Avant Garde Theatre: 1892-1992, and: Twentieth Century Theatre: A Sourcebook (review)

On the verge of the coming millenium, two scholars of modern theatre, Richard Drain and Christopher Innes, offer a look back at this century’s dramatic theories and performance experiments. Both books provide useful viewpoints for researchers, teachers, and students, yet employ very different approaches to the past. Innes focuses directly on avant-garde “primitivism” from Alfred Jarry and August Strindberg, through expressionism, to Antonin Artaud, Bertolt Brecht, Jean-Louis Barrault, Jerzy Grotowski, Peter Brook, and other artists. Drain, on the other hand, presents selections of primary sources moving in various directions, selections that he has organized with an eye towards illustrating contending ideologies.

Although prominent sourcebooks of theatrical writings from ancient to modern already exist, their coverage of recent artists tends to be minimal. A. M. Nagler’s A Sourcebook in Theatrical History ends with naturalism at the opening scene of our own century. As its title indicates, Bernard F. Dukore’s Dramatic Theory and Criticism: Greeks to Grotowski reaches further towards our time; yet it presents no voices from the last quarter century (and just a few from the last half). Drain’s volume picks up where Nagler’s left off, showing certain experimental trends as departures from late-nineteenth-century naturalism. Drain also extends Dukore’s prior work by emphasizing practitioners of theatre, dance, and performance art, as well as dramatic theorists from throughout this century.

Unlike Dukore’s anthology, Drain’s collection is not organized historically and geographically from beginning to end. Drain offers five sections, each with its own chronological progression of voices from the early 1900s to the 1980s or 1990s: modernist, political, popular, inner, and global. These five categories are both insightful and problematic. Drain’s introductions to each section clarify his reasons for his choices, but the excerpts he groups in each section do not always focus on similar issues, nor do they all arise from parallel historical contexts. The emphasis on practitioners is helpful, yet there are no illustrations and rarely any detailed accounts of performance events to give a full picture of the artists’ own examples.

As Drain confesses in his preface, the collection omits “[n]umerous important figures . . . and it deals with five aspects of theatre only” (xv). But Drain’s first section does provide a balanced overview of major movements in modernism, with manifestoes from the leaders of symbolism, futurism, Dada, surrealism, expressionism, formalism, constructivism, Bauhaus, absurdism, and postmodernism. Drain questions this last term, however. Scattered throughout the anthology are selections by Allan Kaprow, Robert Wilson, Tadeusz Kantor, Richard Foreman, Rachel Rosenthal, and Guillermo Gómez-Peña. The index points to these as postmodern; but in his introduction to the modernist section, Drain argues against a simple historical narrative of modernism first, postmodernism next: “Many of the features commonly identified as postmodernist in the other arts are in one sense or another ‘theatrical’; and they already have a long history in modernist theatre” (8). On the other hand, Drain’s way of ordering his sourcebook by taking five tracks across the century rather than developing a single metanarrative from modern to postmodern not only demonstrates the concept’s usefulness by illuminating various proto-postmodern ideas of theatre in the early avant-garde. It also exemplifies two key elements of “the postmodern condition,” as discussed by Jean-François Lyotard in his influential book of the same name: (1) the loss of faith in metanarrative, with a turn to diverse little stories’ and (2) the postmodern as “not modernism at its end but in the nascent state” (xxiv, 79).

Drain’s five little stories of twentieth century theatre overlap in terms of certain characters, and they omit other significant voices. Meyerhold appears in three of the five sections (in the political, popular, and inner dimensions); Brecht also appears in three (political, popular, and global). But while various American artists...