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The Resistance to TheatricalityAuthor(s): Marvin CarlsonSource: SubStance, Vol. 31, No. 2/3, Issue 98/99: Special Issue: Theatricality (2002), pp. 238-250Published by: University of Wisconsin PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3685489

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TheResistance o TheatricalityMarvin Carlson

Probably the most distinctive feature of theoretical speculationconcerning the theater during the past twenty years has been the cross-fertilization of this field of study with the social sciences. While traditionallytheater theorists have most commonly looked to the work of literarytheoristsorphilosophers for inspiration, concepts, and analytic strategies, today theyare much more likely to look to such cultural analysts as anthropologists,ethnographers, psychologists and sociologists. The changes in theinvestigative fields of both theaterand the social sciences as a result of thisshift have been enormous-indeed the fields themselves have beensignificantly reconfigured. Perhaps the most familiarexample of this cross-fertilization was the converging interests of anthropologist Victor Turnerand theater theorist RichardSchechner,but scarcelyless importanthave beenthe theatrical metaphors in the influential writings of sociologist ErvingGoffman, and the emphasis on the performative aspects of language bylinguists John Austin and John Searle. In each of the fields represented bythese theorists, theirwork and the work of others who have been influencedby theirapproacheshave radicallyalteredbothcriticalapproachesand criticalvocabulary.

So widespread and so productive has been this interpenetrationof theformerly fairly discrete fields of theater studies and the social sciences thatit is hardly an exaggeration to say that in the study of social phenomenatoday metaphors of theater and performanceareso common that they havebecome almosttransparent,while conversely,in thestudy of theater,asimilarcritical dominance is currentlyheld by the metaphors and the topoiof socialanalysis.Useful and productive as this cross-fertilization has been, it has notbeen without cost, for of course any new interpretativegrid, any new criticalparadigm, inevitably brings some distortion along with its clarifications,and when the clarificationshave been as stimulatingand productive as thoseresulting from the growing convergence of the analytical methodologies oftheater and performance studies and of the social sciences, then thedistortions involved are very likely to be overlooked in the generalenthusiasm over important new insights.238 ? Boardof Regents, University of Wisconsin System, 2002SubStance# 98/99, Vol. 31, nos. 2 & 3, 2002


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Thanks to the widespread influence of such theorists as Turner,Schechner, Goffman, Austin, and the many subsequent theorists who havesince the 1960s worked in these converging fields, it has become almostimpossible to consider the termperformance,n the many ways that it is usedin contemporary criticalwritings, without the term being conditioned to agreateror lesser extent by the implications of its use as a key critical term incurrentwork in the social sciences.

This new orientation of the term performance has hardly goneunremarked. Indeed it has been celebrated and in fact institutionalized, inlargepartdue to the efforts of RichardSchechner.As earlyas 1973 Schechnerin a special issue of The DramaReviewcalled for more study of the "areaswhere performance theory and the social sciences coincide" (5). Since thattime Schechner has devoted much of his careerto this study in an influentialseries of books and articles,and he was instrumental in the establishment ofa department of performancestudies at New YorkUniversity.The high visibility of the term "performance" n recent writings abouttheater, and its acknowledged relationship to theories and concerns in thesocialsciences,has obscured the factthattheatertheoryin generalhas becomemore involved in recent years with concepts and strategies related to thesocial sciences. This affects the way the field is evolving and how its termsare configured, even when the perhaps overdetermined rubric ofperformance seems not to be directly involved.A striking example of this may be seen in recent uses of the termtheatricality,which, like performance,has been very differently configuredas a result of the interpenetrationof theatricaland social science theory, butwhich has not gained, as performancehas, a higher visibility and a generallymore productive and flexible critical usage as a result. On the contrary, Iwould argue, theatricality has been reduced and constricted as a workingtermby this process. Indeed, in some cases its decline can, I think, be almostdirectly correlated to the relative success of performance, where the twohave been posited as rhetoricallyoppositional terms.A key work in locating the term theatricality within the developinginterface of theater and the social sciences was the book by that namepublished by Elizabeth Burnsin 1972.Bums and herhusband were pioneersin the modern application of sociological methodology to literary andtheatrical studies, and Burns herself described the book Theatricality s anattempt to bring together material from three hitherto separate fields- thehistory of drama and theater (represented by such scholars as AllardyceNicoll and Glynne Wickham), the Chicago School of sociology (whose bestSubStance# 98/99, Vol. 31, nos. 2 & 3, 2002

