism, and I entered the PhD program at the University of Texas at Austin. My goal was, and is, to continue to explore the productive tension between theory and practice both in my work and in my thinking. 4 My practice is extensive. I have directed approximately eighty shows in the last twenty-two years, and even now, as a full-time tenure-track professor at Cornell College, I average directing four productions each calendar year, both in the academy and in the larger professional world. I do not approach theatre projects simply from the vantage point of an academic seeking a laboratory to work on various theoretical issues, though I think this is a vital and too often neglected aspect of pedagogy. Jill Dolan, writing from a complex identity location as a theatre scholar, a feminist and a queer theorist in Geographies of Learning, has made an impassioned