18
Kerstin Schmidt
The Postmodern Condition of Drama and Theater
In one of the first comprehensive discussions of postmodern drama, the critic Stephen Watt stipulates that “within postmodernism, drama retains virtually no value” (Watt 1998: 17). This provocative statement expresses the problematics of the combination between postmodernism and drama/theater: When preceded by adjectives like “postmodern,” drama is emptied of most of the features that have traditionally defined it, such as character, plot, and conflict – all of which have become challenged and subverted, if not altogether abolished within postmodern theorization. Seen this way, postmodern drama comes close to being a misnomer, or, put differently, postmodernism empties out the very existence of traditional drama and theater. Watt’s peculiar book title, Postmodern/Drama, evokes the uneasiness between the two terms, but inserting a slash between them may not solve the problem. The American stage abounds with experimental theater forms that are all too quickly identified as postmodern without specifying in more scholarly detail what this label entails. The abundance of theater forms tentatively called postmodern contrasts with the relative scarcity of scholarly studies on postmodern drama and theater. This comes as a surprise, given the plethora of work on postmodern novelistic writing or postmodern poetry, let alone postmodern studies in other cultural productions such as film or architecture.
Postmodernism is a concept to be wrestled with, and what adds to the difficulty of conceptualizing postmodern drama is postmodernism’s inherent resistance to definition. Granted that postmodernism challenges theater and drama in many ways, but at the same time, I argue that postmodernism offers crucial theoretical tools and features to capture experimental dramatic writing and theatrical practice. Postmodernism remains vital and productive, which is why it needs continuing conceptual attention. The critic Andreas Huyssen has famously referred to postmodernism as a veritable “cultural transformation” that more than deserves to be studied more fully: “What appears on one level as the latest fad, advertising pitch and hollow spectacle is part of a slowly emerging cultural transformation in Western societies, a change in sensibility for which the term ‘post‐modern’ is actually, at least for now, wholly adequate. The nature and depth of that transformation are debatable, but transformation it is” (1984: 8). As such a marked “change in sensibility” and, significantly, a “cultural transformation,” postmodernism has been profoundly received in the theater arts as well, and, what is more, it is arguably a culmination point in the history of experiments on the limits of drama and theater.
“Postmodernism” is frequently used as an umbrella term covering a wide und largely unspecified range of experimental writing of various provenance. For a better understanding of the unwieldy term, however, it is helpful to go back to postmodern critic Ihab Hassan’s set of features that has become a staple of postmodern theory. As problematic as definitions and lists of characteristics may be, Hassan’s inventory of postmodernism includes many of the features pertinent to a discussion of postmodern drama as well. In his juxtaposition of modern and postmodern features, Hassan’s postmodern catalogue lists, among others: antiform, play, chance, anarchy, exhaustion/silence, decreation/deconstruction, absence, text/intertext, parataxis, rhizome/surface, and indeterminacy (Hassan 1987: 86–96). To these, Linda Hutcheon adds pastiche and irony, John Barth a sense of “exhaustion” and, later, “replenishment,” Umberto Eco an aesthetics of repetition, and leftist critics such as Jean Baudrillard, David Harvey, or Jürgen Habermas a concern about the constructedness of reality (cf. Schmidt 2005, chaps. 1–2). From a different perspective, Fredric Jameson highlights the commodification of objects, the photographic superficiality, and the “waning of affect” in his 1984 essay “The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” (Jameson 1991: 10). The following description of postmodern contradictions and inconsistencies seems to capture adequately the appeal of postmodernism for drama: “postmodernism veers toward open, playful, optative, disjunctive, displaced, or indeterminate forms, a discourse of fragments, an ideology of fracture, a will to unmaking, an invocation of silences – veers toward all these and yet implies their very opposites, their antithetical realities” (Hassan 1980: 125).
Postmodern art in general is preoccupied with the examination of the role and function of representation as a constituent of our sense of reality and the real, and postmodern theater is particularly concerned with the forms of representation in the theater. This reflection on the processes and forms of representation can be seen as a metadramatic, respectively metatheatrical orientation. Postmodern drama investigates the signs and constituents of dramatic art. It questions its sign systems, however, not necessarily to negate and discard them altogether, but to critically reflect and thoroughly research them, turn them around, often in a playful manner, and in this sense to deconstruct them in the very process of designing and producing them.
