The Resistance to Theatricality

Probably the most distinctive feature of theoretical speculation concerning the theater during the past twenty years has been the cross-fertilization of this field of study with the social sciences. While traditionally theater theorists have most commonly looked to the work of literary theorists or philosophers for inspiration, concepts, and analytic strategies, today they are much more likely to look to such cultural analysts as anthropologists, ethnographers, psychologists and sociologists. The changes in the investigative fields of both theater and the social sciences as a result of this shift have been enormous—indeed the fields themselves have been significantly reconfigured. Perhaps the most familiar example of this cross-fertilization was the converging interests of anthropologist Victor Turner and theater theorist Richard Schechner, but scarcely less important have been the theatrical metaphors in the influential writings of sociologist Erving Goffman, and the emphasis on the performative aspects of language by linguists John Austin and John Searle. In each of the fields represented by these theorists, their work and the work of others who have been influenced by their approaches have radically altered both critical approaches and critical vocabulary.

So widespread and so productive has been this interpenetration of the formerly fairly discrete fields of theater studies and the social sciences that it is hardly an exaggeration to say that in the study of social phenomena today metaphors of theater and performance are so common that they have become almost transparent, while conversely, in the study of theater, a similar critical dominance is currently held by the metaphors and the topoi of social analysis.

Useful and productive as this cross-fertilization has been, it has not been without cost, for of course any new interpretative grid, any new critical paradigm, inevitably brings some distortion along with its clarifications, and when the clarifications have been as stimulating and productive as those resulting from the growing convergence of the analytical methodologies of theater and performance studies and of the social sciences, then the distortions involved are very likely to be overlooked in the general enthusiasm over important new insights.

Thanks to the widespread influence of such theorists as Turner, Schechner, Goffman, Austin, and the many subsequent theorists who have since the 1960s worked in these converging fields, it has become almost impossible to consider the term performance, in the many ways that it is used in contemporary critical writings, without the term being conditioned to a greater or lesser extent by the implications of its use as a key critical term in current work in the social sciences.

This new orientation of the term performance has hardly gone unremarked. Indeed it has been celebrated and in fact institutionalized, in large part due to the efforts of Richard Schechner. As early as 1973 Schechner in a special issue of The Drama Review called for more study of the "areas where performance theory and the social sciences coincide" (5). Since that time Schechner has devoted much of his career to this study in an influential series of books and articles, and he was instrumental in the establishment of a department of performance studies at New York University.

The high visibility of the term "performance" in recent writings about theater, and its acknowledged relationship to theories and concerns in the social sciences, has obscured the fact that theater theory in general has become more involved in recent years with concepts and strategies related to the social sciences. This affects the way the field is evolving and how its terms are configured, even when the perhaps overdetermined rubric of performance seems not to be directly involved.

A striking example of this may be seen in recent uses of the term theatricality, which, like performance, has been very differently configured as a result of the interpenetration of theatrical and social science theory, but which has not gained, as performance has, a higher visibility and a generally more productive and flexible critical usage as a result. On the contrary, I would argue, theatricality has been reduced and constricted as...