The Text in Play: Representations of Rehearsal in Modern Drama (review)

Reviews483 Robert Baker-White. The Text in Play Representations ofRehearsal in Modern Drama. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1999. Pp. vi + 212. $37.50. In his work on A Midsummer Night's Dream, Peter Brook sought to direct his actors toward a deeper understanding of the various nonverbal levels of the drama. He thus refrained from providing a full reading or analysis ofthe play. Accustomed to using prior interpretation as a springboard for his own actions, one confused actor complained to Brook: "I don't know what I'm aiming at." Brook's reply to the bewildered actor—"As long as that's true, you'll be all right"—parallels Peter Quince's similarlyprovisional announcement in? Midsummer Night's Dream—"this green plot shall be our stage." Both the Brook anecdote and the Quince announcement invoke questions ofauthority andpresence central not only to our understanding oftins specific play but to the understanding of theater. In 77ie Text in Play: Representations ofRehearsal in Modern Drama, Robert Baker-White explores the creative force of such provisionality and interruptibility by analyzing rehearsal scenes in modern theatrical texts. His study is an important addition to recent attempts to redress the imbalance that still exists in theater studies between text and performance. Even after major reexaminations of the premises of theatrical performance, both in the theater and in the academy, critics still demonstrate a tendency to valorize language over gesture. Although the need to examine theatrical gesture and the material elements of production is by now almost universally acknowledged , more often than not these studies continue to examine theatrical works in purely literary terms. Focusing on Bakhtin and Barthes, but making fine use ofhis wide reading in modern and postmodern theory and philosophy (Artaud, Derrida, Lyotard, among others), Baker-White succeeds in avoiding the pitfalls ofan overly text oriented analysis in The Text in Play by investigating what he calls the "visions of dieatricality" (14) evinced in plays that include scenes ofrehearsal. A theatrical text that includes scenes of rehearsal, Baker-White argues, invokes and initiates analyses ofauthority in relation to that text. Moreoever, the representation of rehearsal within a play evokes the "connection between process and product" (13)—the very definition of theater, Baker-White claims—and affords a "unique form of metacommentary" ( 14). The book may be roughly divided into two sections. In the introduction and the first two chapters, Baker-White defines rehearsal and argues that representations of rehearsal in modern drama provide a paradigm for discussing questions of control and freedom not only within the theater but within ethical action as well. Such an overt philosophical emphasis is not always evident in theater studies that also purport to provide individual readings of plays, and Baker-White's effort to connect the contingency and indeterminacy 484Comparative Drama of rehearsal to the "unfinalizability" of human experience is important and provocative. Chapter 2, "What is Rehearsal?" draws largely on Susan Letzler Cole's 1992 study, Directors in Rehearsal. Following Cole's lead, Baker-White defines rehearsal as a "controlled form ofchaos" (23) that is both progressive and heuristic . That is, rehearsal does not posit a truth, but rather moves toward something as yet unknown. Rehearsal is thus aprocessual activity, argues Baker-White, a voyage orjourney toward a "special kind ofaccess to truth" (23). Baker-White is right to emphasize that qualities such as bafflement, misunderstanding, irreconcilability , arbitrariness, and failure—usually thought ofas negative or undesirable in other fields ofhuman activity—can be generative and liberatingwithin theatrical rehearsal. Chapter 3, tellinglytitled "Toward a TheoryofRehearsal: Dialogism, Power, and Suspension" (italics mine), is apparently Baker-White's attempt to incorporate the same nontotalizing dynamic in his criticism that he detects in rehearsal . By bringing Bakhtinian dialogism into the discourse oftheater studies, Baker-White explores the dramatic significance of alterity and plurivocality. Drawing on the writings ofBrecht and Barthes in addition to those ofBakhtin in this context, he moves toward a view of rehearsal within a dramatic text as a "site of particular creative energy" (35), a "crucially material space where a production and its human components may undergo a form ofbecoming" (45). The analysis of process in Bakhtin works particularly well with BakerWhite 's reading ofBrecht. Emphasizing the...