The evanescence and conceptual instability of postmodernism, its “indeterminacy” and predilection for play, causes, according to some critics, the abandonment of a political stance. Despite this frequent challenge that the postmodern eschews a political agenda and encourages the arbitrariness of the often quoted “anything goes,” the plays I will discuss here as postmodern are decidedly political. On the contrary, I would argue that postmodernism’s playfulness and indeterminacy even provoke a political agenda. Hence many ethnic playwrights or feminist dramatists have found postmodernist techniques particularly useful to express distinctly ethnic or feminist concerns and have consequently adapted postmodern ideas and shaped their own version of postmodern drama. Postmodernism is also a theory mainly developed and used by the Western world, but as it shifts attention to the margins of discourse and society, it serves to compel critic and audience alike to be more attentive to those excluded from any given culturally dominant paradigm. Postmodernism’s penchant for the margin, for instance, redirects attention to the ways in which gender and race are broached by artists. Postmodernism functions as a mode of criticism that destructures the order of representation in order to reinscribe it, even if such reinscriptions can always only be provisional and transformative. Similarly, the alleged rejection of history is a frequent challenge brought against postmodern theory. Its interest in historiographic metafiction, however, famously developed by Linda Hutcheon (1988), foregrounds the constructedness of our knowledge and vision of the past (see Schmidt 2005, esp. chap. I).
Survey of Secondary Studies
Scholarship on postmodern American drama is relatively scarce, especially when compared to other genres or forms of cultural expression. After the first comprehensive studies appeared around the turn of the century and during the first years of the new millennium, a look at the academic book market shows that postmodern drama still solicits considerable interest among theater scholars (see Schmidt 2005: 25–29).
The two book‐length studies that appeared on performing arts bookshelves in 1998 and 1999 respectively have, to my mind, set the stage for all discussions of experimental theater forms that could be called postmodern: Stephen Watt’s Postmodern/Drama and the German theater scholar Hans‐Thies Lehmann’s Postdramatisches Theater. At first glance, both studies seem to cover common ground and investigate postmodern drama. Focusing on the European theater scene, Lehmann supports a restrictive definition of postmodernism, namely as the period which reacts against modernism, and invents the term “postdramatic” to refer to what is elsewhere called postmodern. He offers a list of playwrights who would qualify as postdramatic: for the American context, he names Richard Foreman, Robert Wilson, Richard Schechner, and the Wooster Group. After elaborate theoretical ruminations on postmodernism and drama, Watt’s study veers in a different direction and is more generally concerned with postmodern forms of expressions, ranging from postcards to television shows.
In 1989, Steven Connor added an almost encyclopedic study called Postmodernist Culture to the postmodern book market. The author covers a remarkable variety of fields of cultural expression, from more customary topics such as literature, performance, and architecture to well‐informed discussions of fashion, style, and rock music as postmodern discourses, but this huge scope inhibits a concentration on postmodern drama and theater. As early as 1984, Rodney Simard published a study promisingly called Postmodern Drama. He goes back to the 1950s and discusses Samuel Beckett as a turning point in the traditional notions of drama and theater, yet does not elaborate more fully on the significance of postmodernism for drama, as could be expected from the title.
More recently, Annette J. Saddik’s (2007) concise history of American drama includes a chapter on postmodern drama that mainly addresses the issue of representation in Sam Shepard’s and David Mamet’s work. David Krasner’s equally brief historical survey, American Drama 1945–2000 (2006), mentions postmodernism only as part of his discussion of Suzan‐Lori Parks (2006: 157). David K. Sauer’s American Drama and the Postmodern: Fragmenting the Realistic Stage (2011) is preoccupied with the notion of realism and its modes of fragmentation. He defines postmodern drama rather flatly: “For me, there is a very simple criterion for this postmodern drama: instead of a realistic set there is a fragmentary one, announcing to the audience that what they see is not what is real but what characters assume to be real” (2011: 20).
Daniel K. Jernigan introduced his edited collection, Drama and the Postmodern: Assessing the Limits of Metatheatre (2008), with the observation that drama had, in comparison to other genres, still received little attention in scholarship on postmodernism. The selection of essays unveils a quite encompassing definition of postmodernism as contributions discuss twentieth‐century playwrights as different as Samuel Beckett, Gertrude Stein, Mark Ravenhill, and Tony Kushner. Postmodern aspects in Kushner’s works are, by the way, the central concern of a monograph by Hussein Al‐Badri that was published in 2014. An interesting collection of articles called Drama and/after Postmodernism (Henke and Middeke 2007), with an emphasis on the British theater scene, takes a look at both postmodernism on the English‐speaking stage as well as at future developments in the period allegedly following the postmodern (see also my concluding section below).