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known exponent was Erving Goffman), and the European, largely Frenchtradition of sociology of the theater, founded by JeanDuvignaud.Burns, anticipating in some measure the insights of Judith Butlerconcerningthe "performative" n social life, suggests thattheateris a vehiclefor the "transmission of specific beliefs, attitudes, and feelings in terms oforganized social behavior." "Theatricality,"occurs when certain behaviorseems to be not natural or spontaneous but "composed according to thisgrammar of rhetoricaland authenticatingconventions" in order to achievesome particulareffect on its viewers (33).In the two decades between Burnsand Butler, however, the view of subjectivity has shifted, and with it theattitude toward the functions of structuresof "organized social behavior."ForButler,writing in 1990,subjectivityis itself "performativelyconstituted"precisely by the "ritualized production" of codified social behavior (1993,95),and thus the question of agency for the subjectpresents a majorcriticalproblem. This is much less the case for Burns, who follows the model ofmuch sociological writing of her time in positing a subjective "self" thatstands to some extent outside these structuresof behavior and utilizes themin a manner Burns characterizes as "rhetorical"-seeking to create certaineffects and impressions upon others.This separation of "self" from "role"inevitably suggests that the latteris less authentic, more artificial.It is precisely upon these grounds thatJean-Paul Sartre,in an often-quoted passage in BeingandNothingness,condemnsthe sortof social "role-playing"that is explored in fargreaterdetail in ErvingGoffman or in Elizabeth Burns.When we make ourselves known to othersas a "representation," Sartre argues, then we in effect exist "only inrepresentation,"a condition Sartrecharacterizesas "nothingness" or "badfaith" (59, 60). Burns claims that she is distancing herself somewhat fromSartreon this point by claiming that while theatricalitycan involve "rigidityor repetitiveness," its "empty rituals" can be avoided if we contribute tothem "thenovelty of our own experience"(232).Infact,however, this is alsoSartre'sargument, that the "novel" actions of the self can and indeed mustbe utilized to overcome the rigidity and emptiness of theatricality.This opposition between the "authentic"or "meaningful" expressionof the self and the "empty rituals" of theatricality, even when it does notappear in precisely these terms, is very widespread in the sociologicalwritings of the past generation, where its fashionable dress in the languageof contemporarysocial sciencelargelyobscuresthe factthatit is in significantmeasure a modern reworking of a very ancient criticism of theater. FromPlatoonward one of themost predictableattackson theaterhas been precisely

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that it provided empty representations that if unchallenged threatened theauthenticity of the real self.'The negative association of theatricality with rigidity and emptyrepetition suggested by Burns and the sociological theorists upon whomshe was drawing was reinforcedat almost this same time by a quite differentgroup of theorists in the world of art. As minimalism became the fashion,many theater theorists found in the writings of Antonin Artaud a vision ofan "essential" or "minimalist" theater which would rejectthe trappings oftheatricalityas Artaud saw them, such as discursive writing, narration,andtraditionalcharacter.Within the artworld, minimalist theorists like ClementGreenbergand MichaelFriedduring the 1960swere involved in a searchforthe "essence"of art,a kind of authentic "self" for each art and each work ofart,and for them the "theatrical"was seen as inimical to this project,partly(as with Artaud) because of its associations with pre-determined structure,but even more importantlybecause of the emphasis itplaced upon reception.In Fried's 1980Absorption ndTheatricality:aintingandBeholdern theAge ofDiderot,he contrastsapparentlyself-sufficientinwardly directed "absorbed"art works with works of "theatricality,"consciously opening themselves tothe gaze and interpretationof a spectator.If the work of artwas indeed to beself-contained, as the modernist projectinsisted, then it could hardly be heldhostage to the reception conditions foregrounded and "authenticated"bytheatricality.Fried's association of the concept of theatricalitywith a foregroundingof the actor-spectator elationshipand theepistemologicalproblemsinvolvedin "knowing" something (or someone) consciously "displayed" for aspectator or spectatorshad wide influence in subsequent theory not only inart history but also in the field of literary and film studies. Stanley Cavellbased provocative essays on Endgameand KingLearon the operations ofappearing as a spectacle before spectators (1969) and later extended thisanalysis to film and philosophy (1 and 2; 1979).David Marshallmakes theseoperations central to his analysis of Shaftesbury,Defoe, Adam Smith, andGeorge Eliot in his 1986TheFigureofTheater.The theatricalitythat is viewedwith suspicionby eachof these theoristsis specificallyconcerned,as Marshallputs it, with the "literal or figurative position of appearing as a spectaclebefore spectators" (5). Theatricality, especially in the works studied byMarshall, is not precisely condemned, but neither is it viewed positively.Rather,it is a problem to be addressed, an inescapable and distorting filterthrough which the souls and intentions of others must be read. The "dreamof sympathy, the desire to transcendthe differenceand distance thatseparateSubStance# 98/99, Vol. 31, nos. 2 & 3, 2002



