Affinity and Contradiction

Re:Direction, A Theoretical and Practical Guide Edited by Rebecca Schneider and Gabrielle Cody 2002: Routledge

In this new anthology, Rebecca Schneider and Gabrielle Cody have mined issues of the Drama Review dating back to 1968 to create a collage portrait of the field of directing as it has shape-shifted across a century of political and aesthetic upheaval. These two distinguished scholars of theater history and performance share a passion for juxtaposition, for the patterns of affinity and contradiction that occur when two or more objects are set down next to one another. Hence, in Re:Direction, they do not adopt the strategy of evolutionary narrative in compiling their material. Instead, they divide these previously published interviews, essays, manifestos, production notebooks, and program notes among four overlapping categories—Directors of Classical Revolt; Auteur Theatre; Theatres of Community and Transculturation; and Montage, Reiteration, and Revision—each of which is introduced in an essay by the editors. The goal of this horizontal or "spatial" system of organization is to acknowledge what Schneider and Cody call the "complexity of the terrain." "Rather than champion a narrative of evolution," they write, "we have chosen to embrace the recurrence and interconnectedness of a number of aesthetic positions" (5).

Although materials have been arranged chronologically within each part, the emphasis is on ways in which seemingly opposed aesthetic strategies may reflect similar philosophical programs. In part 1, for instance, it is fascinating to see how directors throughout the century have defined the theater's responsibility to portray "reality." From Antoine and Stanislavsky to Meyerhold, Okhlopkov, Brecht, and Boal, each has embraced or rejected theatrical illusion, yet all share the larger aim of arriving at something "true" or "real." Thus, as Schneider and Cody point out, "Both the MAT and The Living Theatre blurred the line between stage and house—one, ironically, through buttressing the fourth wall, the other through literally dismantling it" (16).

In part 4, the artists on review (who include Sergei Eisenstein; Charles Ludlam; the Wooster Group; and Suzan-Lori Parks and me, interviewed in 1995 by Steven Drukman), while formally radically different, seem united by a preoccupation with deconstruction as a liberating act. A project of destabilization is under way—of conceptions of gender, race, authorship—of the very project of discovering or revealing truth. Ludlam insists, "We are involved in a certain kind of consciousness that does not permit codifying a specific philosophy and proselytizing it" (312). At the same time, there's a celebration of the unique power of play and the astonishing ability of theater's crude tools to perform the subtlest acts of subversion. In a long debate over the usefulness of the term meaning in the theater, Parks finally says, "Stick to the play."

Re:Direction itself, particularly when read straight through, can have a severely destabilizing effect on any leftover hopes that a linear narrative describes the history of directing in the theater. The idea that the postulates of one artist give way to those of another in a tidy dialectical pattern shatters into a cacophony of overlapping and opposing definitions, aims, and strategies. Progress? Nah. History? Sez who? What Re:Direction shows instead is a wonderfully complex, dense nexus of intersecting and parting, connecting and diverging ideas about theatermaking, a Milky Way of styles and systems affecting one another across space and time.

Finally, Re:Direction has the salutary effect of shaking up habitual ways of seeing the profession of directing, of introducing what Richard Foreman describes so marvelously as "a creative wobble." As he explains, "ART IS THE PLACE TO ALLOW THIS, WHICH CANNOT REALLY HAPPEN IN LIFE, TO HAPPEN IN ITS FULL, RICH, RADIANT, AND ABUNDANT GLORY" (173).