A Formalist Theatre by Michael Kirby (review)

Book Reviews 585 incomplete because of the richness of the subject, the book is a strong effort to justify reintroducing Clifford Odets to a critical spotlight that many feel he deserves. Finally, the effort to coordinate a literature alld life study is something that the reader must tolerate while working through this text. As it stands, Miller's book seems to want to subordinate biography to criticism, but it regularly, if half-heartedly, returns to an effort to coordinate the two goals. The reader. however, will do well to ignore this confusion and read Clifford Odets because Miller's success at demonstrating Odets's richness and versatility is exactly the kind of work that is needed in modem American drama studies if, as Miller notes, the tyranny of the big three (Eugene O'Neill, Arthur Miller, and Tennessee Williams) is to give way to more democratic studies of the genre and the period. WILLIAM W. DEMASTES, LOUISIANA STATE UNNERSITY, BATON ROUGE MICHAEL KIRBY. A Formalist Theatre. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 1987. pp. xix, 159· $24.95. Michael Kirby's A Formalist Theatre is an uneven book, a problem exacerbated by the fact that the various "chapters" were published as articles in The Drama Review over a ten year period, Kirby contends that the material is consistent in style and approach and that it "reads as though it has been written for a book" (ix). But although there is much merit in several of Kirby's ideas and certain themes reappear throughout the text, A Forma/is! Theatre is marred by the absence of a consistent line of development and by Kirby's apparent obsession with purely formal aspects of performance. A Formalist Theatre is divided into three broad sections each containing several chapters that are loosely related by theme. In Part I, •'Formalist Analysis," analytical continua are developed and applied to acting, style, and structure; Kirby devotes Part II, "The Social Context," to an analysis of the current state of criticism, theatre as a political tool, and the current state of the avant-garde; Part III, "Structuralist Theatre," describes particular performances produced by Kirby under the auspices of his structuralist workshop as well as several SU1Jcturalist films. Although Kirby introduces little that is new, Pan I contains several concepts that might be useful to those of us who must answer eternal questions from Intro students who want absolute definitions of theatre, acting, etc. Part II, with its focus on the role of the critic in performance and the role of politically committed theatre in society, was both the least interesting and least useful. Readers may discover that A Formalist Theatre's primary value is as a pedagogical tool. After years of querying Introduction to Theatre students about the nature of theatre as an art, about differences between "real life" and theatre, and about acting on stage as opposed to acting in real life, and having them consistently present situations/examples that do not fit neatly into hermetic definitions of theatre and acting, I found Kirby's "analytical continua" particularly useful. In trying to defme 586 Book Reviews acting. for example, Kirby rejects the popular notion that we must establish rigid, either/or defmitions for what is and is not acting. Instead, he begins with the following definition: " To act means to feign, to simulate, to represent, to impersonate." He then sets up a continuum (or scale) with that definition at one end and its implied opposite at the other: Non-Acting - -- -- - - -- Complex Acting Beginning at the non·acting end of the scale, several points. each of which indicates the growing complexity of the acting process, are established on it, until eventually we reach the most complex manifestation of the actor's art which i.s "true" acting. The first point on the continuum is, for example, a "symbolizes matrix" - a performer (Kirby's example is the stage attendants in Kabuki or No) who does nothing to reinforce the performance's infonnation. fhe next point is "received acting" - for example, the extra who does nothing but walk on stage and stand in costume - and so on until we reach the final point on the continuum which is "complex acting." Kirby...