Changing the Subject: Marvin Carlson and Theatre Studies, 1959-2009 (review)

The great thing about a festschrift for someone like Marvin Carlson is that it so readily lends itself to a retrospective look at a field during a time of radical transformation. Carlson's career overlays the whole modern development of Theatre Studies; his writings and his teaching kept pace with its unfolding, at some junctures pointing the way; and his students, many distinguished in their own right, are at hand to bear witness to the different stages and, not coincidentally, to Carlson's remarkable range. Carlson entered the field when it had a modest presence in Speech-Drama and Language and Literature departments and, otherwise, was still the province of devoted amateurs, meant in the best sense. But a rapprochement between theatre and drama studies — so obvious to us, so necessary — was in the works. (The life of this journal coincides with the dates in the title, and of course, like Carlson, it continues full blast.) "Changing the Subject" is the ingenious, multivalent headline for all this, and Roach's warm introduction offers a concentrated overview, tracing Carlson's trajectory, as scholar, teacher, and theatregoer, in parallel with that of the field. It also places the contributions of the other writers, mostly Carlson's former students, in relation to each other and to the assimilative metamorphoses of their mentor's interests and approaches. These ran from intrinsic and contextual history with a European focus, initially French and German; to the semiotics of the stage and then of the playhouse proper; to performance studies; to the phenomenology of memory, cognitive and cultural; to dramatic heteroglossia; to postmodern director's theatre; to Arabic-speaking theatre.

There are fourteen essays in the book, apart from Roach's introduction and afterword, and a charming, rueful, and perfectly tuned preface by Paula Vogel on her experience of Carlson as a teacher: exemplary in himself, shaping the raw materials of passion and intelligence with a benign and artful hand. Doug Peterson's piece extends this perspective anecdotally through the turmoil of the late sixties and the emergence of a "radical pedagogy." A few of the essays that follow seem caught in time, and more than a few exemplify a facet or a phase of Carlson's interests or gracefully tie their subject to a particular book. His Haunted Stage: Theatre as Memory Machine (2001) appears to have particular traction, notably in Eszter Szalczer's "The Case of Strindberg's Modernity," which — apart from its bow to Carlson's long engagement with the great modern innovators of the North — offers an excellent close reading of The Ghost Sonata. The Haunted Stage also percolates through Gay Gibson Cima's "Speaking of Human Trafficking," focused primarily on two "performative" events: one, a bicentennial commemoration, involving Queen Elizabeth II, of Britain's ending its slave trade, which echoed a celebration a hundred years earlier under Queen Victoria; the other, appearances on London lecture platforms, in the year of the earlier celebration and just days apart, of the African American abolitionist Sarah Redmond and the pro-slavery advocate, the flamboyant Lola Montez. Striking and revelatory is Cima's deployment of visual materials, notably portraits of Queen Charlotte, George III's reputedly mixed-race consort, and Annie Leibovitz's portrait of Elizabeth II. In one of the best pieces in the book, David Savran also invokes Carlson's ghosting trope in putting the case for serious attention to musical theatre, so snobbishly ignored in academic scholarship and curricula until recently. He lays down the criteria for its serious study, as well as identifying the difficulties, and exposes the flimsiness of the "evolutionary romance" that prevails as the received history (226). Best of all, he gives an account of the Kurt Weill/Ira Gershwin/Moss Hart collaboration, Lady in the Dark, as an example of what can be done, alert to its barometric immersion in contemporary cultural and social politics (Carlson's "contextualization," with grace notes...