Artists and Onlookers: Theater and Twentieth-Century Scientific Views of Nature by Natalie Crohn Schmitt (review)

Book Reviews NATALIE CROHN SCHMITT. Artists and Onlookers: Theater alld Twentieth-Century Scientific Viewso/Nature. Evanston, lJIinois: Northwestern University Press, 1990. Pp. 163, illustrated. $32.95, $12·95 (PB). This book is a blessing for readers struggling to understand postmodern thought and art. Schmitt's focus is very specific, beginning with a full-dress analysis ofJohn Cage - like Beckett, a seminal spirit with influence far beyond his specific arts or genres - and proceeding to detailed critiques ofSpalding Gray's Rumstick Road, AChorusLine. and the acting theories of Stanislavsky, Joseph Chaikin, and Viola Spolin. But Schmitt is also ambitious and sweeping in her overall strategy ofreconciling modern science and postmodem performance, lodaY's equivalent ofjustifying the ways of God to man. In cant-free, passionately clear language, this compact book introduces a world of quantum theories and cosmologies to a theatre still training its students to think with the ideas of an ancient Macedonian empiricist and a nineteenth-century Russian amateur, Schmitt's "Scientific Views of Nature" come from contemporary physics, to which nature appears uncertain, relative, unordered, nonintentional, and meaningless. Choosing physics, rather than biology, as the key science "turns the emphasis away from living things to the larger universe, a universe conceived of as infinite and therefore withouta center, In this perspective, both man ... and the idea ofdevelopmental change diminish in significance." Using the words of Werner Heisenberg. Niels Bohr, and Percy Bridgman and plentiful i1lustrations from contemporary productions, Schmitt makes propositions with profound artistic and dramaturgical implications: - ''The law of cause and effect must be given up." - "Nature has no value system." - "Language does not faithfully represent experience." - "Not life but phenomena constitute the central reality." - "Nature does not consist of discrete entities but of interpenetrating processes." Book Reviews 349 These statements come from her first chapter, a brilliant comparison of Aristotle and Cage as realists who believe that art should depict or conform to the nature of reality. Their radical aesthetic differences testify to the drastic changes in our views of "the nature of reality" since post-Socratic Greece. Later chapters erect critical practice around key instances: Rumstick Road as a cool, self-conscious, postmodern counterpart to Long Day's Journey In/o Night; A Chorus Lille as the thoroughly postmodem hit, a backstage musical that is presentational, process-oriented. and nonlinear;Chaikin and Spolin, among other 19605 radicals, as the improvisatory, transformational, game-oriented successors to Stanislavsky. Perhaps Schmitt's most controversial chapter is her demolition ofStanislavskian philosophy and aesthetics. "The system no longer has, and can no longer have. the authority it once did," she maintains, because ~e major tenets of Stanislavskian theory - "Nature," "the human spirit," his view that human behavior is directed, conscious, or developmental, and his logical, purposeful idea of"truth" - are based on premodern views of reality and humanity. If she underestimates his mysticism ("belief," "the prana") and his dynamism ("spine" as change, dramatic reality _ as a fluid, inter-reactive dance of self and other), Schmitt makes Stanislavsky appear positively antediluvian in his insistence on arranging the apparently disorganized (parts and wholes), unifying the apparently disparate ("spines," "through-line," "superobjectives"), and forever explaining the mysterious or unknowable. Schmitt especially excels at describing the peculiar aesthetic delights of postmodern arts. In a few heady pages that conclude her chapter on A Chorus Line, she describes the musical's complex structures and our complex responses and then remarks, "We have " no word for the kind of aesthetic experience provided by this layering of isomorphic elements: a kind of shimmering, density, or multitude, often suggestive of an infmite loop or akin to a religious experience. a mystery." In the " book's opening pages, she maintains that a contemporary scientific worldview is not alienat~, absurd, or otherwise unhappy, and her final pages strongly refute any idea of postmodem performance as "anti-theatre." Such art is more interesting and important than its apparently rebellious or destructive or nonsensical aspects. Dislocating our certainty about the self and its world, she concludes, is "a way of embracing the world, not of withdrawing from it." Schmitt's arguments are so compelling that they make me want to hear more about their history (major figures missing from the discussion...