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people," canbe achieved only by "defeatingor negating theatricality"(225).Thus, though far more sophisticated than the simple "self-role"distinctionof the Platonic tradition, it derives in fact from the same assumptionsconcerning the relationship between authenticity and mimesis and in theend uses the metaphor of theatricalityto suggest a lack or falseness, evenwhen this lack is perceived as inevitable.Theseparallelobservationsfromsociology, art, film, and literarytheory,and even certain major theater theorists like Artaud, all contributed to adistinctlyrestrictedand decidedly negative view of theatricality n theoreticalwritings of the late 1970sand 1980s,aview thatassociated the termprimarilywith formal, traditional and formally structured operations, potentially oractually opposed to the unrestricted and more authentic impulses of lifeitself. The general theoretical reaction to what was now widely seen as therepressiveness of structuralist concerns, also extended, in those criticsinterested in such matters, to theatricality,which the writings of influentialsociologicaltheoristshad associatedwith the establishment and maintainanceof structures of social action.

As performance emerged during the early 1980s as a majornew criticalterm in theatricaltheory, there was (and still remains) an enormous varietyin its application, but very frequently it was developed in a dialecticalrelationship to theater. When this happened, the opposition was usuallybased on some variation of theater's association with semiotics and formalstructures, and that of performance with the inchoate, still uncodifiedmaterialof life itself. A major survey of currenttheory appeared in a specialissue of Modern Drama in March, 1982, which contained one sectionprovocatively titled "Performancer the Subversion of Theatricality."A keyarticle in this section, by Josette Feral, was entitled "Performance andTheatricality:the SubjectDemystified." This suggested a more positive andproductive view of theatricality than many writings of the period, eventhough it drew upon the general model of opposing the structuralism of"theater"to the poststructuralismof "performance."Following this model,Feral characterized theater as a narrative, representational structure thatinscribes the subject in the symbolic by means of "theatricalcodes," whileperformance was devoted to undoing these "codes and competencies,"allowing the subject's"flows of desire to speak."The firstbuilds structuresthat the second deconstructs. Ratherthan associating theatricalitywith theoperations of theater, however, and with its shortcomings in apoststructuralist discourse, Feralmoves this term to a higher critical level.Theatricality,she suggests, arises from a play between the two realities, the


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specificsymbolic structuresof the theatricaland the realities of the imaginarythat make up performance (178).Feral'singenious andprovocativearticledoes, I think,provide a strategyfor recuperating a positive and productive view of theatricalitywithin theframework of the pre-existing discourse established in sociology, modernart, and poststructuralism,most of which worked to place this concept in adistinctly negative light. Feral's location of theatricalityin a field of playfultension has strong appeal in a period when theoretical attention has shiftedfrom seeking centers to seeking margins and boundaries, from seeking afixity of meaning to seeking sites where meaning is continuously fluid andunder negotiation, but it also calls attention to a particular quality oftheatricality hatis by no means groundedin modern criticaldiscourse. Thereis something profoundly paradoxical about the relationship of theater tohuman experience that is involved in the process of theatricalmimesis itselfas well as in the reception of this mimesis. One can speak of this paradox interms of a play between codes and flows, as Feraldoes, but it has historicallybeen spoken of in many otherways, many of which have little directly to dowith the particularconcernsof poststructuralism.I am thinking for exampleof the play between the real and the ideal that Friedrich von Schiller andothers thought could best be captured within the theater, or of the playbetween belief and disbelief thatSamuel T. Coleridge posited as the properreception process for mimetic art.

