Performing Television: Contemporary Drama and the Media Culture by Elizabeth Klaver, and: Mediated Drama / Dramatized Media ed. by Eckhart Voigts-Virchow (review)

REVIEWS ELIZABETH KLAVER, Pelforming Television: Contemporary Drama and the Media Culture. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 200!. Pp. 145. $40.95 (Hb); $19·95 (Pb). ECKHART VOIGTS-VIRCHOW, ed. Mediated Drama I Dramatized Media. Contemporary Drama ill Ellglish 7 (2000). Pp. 229, illustrated. €20.50 (Pb). Reviewed by Alldre Loiselle, Carleton University "Is theater a viable performative art form given the overpowering presence of television? Is there an audience for drama when theater has given over to television and film the role it once played as popular entertainment? What sort of attraction can drama have to a culture increasingly mesmerized by the televisual image?" (Klaver 1-2). These questions, asked by Elizabeth Klaver at the beginning of her book, are those Ihat run through both Performing Televisioll and the special issue of Contemporary Drama ill English entitled Mediated Drama I Dramatized Media. At the core of both volumes lies Ihe question of drama's relationship to its more recent counterparts: film , television, and digital imagery. While the articles collected in Mediated Drama I Dramatized Media approach these questions from a wide range of perspectives, Klaver focuses more specifically on the need for stage drama to assert a certain subject position in the face of new technologies, especially TV. The first half of Klaver's book discusses stage plays that engage directly with television either by deconstructing the popular icons deployed by broadcasters or by literally putting TV monitors on stage and incorporating them as integral parts of set. Susan Blattes's article "The Blurring of Boundaries between Stage and Screen in Plays by Sam Shepard and David Mamet" in Mediated Drama I Dramatized Media focuses on the similar topic of theatre's explicit encounter with cinema in plays like Shepard's True West and Mamet's Speed-tile-Plow. The second part of Pelforming Televisioll extends the argument beyond theatre's reaction to television to include commentaries on TV 's own response to drama and an analysis of the particular cultural status that theatre shares with other visual media as the object of censorship. What remains central to Klaver's study throughout the four main chapters of her book is the idea that, within the postmodem context of the late twentieth century, the only way to understand the essence of theatre is to examine it in relation to the other art fonns that constitute the media-saturated landscape of North America. For Klaver, the suhject of theatre can be comprehended only in tenns of its rapport with the medium it positions as its "other"; television, Klaver spends a significant portion of her first chapter explaining how the fundamental identity of a subject is always detennined by its other. Borrowing from Lacan's theory of the mirror stage and Sartre's concept of subjectivity as the result of the "relation of the ' For-itself' to the 'For-others'" (27), she Reviews 139 aligns the construction of drama's self-perceived identity in society with the human experience of imaginary misrecognition of, and existential negotiation with, the other. "Like the human subject," Klaver claims, "drama ought to be able to delineate subject positions by the object positions in which it places television" (31). One mayor may not agree with Klaver's hypothesis that the process whereby drama constructs its sense of self actually mirrors that of the Lacanian subject, but the fact remains that she manages to provide surprisingly clear and concise explanations for the various theories she utilizes. Indeed, this is one of the book's main qualities: it is highly lucid and readable in its explanation o~ sometimes very abstract notions. Furthermore, Klaver's anthropomorphic interpretation of drama as a subject that objectifies television allows her to offer intriguing readings of certain plays that incorporate the televisual other as a means to improve the "selfesteem " of theatre. For instance, she reads the positioning of a television set in Michael Frayn's Noises Offas a means to ridicule the new technology: by turning the television screen away from the audience, Noises Off makes visible only the backside of the television set, producing a highly negative trope which positions television as an object of jeer. It is the technological...