The Theater of Transformation as a Model of Postmodern Drama
In my own book on postmodern American drama (2005), I have shown in which ways specific theoretical aspects of postmodernism have been adapted and redesigned by postmodern playwrights. I have established transformation and transformative processes as key techniques and metaphors of postmodern American drama and have hence called postmodern playwriting a “theater of transformation” (Schmidt 2005: esp. chap. 2). Transformation itself is well known as a major acting exercise practiced most prominently by Joseph Chaikin’s Open Theater. It meant the abrupt taking on and dropping of different roles without any accompanying changes in setting, costume, or lighting. The technique itself is said to go back to the famous Chicago workshops of Viola Spolin, renowned theater teacher, whose handbook of teaching and directing was soon to assume quasi‐biblical status for theater groups of the time.
I have described transformative practices as strategies to ensure that postmodern plays do not rest at simply destructing dramatic constituents or destroying the communal orientation in theater. Rather, they evoke these constituents or the notion of a communal event while challenging and questioning their very possibility. Put differently, postmodern drama disturbs and subverts these features and constituents by transforming them. As more traditional techniques of making plays are called into question, transformative practices may function as one of the few remaining connectors in postmodern drama; rather than a coherent plot development or a full characterization, transformation works as a pivotal organizing principle of this most experimental form of playwriting. Most importantly, perhaps, transformation as an ongoing practice defies closure and hence expresses a key concern of postmodernism. Hence, I argue that transformation is key to the question of postmodernism on the American stage and a major technique in the development of a postmodern language of drama and theater.
In their exploration of the boundaries of dramatic form, postmodern dramatists have concentrated on many aspects pertinent to postmodern forms of writing. Most crucially, they have studied the fragmentation and transformation of the self and postmodern variants of character in a mediatized culture. An inquiry into the postmodern notion of text, authorship, and performance also looms large in the theater of transformation, as does the reconfiguration of plot, action, theatrical space, and other constituents of drama. But since postmodern drama is also decidedly interested in the larger political climate, it conceives of form not as an end in itself but as reflecting and, what is more, as shaping a particular cultural and social context.
The effort to delineate as well as conceive of a postmodern sense of self is intertwined with the metadramatic concern in postmodern drama. In this sense, postmodern drama refers to and reflects upon itself while simultaneously exploring the condition of the self in postmodernity and the concept of dramatic character in postmodern drama. Since the fragmentation of the self is inherent in dramatic form at large, postmodern drama uses, and thrives in, the space that the actor/character split opens up. Postmodern writing has often been associated with the proverbial “death of the author,” an idea which entails profound changes with regard to text, textuality, and authorship. Without doubt, the postmodern “death of the author” has also left its imprint on postmodern dramatic writing and has had far‐reaching implications for the status of playwright and dramatic script. Since authorship and text are almost generically contested in the theater due to the many collaborators involved in any dramatic performance, postmodern drama has become an ideal site to redefine and enlarge our notion of these crucial concepts. In terms of signification, the postmodern dramatic text is conceived as a series of provisional meanings that mutate, contradict, and answer one another. Postmodern drama unveils the illusory character of presence, and as such deviates from performance art in this respect. Yet, the illusion of unmediated action remains a powerful construct in the theater. There is often an awareness of the illusory nature of performance, and, paradoxically enough, theater is nevertheless presented as the truth of illusion, of theater‐as‐life. A changed concept of theatrical space is instrumental in developing a concept of postmodern drama, as the site of theater is reconceptualized and turned into an important topic itself, a fact that also corroborates the metadramatic thrust of postmodern drama. In addition to the pronounced metadramatic interest in the stage, the diversified use of contemporary media has changed the concept of the postmodern stage considerably. As can be seen in contemporary practices, a wide range of media technologies and devices from television, video, and the movies has transformed the theatrical space and its boundaries in order to represent and problematize a thoroughly mediatized culture in postmodern drama and theater. This theater frequently creates interfaces between human beings and machines and, later on, includes virtual spaces as well. The virtual realm excludes the material body and is preoccupied with its mediatized immaterial appearance. Video art installations frequently proffer concepts of a mixed reality where the live action of the body is constitutive of the work of art but, at the same time, is present not in its materiality but in its screen image. In the same vein, a tape‐recorded voice in the theater alters the concept of theatrical space because its origin can be neither determined nor localized.
