Reading Modern Drama ed. by Alan Ackerman (review)

Our understanding of modern drama has been impoverished by the division of literary and performance studies. Alan Ackerman’s edited volume Reading Modern Drama, which compiles exemplary recent contributions to the journal Modern Drama, of which Ackerman is the editor, challenges what have become truisms in both fields about the distinction between page and stage, literary analytics and performance hermeneutics, and the written and the live. Ackerman’s volume makes the strong case that the texts of modern drama are worthy objects of study in their own rights and that attention to them as texts (i.e., close reading) need not – indeed, must not – foreclose our attention to their situatedness in history, both social and theatrical. Challenging the common notion that analyzing texts amounts to “sticking to the script” (with all its hegemonic connotations), Reading Modern Drama suggests new paradigms for understanding modern drama and its complex imbrication of literary and theatrical semiotics.

Ackerman’s introduction, which reorients long-standing debates about the proper object of theatre studies, also suggests that to properly understand modern drama, we must overcome divisions between formalist and historicist ways of reading. Although some may object that these divisions no longer hold purchase for the majority of critics working today, his critique still has relevance for the relatively undertheorized field of drama (more surprising to some may be Ackerman’s note of moral didacticism). The collected essays all exemplify this integrated approach: although most centre on close readings of drama, every one includes attention to the theatrical and historical context. Despite this shared integration, however, the essays display distinct methodologies, and this diversity of approach is itself instructive. The book hinges, for instance, on two very different analyses of Samuel Beckett, which together suggest the fruitfulness of reading through both definitions of the performative. Richard Begam’s rigorous reading of Waiting for Godot, “How to Do Nothing with Words, or Waiting for Godot as Performativity,” reads performativity back into its original context in J. L. Austin’s post-foundational philosophy, demonstrating that the linguistic indeterminacy of Beckett’s dramatic language reveals a radical perspective on the relationship between art and life. When S.E. Gontarski’s “Reinventing Beckett” argues that Beckett “embrac[ed] the performative,” he means that Beckett “embraced the volatility of performance.” Tracking the troubled performance history of several of Beckett’s most difficult works and the Beckett estate’s refusal to allow the plays to evolve, he ends by arguing that the best place for Beckett may be the non-traditional spaces we usually associate with performance art.

Other contributors use dramatic texts to reconsider the role of drama in modernity: Joseph Roach’s “Gossip Girls: Lady Teazle, Nora Helmer, and Invisible-Hand Drama” demonstrates that the characteristics we associate with Henrik Ibsen’s modernism are visible a century earlier in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The School for Scandal. Allison Carruth’s “The Space Stage and the Circus: E. E. Cummings’s Him and Frederick Kiesler’s Raumbühne” reads Cummings’s appropriation of the popular performing arts of burlesque and circus in Him alongside Kiesler’s stage innovations. And Julie Stone Peters’s fascinating “Jane Harrison and the Savage Dionysus: Archaeological Voyages, Ritual Origins, and the Modern Theater,” which closes the volume, argues that Cambridge classicist Jane Harrison’s discovery, at the end of the nineteenth century, of the ritual element of Greek theatre reveals another modernist nexus of anthropological performance studies. As these examples suggest, the volume’s goal is not so much to expand the canon (with the exception of Peters’s revisionary history) as it is to provide fresh understandings of already canonical works.

Although it is hard to avoid the obvious objection that the complete contents of the volume, excepting Ackerman’s introduction, are already available online (the essays were not revised after their publication in the journal), the essays do gain force from their collective juxtaposition. The best essays in Reading Modern Drama offer rich models for invigorated readings of dramatic literature.