Re:Direction: A Theoretical and Practical Guide (review)

In many powerful ways Re:Direction is a book about reenactments—of directing styles, methods, and production practices. Culled from articles that have appeared in The Drama Review over the past forty years, Re:Direction offers much more than a comprehensive overview. As the colon in the title pointedly suggests, Re:Direction is engaged with marking time (like 5:27 on one's digital clock), or perhaps better, with staging (in/through) time. Actively resisting a narrative of evolution, the editors invite their readers to discover contradiction, dialogue, and interconnections as they read across and between directing aesthetics that emerged throughout the twentieth century. To this end, Schneider and Cody include a wide variety of textual approaches to the topic of directing, ranging from interviews with directors, manifestos, logs, and program notes to critical descriptions of directors and theoretical analyses.

Attendant to the ways in which performance marks out a unique temporal space that nevertheless contains traces of other now-absent performances and other now-disappeared scenes, Schneider and Cody have organized their material into four overlapping sections. The first part, "Directors of classical revolt," includes material by and about practitioners with ambitions as far-reaching as, for example, Meyerhold and Linda Montano. The interpretive documents tracking modalities of "revolution" are quite varied. The opening essay by Bettina Knapp is about French directors Antoine and Lugné-Poë; the section also includes excerpts from Lee Strasberg's workbook/diary from his trip to Russia in 1934 as well as Richard Schechner's 1965 interview with Alan Schneider, and Augusto Boal's notes on Invisible Theatre. This assemblage showcases the variety of ways in which the concept of revolt inflects modern directing, ranging from naturalism in its French incarnation to its Russian variations where theatrical and political revolutions grow increasingly intertwined, as was the case in the move by Meyerhold away from his teacher Stanislavsky, to the point where we are led to query: is reality enough? Carl Weber's 1967 lecture "Brecht as Director" engages the question from another angle, moving toward visible theatricality, making the natural detail appear as performance. This uncanny strangeness, or that which we forget about the familiar, is foregrounded in a different light in works like The Living Theatre's, whose revolution lies in blurring the distinctions between art and life in order to effect social change.

In the second section, "Auteur Theatre," the editors have grouped together texts that speak to the return of auteurship in contemporary theatre. Pointing to the complex ways in which the reified presence of theatre is complicated by incompleteness, non-linear temporalities, and a variety of relations to the physical body and the body of language, the texts in this section include Artaud's letters to Gide, Louis Jouvet, and Jean Paulhan; Bill Simmer's essay on Robert Wilson; John Bell's theoretical analysis of Reza Abdoh's "avant-garde classicism"; Brooks McNamara's 1972 interview with Meredith Monk; Kate Davy's analysis of Richard Foreman's PAIN(T) and Vertical Mobility; Foreman's program notes for Pearls for Pigs; and Meiling Cheng's analysis of Naoyuki Oguri's "transmutations." In her introduction to the section Cody suggests that "[w]e might read these self-conscious masterpieces relative to the trauma caused by two World Wars which generated a deep distrust in the reliability or truth-value of textual remains" (125). These manipulators of the mise-en-scène (Antonin Artaud, Tadeusz Kantor, Meredith Monk, Robert Wilson, Richard Foreman, Reza Abdoh, Pina Bausch) have created "masterpieces on an edge of self-destruction where, if there is a 'play' at all, it is a broken text strewn about the stage amid other theatrical debris" (125). Here again, the editors' choices are compelling insofar as they bring together texts documenting a range of performance strategies and intentions and a diverse phenomenological means of presenting images, and amplifications of sound, that are...