Drama

The year's selection of books and articles has several common denominators, despite the wide diversity of the plays in time and space. The most prominent shared feature is concern to address the theoretical problem endemic to studies of drama: what to do about the role of staging and performance in the dramatic text. That tension in drama scholarship between the text on the page and the staging and production elements of performance has tended to marginalize American drama from the rest of American literature. The text-performance dichotomy was not a problem in earlier dramatic criticism, which could approach a play as a purely literary construct like a poem. Many of the books published this year seem to echo that earlier criticism by taking as their subject plays that can primarily be studied as texts, the performances being either long ago or far away. But the critical perspectives being applied are quite different, proceeding in diverse directions and following paths outside the traditional ones. Works like Secrecy, Magic, and the One-Act Plays of Harlem Renaissance Women Writers; Bulldaggers, Pansies, and Chocolate Babies: Performance, Race, Sexuality in the Harlem Renaissance; Uncloseting Drama: American Modernism and Queer Performance; and Racial Geometries of the Black Atlantic, Asian Pacific and American Theatre, to be discussed in this essay, suggest the scope of these new efforts. In making use of such approaches as queer studies, African American studies, and Asian studies, this scholarship joins similarly inflected studies in other genres and strengthens the intellectual connections between American drama as literature and the larger canon of American literature. What is lost or undervalued along the way, unfortunately, is the other half of the dichotomy—performance.

i Melodrama, the Harlem Renaissance, Gay Modernists, and Asian Americans

What unites the works gathered under this heading is their focus on the predicament of the postmodern or global person, cut off from a fixed identity in place and time, living in flux. In a fundamental sense, the experience of contemporary immigrants is also the experience of African American women of the Harlem Renaissance and of gay characters in and out of the closet. Essentialism and univocal assertions are forbidden. Realistic staging implies a fixed, objective position and so is similarly ignored; instead, flexible postrealistic staging is ideal for dramatizing identities in transition.

Closet drama, deliberately unstageable (and so free from performance considerations), figures this year in a number of studies. Nick Salvato's Uncloseting Drama: American Modernism and Queer Practice (Yale) concentrates on the closet dramas of canonical literary figures Ezra Pound, Djuna Barnes, Gertrude Stein, and Louis Zukofsky, seeing these materials as embodiments of modernism. "Barnes and the others all used their dramatic work," posits Salvato, "to interrogate received notions about sexuality. Nor is it an accident that the work in question should take the form of closet drama. Just as the closet drama approaches the stage (if it does so at all) ambivalently and ambiguously, so does the queer refuse to fit neatly into stable sexual roles." Ambivalence and ambiguity are at the heart of the very form of closet drama: it is both theatrical, in play form, and at the same time antitheatrical in its rejection of conventional staging. Salvato's chapter on Gertrude Stein illustrates this view: "Indebted to cubism and other radical innovations in the visual arts, Stein must confront sex obliquely, abstractly, and from many different angles. Though her experimental province as a writer is not the image but 'a matter of tone,' she must, as she puts it, treat sex as 'part of something of which the other parts are not sex at all.' Sex must be subject to fragmentation, manipulation, and juxtaposition with other subjects if its role in literature is to serve anything other than, and more interesting than, a strictly representational purpose." And this view of cubist sex fits very neatly with the attack on staging of her closet drama: "Stein's plays so aggressively—so passionately, to return to her word of choice—violate theatrical norms that they constitute an implicit challenge. 'Stage this,' they seem egotistically to dare, beckoning an ingenious director to top Stein's...