Expectation, Confutation, Revelation: Audience Complicity in the Plays of Sam Shepard

Expectation, Confutation, Revelation: Audience Complicity in the Plays of Sam Shepard STEVEN PUTZEL For over a decade now Stanley Fish and his fellow Readers have been settling back within the warm confines of an established critical school, not so much to read books as to describe their own responses to books.I Those who wish to describe audience response to performance texts, however, still remain out in the cold. Even Hans Robert lauss's five modalities of "identification," Wolfgang Iser's "implied reader" and the many other useful and provocative tenets of Gennan "reception theory," though they touch on the reception of dramatic texts, provide little infonnation concerning the reception of performance texts.2 Although reader-response and reception theories are certainly not simple constructs, an aesthetic of theatrical audience reception is far more complex. The writer-text-reader relationship becomes the writer-text-directordesigners -perfonners-spectators relationship, and, of course, all these participants bring their own codal baggage: their personal histories, their cultural givens, their literary and theatrical precursors, their theatrical conventions, their expectations, their fears, etc.3 Rather than attempt an impossible act of construction, this essay will (to borrow a phrase from Patrice Pavis) attempt to circle closer to the problem of "theatrical relatiollship," i.e. "the position of the spectator facing the stage ... and his effort to constitute meaning by his act of reception.,,4 In so doing the essay will draw on examples from two early works by Sam Shepard with some reference to his more recent plays, all of which have been perfonned in New York over the past few years. The theoretical point of departure for this approach can be summarized by noting a few tenns that are essential to any study of audience reception. Viktor Chklovski's (or Shklovskii's) "Ie procede de singularisation," and the "caractere etranger" leading a reader or spectator to "Ia difference essemielle" (the Russian Fonnalist predecessor of Brecht's verfremduIIgseffekt) enable the audience to distinguish what is unique in a particular theatrical experience, thus allowing the audience to establish its point STEVEN PUTZEL of view or relationship with the performance text. Roman Ingarden's discussion of "open" and "closed" stages will help determine the intended degree of audience participation in productions of Shepard's plays; a "closed" performance is one in which "the acting is done as ifthe "fourth wall" were not missing and as if there were no spectators," while an "open" performance acknowledges the audience and thus includes them directly in the action. We will see that few plays are either entirely "open" or entirely "closed." Jauss's "expectation horizon" helps us to understand and evaluate audience anticipations and assumptions, while the process Jauss calls "historicization" allows us to place a work in its social, ideological and literary context. Patrice Pavis draws on the work of Ingarden, Jauss and others to define "complicit readings" (the work of reception that takes the audience beyond "initial" or "naive" interpretation) and "concretization" (the director's interpretation and transformation of the written text and, on a second level, the audience's interpretation of this performance text).5 These concepts and devices do not in themselves formulate a theory of audience reception, but they do provide a vocabulary that will help readers and audience to approach Shepard's work from a perspective that has been previously overlooked by most critics and commentators.6 When considering American reception of plays by Shepard we can, with some degree of impunity, simplify the audience response paradigm by collapsing the plays' two "historicities." That is, Shepard assumes that his American audience shares his social and literary context, or as another way of putting it, the receivers' social and aesthetic expectations are coeval with the writer's. Suicide in B~ , Angel City, Curse ofthe Starving Class, Fool for Love, and A Lie ofthe Mind are all more or less contemporary and all play with and act upon certain American cultural or pop-cultural expectations. Angel City's historicity involves Hollywood and American big business. Suicide in B> conjures with the world of Raymond Chandler novels, the seamier side of the American jazz scene, and film noir characters and mood. Curse of the Starving Class presents...