Theatricality, like the closely related (and equally complex) termmimesis, has built into it a doubleness, or aplay between two types of reality.In the most familiar articulationof this doubleness-between "life" and itsmimetic double, the drama or theater-there has from Plato onward creptinto discussions of thisphenomenon the operationof what Derrida has calledthe "metaphysics of presence," which has privileged "life" as the primaryand groundingterm of thisbinary,with theaterviewed as secondary,derived,and for some, even deceptive and corrupting. Such an approach hardlyencourages a strong interest in the field between these terms, and sotheatricalityhas often been associated not with a relationship but with thederived term, and thereby has shared in its frequently negative valence.This, as we have already seen, has been the case with many of the modernsociological theorists who used the term. Even Feral, who restorestheatricality to a position of greater importance, retains a suggestion ofnegativity about the formal codes of theater,which the liberating and life-based activities of performanceworks to break down.




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The decline in the fortunesof the termtheatricality n theoreticalwritingwithin this tradition (often balanced by a corresponding rise in the fortunesof performance) has doubtless been reinforced by the dominance in thiscentury of realism in the mainstream Western theater. Within the realistictradition, theatricalityalso is seen quite negatively, since its appearance oracknowledgement calls into question the basic illusion upon which realismis based, the illusion that seeks at least in principle to deny the operations ofthe theater.

On the realist stage, to designate a costume, a setting, a lighting effect,or an actor's work as "theatrical"normally suggested a flaw-a note ofartificiality that was seen as working at odds to the illusionism of thistradition. Here in a ratherdifferent way, theatricality again suffers from amentalgrid thatpriviliges normal,everyday life as the experienceof primaryinterest and validity, and theatrical enhancement of that life as artificial,false, and thus to be avoided insofar as possible. From the 1930s onwardthisattitude was enshrinedin statepolicy in theSovietUnion, and championsof theatricality, most notably Meyerhold, were silenced or purged. In theWest, and especially in America, the major intellectual campaign againsttheatricalism came not frompoliticalbut from aesthetic theorists, especially,and ironically, those furthest removed from the engaged art of socialistRussia-the proponents of abstract and miniminalist art,which dominatedthe Western art world at mid-century. Very little common ground existsbetween such Soviet ideologues as Andrei Zhdanov, the Secretary of theSoviet CentralCommittee, or Alfred Kurella,the bitter foe of expressionism,and Western modernists like Greenberg and Fried, but they are united intheir determined rejection of theatricalism. In certain respects, then, thecurrent popularity of sociological analysis in theater studies, certainimportanttrends in modem art and literarytheoryand the dominant ongoingtradition of realistic drama have combined in an unexpected and at firstglance ratherunlikely reinforcement of an ancient anti-theatricalbias, andthe repute of the term theatricalityhas suffered accordingly. It need not beso, however. Theatricalitycan be and hasbeen regardedin a far more positivemanner if we regard theater not as its detractors from Plato onward havedone-as a pale, inadequate, or artificiallyabstractcopy of the life process-but if we view it as a heightened celebration of that process and itspossibilities.A useful recent contribution to such an orientation has been providedby JeanAlterin his 1990A SociosemioticTheory fTheater.Despite its title, thisstudy owes little to recent sociological criticism.It is "sociosemiotic" rather


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in the sense that unlike the majority of semiotic analysts of theater, Altergives significant attention not only to the production of signs but also totheir reception. Alter, like other theorists already mentioned, posits aparticulardoubleness in the operations of theaterand its reception, tellinglycharacterizing his own as a "binocularview." This correctly suggests thatthe two contrasting functions that he describes do not operate dialectically,like Feral's theater and performance, each undoing the other and thusestablishing a wavering field of reception in the tension between them, butrather as mutually reinforcing to achieve a more powerful total effect.

