STANFORD DRAMA ELECTRONIC FORUM

FORUM THREE

Comments on "Discussing The Undiscussable", an essay by Arlene Croce, The New Yorker, December 26, 1994/January 2, 1995, pp. 54-60.

1. Croce makes the assumption that by incorporating the "real" into his performance work--specifically, by "working dying people into his act," Jones removes his performance from the arena in which it can be discussed by a critic. What are the possible responses to Croce's claim?
   1. One could argue that the real has frequently, in dramatic modernism, been framed within a performance: Piscator's appropriation of film depicting actual historical events; Brecht's variations on Piscator's use of film and projected images; the incorporation of actual testimony in a whole series of docu-dramas in the 1960s. A later example would be Emily Mann's use of the film or video image of Dianne Feinstein announcing the murder of Major George Muscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk in Execution of Justice. Even in terms of earlier drama, we know, for example, that after the Reformation luxurious ecclesiastical garments became part of the costume stock of companies like Shakespeare's; and the Bishop of Carlisle in a performance of Richard II might be dressed in an actual bishop's regalia, the real garment transformed into a costume. Elizabethan spectators, at least some of them, would have recognized that the garment was real.

   2. One of the aesthetic strategies of postmodernism is framing, putting a familiar scene, object, even the recording or photographic or video image of some actual, non-theatrical artifact or person, within the aesthetic event. Spalding Gray's use of actual recorded telephonic conversations in the early days of the Wooster Group serves as an example, reinforced by the resulting lawsuits. The framing of the real within a self-conscious aesthetic event constitutes one of the important conventions of postmodern performance, often making the point that the real is itself a representation. This technique builds upon aesthetic events within the fine arts: Duchamps' infamous urinal springs to mind or Louise Nevelson's arrangements of found objects. The whole tradition of collage encompasses the aesthetic framing of the real.

   3. The specific material condition of the actor, as well, comes to play in the performance. Our awareness that the performance of John Guilgud as Prospero in Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books may well be his final extended performance plays within the fiction of Prospero's sense of mortality and his self-conscious renunciation of magic; "our revels now are ended." Frankenheimer's filmed production of The Iceman Cometh (1973), in which Larry Slade is played by the dying Robert Ryan, who knew he would not live much beyond that filming extends, deepens, and radically complicates our witnessing of that performance and invests the fictional character's suicide with amplified pathos. Even more the point, perhaps, is the choice to cast a non-actor in the role of the returning veteran whose hands had been blown away in The Best Years of Our Lives, so that the character's struggle with the response to the steel hooks that served as surrogate hands and his equally acute struggle with the perception of others blurred the boundaries between the real and the fictional. Would Croce fold this performance into her notion of the performance of the victim? Looking at it from the perspective of the playwright's work--and Jones here is functioning as a playwright as well--do we suppress our knowledge of the autobiographical aspects of Long Day's Journey Into Night or Glass Menagerie in order that our sense of the playwright as victim of a tyrannical or abandoning father doesn't enter into our response? Does our knowledge of Rose Williams' lobotomy compromise our response to a performance of Suddenly Last Summer? Does our knowledge of the fact that Samuel Beckett appears to represent his own diseased hands in the description of Protagonist in Catastrophe diminish the value of that play? If Beckett himself had performed that role, displaying his infirmity, would that had placed him in Croce's camp of victimage art?