Edward Albee: From the Absurd to the Postmodern
Playwright Edward Albee is an interesting case with regard to the question of postmodernism’s influence on twentieth‐century American drama and theater. Associated with the American variant of the Theater of the Absurd, his work in fact impressively indicates the development from the absurd to the postmodern. In The Theatre of the Absurd (1961), Martin Esslin explains the utterly pessimistic worldview and hopelessness of human existence that characterize the theater of the absurd as follows: “[it] strives to express its sense of the senselessness of the human condition and the inadequacy of the rational approach by the open abandonment of rational devices and discursive thought” (Esslin 1961: 24). Albee’s The Zoo Story (1959) comes closest to Esslin’s definition of the theater of the absurd. Jerry and Peter sit on a bench in Central Park. Jerry is desperately seeking human contact and communication and eventually manages to coerce the rather reserved middle‐class proponent Peter into a conversation. This exchange ends by involving Peter in Jerry’s suicide. Jerry forces Peter to leave his superficial detached friendliness, to break out of his subjective cage, and provokes the human, albeit aggressive reaction that he craves so ardently. The play about the failure of language‐based communication, however, ends with Jerry sacrificing himself for a deeply human reaction. Hence, there is reason to doubt whether the The Zoo Story fully counts as a play of the absurd, as Jerry’s final act is an affirmation, even if negative, of sense.
Despite its controversial absurdist orientation, Albee’s Zoo Story is still paramount for a periodization of American drama since, together with a wide range of plays from Jack Gelber’s The Connection (1959) to Lorraine Hansberry’s renewal of black drama with her play A Raisin in the Sun (1959), it marks the beginning of a period of intense experimentation from the 1960s onwards that could in many ways be seen as the opening of postmodern theater. Albee experimented with a variety of dramatic tools and theatrical models. Whereas A Delicate Balance corresponded to the conventions of the well‐made play, his next play, Box and Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse‐Tung (1968), is a daring experiment. Originally two separate one‐act plays, the final work is a three‐part structure in which two‐thirds of Box precede Quotations and are followed by the remaining third of Box. The entire theater piece is often referred to as Box–Mao–Box. The audience only sees an empty, brightly lit box on stage, and hears the disembodied voice of a middle‐aged woman. The female voice only delivers a pessimistic stream‐of‐consciousness monologue. The four characters of Quotations, the Minister (always silent), the Long‐Winded Lady, the Old Woman, and Mao Tse‐Tung, are presented as insulated from each other. The last three of them speak, but not to each other. The audience is compelled to make sense, to create dialogue among the players, but in vain. The play’s dialogue is guided by fragmentation as sentences remain unconnected by logic or narrative coherence. Albee calls this an experiment, the “application of musical form to dramatic structure” (1969: ix), thus exploring the sonata form with an exposition of a theme and its variations as the building principle of his play. He has also admitted to using a method of cut and paste (Gussow 2001: 273–274). He thus avoids narrative linearity, replacing it by other means of organizing and structuring his postmodern work.
A later, very successful postmodern play is Albee’s Three Tall Women (1995; premiere 1991). It is a study of aging, as it shows three women at ages 91, 52, and 26, each talking about her individual perspectives on life at her given age. At the same time, the three women seem to be but one and the same person, thus casting doubts on the possibility of the existence of a wholesome sense of self and identity. This “meditation on the passage of time” (Zinman 2008: 118) can be seen as metadrama in the sense of watching yourself live your life at different times. At the end of the play, A muses on what it is alike to think about oneself “like I was watching” (1995: 110), or to think about oneself “in the third person without being crazy” (1995: 109). Their final ruminations on the end of life, though, evoke a Beckettian moment, when A identifies the happiest moment in life precisely in its ending (1995: 109).
Megan Terry and Rochelle Owens: Feminism on the Postmodern Stage
The so‐called classical postmodernism of the 1960s was a predominantly male phenomenon, with well‐known proponents such as John Barth, Ronald Sukenick, Richard Brautigan, Robert Coover, and Ihab Hassan. Even though this has changed in more recent postmodern theory and art production, the rather male‐dominated beginning is crucial as a backdrop for the discussion of a feminist postmodern theater. Eminent scholar of feminist drama Helene Keyssar has called Megan Terry the “mother of feminist drama” (1984: 53). Known for Viet Rock: A Folk War Movie (1966), a rock musical and protest play about the Vietnam War, Terry started out as a collaborator with the Open Theater and then wrote numerous plays for the Omaha Magic Theatre, a predominantly female theater collective in Omaha, Nebraska. While Terry’s American King’s English for Queens (1978), for example, or Approaching Simone (1970), an Obie‐winning chronicle of the life of Simone Weil, are overtly feminist plays, carrying this orientation in their title, I will focus here on her Keep Tightly Closed in a Cool Dry Place (1965), a play with an all‐male cast about the murder of a woman. Like many of her plays, Keep Tightly Closed was developed in collaboration with the Open Theater and counts as one of Megan Terry’s first and most successful one‐act transformation plays. The play features Jaspers, Michaels, and Gregory, who are cell‐mates imprisoned for the unresolved murder of Jaspers’s wife. All three are connected to the killing, but it remains vague to what degree they were each involved in the crime and it remains equally unclear who among them committed the crime. Terry concedes that she deliberately created this limbo to encourage a higher degree of collaboration among all involved in any given performance of the play. The play consists of cut‐up scenes that are only connected by means of transformations. At the beginning of the play, the three actors are presented as being transformed into one machine‐like organism:
MICHAELS:
Press here . . .
