American Alternative Theater by Theodore Shank (review)

books and company American Alternative Theater. Theodore Shank. Grove Press, 202 pp., $9.95 (paper). Although the book (excluding apparatus) is 189 pp., because of the 120 photographs it is really more like 125 pp. With such a limit, the strategies of division are highlighted. Richard Foreman and his Ontological-Hysteric Theatre , for example, are included in the chapter titled "Self as Content," along with Spalding Gray's autobiographical monologues, rather than in the chapter titled "The New Formalism," along with an artist like Robert Wilson . Similarly, the Bread and Puppet Theatre is in "Environmental Theatre" rather than "Theatre of Social Change," and the latter, which includes the San Francisco Mime Troupe and El Teatro Campesino, also includes (in passing) Ridiculous Theatre. The works surveyed, Shank says in his Foreword, "exist only in audible, visual , and social circumstances of performance." Scripts are non-existent, after the fact, or of minimal importance. However, this diminution of text among the artists included is not entirely accurate. All of Charles Ludlam's plays, for example, are scripted, nearly a dozen of Richard Foreman's scripts are in print, and the scripts of groups like El Teatro Campesino and the Wooster Group exist in book and periodical form, presumably to be recreated by others, just as are traditional plays. Shank also writes in his Foreword, "Because the productions are more perceptual than verbal, only the work of artists and companies I have seen can be included." Thus, although he mentions the Free Southern Theatre, he cannot include, for example, the more important work of Imamu Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Spirit House in Newark or an important environmental and social protest production like Baraka's "Slave Ship." The work of a major multi-media artist like Meredith Monk is not mentioned at all, but the Los Angeles based Kipper Kids merit mention and illustration. In part this is unavoidable ; Shank lives and teaches in California, and much of what he misses occurs across the continent from him. Understandably he is quite thorough in presenting and introducing California artists. Excluding groups like the Living Theatre and Robert Wilson's 115 Byrd Hoffman group, which can be seen as more of international than American repute, one can say that in this book alternate theatre in America is roughly fifty percent West Coast and fifty percent East Coast, with not much in between. Shank gives as much space to the San Francisco Mime and El Teatro Campesino ("Theatre of Social Change") as to the Living and Open Theatres ("Primary Explorations"), as much to California's Snake Theatre and Alan Finneran's Soon 3 group as to R. Wilson or R. Foreman. Similarly , there is a detailed account of nearly a dozen S.F. Mime dramas and seven or eight Teatro Campesino pieces but only of four of Foreman's more than two dozen plays. True, agit-prop drama lends itself to discursive commentary , but in a book like this a reader wants to know more about what is behind complex theatre like that of Wilson and Foreman. In sum, useful as the book is, it labors under several difficulties: limited space is foremost, given the abundance and difficulty of some of the work. Next is the restriction to what has been seen (and approved). And finally, related perhaps to the previous difficulty, there is the problem of emphasis, so liable to misinterpretation. Kenneth Bernard Farce: A Historyfrom Aristophanesto Woody Allen. Albert Bermel. Simon & Schuster, 464 pp., $20.75 (cloth). Farce is an expansive, well organized and often amusing examination of the genre. Bermel's study spans the history of farce from its origins in ancient Greek theatre to its modern manifestations in film and television. In Bermel's introduction, "Recognizing Farce," he discusses the unreal nature of the farcical world, the cruelty of its humor, and the distinctions between farce and related genres, among other subjects. He also explains the importance of the figure of Dionysos in the origins of Greek farce and takes a novel look at the farcical elements of The Bacchae. The book's second major section, "Identifying Farce," is the most useful for students and researchers. Here, Bermel analyzes specific historical farces, beginning each...