Actors and Activists: Politics, Performance, and Exchange Among Social Worlds (review)

David Schlossman's Actors and Activists borrows from symbolic interactionist sociologists to argue that the "social worlds" of theatre and politics constantly overlap, interact, and negotiate ever-blurring boundaries. Social worlds "tend to be larger, more diffuse, and less hierarchical than formal organizations" (5), which allows Schlossman to argue that social activities like performance and activism touch and blend with each other in numerous ways that mutually advance both their causes. Schlossman builds a model in which activist performance negotiates with what he calls "institutional performance" and vice versa. Questions of political efficacy matter less to Schlossman than the practices through which activists and theatre people effectively borrow each other's languages and actions in specific historical moments for specific political ends.

The book presents its theoretical model and then applies it to various cases in which activists, then performers or theatre producers, and finally activist-artists, are "insiders" in their particular world but benefit from adjacent cultural work. Schlossman offers various metaphors to stage his argument. Thinking of a firmament of cultural constellations helps him study the connections among social worlds: "[A]rt exists in relation to other social activities [and] therefore participates in struggles for resources and . . . influences and is influenced by other worlds and their discourses" (54). A jigsaw puzzle helps him imagine how "performance offers spectators a 'piece' that they assemble as part of a larger arrangement" (50). While both metaphors compellingly describe the symbiotic relationships of theatre and activism, they illuminate his argument less than his close, historical, contextual readings of two paradigmatic events from recent performance history: the controversies over casting the Broadway version of Miss Saigon in the late 80s and the NEA Four's trials and fiascos in the 1990s.

Schlossman establishes his progressive, leftist credentials by documenting demonstrations and actions against the Gulf War, for safe-sex practices and AIDS funding, and for pro-choice, mostly in the early 1990s—activism that sought to "reshape rather than merely reflect social reality" (87). As he notes, activist performance hasn't been widely acknowledged in conventional theatre history; one of Schlossman's contributions here is his participant observation research into such events, which will add to the archive of performance studies. He also considers useful historical precedents, such as the union-generated performance of the musical Pins and Needles in the 1930s, which modeled "exchange between the world of activism and performance that occurred when activists . . . appeared on the institutional stage" (65). Schlossman is careful to distinguish among activists who use performance elements, those who fully use performance as demonstration, and what he calls "activist-theatre troupes," such as Ladies Against Women (LAW), No More Nice Girls, and the Theatre With Alienating Tendencies (or TWAT) Team. He discusses these groups at length, describing how they rallied to specific political causes and brought their satirical, parodic, often agit-prop performance techniques to propel social discourse in more progressive directions.

Just these finely detailed distinctions, however, begin to weigh down Schlossman's argument. He says, "[W]hen activists incorporate a costume, puppet, or die-in within an action without remarking upon it, the event constitutes a component of cultural performance; when activists use the same type of device and call it theatre, they articulate exchange (albeit indirect exchange) with performance as an institutional practice" (90). Institutional performance, for Schlossman, "refer[s] to the constellation of overlapping social worlds in which people gather with the primary and express intent of creating and consuming live performance" (52). More or less inventing this term leads Schlossman into some semantic quagmires when he begins to discuss the controversies over casting the US production of Miss Saigon. Schlossman's model troubles distinctions among "commercial," "not-for-profit," "alternative," and "mainstream" theatre, but "institutional performance" somehow doesn't serve him well as a rubric for all the categories of performance into which his argument leads.

Schlossman reads closely...