GREGORY:
Tear back . . .
JASPERS:
To replace . . .
TOGETHER (Locking arms):
Insert lip. But we may be opened. But we may be opened. But we may be opened for . . .
JASPERS:
For inspection. (1965: 157–158)
As a matter of fact, the image of the human machine and particularly the last words could figure as a heading for the play as a whole: It opens the constituents of plays such as the concept of character and sense of self for scrutiny, “for inspection.” The categories of plot and narrative coherence, too, are rendered dubious under Terry’s postmodern playwriting eye, as the abrupt change of topic below indicates:
GREGORY:
I’ll never sign the treaty. This is our land. Cut me. Shred me into pemmican, but a hundred historians and Life magazine will tell the world of your cowardly crimes.
[…]
JASPERS (Drawling):
Save his song for Ruth Benedict and the National Geographic. (1965: 163; 164)
The sudden and unprepared change to historical controversies over Native American land ownership and unfair treaty negotiations suddenly transforms yet again to more contemporary issues of anthropology (Ruth Benedict) and respective publications. Whether one could claim that the historical debates and the contemporary anthropological publications do still have a logical link, one is hard pressed to find a viable connection between Native American debates of land ownership and the murder of Jaspers’s wife which is, after all, the play’s topic. One may identify murder as common to both incidents, but other than that they unrelated. The sole connector are the exercises of transformations on stage. This strategy casts doubts on the concept of a straightforward storyline and the very possibilities of telling coherent stories in the first place.
Peter Feldman, director of the Open Theater production of the play, describes the method of transformation and perceptively singles out its effects:
It [the transformation] is an improvisation in which the established realities or “given circumstances” (the Method phrase) of the scene change several times during the course of the action. What may change are character and/or situation and/or time and/or objectives, etc. Whatever realities are established at the beginning are destroyed after a few minutes and replaced by others. Then these are in turn destroyed and replaced. These changes occur swiftly and almost without transition, until the audience’s dependence upon any fixed reality is called into question. (1967: 200–201)
Keep Tightly Closed brings up a series of images, mostly unrelated, in the manner of an image‐generating machine. Unguided by narrative causality, images are added to one another as in a layering process. Whenever a particular setting is evoked and the audience may enjoy a moment of recognition and epistemological certainty, transformation is ready to disturb the certainty and thus questions any sense of customary identification with a given social setting. With regard to the postmodern sense of self, transformation serves as the method to motivate and carry out the process of generating multiple, changing, and fragmented selves. It then depends on the imaginative and perceptive abilities of a given spectator how the characters and the situations of the play are seen. Postmodern drama in Terry thus turns into a “drama of perception” (Schlueter 1990: 163) in which the audience is required to become an active participant in the semiotic process. Additionally, the audience is directly involved by audience addresses (1965: 190; 198) which accrue additional significance when the play ends on such an address:
JASPERS:
This side
MICHAELS:
Should face
GREGORY:
You!
TOGETHER:
And you and you and you and you and you and you and you AND ROLLER AND ROCKER. THIS SIDE SHOULD FACE YOU. AND ROLLER AND ROCKER. (The wheel stops with JASPERS facing audience.)
JASPERS:
This side should face you!
Curtain (1965: 198)
The active integration of the audience and the transformative practices present a conception of character and identity that focuses on the social constructedness of gender roles rather than on nature or any other pregiven determinant. In an interview with Dinah Leavitt, the playwright explicitly acknowledges the feminist potential inherent in the principle of transformation: “If feminism is going to really move ahead, it’s got to explore the possibilities of what a woman could be. We don’t know what a woman could be like because we’ve had so many outlines and definitions forced on us. […] That’s the true frontier” (Leavitt 1987: 328). Terry thus defines the new and “true frontier” in America as the exploration of the possibilities of gender identity. This identity is to be liberated, among other things, from the prison house of enforced definitions of femininity. Transformation is, for Terry, one of the most effective theatrical means to overcome such enforced definitions (see Schmidt 2005, esp. chap. IV.1).
