Agitated States: Performance in the American Theater of Cruelty (review)

In a post-9/11 America, when we seem more disposed than ever before to explain our woes by recourse to a variety of big, bad Others, it is particularly meaningful that Anthony Kubiak locates our central problem within our own borders. In order to understand America, Kubiak argues that what we need to explain is why children in our country shoot other children. This is not an entirely original proposition; recall, for example, Michael Moore's recent documentary Bowling for Columbine. But Kubiak's answer is original. The reason children shoot other children in our country is not the availability of guns, nor international terrorism, nor even the effects of the media on contemporary culture. Our states are agitated because they repudiate their own theatricality—and they always have.

Agitated States is a satisfying companion to Kubiak's earlier work, Stages of Terror. There, he elucidated violence as the ground of performance and of culture itself, throughout the Western tradition. Here, he reads the American context somewhat differently, arguing that it is our refusal of theatre that leads to a uniquely American brand of violence.

Kubiak begins his argument by pointing out a symptom of America's repudiation of theatricality within the theatre itself. Our theatre, he asserts, lacks a tradition that "questions, critiques, the hidden and blatant theatricalities of culture in the manner of Brecht, Beckett, Pirandello, or, more pointedly . . . Artaud" (13). It is to the advantage of Kubiak and his readers that his book does not try to defend this assertion—some of the very playwrights Kubiak later reads make compelling counterexamples—but proceeds to a compelling reading of blindness to theatre in American theatrical and cultural history.

Kubiak's study makes two essential contributions to contemporary theatrical thought, one theoretical and one historiographic. The first gets off to a somewhat shaky start. I am not convinced that his readings of Lacan and Artaud are particularly useful to his theoretical project. Kubiak uses Lacan to preserve a vaguely articulated notion of the Real, and Artaud for apparently contradictory purposes, aligning him now with the theoretically savvy Brecht, now with the theoretically bereft Puritans. What is truly valuable, however, is Kubiak's own smart and refreshingly skeptical critique of high theoretical chic. Kubiak's American history begins with the Puritans who, though absolutely repudiating the theatre as an institution, were, nonetheless, in their search for the authentic and their deep anxiety over appearances, always acting. With this example, as with subsequent ones, Kubiak deftly recovers the insights of performance studies for the theatrical, arguing eloquently against Judith Butler and others that theatre is the more encompassing term. By relegating theatre to a subcategory of performance, Kubiak argues, we lose sight of "the very site in which performance and performativity arises and is problematized. . . . As theatre seemingly disappears, we lose focus—we lose, in a sense, our critical faculties" (157-58). While others such as Jill Dolan have called for a recovery of performance to theatre studies, none have so clearly demonstrated its need and utility.

Along the way, Kubiak offers broad yet concise readings of performance theories about, among other things, blackface minstrelsy and realism, purportedly oppressive theatrical traditions that he argues have never, at least as they are traditionally understood, existed. He also deconstructs the notion that deconstructed selfhood is inherently empowering via a discussion of multiple personality disorder and its role in cultural understandings of the theatrical.

The second contribution of Kubiak's study is the history itself. Kubiak reads historical moments such as the 1801 Enthusiastic performances at Cane Ridge, Kentucky—arguably the inauguration of theatrical performance in America—and cultural moments such as the one giving rise to the eighteenth-century dramatic text The Contrast. In examining the nineteenth century, he makes a surprising move to fiction, arguing that this genre's understanding of the theatrical...