Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theatre by Bert O. State (review)

280Comparative Drama have a constructive future" (p. 104). Since these figures presumably find life without illusion preferable to death, they suggest a very different message than the one Barlow attributes to O'Neill. Barlow's book overall is a valuable investigation of the generation of the last plays based on meticulous scholarship and generally sound insight . If its discussions of individual points are sometimes inadequately framed by introductory and concluding statement, the book says what it has to say clearly and sparely. Most important, it contributes significantly to the articulating of what makes these plays "three of the finest ... in the American dramatic canon" (p. 162). MICHAEL MANHEIM The University of Toledo Bert O. States. Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theatre. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. Pp. 213. $21.50. Professor States' Great Reckonings in Little Rooms is part of the University of California's Quantum Books series which allows for the publication of mongraphs within a hundred pages. States' exploration of the interactions among text, actor, and audience runs to twice that length. While most readers may find two hundred pages of theatrical theory difficult to digest in the evening anticipated by its publishers, his lucid prose and his ability to objectify the vague impressions that many theatre practitioners and audiences have experienced make his work refreshingly accessible in a period of expressionistically creative and often selfindulgent criticism. In his last chapter, States writes that "the ritual in theater is based in the community's need for the thing that transpires in theater. . . ." It is the nature of this thing, what the phenomenon consists of, that States explores. His approach is personal and consequently idiosyncratic as opposed to almost ritualized diagrammatic systems attempted elsewhere. His introduction states that "the book does not have an argument, or set out to prove a thesis. . . ." While admitting the virtues of semiotics as "a mediation between artist and culture, speaker and listener," States recognizes that the components of a theatrical performance cannot be completely understood through scientific analysis, because the phenomena of theater occur simultaneously. The audience has little time to consider. They cannot stop the performance without becoming the performance. They cannot analyze fully. Brecht's Verfremdungseffekt, as States puts it, "takes no account of the fact that distance tends to close rapidly." The theatre-goer's ability to semioticize is limited, because the play will not stop. The audience comes and even pays to suspend its disbelief, and whatever happens on stage is real, because it appears to have occurred. Theatrical performance ultimately sacrifices analysis for intensity. As Aristotle realized, it also sacrifices scope for intensity. One of States' finest concepts is that at any one moment a human being doesn't see his/her entire life but rather only segments of it, and special segments at that. Theatre recreates this experience. It stops life. It is always, to Reviews281 some degree, a departure from real life which intrudes into daily reality. It is part of that reality but simultaneously apart from it. Nowhere is this better shown than in States' understanding of the simultaneous duality and inseparability of the actor and the role. In his view, "the text is not a prior document; it is the animating current to which the actor submits his body and refines himself into an illusionary being." Hamlet does not exist. The text in which he appears is a series of possibilities which are filtered for an audience through the body and mind of a particular actor within an environment set up by the production . There are no definitive performances, and the envelope of interpretation is constantly being stretched by the pressures of the social forces at work within and between creators/interpreters and the audience. And it is the interaction between actor and role—the difficulty of distinguishing the two, the crossing of the boundary between performer and performance—which provides us with our most memorable moments in the theatre. Judy Garland's ability to make audiences believe that if she did not hit the high note in "Over The Rainbow" she would die right in front of them invested the sweet sentimentality of the song with life and...