Rochelle Owens’s work differs considerably from Megan Terry’s in both style and scope (see Schmidt 2005, esp. chap. IV.2). Better known as a poet than as a playwright, Owens emphasizes collaborative processes in her theatrical work and admits to a strong dedication to group work instead of the single focus on the authorial figure. The challenge to authority is perhaps the single, most salient trait of her wide‐ranging and innovative work. Owens is very interested in experimentation, especially for staging feminist concerns, and she deplores the formally and aesthetically conservative style of much feminist playwriting. Asked about the role of feminism in her work, she replies:
My writing is feminist because it has much to do with my personal and social identity as a woman in a patriarchal culture, and because it resists both the form and the idea of absolute power of organized doctrine, principles, and procedure. One ought to question the assumptions of the culture which created the social role of women.
(Coleman 1989: 20)
The stress on formal aspects also informs her work. In a description of her poetry, for example, she describes her style as “non‐linear, transmitted, placed and displaced, scattered, textured and re‐textured in an endless, complex system of designed irregularity” (Coleman 1989: 21) – a description that also applies to her dramatic work and certainly describes her play Emma Instigated Me (1976). Consider the beginning stage directions introducing the topic of the play:
This play is about a play in the process of “becoming.” The line of the play follows the author who is writing a play about the life of Emma Goldman, the 19th century revolutionary and anarchist. (1976: 71)
The play hence focuses not so much on the presentation of a finished piece for the theater; rather, it thematizes the process of dramatic production and the act of writing a play – in other words, the play demonstrates the “instigation” that prompts the finished work. In a metadramatic movement, it stages the tension between product and process and the transformative processes from one to the other. In accordance with the patriarchal discourse of male control, the author takes great pains to uphold and defend his position of authority, thereby acting as a father to the text, or, to the story of this woman’s life. The Author’s voice chronologically precedes that of the (textual) child, which entitles the Author to intervene in the story as soon as it does not follow the path he has carved out:
AUTHOR:
Stop. This is the creator. The maker of your adventure. I’m speaking. Stop. Stop. (1976: 75)
The Author as creator and God‐like ontological founding principle asserts his voice and his command, and maintains his epistemological superiority. The recorded voice of the Author also leaves no room for doubts:
RECORDED VOICE – AUTHOR:
I’m the author. I know best. (1976: 74)
Notably in this passage, it is not the Author’s live, natural voice that asserts his position of superiority, but a pre‐recorded voice. Owens here posits a relationship of antecedence: the moment when the voice of the author made this utterance has passed, and the authorial assertion is nothing but a pre‐recorded “thing of the past.” The play thus expresses a deferred sense of presence precisely in an art form traditionally so identified with the present moment as the theater.
Refusing to pay due respect to the Author as grounding principle of the text, subverting the “law of the father,” as well as struggling for a voice not controlled by the author, reveals the play’s feminist agenda. Transformation as a technique most vividly serves to express these feminist concerns. It functions, among others, as a means to escape the limitations imposed on the text by an alleged author and thus defies closure. As Roland Barthes so famously put it: “To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing” (1988: 147). Emma’s phenomenological approach to history clashes sharply with the Author’s. The following passage exemplifies the battled terrain of the legitimacy and ownership of someone’s life story:
EMMA GOLDMAN:
I want the cause, Anarchy – my ideals, honored – or I’ll kill you with my bare hands. […]
AUTHOR:
Don’t antagonize me.
EMMA GOLDMAN:
I’ll dismember you!
AUTHOR:
Emma, do you want to be merely a sardine in a tin can? I’ll put you in with all the other small accidents of fate. In the unfinished plays file. […]
EMMA GOLDMAN:
Capitalist. You are my enemy.
AUTHOR:
You are my invention. (1976: 78)
Both the author as the traditional authority and Emma struggle over the issue of memory and how to memorize correctly. Memory, re‐membering and dis‐membering, are closely connected. The battle over authorship and authority is carried out on a metadramatic level, questioning the very possibility of telling a life story on the stage. Deliberately foreclosing any epistemological meaning‐making attempts, the play is demonstratively located “in between” meanings, transforming and making provisional each effort at meaning making:
RECORDED VOICE 2:
This play happens between gaps, intervals, spasms. A pick on the ole heart‐string. A contraction of the vocal cord. (1976: 73)
Suzan‐Lori Parks: Postmodern Transformations of History as Play
The African American playwright Suzan‐Lori Parks is among the most innovative and audacious dramatists in the contemporary US theater scene. The recipient of numerous awards, from Pulitzer (Topdog/Underdog [2002]) to Obie (Venus [1995/1996]), she has also excelled as an educator, screenwriter, and novelist. The America Play (1995), commissioned by the Theatre for a New Audience and written from 1990 to 1993, exemplifies best her approach to postmodern playwriting. The play reenacts one of the most significant events in American history, the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln on 14 April 1865, in Washington’s Ford Theatre. It consists of two major parts, “Act One: Lincoln Act” and “Act Two: The Hall of Wonders.” Act One is a monologue by a character named “The Foundling Father as Abraham Lincoln,” also known as “The Lesser Known.” The character bears a striking resemblance to President Lincoln, but he is, as his second name indicates, just “less known.” The Lesser Known uses his natural resemblance to Lincoln and enacts his assassination in a Vaudevillian mock shooting scene. Act Two is predominantly about The Lesser Known’s wife Lucy and their son Brazil who are shown as digging for the husband’s, respectively father’s, legacy. The scenes featuring Lucy and Brazil alternate with parts that present scenes from the performance of Our American Cousin, the play that President Lincoln saw on the evening of his assassination.
