Performing Age in Modern Drama by Valerie Barnes Lipscomb (review)

"Act your age." How often this reproving expression is flung around, performatively scripting behavioural norms across the life course. But if we understand age to be defined through performative acts, does it not follow that age identity is just as culturally mutable and individually fashioned over time as, say, gender? What cultural assumptions are we making when we scrutinize age-appropriateness both on stage and off? This line of questioning provides a jumping-off point for Valerie Barnes Lipscomb's Performing Age in Modern Drama. In the book, Lipscomb bridges a wide gap in the field by focusing her analysis on the representation and performance of age and aging in American and British theatre and drama from the modern to the contemporary period. As one of the principal scholars leading the growing field of age-based theatre and performance studies, Lipscomb skilfully reconsiders the centrality of aging in the western canon from Thornton Wilder to Paula Vogel, theorizing the performativity of age through an analysis of both text and performance.

Drawing upon the interdisciplinary field of critical age studies, Lipscomb reveals the illusion of a static aging self, or "a longing to present a consistent, unified identity" (2), ultimately exposing the ways in which age identity is necessarily fragmented by time and lived experience. She argues that the idealized representation of an "ageless" or "timeless" self results in the erasure of actual experiences of aging (especially in middle to older age) and that this cultural invisibility is reflected in the lack of scholarship on age in the field of theatre and performance studies.

Lipscomb offers reparative close readings of more than a dozen canonical plays, thus allowing readers to reflect upon highly familiar texts with regard to age. She demonstrates convincingly how the self is continually (re-)formed over time through performance, rather than advancing chronologically into inevitable decline. Her perceptive textual analysis is bolstered by a survey of key productions and a plethora of critical reviews, providing the reader with the necessary context for situating these plays formally and historically. In the process, Lipscomb debunks ageist cultural constructions and stereotypes through an in-depth analysis of age as construction in drama, highlighting the non-Aristotelian dramatic convention of jumping huge gaps of time within a single narrative, which necessarily ages the chief characters in most of the plays she surveys. But whether these shifts in age are actually reproduced in performance is another question entirely. She rightly points out that, despite the nuanced presence of aging inherent in these plays, longstanding conventions consistently cast younger actors in elderly roles, thereby reifying stereotypical representations of the aged as weak and vulnerable and making these bodies invisible on stage.

Following a short introduction, the book is divided into five chapters, four of which focus on award-winning plays in (mostly) chronological order. In her first chapter, Lipscomb considers the memory plays of Thornton Wilder, Arthur Miller, and Tennessee Williams, demonstrating how the plays manipulate time but do not acknowledge the embodied physical changes that characters necessarily undergo within these narratives; instead, characters are often played by a single actor who does not show any physical signs of aging during the course of the play. These foundational works of modern drama set the tone for more contemporary developments. Her analyses of Our Town and Death of a Salesman also offer refreshing discussions of the dramaturgy of age performance, and Lipscomb carefully unpacks her theoretical argument through close readings and engagement with previous scholarship on the memory play.

The following chapters build upon the tone and style of the first. In her second chapter, Lipscomb looks at the more recent memory plays of Hugh Leonard, Brian Friel, and Tom Stoppard, all of which build up tension around the false representation of a timeless aging self. This tension is more fully realized as explicit fragmentation in her third chapter, which focuses on the work of contemporary female playwrights Paula Vogel, Wendy Wasserstein, and Margaret Edson. Each of these...