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

I once attended a staged reading in San Francisco; I recall neither the play nor the venue. What I do remember is that it was going badly. The play was a modern-day minstrel show with an African American cast and deployed disparaging stereotypes that were all too familiar to both the audience and the performers. Perhaps because actors typically rehearse staged readings for only a few hours, the play was desperately struggling to find its feet. The anxiety of the racially and ethnically mixed audience was growing by the moment: was this supposed to be funny? Then, in the midst of a particularly offensive chicken-stealing scene, two of the actors were no longer able to suppress their giggles. The audience paused, momentarily stunned, and then dissolved into gales of laughter. We laughed until tears streamed down our faces, until some of us really were weeping, but still laughing, too. I do not want to make too much of this moment: our collective laughter and tears did not serve as evidence of a singular audience experience or perspective. The unexpected and unscripted affective moment did not transcend our differences in favor of a universalized subject position, but it did allow us to recognize ourselves as a "temporary public," and it allowed us, if only for a moment, to laugh in spite of horrific histories (25).

I offer this meditation on my own theatregoing experience as a kind of homage to Jill Dolan's Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theatre, in which Dolan's own description of moments she calls "utopian performatives" are descriptive, moving, and evocative. Ever mindful of the ways utopia and humanism have been deployed to coercive and fundamentally conservative ends, Dolan nevertheless works to reclaim affective experiences of hope, collectivity, and communitas, both for theatre scholars and for progressives, more generally. The theatrical experience, Dolan proposes, sets the stage for the emergence of the utopian performative, a "'wish'-oriented moment" that performatively enacts the imagining of a better world (6). Dolan builds on J.L. Austin's (1975) use of the performative, in which saying something—as in pronouncing a couple as married—makes it so. That is, the performative enunciation enacts what it claims. But Dolan also resists the absolutism in this framework, emphasizing the political and social dimensions of the utopian performative. She turns to the words of José Muñoz to describe this distinction, articulating her use of the utopian performative as a "blueprint for a possible future" (Muñoz in Dolan 174).

Dolan writes elegantly about nearly a dozen works of contemporary theatre, documenting and detailing the utopian performatives that each work enacts. Much of the first half of the book addresses contemporary solo performance; the second and third chapters investigate the autobiographical solo performances of Peggy Shaw, Deb Margolin, and Holly Hughes, and the multiple-character solo performances of Danny Hoch, Lily Tomlin, and Anna Deavere Smith, respectively. These performances provoke the intersubjective act of "finding our feet in one another's shoes" (63). Dolan mines these performances for moments that envision a world that does not merely "tolerate" difference, but actively embraces cultural identities as fluid, mobile, and multiple.

In the fourth chapter, Dolan draws on theorists of the public sphere—Jürgen Habermas, Nancy Fraser, and Chantal Mouffe—to examine how certain kinds of theatre can construct what Mouffe calls a "political community" of radically engaged spectatorship (101). Through strategies of direct address, Dolan argues, this mode of theatrical performance can function as a site for the rehearsal and enactment of participatory democracy. Dolan sees this engagement modeled in Russell Simmons Def Poetry Jam on Broadway (2002), which rewrote the "rules" of polite Broadway theatre spectatorship by encouraging the young audience to sing along with a DJ prior to the show's ostensible beginning, generating a call-and-response relationship between the stage and the house. Dolan further investigates theatre's relation to the public...