The first of these two functions Alter calls "referential," he traditionalemphasis of semiotic critics.This is concerned with the communication of anarrative or some other discourse, and is achieved by "signs that aim atimparting information."The second Alter terms the "performantfunction,"which "falls outside the operations of semiosis," seeking to please or amazean audience by a display of exceptional achievement (32).Alter's referentialfunction has something in common with Feral's concept of theater, sinceboth aresemiotic,concernedwith narratives, nformation-bearingstructures,codes and signs. But his "performant function," despite the confusingsimilarity of terminology, is quite different from her "performance,"whichis why his two terms interrelatein such a different way.Alter's use of performanceis equally far from Feral'spost-structuralistusage and from the common usage in the modern social sciences, whichstresses performance's repetition or "quotation" of already establishedpatterns of action. It draws instead upon a more colloquial use of the term,which involves the public activities of various "performers"-actors, circusmembers, musicians-whom audiences seek out in order to witness theirtechnical skills. Normally this term is used only to refer to human actions,or in a few cases to the actions of animals, when these also seem todemonstrate a particularskill, so that we may speak of "performing" dogs,bears,elephants, or horses. The well-known circus semiotician Paul Bouissachas argued against even this modest metaphoricalextension of the term, onthe grounds that such animals are only responding to a stimulus within aframe provided by their trainer,while true "performance"should involvethe conscious display of skills (24).Bouissac's argument emphasizes how closely this use of performanceis normally associated with human skills, but in fact Alter suggests that theconcept can be productively extended to any of the arts of the theater-tocostume, scenery, lighting, directing. So the visual display of dazzlingcostumes, striking lighting or scenic effects, or the director's particularSubStance# 98/99, Vol. 31, nos. 2 & 3, 2002

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manipulation of any or all of these for virtuosic display can, according toAlter,be considered as foregrounding the performantaspect, as much as thetechnical skill and achievement of the actor. The quality that Alter isdescribing, especially in referenceto the non-acting theater arts, has also-and more commonly-been referredto as "theatricality,"providing us withanother set of associations for that term, much more positive than those wehave so farbeen discussing.The response this view of theatricalityoffers to the misgivings of bothrealists and Platonists is similar. To both, it answers that the function oftheater has never been to provide an exact duplication of everyday life (asrealism suggested) nor a pale, secondary, derived imitation of life (as Platocharged),but rather a heightened, intensified variation on life, not so mucha mirror as an exploration and celebration of possibility. Aristotle looks inthis direction with his observation that the theater presents things not asthey are,but as they ought to be. Gerald Else has memorably characterizedthis shift from Plato as a transition from art as copying to art as creating(322).One of the central functions of the stage has always been to provide anarena for the display of creativity,achieved by the technical skill not only ofactors,but of designers, dancers, musicians, and poets. One might thereforeexpect that within the theater, and outside the ranks of the realists, thePlatonists, and all those who have seen theater as a diminished or inferiorimitation of life, this more positive view of theatricalitywould be generallyaccepted.Butalas,even here,where thepower and importanceof theatricalityhave been widely acknowledged, thatvery power has stimulated significantresistance to accepting theatricalityas a positive concept.Since theaterbalances the contributions of a number of other arts,thereis always the threatthatthese various artswill become engaged in a strugglefordominance within the theaterexperience.IntheWesterntheater,the mostfamiliarform of this struggle has been between the competing claims of theliterary text, the playscript, and the various other contributing arts.Playwrights and critics oriented toward the written text have for centuriesexpressed concern about the potential overshadowing of the playscript bythe work of other contributors to the total theaterexperience. Such concernhas commonly been expressed in terms of a competition between the"literary"and the "theatrical,"with the latterpredictably cast as a force forlowering, cheapening, or distractingfromthe assumed higher values of theformer. Once again, theatricalitysuffers from its placement as the derived