The assassination of President Lincoln certainly figures in the grande histoire of the nation and can be considered a master narrative. As the president of the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln is of paramount importance for the African American population, and yet he remains a controversial figure as a white president in a country fraught with racism. In a notable twist, Parks casts the Lincoln look‐alike as black, having a black actor impersonate “The Lesser Known.” She hence explicitly picks up the tradition of blackface performance, minstrelsy, and recasts the significant moment in the nation’s history from an African American perspective. At the very beginning of the play, history is presented as the play’s main concern, as indicated by the setting of the play:
Great Hole. In the middle of nowhere. The hole is an exact replica of the Great Hole of History. (1995: 158)
Parks’s approach to history, however, deviates from traditionally established models of staging history. The wordplay between “hole” and its homophone “whole,” that is, between absence or lack (as in hole) and its opposite, fullness and completeness (as in whole) expresses an interesting transformation, as it indicates how history, the whole of history, has rather been a “hole” for African Americans, meaning a sense of nothingness and exclusion, or a hole in which they were stuck. What has figured as history for the overall, predominantly white nation, has merely been an absence for black people, a discourse from which they are violently excluded. The play’s location expresses this absence. In addition, the w/hole of history is only a “replica,” a simulation. The postmodern wordplay casts doubt on the idea of the existence of an authentic and original history.
“The Lesser Known” as Lincoln look‐alike is not the real thing either, but a mere enactor of the historical drama staged for entertainment purposes. The play features several mock shooting scenes that typically run like this:
(A Man, as John Wilkes Booth, enters. He takes a gun and “stands in position”: at the left of the Foundling Father, as Abraham Lincoln, pointing the gun at the Foundling Father’s head)
A MAN:
Ready.
THE FOUNDLING FATHER:
Haw Haw Haw Haw
(Rest)
HAW HAW HAW HAW
(Booth shoots. Lincoln “slumps in his chair.” Booth jumps)
A MAN (Theatrically):
“Thus to the tyrants!”
(Rest)
Hhhh. (Exits)
THE FOUNDLING FATHER:
Most of them do that. Thuh “Thus to the tyrants!” – what they say the killer said. “Thus to the tyrants!” The killer was also heard to say “The South is avenged!” [Footnote: Allegedly, Booth’s words.] Sometimes they yell that. (1995: 164–165)
This passage also evokes an innate sense of theatricality in American history. After all, in the historical assassination, the pro‐Confederate actor John Wilkes Booth entered Lincoln’s booth, shot him in the head, and then leapt onstage, shouting the Virginia state motto “Sic semper tyrannis” (“Such is always the fate of tyrants”) and then escaped, despite a broken leg.
Parks investigates the genre of the history play from a postmodern perspective, as she literally plays history, replays the historical incident of the assassination, but not only to repeat the event, but to replay it from varying perspectives, depending, for example, on the particular Vaudeville customers who keep coming in order to shoot Lincoln. This parody of death insinuates that the postmodern version of death is not final, but doomed to endless repetition. On the one hand, the endlessness of the ad lib repetition can be seen as a historical trap without any possibility of escape or closure. The continuous repetition with differences expresses a postmodern transformation. Parks has coined the term “Rep & Rev,” short for repetition and revision, for this formal writing technique. Adapted from the jazz aesthetic, “Rep & Rev” means that a particular phrase is followed by numerous concomitant repetitions. Such repetition, though, is never identical to itself. A phrase is always repeated with a difference; in other words, it is always revised. This principle reveals sameness as a fiction. Repetitive structures, however, are more likely to be considered anti‐dramatic in the classical model of drama which is based on climactic conflict. This model is not without predecessors in literary history, ranging from the modernist writer Gertrude Stein’s preoccupation with repetition and difference to African American scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who analyzed the significance of “repetition with a difference” in African American culture (see Gates 1988). In Parks, variation is a constitutive part of repetition, as the play’s protagonist reflects on the possible outcomes that the story could turn to when he wonders: “It would be helpful to our story […]” (1995: 160), or when he wonders about other developments that the narrative could take in the question (without question mark): “Howaboutthat” (1995: 161); claims to (historical) truth are radically transformed into provisional, marketable versions. Put differently, History (with a capital H), is Disneyfied. As Lincoln is resurrected time and again, defying a sense of closure, the rampant sensationalism and performative commodification of history eventually empties out historical meaning and significance (see Schmidt 2005, esp. chap. V.2).
