Theater Historiography: Critical Interventions (review)

While Thomas Postlewait and Bruce McConachie's edited volume Interpreting the Theatrical Past: Essays in the Historiography of Performance (1989) is still cited as a landmark study in theatre historiography, the past few years have seen a number of important additions to the field, such as Diana Taylor's The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (2003) and Charlotte Canning and Postlewait's Representing the Past: Essays in Performance Historiography (2010; reviewed above). By and large, these texts address defining issues facing contemporary theatre historians, such as the changing nature of the archive and its effect on the interpretation of historical evidence. In Theatre Historiography: Critical Interventions, editors Henry Bial and Scott Magelssen have compiled twenty-one essays from a diverse group of theatre scholars to introduce students to the field of theatre historiography, while presenting many of these same pressing issues "with an eye toward use in the classroom" (8).

The book is divided into five sections, each of which focuses on a specific topic in theatre historiography: the question of evidence; the political stakes of history; the shifting paradigms of theatre history; history as performance; and disciplinarity. Each section is composed of four or five brief essays, averaging around ten pages. Since the brevity of these essays limits the scope of inquiry within each piece, the entire work reads as a series of very precise investigations into specific topics, providing a cursory tour of the field of contemporary theatre historiography.

The first of these sections, "Unearthing the Past," includes Odai Johnson's "Unspeakable Histories," Robert Shimko's "The Spark of Strangeness," and Heather Nathans's "Is There Too Much 'History' in My Theater History?" each of which explores questions of evidence with reference to a particular case study. The section concludes with Ellen Mackay's "Against Plausibility," which addresses "the illusion of empirical factuality" (29). Mackay argues that, in light of the unrecoverable nature of performance, researchers should use available evidence not to assert an unassailable account of the past, but "to simulate the experience" (25) of it for their readers.

The second section, titled "The Stakes of Historiography," explores the political costs and effects of collecting and interpreting archival material and of narrating theatre history. Perhaps the most cohesive of the five sections, the essays include Branislav Jakovljevic's "The Theater of the Absurd and the Historization [sic] of the Present," E. J. Westlake's "No Hint as to the Author Is Anywhere Found," Alan Sikes's "Sodomitical Politics," Erin Mee's "But Is It Theater?" and John Fletcher's "Sympathy for the Devil." Fletcher's essay is particularly insightful, drawing from his own research on gay activist performance to offer a candid examination of the "assumed or obligatory consonance between progressive scholars and progressive artists" (112). Analyzing the rhetoric of both pro- and anti-gay responses to these performances, Fletcher acknowledges that both sides of the debate feel an intense attachment to the ideals of liberty and democracy, albeit with vastly different conceptions of what those terms necessarily mean. Through this examination, Fletcher cautions the reader to avoid allowing one's personal (and at times, institutional) viewpoints to overshadow the objectivity of one's historical analysis.

"Historiography for a New Millennium," the third section, addresses the shifting definitions of theatre history in the twenty-first century. It includes Harvey Young's "Working with Paint," Wendy Arons's "Beyond the Nature/Culture Divide," Jonathan Chambers's "Or I'll Die," and Sarah Bay-Cheng's "Theater History and Digital Historiography." In her piece, Bay-Cheng explores how digital technology allows for a wider dissemination of archival materials as well as "a fuller understanding and a clearer articulation of . . . performance" by providing researchers with "a diversity of knowledges and perspectives that may extend our sense of being there" (134).

Section 4, "Performance as Historiography," investigates performance not only as an historical event, but also as "an ideal venue for critical reflexivity with regard to the remembrance and retelling of past experience...