The Play of Misreading: Text/Theatrel Deconstruction

88 A HUMANIST VIEW OF THEATRE ZELDA FICHANDLER DISSIDENT GOES WITHOUT SAYING MICHEL VINAVER 100 115 BOOKS AND COMPANY Cover: A Bunraku puppet-doll Photo: Courtesy of Japan Society Publication of Performing Arts Journal has been made possible in part by public funds received from the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency, and the New York State Council on the Arts. CORRECTIONS TO PAJ 19 The cover photograph was incorrectly credited. The photograph was taken by Roe Dibona. In The Play of Misreading by Gerald Rabkin, page 47, line 13, the section should read: "While I am attracted to its rigor, intelligence and omniverous energy, I am repelled by its willful opacity, virtuoso grandstanding, and quasi-mystical divorce from the concrete. I remain unconvinced that radical ideas can only be expressed within a radical rhetoric." In Postmodern Dance/Postmodern ArchitecturelPostmodernism by Roger Copeland, page 40, line 20, the sentence should read: "So ironically, the sort of current choreography that many dance critics are tempted to call post-postmodern would make the postmodern architect feel right at home." 3 THE PLAY OF MISREADING Text/TheatrelDeconstruction Gerald Rabkin Since his resignation from Lincoln Center in 1977, Joseph Papp has been strengthened in an ambitious resolve-announced at the beginning of his last season there-"to create a bridge between the avant-garde theatre and the conventional." Downtown at the Public Theatre he has gathered many of the past decade's major theatre experimenters, grateful for a perch in crisis -ridden times. And for the past two summers he has offered them the Delacorte Theatre to continue building the bridge of "classics treated by modern minds" begun when Richard Foreman's Lincoln Center production of Threepenny Opera was transferred to the park at the end of Papp's final season. Lee Breuer's 1981 version of The Tempest and Foreman's recent version of Moliere's Don Juan were both uncompromisingly radical in theatrical means and roused audience and critical outcries of perversity and distortion. John Simon, whose critical distaste of experimental theatre has remained consistent through the years, castigated Foreman's Don Juan with characteristic spleen: "When Richard Foreman, the profoundly factitious and intellectually bankrupt avant-garde director, puts on his own garbage at his Ontological-Hysteric Theater, it does not matter how hysteric or ontological he gets. . . . If nonactors in outlandish garb may mouth for the millionth time the same old neo-Dada clap-trap-who cares? . .. But when this same Foreman is invited by Joe Papp to repeat an outrage originally perpetrated at Livieu Ciulei's Tyrone Guthrie Theatre, ... a noble and wise play is decimated to Foreman's lilliputian stature and an unsophisticated audience that has never encountered the play is, at best, bewildered and, at worse, bamboozled." 44 Hyperbolically, Simon points a familiar finger: "innovative" directors egoistically appropriate and distort the play their job it is to serve. So long as experimentalists stuck to their own turf and knew their place geographically and aesthetically, their wilder visions could be neatly quarantined. But as they move with greater frequency out of their lofts into institutional theatres (not only under Papp's patronage, as Foreman at the Guthrie and Breuer at the ART in Cambridge demonstrated) and classic texts, the fingers have been pointed more insistently. Even critics not hostile to new ideas and methods wonder if a production with Ariel played by eleven actors is not going too far. Richard Gilman, probably the most culturally knowledgeable of working theatre critics, echoed (more moderately, of course) Simon's misgivings. In a piece in the Saturday Review called "Directors vs. Playwrights," he questions the "great line" of modern directorial thinking (represented by Craig, Meyerhold, Artaud, Brecht, Grotowski, Brook) that "texts have to be interpreted, or re-interpreted, and not simply placed literally , faithfully on the stage." Although he respects and partially welcomes the directorial urge for aesthetic autonomy, Gilman also asserts: "There are limits to what may be done to a text and these are set within the text itself." The rage for relevance and modernity at all costs (represented most simplistically for him by shifting plays from their original settings or original historical periods) reveals aggrandizement, not independence...