After Postmodern Theater, What Next?
The question of what comes after postmodernism has surely been raised numerous times and concerns not only drama and theater, but other genres as well, as debates on the contemporary novel amply show. Against the backdrop of a rich, diverse, and highly productive American theater scene today, I would like to single out tendencies in contemporary playwriting that both significantly depart from the full‐fledged fragmentation of the constituents of drama and theater as practiced in postmodernism and at the same time draw heavily on postmodern drama’s toolbox and benefit from the formal liberation it brought about. For one, performance and performativity have regained importance in contemporary theatrical practice. The growing popularity of performance collectives such as Nature Theatre of Oklahoma or the British‐based groups Gob Squad or Forced Entertainment seems to support this tendency; these groups have joined the global theater circuit and have become mobile theater practitioners. This goes hand in glove with a renewed interest in the performer as opposed to the traditional actor/actress. While this is hardly a new development, the growing, reinvigorated fascination with the idea of real people playing/living their lives on stage, and not so much actors and actresses enacting different roles, suggests that the idea of authenticity has notably regained prominence after postmodernism had cast a deep shadow on its very possibility. The question of the boundary between art and life preoccupied postmodern theater as well. But today, the resurgence of performance art projects seems to indicate a different impulse. As people from the audience or the street are asked to join the performance without prior rehearsal, an intensified sense – and assurance – of presence in an augmented real‐world environment could be at stake. Such performances often deal with pressing social concerns or acute political events. Numerous productions today include refugees or immigrants, evoking the allure of the “real” person who truly suffered the experiences of immigration or flight, who embodies these experiences. The outspoken political agenda of this theater often runs the danger of coming close to didacticism or assuming the role of the social worker.
The emphasis on a sense of the real and its complications can also be discerned in a turn to documentary theater forms. Moisés Kaufman and the Tectonic Theater Project’s 2000 The Laramie Project (2001/2014), one of the most‐performed theater pieces in America, as well as its sequel draw on hundreds of interviews with inhabitants of the town of Laramie, Wyoming, where the young gay student Matthew Shepard was murdered in 1998; the plays also include journal entries from company members or news reports to investigate and reflect on the crime, but also on its sociopolitical context and cultural climate. In a similar vein, Lynn Nottage’s award‐winning play Ruined (2009) is based on the writer’s conversations and observations during a trip to Africa to research the brutalities and damage Congolese women had suffered during their nation’s civil war. In these plays, the documentary mode is joined by a return to narrative in the sense of a coherent telling of stories. These plays freely use postmodern processes of fragmentation and subversion, but finally spell out an insistence on a consecutive narrative.
As these stories conspicuously often addresses concerns of sociopolitical relevance, they could be grouped under the label “human rights” in an encompassing sense of the term. This orientation is easy to see in both the Laramie Project and Ruined. This trend does not seem a negligible remainder of the bygone days of radical political activism on and off the stage, but it informs the fully commercialized Broadway scene as well. A quick survey of recent Broadway shows yields an astounding number of plays dealing with human rights issues. From Danai Gurira’s Eclipsed (2015), about the raging civil war in Liberia, to Stephen Karam’s careful investigation of more private, quotidian plights in The Humans (2016), all stories stage concerns that largely address human rights issues, with varying degrees of postmodern experimentation.
As a conclusion to this survey, the playwright Annie Baker skillfully merges her meditation on the conditions of contemporary life with the acting technique of transformation. In one of her Vermont Plays called Cycle Mirror Transformation (2009), Baker uses acting exercises in a drama class as the major structural organization of her Obie Award‐winning play in which the audience should learn about the characters only through formal theater exercises. Thus, it seems as if the theater of transformation as a mode of postmodern playwriting has left its mark and opened up rich and promising avenues for dramatic writing in the decades to come.
References
Further Reading
SEE ALSO: CHAPTER 8 (THE LITTLE THEATER MOVEMENT).