2. Croce writes: "In theatre, one chooses what one will be. The cast members of "Still/Here"--the sick people whom Jones has signed up--have no choice other than to be sick." I wonder how many actors, other than performance artists, choose what they will be in a performance? If you are a woman, say, for example, the feminist Elizabeth Robins playing Hedda Gabler at the end of the 19th century, or Mary McDonnell playing Mary Ann White in Execution of Justice, is it possible for you to make an absolute separation between your sense of yourself as a woman, as your historical moment positions you, and your "choice" to perform these fictional characters? I suppose that the transvestite performance of fifth century Athens and Elizabethan London, which men or boys represented women, would constitute the kind of choice that Croce would approve. That is, if your choice is to assume a different gender, a different class, and a different temperament you would protect yourself from the charge that you would be playing to the victim in your own situation. Isn't it interesting that what she celebrates here is the transvestite performance of David Gordon. In terms of your Anna Deavere Smith's particular work, isn't part of the implicit power of her performances the interplay between what she is what she has experienced, what she has heard in the interview shaped by she is, and the persona of the speaker whose words she temporarily inhabits? If Fires and Twilight were played by someone else, some of "Anna Deavere Smith" as listener would still be present but complicated by the experience and "presence " of the new performer.

3. Croce objects to the strategies of those whom she labels "victim artists." What seems obvious, when we think about this objection, is that the theatre since fifth century Athens has represented victims: the suppliant women, Oedipus, Cassandra, Antigone. Lear, as "more sinned against than sinning" is a victim. Vladimir and Estragon, Hamm and Clov are victims. The revised Galileo invokes the victims of Hiroshima to make its point about the submission of Science to the State. What Croce wants is the comfort of knowing the actor is whole and and only performing disfiguration or injury. John Vickery's performance of the Elephant Man--untouched by the illusory distortions of make up, his personal untouched good looks mediating the horrors of the disease, would define her kind of theater, I would think.

4. I think the crux of Arlene Croce's notion of the resistance of this kind of postmodern performance to criticism is that it is resistant, or rather, inaccessible, to the kind of criticism she practices. She is tied to the analysis of works of art as the expression of the thought and virtuosity of the subject. She is interested in modernist criticism, modern, not postmodern dance and performance, and, consequently, the abrogation of the subject--the substitution of the "real" for the virtuouso performer as the accompaniment to Jones' dance threatens her by giving her nothing to analyze in the terms in which she works. She doesn't recognize that there is plenty to say that isn't "interpretation." Post-modernism doesn't resist criticism or analysis; it resists hermeneutic criticism that relates the work of art to some system of knowledge or organization outside of itself: psychology, sociology, aesthetic valuation, philosophy. Because postmodernism forces us to see that all conceptual structures are, in a clear sense, "representations", not the real, these performances empty out or unvalidate the bench marks that she would use to position them in the world. Notice that she praises Merce Cunningham for holding on to "pure movement", ignoring the fact that he worked so energetically to take narrative out of dance, and puts the blame for the postmodernism of the company on John Cage.

5. I think that Croce and Brustein want a theatre of revolution, A Drama of Revolt, that is contained with an obvious fiction, so that the distance between the spectator and the performance is always clear. In this kind of theatre, the spectator can feel good because of having gone through an experience in which there is the illusion of having confronted serious issues. Framing the real within the performance robs that distance. Croce's position is the more difficult to sustain, because she makes statements like "The morbidity of so much Romantic art is bearable because it has a spiritual dimension. The immolation of the body leaves something behind: it's like a burning glass through which we see a life beyond life--not "the afterlife" but an an animation of spirt, a dream life more abundantly strange and real than anything we know." This is the kind of writing that The New Yorker itself would quote and quip: Block that metaphor! It doesn't mean anything other than that Croce wants art that provides the illusion of confrontation with significant issues but then retreats into some kind of energetic theatricality that palliates or distracts, suggesting the presence of some ineffable "spirituality". I, too, believe in spirituality buts as a disciplined, regular confrontation with our own thinking, attempting to make thought and action somehow joined--not some kind of high-handed theatrical coup de theatre. She should read Brecht's Baal as the nail in the coffin of her notion of the Romantic artist.

