Choices Made and Unmade

Because I have never been very good at playwriting, I am reluctant to suggest what the next act of theater studies should be. I am not even sure I have been able to follow the plot thus far. And as one who initially went into the theater to be applauded and loved, I am nervous about critiquing work by friends and associates, and so I will draw my examples from theorists in other fields whose work provides the foundation for certain developments in theater studies. I also feel some discomfort at knowing that my own work is part of the field I am critiquing and that I have at times been guilty of all of the trespasses for which I reprove others. Finally, as one averse to most efforts in confessional criticism because I see them as substitutes for history, I am reluctant to bandy about my own experiences. On the other hand, I am even less eager to conceal my own professional history behind an imperious and impersonal analysis of the field. So I shall try, Odysseus-like, to sail the seas of personal narrative while steering clear of the Scylla of triviality and the Charybdis of narcissism, attempting to historicize my own experiences using a method inspired by Pierre Bourdieu, whose work offers extraordinarily rich tools for theater scholarship. I believe this historicization to be a worthwhile effort to the extent that my experiences are emblematic of those of a generation of baby-boomer theater scholars who passed through graduate schools in the 1970s and early 1980s.

The trepidation I feel is also linked to an inferiority complex from which I have suffered at least since I was a graduate student at Cornell in the mid-1970s and with which, I suspect, many in our discipline are afflicted. For as theater scholars, we have long been multiply marginalized within both theater programs and universities at large. On the one hand, as Joseph Roach observes, theater scholars do not "fit among the MFAs"--and, I would like to add, theater professionals--"because they read books." On the other hand, they do not "fit among the community of scholars because they were appointed in theater."¹ When I tell some of my associates in the Brown English department that I am teaching a course on American musical theater, their nervous "That must be interesting" makes me feel as if I have just confessed to moonlighting as a circus clown. Theater is disdained because it represents neither elite nor mass culture but rather an old-fashioned, blandly disreputable, middlebrow art.

Having been trained by Bert States and Marvin Carlson in what was a rigorously traditional program, I read more theory--we called it aesthetics back then--than many of my friends in the Cornell English department. But I vividly remember in 1975 turning to my lover, who was a graduate student in French, and asking him what seemed an innocent question: "What's structuralism?" Two years later I could begin to answer that question and to understand the generation gap that was opening between traditional scholars, whether New Critics or old historicists, and those newly converted to continental theory. Over the next decade, I saw poststructuralism gradually conquer English departments, while theater studies stayed out of the fray. By the mid-1980s, however, Foucault, Lacan, and Derrida were appearing more and more frequently in footnotes of theater journals while the field as a whole was being revolutionized by those looking outside the field for inspiration: semioticians, critics working on performance art and avant-gardist theater, feminists well practiced in film theory, and anthropologically based performance theorists. I, meanwhile, was being seduced by Foucault and the Wooster Group into forgetting about things like demystification and class struggle.

The 1990s ushered in a pluralization of methods in theater studies. And I have gone into recovery for my Foucauldianism, joining a Marxist reading group and swearing never again to write about micropolitics and networks of power. In theater, as in literary studies, scholars use psychoanalysis, deconstruction...