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Reviewed by:
  • The Theater of Transformation: Postmodernism in American Drama, and: Expressionism and Modernism in the Modern Theatre:Bodies, Voices, Words
  • Anthony Kubiak (bio)
The Theater of Transformation: Postmodernism in American Drama. By Kerstin Schmidt. New York: Rodopi, 2005; 230 pp. $64.00 paper.
Expressionism and Modernism in the Modern Theatre:Bodies, Voices, Words. By Julia A. Walker. New York: Cambridge, 2005; 300 pp. $85.00 cloth.

Trying to understand the world, especially the world through its theatres, ought to be—it seems to me—a difficult business. Like the theatrical enterprise itself, paradigms keep changing, frames keep shifting, and theorists with any sort of philosophical inclination often end up choosing between writing styles that either try to enter the transformative flows or operate against them; that is, opting for either more clarity or more density. Ideas often suffer in the exchange; elusive and allusive captivations by liquid identities, political uncertainties, ideological aporias, and bifurcating flows are either embedded in the most impacted of prose styles, or reduced to simple formulae and unexplored terminologies. Younger scholars, I fear, increasingly choose to work in [End Page 192] easier, if somewhat more reductive, fields of inquiry rather than submit to the rigors of, say, continental philosophy or theory. Homi K. Bhabha and Judith Butler, though also writing in turgid style, are nonetheless a lot easier to "get," in the end, than Martin Heidegger, Jacques Lacan, or Gilles Deleuze. This is not to suggest that difficult writing indicates difficult and thus somehow superior content (note Bhabha and Butler), but it is an indication that theory and its philosophies have, in recent years, often become repetitive and thin or have simply turned away from the implications of their own conclusions. It is rare for authors to balance the complexities of theory with the demand for clarity and engaging exposition. Witness two recent books on theatre history, The Theater of Transformation: Postmodernism in American Drama by Kerstin Schmidt and Expressionism and Modernism in the Modern Theatre: Bodies, Voices, Words by Julia A. Walker. The first might have been a book of passing interest if written in the 1970s or '80s (the period when most of the research materials were published); the second is an excellent, well-researched, clearly written, and valorous attempt to redeem the intellectual impoverishment of modern American theatre. In some sense, both books try to resituate an American theatre that has often been anti-intellectual, superficial—even obtuse— within a philosophical tradition that has largely been hostile to it by choosing fairly minor examples from its canon; Joseph Chaikin is hardly the intellectual that Schmidt might imagine him to be, and the plays analyzed in Walker's book are not really indicative of any larger intellectual trend in the American theatre. Nonetheless, the difference between research that skims postmodern surfaces and critique that argues with depth and conviction is noteworthy.

The Theater of Transformation is an attempt to delineate a type of American theatre, largely from the 1960s and '70s, which emphasizes a postmodern ethos over a modern or even post-structural one. Developing the techniques of Chaikin's Open Theater, these playwrights favored the fragmentary, surface play of theatre. They used the shifting registers of character identity, the author claims, to institute a theatre of transformation—characters, situations, spaces, and time change and shift under the gaze of audience and actors (the author does not seem to be aware that many critics—among them, Ihab Hassan, whom she frequently cites— have suggested that Western theatre, at least, has always been a space of transformation). These transformations indicate, according to Schmidt, the very kernel of what Jean-François Lyotard called "the postmodern condition" (1979). After presenting the idea of transformation, Schmidt goes on to read through a selection of playwrights—Jean Claude van Itallie, Megan Terry, Rochelle Owens, and in a leap through time, Suzan Lori-Parks—showing how the issue of transformation plays itself out through the playwrights' works.

The problem here is twofold: we have no sense of the postmodern as a period and why the author is revisiting it, or rather if she is revisiting it or simply assumes it is ongoing. Does she think, along with J...

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