6. Shouldn't reviews should articulate how the production goes about its work, how it relates to familiar conventions and how it extends and complicates them, how it positions itself in the world? The meaning of the work should be up to the negotiations of each spectator with the performance. If the spectator goes to the theater with a clearer understanding of the way in which the production goes about it work from reading a well-written review, that negotiation will be wiser and better informed probably. If theater critics analyzed contemporary performances that way, maybe audiences wouldn't be so content that Edward Albee, Sam Shepard and August Wilson have moved from a freer, more open structure to an increasingly conventional and regressive use of the conventions of late 19th century realism. Maybe if critics had concentrated upon the ways in which Tennessee Williams was working, his later plays might have had a greater appeal as experimental and challenging.

7. Croce tries to blames things on a variety of causes, but she emphasizes our mediatized culture. That's too easy. And, ironically, postmodernist performance confronts the seductive appeal of media and addresses it frequently. We see the dying and death over and over again on television--most recently in the repetition of the painful individual experiences of suf- fering in Kobe. Maybe "Still/Here" attempts to recuperate the individuality of suffering individuals that our mediatized culture seems to neutralize. Our culture seems to feed on a full range of victimage, mediated through television from the Sally Jesse Raphael explorations of bizarre behavior, with Oprah and Phil and Geraldo. Doesn't that compulsive exercize make these real people into representations with entertainment value? Shouldn't Croce be acknowledging the ways in which "Still/Here" confronts that phenomenon and attempt to differentiate between the work of Jones in the theater and these television equivalents of the old-fashioned circus freak shows that our "sensitivity" would now condemn.

   Remember that Bernard Shaw wrote that he liked the plays of Ibsen because he saw himself reflected in them. On one level that boggles the mind (because I like Ibsen and am bored with Shaw [except as an actor because he lets you talk for so long!], but people like Arlene Croce can't see themselves in these more diverse performances. She identifies movements of multiculturalism as the operation of an invidious logic. The logic that restricted the theater to white, Eurocentric drama--that restricted so much of our world to that--is the invidious logic, a logic of exclusion that ignores the presence of the diversity that is there. Her remarks on the narcissism of the nineties, with which she closes, are ironic. She wants drama as the complex expression of the subject, as the exploration of consciousness, as the expression, the manifestation of genius and artistry. She wants the Romantic subject, caught in the turmoil of self-definition, in a world in which consciousness defines the world, in which the consciousness of the White european descendent projects the world. She wants performances that reflect her sense of identity. She doesn't realize that she is a victim of outmoded social and aesthetic theory and in her preferences exemplifies narcissism. Some of the new drama claims that the world is a construct and we are subject to that construct; that culture has created that construct and we are the victims of it. Whereas the only way we can get away from being victims is to forge a kind of negotiation between differences that lets culture produce itself in some kind of new way, some people will try like mad to hold on to the old universals -- spirit, truth, beauty, the subject. I can remember Jean-Louis Barrault speaking to Berkeley students in 1970, declaring with his marvelous accent: "Zey may emprison moi boudee, but zey could nevaaah emprison moi mind, L'ame du Barrault, because even dans le cell, moi mind would be free." How's that for a claim that plays into the system of incarceration of political subversives? I remember thinking, as much I admired his acting and directing, that it would be better to articulate the need for change rather than to define freedom as a state of mind rather than a concrete, material, organization of relations among the men and women who constitute the body politic. Croce wants to hold on to the old universalist subject by making the performance artists into narcissists, as though her romantics were not; but this idea of the self is one that she can understand, one that comes within her frame of reference.

8. The snide reference to the AIDS quilt is reprehensible. Notice the deprecation of collectivism. She wants to celebrate the individual subject. How could she make this reference as a dance critic when she has witnessed that field dessiminated by AIDS, seeing one performer after another in the obits every day? Her comments also reflect her division between real people, on video tape or making the squares of the quilt and "professionals", whose virtuosity creates the desired distance between spectator and performer. She is clearly uncomfortable when the membrane that separates performer and audience becomes permeable. What she sees as "pathetic lumping together" should be marked as a material, collective activity that attempts to stitch together, metaphorically and literally, a community of people who, in grief, mark the fact their friends, family members, and lovers had presence and value and mattered to people. To call this pathetic is insensitive