Staging Age: The Performance of Age in Theatre, Dance, and Film Edited by Valerie Barnes Lipscomb and Leni Marshall (review)

Staging Age: The Performance of Age in Theatre, Dance, and Film, edited by Valerie Barnes Lipscomb and Leni Marshall, is a groundbreaking and timely collection of essays that demonstrates the value of bringing age studies and performance studies into greater dialogue. Read together, the book’s chapters evidence “the many ways in which audience members as well as performers alter their perceptions of age, aging, and old age through staged performances” (1). Organized into three sections, the contributions are linked by the unifying premise that age, when staged, is both a performance and performative. Contributors include professional theatre, film, and dance artists, alongside scholars from theatre, film, dance, and cultural studies. Lipscomb and Marshall have assembled this constellation of contributors to bolster an interdisciplinary approach to age studies in the humanities, recognizing that “the time is ripe for expansion and increased critical engagement with the category of age” (4). The combination of disciplinary and professional perspectives demonstrates the breadth of activity and potential in this lively and emerging field, and supports the book’s stated aims to “advance the collected understandings and parameters of age and aging studies” (x) and “stimulate further research and undergird pedagogy” (1).

“Section I: Film” consists of three essays that consider the enactment of age in films ranging from early silent film (Cecil B. DeMille’s 1918 Old Wives for New) to more transgressive contemporary work (Roger Michell’s anti-ageist 2002 film The Mother). These essays cover a range of issues: the intertwined effects of character and casting, the influences of genre, the role of particular filmic techniques in establishing age narratives, and the function of the social and economic culture of Hollywood in influencing which representations of age are funded and produced. Together, the essays share a concern with the gendered portrayals of age in the films they discuss, revealing that the consequences of aging in Hollywood films differ for men and women, and are generally more negative for the latter. For example, Heather Addison’s contribution argues that the gendered construction of age in Old Wives for New casts women as losing their youth about twenty years before men. Similarly, E. Ann Kaplan’s essay “The Unconsciousness of Age: Performances in Psychoanalysis, Film, and Popular Culture” speculates that producers had difficulty funding The Mother because the central character breaks age codes and taboos and does not suffer the typical negative consequences experienced by older women in Hollywood films.

The most diverse group of essays, assembled under “Section II: Theatre,” explores well-known classical and modern plays, as well as theatre for young audiences. Analyses in this section variously consider text-based representations of age, audience reception, and insights gained by practitioners through the act of performing age—all pointing to the relationship between age and power. For example, Allen Wood, in “Molière’s Miser, Old Age, and Potency,” examines the relationship between Harpagon’s age and issues of power and desire, arguing that his disagreeable character is less related to advanced old age than to enduring character flaws. Other essays, such as Janet Hill and Lipscomb’s interviews with experienced actresses performing Shakespearean roles, move beyond textually embedded narratives and toward issues of age, embodiment, and power within the acting profession. Here, the actresses interviewed claimed that their experiences acting Shakespeare’s mature female roles revealed to them new and surprising insights. Audience reception of age also becomes an important theme, exemplified most clearly by Jeanne Klein’s essay, which asks “whose bodies… theatrical producers employ to perform childhood on stage and screen, and how … child spectators interpret these embodied performances?” (110). Similarly compelling on the notion of reception, Ruth De Palileo analyzes four of Samuel Beckett’s plays through the lens of gerontological studies of the aging voice. She suggests that audience reception of a character’s age can be guided by the specificity of scripted cues regardless...