Theater of the Avant-Garde 1890-1950: A Critical Anthology (review)

Anthologies of modern drama conventionally present an overview of the multitude of styles and structural modes, realistic and theatrical, that represent the early twentieth century's spirit of experimentation. Bert Cardullo and Robert Knopf shift from what they see as the common outlook on the relationship between realism and anti-realism, and present Theater of the Avant-Garde 1890-1950 as a contribution to a "revisionist history of modern drama" (1). Here the avant-garde becomes central in defining modernism, rather than serving an ancillary and occasionally influential role in realism's move from late nineteenth-century Naturalism and Realism to the "socially, politically, and psychologically oriented 'problem plays' of the twentieth century" (1). The authors recognize that avant-garde documents and plays exist in scattered (and often out-of-print) forms, or are gathered as the drama of one country or as one "-ism," a problem that their anthology addresses. But the grouping together of avant-garde plays is only part of the book's purpose. "[N]o comprehensive collection in English—or any other language for that matter—gives adequate recognition to the place as well as importance of the avant-garde in the development of a distinctive, freestanding theatrical sensibility and vocabulary," Cardullo claims in his introduction, "En Garde! The Theatrical Avant-Garde in Historical, Intellectual, and Cultural Context," an essay which is meant to shape the critical reading of this collection of plays (2).

Cardullo summarizes the major avant-garde movements and finds a thematic throughline to join the dissimilar "-isms." In developing his thesis, he examines the historical use of the word "avant-garde" as its definition changes from a military term at the end of the eighteenth century, to become associated with socialist or humanitarian "men of vision" in the mid-nineteenth century and then, toward the end of that century, to be contextualized almost exclusively with revolutionary aesthetic developments (12). Cardullo sees this transition of the word's meaning, and the creation of an avant-garde mentality, to be the effect of a more general intellectual progression from a view of human existence as logical, and static or cyclical, to a "scientific view of a universe evolving in time. . . . The increasing prevalence of avant-garde attitudes reflects the growing effect of [the] perception that we live only in time and have to find our values in time," he postulates, while pointing out that in spite of this modern, scientifically-founded progressivism, most avant-garde artists incorporated a non-progressive aspect into their attitudes as a means of escaping from the "dilemma of perpetual movement by finding some substitute for eternity" (15). By no means does Cardullo imply that there is an evolutionary thread running from one avant-garde style to another; rather, the concepts of an evolving universe and of human nature as ever-adapting and changing constitute a world view to which modern artists must react. Thirteen dramatic styles are covered in this anthology: Franco-Russian Symbolism, Pataphysical Theatre, the Intimate Theatre, Correspondences, Italian Futurism, German Expressionism, Dada, the Theatre of Pure Form, French Surrealism, the Theatre of Cruelty, Russian Oberiu, American Dada and Surrealism, and the Theatre of the Absurd. Although the one- to three-paragraph introductions to these chapters do not echo Cardullo's theme, the editorial choices support it.

Theater of the Avant-Garde fills a void, particularly as a comprehensive text for the classroom, where this anthology will prove especially useful. Each movement or artist is represented by a short introduction, critical article, dramatic piece or play, select bibliography (a more comprehensive bibliography ends the book), and often a manifesto. These pieces are drawn primarily from journals and out-of-print books; some are from fairly standard sources, but a number are not so well known. Most of the translations were done in the 1960s...