Theater Historiography: Critical Interventions (review)

In his afterword to this diverse and broad-reaching collection of essays, Henry Bial looks back on the decades-long turf wars between performance studies and theatre history – between historians who dismiss performance studies as “ungrounded, ahistorical, and willfully obscure” (277) and performance scholars who “have charged theater historians with intransigence, Eurocentrism, and lack of imagination” (278) – and wonders what changes, both theoretical and practical, might transform this competition into cooperation. “Given the intensity of the internecine jockeying and scrambling, the careful self-positioning in prefaces and introductions, the surfeit of conferences and seminars devoted to questions such as ‘What is theater history?’ and ‘What is performance studies?’” he asks, “[W]hat is the next generation of theater and performance scholars to do?” (280).

Theater Historiography: Critical Interventions proposes several provocative, if speculative, answers. In twenty-two essays examining sources as diverse as archived anecdotes about aquatic spectacles in ancient Rome, Victorian ethnographic records of a Nicaraguan dance-drama, and the traumatized speech of modern North Korean prisoners, leading scholars discuss and demonstrate the ways in which theatre historians might (and the ways in which they cannot) incorporate the methodologies introduced by performance studies; and the ways in which, as Scott Magelssen writes in his introduction, “theater history can be more ethically practiced, more incisively written, and more cogently read” (3). This emphasis on the history of theatre as informed by performance studies rather than on the history of social performance as informed by studies of the stage distinguishes Magelssen’s and Bial’s volume from earlier collections, such as Thomas Postlewait and Bruce McConachie’s Interpreting the Theatrical Past: Essays in the Historiography of Performance (1989). This is not to say that Theater Historiography is the first collection to “challenge the misperception that theater history and performance studies are intellectually or professionally opposed to one another” (283–84). But along with previous volumes (such as Mark Franko and Annette Richards’s Acting on the Past [2000]), the essays collected here provide a significant and much-needed meditation on the growing interest in performance theory among historians of the theatre.

Pointedly, Bial and Magelssen arrange their volume not by period or by continent but according to several historiographical strategies and challenges that reflect the book’s focus on methodology. The essays in Part One, “Unearthing the Theatrical Past,” model several strategies for reading the frustrating gaps in historical evidence – such as the silences suggesting the trauma of genocide in ancient Roman comedies or the disappearance of a reputedly “conspicuous” Jewish minority from early American theatre – as evidence in and of themselves (45). This focus on what to do in the absence of evidence in Part One gives way to an examination of the challenges presented by an excess of evidence in Part Two, “The Stakes of Historiography.” Here, scholars expose and critique the political agendas that influence the historical archive and the scholarship that employs this archive uncritically. The scholars in Part Three, “Historiography for a New Millennium,” expand the definition of evidence to include sources not often employed in discussions of theatre history, from digital archives to nineteenth-century paintings to research on evolutionary biology to philosophical documents on death. While Part Three includes several different media as kinds of performance, Part Four examines what it might look like to explore performance as a kind of historiography: analysing the relationship between an acting company and its audience as a way to explore Latvian citizens’ complicity under the Nazi regime, for instance; or using reenactments of historical events in the classroom and museum so that students “not only acquire knowledge but learn about how knowledge is produced” (210). Part Five, “Theater History’s Discipline,” returns to many of the questions raised in earlier sections and considers their practical implications within an academy still largely governed by traditional disciplinary organizations and pressures. The volume concludes with Bial’s cogent afterword, which lays out the stakes of such discussions and restates the inquiries of...