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and inferiorterm in a criticalbinary,but here theatricalitydistracts from thepurity not of life, but of literature.Indifferent historicalperiods, literaryartistsconcerned about the threatof "theatricality" o the autonomy of theirtexts have focused upon differentaspects of the theatricalprocess. An early and famous statement of this wasthe tension between BenJonson,the leading author of texts for the masques,elaboratecourt entertainments n Englandat thebeginning of the seventeenthcentury, and Inigo Jones,the leading creator of the visual spectacle for theseentertainments.Jonsoncomplained, doubtless with ample justification,thatthe masque audiences paid much less attention to his literary texts-in hisopinion the ground and essence of the experience-than to thetheatricalization of these texts in costumes and scenery created by Jones.Thegeneraland continuingWesternbias toward the literaryand againstthe theatrical has supported a restatement of Jonson's complaints in almostevery subsequent generation. So for example, JohnDryden in a prologue of1674, concerned by the opening of a rival theater in London with moreelaboratepossibilities forscenicdisplay, lauded the Spartanvirtues of DruryLane,his own "PlainBuiltHouse," where discerning audiences would findliteraryvalues maintained, leaving to those of inferior taste the seductionsof the Dorset Garden, where "Scenes, Machines, and empty Opera'sreign/And for the Pencil You the Pen disdain" (173).Similarly, the Prologue toRichardSteele's 1701 drama TheFuneralcomplained that:

Nature'sDesertedandDramatickArt,To Dazle now theEye,has lefttheHeart;Gay Lights,and Dresses,long extendedScenes,Daemons and Angelsmovingin Machines,All that can now orpleaseorfrightthe FairMaybe perform'dwithouta Writer'sCare.(Avery,cix)Thefamous barestage of the latenineteenth and earlytwentieth centurywas based on this same concern, so that one of its most articulate and

successful champions, JacquesCopeau,could boast that his treteaunuallowedthe presentation of the text without any "theatrical"distraction (248).Eventoday this literary bias remains strong, even among quite sophisticatedtheater people. I often hear productions, especially but not exclusively inthe modern musical theater, condemned, as Dryden condemned the CoventGarden productions, for being too devoted to "empty spectacle," but it is




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rare indeed that I hear of a starkly produced more "literary" dramacondemned for inadequate visual effect.Inmost of these examples thisbias againsttheatricalizationhas a certainpuritanical edge, suggesting that the "plain built house," the "barestage"have a natural advantage in virtue over sites of sumptuous display, but theliterarydistrust of theatricalizationgoes deeper than that, as can be seen inparticularin the writings of many key romantic authors and in most of thesymbolists. For such authors as JohannW. von Goethe, Charles Lamb, orMauriceMaeterlinck, heproblemwas not merely the distraction of elaboratevisual display,but indeed the distraction of any theatricalizationwhatsoever.Thus Goethe advises in Shakesper nd kein Ende! that Shakespeare is bestenjoyed by reading:

for then the attention s not distractedeitherby a too adequateor a tooinadequatestage setting.There s no higherorpurerpleasurethan to sitwith closedeyes and hear a naturallyexpressivevoice recite,not declaim,a play of Shakespeare's.59)Lamb's famous condemnation of scenery, costume, and acting in the

production of Shakespeare as "non-essentials" that are "raised into animportance injurious to the main interest of the play" (111),or Maeterlinck'swell known championship of an internal drama that would eschew theatricalspectacle, including the living actor, to reveal the symbol within, providewitness to the continuing importance of this anti-theatricalbias within theartisticcommunity itself.With the emergence of the director as a significant shaper oftheatricalizationof the dramatictext, more recent struggles between authorand the theatrical apparatus have been in this context. The 1980s saw anumber of widely publicized challenges by dramatists to visual and auralinterpretationsof their texts by leading directors.Particularly striking werethe protests raisedby Samuel Beckettagainstproductions of his Endgame yJoAnne Akalaitis at the American RepertoryTheater in 1984, and by GilesBourdet at the Comedie Franqaise n 1988.Inboth cases, a compromise wasreached that left neither side particularlysatisfied, and certainly did little toremove the ongoing tensionbetween thewritten text and its theatricalization.The distrust of theatricalization growing from the conflict betweenliteraryartists and other theater artists is more unfortunate, it seems to me,than the distrust based upon a Platonic or essentialist bias against theateritself, for two reasons. First and most obviously, because it pits against eachother parties that would be more profitably united in a common concern,but second because it obscures a fundamental similarity in the operations

