Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater (review)

It is tempting to read Jill Dolan's new book as the history of the feminist spectator as critic—and it is, compellingly and often movingly, just that. But Utopia in Performance is also a great deal more, a project that understands utopia as a "placeholder for social change, a no-place that the apparatus of theatre—its liveness, the potential it holds for real social exchange, its mortality, its openness to human interactions that life outside this magical space prohibits—can model productively" (63). In thinking through possible impacts and pleasures of a range of performance practices, Dolan creates an important barometer for theatre studies in the United States. The book accounts for the questions, methodologies, and goals that have predominated theatre scholarship for at least a decade now and, at every turn, Dolan pushes herself—and us—not simply to work within these parameters, but to imagine where else we might take our analysis and advocacy. Without moving away from the significance of feminism, queer theory, and critical race studies, she seeks "a more capacious form of response and address" and suggests: "While noting how the performances I discuss position the politics of identity, I find myself equally interested in how, through their particular performance styles and genres, these performances address something we might call our common humanity" (22). Thus Dolan starts the move toward some new questions, some refinements to still-knotty problems, and some different directions as to what we might pursue in theatre studies as a field. It is in this way that Utopia in Performance is a landmark book.

Introducing her project, Dolan tells the story of her own history in and with theatre, why it has always mattered to her. And it is from this vantage point that she raises questions to underpin discussions of specific performances:

How can we capture, in our discourse, not just the outlines of a performance's structure and form, its content and the contours of its narrative, but the ineffable emotion it provokes in its moment of presence? How can we evoke, in writing, how its presence grounds us in a present, a moment of life at the theater, that seems somehow imbued with our past and our future, at once? How can I summon for you here my own experience of the simultaneity of time that infuses my argument, and that I feel during my richest, most memorable visits to the theater, many of which I want to conjure for you in these pages?

(9)

The author's turn to affect is dialogic; Utopia in Performance is not intended to be "just" another interrogation of contemporary performance, but a starting place for engaging what might be the trickiest question of all: Why do we love the theatre?

Certainly, this book collects performances that the author loves, as she finds in them "engaging languages of emotion and images, of passion and fervor as part of a necessary, crucial representational counterdiscourse" (23). Chapter 2 looks at feminist autobiographical solo performances—Peggy Shaw's Menopausal Gentleman, Holly Hughes's Preaching to the Perverted, and Deb Margolin's O Wholly Night. Dolan explains how these "performances inspire me, move me towards . . . feelings of possibility, hope, and political agency" (59) and how, sometimes, these were feelings experienced in the communitas of audience: "This, for me, is the beginning (and perhaps the substance) of the utopian performative: in the performer's grace, in the audience's generosity, in the lucid power of intersubjective understanding, however fleeting" (62). Next is a persuasive reading of the "live, present-tense relationship between performers and spectators in a particular historical moment and a specific geographical location" (65) and how this works in the affective domain. Here Dolan discusses Jane Wagner's Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe, performed by Lily Tomlin; Danny Hoch's Jails, Hospitals, and Hip-Hop; and Anna Deavere Smith's Fires in the Mirror and Twilight: Los...