Staging Resistance: Essays on Political Theatre ed. by Jeanne Colleran and Jenny S. Spencer (review)

Book Reviews 661 JEANNE COLLERAN and JENNY S. SPENCER, eds. Staging Resistance: Essays on Political Theatre. Theatre: Theory(fext/Performance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998. Pp. 312, illustrdled. $49.50; $21.95, paperback. Editors Jeanne Colleran and Jenny S. Spencer.have assembled, as part of the extensive Theatre: Theory(fext/Performance series, fourteen original essays around the topic of contemporary political theatre. Their introductory essay shows a clear intention to cover a remarkable range of\heatricai forms and practices, and to accept a generous rendering of the term "politica\." But in trying to cover all possible areas of political theatre, they have stretched their ambitions too far; the result is a broad collection of papers that lacks editorial consistency. Still, by throwing the net wide, they have drawn a modest catch of exciting pieces. Linda Kintz's cogent analysis of Keely and Du could easily form the basis of a more lengthy study on the allegorical nature of performance to text. She argues that the play works on a political level because it resiliently straddles two forms of allegory. On one end, the ostensibly realistic dramatic narrative proves an instance of Benjaminian dialectical allegory, where each successive reading adds layers of signification to the text. At the other end, the abortion debate plot is an allegory for a deeper sense of "collective unease" brought about by a rapidly changing social order (209). Keely and Du sits uncomfortably in the gap between the contextual allegory and the more absolutist one, proving resistant to established political categories. Three essays in the collection explore the role of personal identification in political theatre. In "Pity and Terror as Public Acts: Reading Feminist Politics in the Plays of Maria Irene Fornes," Josephine Lee argues that resistance is found in Fornes's plays if we "surrender a notion of agency as something manifested through an apparent objectivity or mastery over a situation"(167). Her use of Brechtian dramaturgy to analyse specifically feminist questions is somewhat novel, yet her main argument - that we should discard the binary model of thinking that leads us to see empathic and rational judgements as mutually exclusive - is not. Elaine Brousseau's "Personalizing the Political in The Noam Chomsky Lectures " begins with the assertion that "the more overtly political a dramatic statement is, the more intensely personal it may need to be" (248). Personal disclosures throughout the play are meant to inculcate audience trust in the performers, so that what may first be seen as a removed political platform seeps into the viewer's individual critical mind-set. In this way, there is a positive correspondence between what is being discussed on stage and what the audience member learns. For the authors of "Body Parts: Between Story and Spectacle in Venus by Suzan-Lori Parks," however, the personal takes on a new meaning. In lending dramatic formalization to an historical event (in this case the public exhibition and degradation of Saartje Baartman), the audience 662 BOOK REVIEWS member becomes entangled in the retelling of the oppression. Harry J. Elam, Jr., and Alice Rayner call for viewers to "recognize how we are implicated in . the sights we abhor" (280), but come dangerously close to conflating the repulsive original act with its dramatized re-enactment, thereby making one question whether they think such events should be retold on stage. Una Chaudhuri 's analysis of Brook's Mahabharata and Marcia Blumberg's "Re-Staging Resistance, Re-Viewing Women: 1990S Productions of Fugard's Hello and Goodbye and Boesman and Lena" focus on the volatile nature of cultural reception. Blumberg questions how the political impact of these texts has changed after apartheid and, more.pointedly, how the system of symbols attained through performance creates meaning in a new time and place. While audiences are used to seeing classic plays staged with a modem sensibility, Blumberg's question is interesting because the productions she analyses span a relatively short period in chronological terms, but a profoundly significant one in political tenns. Chaudhuri's essay focuses on cultural reception across place, arguing that Brook's mammoth production took place at a critical juncture where liberal humanism was giving way to p ostcolonialism as the reigning discourse...