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and in the sought reception of the achievements of each party. If, returningto Alter, we see the goal of theatricalization as the display of exceptionalachievement, then it seems clearthatthe literaryartist,no less than the actor,the designer, or the director,is engaged precisely in such display, and thatan awareness and acknowledgment of this achievement is as central to theenjoyment of the reader as it is to that of the spectator.The ongoing struggleover which of the various contributing artists is to have the upper hand inthe final shaping of the theatrical experience has all too often utilised"theatricality" as a weapon against rival claimants-actors, designers,directors-thus obscuringthe factthattheatricality s rightly and necessarilyinvolved in every aspect of theatrical production. Perhaps the growingawareness in contemporary theoryof the "performative"nature of literatureitself may help to overcome the longstanding suspicion of "theatricalization"as a potentially corrupting process of the literarywork.Even the separation of the spectator from the work, the source of somuch tension in theorists like Cavell and Marshall, takes on a much morepositive and beneficial valence when regarded from the perspective offeredby Alter.When one focuses upon pleasurein the display of exceptional abilityinstead of on emotional identification and sympathy, the valences ofidentification and distancing reverse. When sympathy is sought,identification is privileged, and distance becomes a barrier. When the goalis display of exceptional ability, identification is useful only to establish abase line, and all the joy arises from the distance (I am a human being likethat actor,that gymnast, thatcircusperformer,and yet how great a distancebetween the achievements they display and what I am presently capableof).Theatricality,viewed from thisperspective,can admit to all those qualitiesthathave historicallybeen cited against it-that it is artificial,removed fromeveryday life, exaggerated, extreme, flamboyant, distracting.Yet despite-indeed because of-these qualities, it can still be recognized as an essentialelement in the continued vitality and enjoyment of both theater andperformance and beyond that, as a positive, indeed celebrative expressionof human potential.

City UniversityofNew York

Note1. Thepersistenceof this concerncanbe traced n JonasBarish'sexcellentreview of thissubject(1981).

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WorksCitedAlter,Jean.A Sociosemioticheory fTheater.hiladelphia:UniversityofPennsylvania,1990.Avery, EmmettL. TheLondon tage1700-1729.Carbondale:SouthernIllinoisUniversityPress,1968.Barish,Jonas.TheAntitheatricalrejudice. erkeley:Universityof CaliforniaPress,1981.Bouissac,Paul."Behaviorn Context: n WhatSenseDoes a CircusAnimal Perform?"nTheCleverHansPhenomenon:ommunicationithHorses,Whales, pes,andPeople. homasSebeokand RobertRosenthalEds. New York:New YorkAcademyof Sciences,1981.Burns,Elizabeth.Theatricality.ondon:Longman,1972.Butler,Judith.Bodies hatMatter.New York:Routledge,1993.- . Gender rouble. ew York:Routledge,1990.Cavell,TheWorldViewed: eflectionsn theOntologyfFilm.Cambridge:HarvardUniversityPress,1979.- . TheClaimofReason:Wittgenstein,kepticism, orality ndTragedy. ew York:OxfordUniversityPress,1979.-. Must WeMeanWhatWeSay?New York:Scribner's, 969.Copeau,Jacques."Critiquesd'un autretemps."InNouvelle evuefrancaise1 Dec. 1923.Dryden,John."Prologuespokenat the Openingof the NEW HOUSE." n TheProloguesand Epiloguesof the Restoration 660-1700.PierreDanchin Ed. Nancy: PublicationsUniversiteNancy,1981,I.Else,Gerald.Aristotle's oetics: heArgument. ambridge,Mass:HarvardUniversityPress,1957.Feral,Josette."Performance ndTheatricality:heSubjectDemystified." n ModernDrama25,1 March,1982.Goethe,JohannWolfgangvon. "Shakespeared Infinitum."nShakespearenEurope. rans.RandolphS. Bourne.OswaldLe WinterEd.Cleveland:Meridian,1963.Lamb,Charles."On heTragediesofShakespeareonsideredwith reference o their itnessforstagerepresentation."n Works. . V. LucasEd. 5 vol. New York,1903.Marshall,David. TheFigureof Theater:Shaftesbury, efoe,AdamSmith,andGeorgeEliot.New York:ColumbiaUniversityPress,1986.Sartre, ean-Paul.BeingandNothingness. rans.HazelE. Barnes.New York,PhilosophicalLibrary, 956.Schechner,Richard."Performance ndtheSocialSciences." n TheDramaReview 7,1973.

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Documents

Resistance to Theatricality MC