Berkeley Book List: Drama, Theater, and Performance
W. B. Worthen, professor and chair, Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies Staging Place, Una Chaudhuri, University of Michigan Press, 1995 The Actor's Freedom: Toward a Theory of Drama, Michael Goldman, Viking, 1975 Looking at Shakespeare: A Visual History of Twentieth-Century Performance, Dennis Kennedy, Cambridge University Press, 1993 Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts in 19th Century England, Martin Meisel, Princeton University Press, 1983 Unmarked: The Politics of Performance, Peggy Phelan, Routledge, 1993 Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance, Joseph Roach, Columbia University Press, 1996 The Shape of Paradox: An Essay on Waiting for Godot, Bert O. States, University of California Press, 1978 Dada Performance, Mel Gordon, PAJ Publications, 1987 Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance, W. B. Worthen, Cambridge University Press, 2003 Lines of Activity: Performance, Historiography, Hull-House Domesticity, Shannon Jackson, University of Michigan Press, 2000 |
It is with considerable difficulty that I've arrived at a selection of books from the broad range of drama, theater, and performance studies. Because the field encompasses the study of dramatic writing, performance traditions, architecture and design, and the sociology and economics of performance — and does so across time, place, and human cultures — it is truly impossible to generate anything approaching a "representative" list, either of classics in the field or of cutting-edge new scholarship.
In this list I have highlighted books that are both provocative and readable, and that explore different aspects of the wide range of theater and performance studies today. I have listed two books directly concerning dramatic literature; one that relates acting to the scene of drama; one on the history of modern stage design; and two that work to define the practice of "performance studies." Last, should readers of the Berkeley Book List be interested in the research happening on campus today, I have included three books by current Berkeley faculty in the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies.
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Una Chaudhuri's Staging Place is perhaps the most recent in the long tradition of modern drama studies: the study of the literature of the modern stage in the West from a thematic, literary, and cultural perspective. In this sense Chaudhuri is the heiress to figures like Eric Bentley and Francis Fergusson, whose work in many ways established the field. But while Chaudhuri's book is centrally concerned with the traditions of European and American dramatic writing in the 20th century, her perspective is distinctively contemporary, tracing the impact of "geopathology" — the deformation of traditions of "locatedness" characteristic of global modernity — as it is represented in drama and theater, arts which, after all, are centrally dependent upon making space meaningful. The book ranges widely across the great playwrights of the modern tradition — Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Pinter, Beckett — as well as treating some contemporary playwrights with fresh insight and energy. Anyone interested in the cultural meaning of modern dramatic writing would find this an exciting and provocative book.
One of the central problems in the study of dramatic theater has to do with articulating a relationship between the practices of performance and the structure of the written play. In his elegant, intuitive book The Actor's Freedom: Toward a Theory of Drama, Michael Goldman works to understand "drama" as an art written to exploit the power of acting in significant ways. Goldman, however, is not concerned with whether a play provides an actor with a "good part." Instead, he understands acting as harnessing powerful psychological and social desires and fears: to be an actor is to perform in an extraordinary position of freedom and vulnerability, to command the attention of an audience while at the same time being subject to its whims — think of how stand up comics always say "I died out there" when they fail, and "I killed them" when they succeed. For Goldman, acting arises from this dialectical essence: the actor performs at the axis of the sacred and the blasphemous, and it is the function of great dramatic writing to articulate that axis, to give it shape, power, and meaning. In "The Actor's Freedom," then, he proposes the following formula:
The leading role or roles of any play act out some version of a half-allowed, blasphemous, and sacred freedom characteristic of the era in which the play was written. In the enactment, by the very nature of the freedom pursued, the hero risks destruction.
While this formula may seem, well, formulaic, it leads to truly engaged and engaging readings of the major plays of the Western canon, readings that are less concerned about expressing the plays' themes than about the ways they might be seen to harness the powerful desires at the core of theater: the desire to act, and the desire to watch. Goldman has written widely on Shakespeare and on modern drama; he is also a poet and playwright, and his writing is always lucid and provocative.
The work of theatrical performance is inherently collaborative: the playwright's contribution is in many ways only one of the many materials (such as the actors' bodies, the space of the stage, lights, fabric, lumber) that must be composed to bring the play into its life as performance. Dennis Kennedy's Looking at Shakespeare: A Visual History of Twentieth-Century Performance is a superb book tracing one element of that extra-literary dimension of the theater — stage design — in the 20th century. Although Shakespeare may have been the greatest playwright of Elizabethan London, his plays continue to inspire revolution in the theater: many of the greatest directors, designers, and even playwrights of the modern theater have used Shakespeare as their fulcrum for leveraging a new conception of theater and new ways of practicing performance. In a richly illustrated study now available in paperback as well as hard cover, Kennedy sees the traditions of modern design and directing as themselves practicing a kind of "visual criticism," a criticism that simultaneously interprets Shakespeare and opens new avenues for theatrical work. "Looking at Shakespeare" provides a brief account of the traditions of Victorian staging, then tracks the major lines of modernist innovation in the theater; it brings the English tradition (Gordon Craig, Harley Granville Barker, Peter Brook, Peter Hall) into dialogue with several crucial European lineages (Max Reinhardt, Bertolt Brecht, Josef Svoboda) that provide the visual idiom of our ways of seeing Shakespeare — indeed, of seeing theater space — today. No one who reads this book will ever again cast an innocent eye at the stage.
Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-Century England is one of the very few books to place drama and theater in a conversation with the other arts of modern culture, notably with the predominant arts of the first era of the artistic industrialization, the 19th century. Though it is often bypassed in conventional histories of literary drama, the 19th century defined the practices of modern theater. Much of what we think of today as standard practices for devising, marketing, and staging a play — to say nothing of the our conventional stage technologies — were shaped in this period. Moreover, author Martin Meisel recognizes that boundaries between genres of popular culture (theater, novels, visual culture) are porous: we might recall that Dickens's novels were not only "enacted" by their author in his superb readings, but were incessantly pirated by playwrights and theater managers eager for a sure success. Less familiar is the common practice of dramatizing the story behind the narrative paintings popular in the period, paintings which were reproduced as steel-plate engravings to decorate the homes of the new bourgeoisie, a precursor to the Picasso and Degas prints that bedeck dormitory rooms today. In this massive, readable, and richly illuminated study, Meisel brilliantly coordinates a wide range of 19th-century arts — the novel, painting, the stage — and claims the centrality of the stage as the period's master art form.
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Peggy Phelan's Unmarked: The Politics of Performance is perhaps without rival in the emerging field of performance studies. Ranging across a wide variety of performance forms, she traces the interface between the "real" and the "representational" that defines the evanescent ontology of performance. Phelan's writing is deeply inflected by Jacques Lacan, and tends to see the "active vanishing" of performance as a way to interrogate the personal, social, and political dimension of representation in psychoanalytic terms. Yet Phelan's superbly lucid and subtle style is always more than adequate to evoking the ways performance engages its audience and perhaps even (re)creates it. Chapters consider the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe and Cindy Sherman; the films of Yvonne Rainer; Jennie Livingston's "Paris is Burning"; Tom Stoppard's play "Hapgood'; the performances of Operation Rescue; and, finally, the "ordeal performances" of Angelika Festa.
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Joseph Roach's work has also been extremely influential in the field of performance studies, particularly for his imaginative way of understanding the "genealogy" of performance, how performance can memorialize events that have been written out of conventional narrative history. In his sweeping and imaginative Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance, Roach triangulates three cities — London, Paris, and New Orleans — whose inter-involvement as sites of performance can be traced to the late 17th century and continues to the present day. For Roach, the central issue of this "circum-Atlantic performance" triangle is the exchange of sugar, slaves, and capital so well explored in Paul Gilroy's "The Black Atlantic." While this history can be resurrected through accounts of performances of the era — the funeral of the famous English actor, Thomas Betterton, or the decision to stage Thomas Davenant's "Macbeth" for four visiting Iroquois kings in 1710 — it is still palpable in the performances that surround us today: for example, in the geography of cemeteries, the performances of Mardi Gras "Indians," and jazz funerals in New Orleans. Such performances enact a deep "surrogation" of the past, an act that at once invokes, restates, and replaces past performances, past struggles. As Roach suggests in the close of this energetic study, "Texts may obscure what performance tends to reveal: memory challenges history in the construction of circum-Atlantic cultures, and it revises the yet unwritten epic of their fabulous cocreation."
Samuel Beckett's plays define the possibilities of theater in the second half of the 20th century, and Waiting for Godot is surely his most familiar and most-produced play. In The Shape of Paradox: An Essay on Waiting for Godot, a brief book published in a series inviting major scholars to write succinct and engaging books for a general audience, Bert O. States provides an exemplary reading of Godot, a reading that systematically refuses to assert the play's elusive meanings. Instead, he takes his cue from Beckett's famous remark — "I am interested in the shape of ideas even if I do not believe in them" — and traces the many shapes inscribed in the action of "Waiting for Godot": the deferral of Christian salvation, the entropic routines of silent film comedy, the generic hallmarks of stage drama. Without asserting the play's meaning, these forms of experience — what Raymond Williams might have called "structures of feeling" — are shaped and reshaped by Beckett's terse yet lyrical play. States has a sure sense of the power of dramatic writing and its implications for stage action.
Dada was one of the most influential, but least-preserved, literary and theatrical movements of the 20th century, in large part because so many of its gestures were designed to subvert the notion of a permanent, oppressive "canon." In his fine collection Dada Performance, UC Berkeley professor Mel Gordon brings together well-known figures from the movement throughout Europe, combining writer/performers associated with Zurich's Cabaret Voltaire with figures from Berlin, Paris, Cologne, and Hanover.
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In Lines of Activity: Performance, Historiography, Hull-House Domesticity, associate professor Shannon Jackson develops a new sense of "performance historiography," not merely a history of performance, but a sense of how performance itself might be used to understand past notions of identity, space, and community. She investigates the reformist and pedagogical uses of performance at Jane Addams's Hull House Settlement in Chicago, one of the most influential of Progressive social institutions from its founding in 1889 well into the 20th century. Jackson looks at the many ways in which theater, dance, sports, children's games, storytelling, festivals, tableaux, living museums, and even everyday life events could become part of "reformance": performance that at once restores and resists conventional behavior, as part of the Addams's larger mission. "Lines of Activity " provides readers with a fascinating history and an innovative sense of the ways performance and performance scholarship might engage with the past.
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Although Shakespeare's career in the theater ended in the seventeenth century, his work continues to influence our understanding of the nature of dramatic writing and the purpose of theatrical production. In Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance, I ask what a wide range of contemporary "stagings" of Shakespeare plays might say about our understanding of drama and performance now. For today, Shakespeare no longer "performs" only on the stage — Shakespeare is a figure of a wide range of contemporary films, participates (at the Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in London) in the living history and theme-park industry, is part of a globalized trade in "intercultural performance," and is omnipresent in digital culture and the Internet.
About W.B. Worthen
W. B. Worthen is professor and chair of the Department of Theater,
Dance, and Performance Studies at UC Berkeley. He has written
widely on dramatic literature and
performance, including "The Idea of the Actor," "Modern
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