Intermediality and Theatre: Wendy Wasserstein’s The Heidi Chronicles

Spring 2010 31 Intermediality and Theatre: Wendy Wasserstein’s The Heidi Chronicles Scott Pound AnAmerican dramatist, availing herself of a sound design technique pioneered by filmmakers, weaves soul and rock songs into her plot in a way that might best be understood in terms of Roland Barthes’s theory of photography. The seemingly tortured logic required to formulate Wendy Wasserstein’s use of intermediality in The Heidi Chronicles (1988) belies the effortless way the properties of one medium can be integrated into the framework of another. In Wasserstein’s case, a visceral aural aesthetic with great cultural currency is spun into the theatrical event in a way that both complements and competes with meanings encoded via conventional dramatic devices. In the process, the expressive resources of popular music become a powerful adjunct to the meaning-making apparatus of dramatic realism. In the most basic sense, Wasserstein’s use of recorded popular music functions as an unusual, though highly effective, form of exposition. In the play, songs by Betty Everett, The Rolling Stones, Janis Joplin, Otis Redding, John Lennon, Jefferson Airplane, and Sam Cooke perform—and in the process transform—the utilitarian task of providing background information necessary for the audience’s understanding of the dramatic action. This is not background or between-the-acts music. Rather, songs, and especially their lyrics, are foregrounded as an integral part of the plot. While comparable to the usual modes of dramatic exposition (dialogue, soliloquy, prologue/chorus, and narration),Wasserstein’s use of music is more subtle and efficient, capitalizing on the informational density of popular music1 to guide the audience and connect the drama to a series of cultural and historical backdrops. But the songs do more than simply communicate information. They also, and much more dramatically, communicate somatically as resonant events in the lived experience of the audience. “Music moves us, quite literally,” Stephen Davies points out, “and often we are unaware of the small motions we make in response to it.”2 When it comes to rock ’n’ roll music, “These material or ‘visceral’ properties of rock are registered in the body core, in the gut, and in the muscles and sinews of the arms and legs rather than in any intellectual faculty of judgment.”3 “The power of rock and roll,” Lawrence Grossberg writes in a similar vein, “is located Scott Pound is Associate Professor of English at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada. His research examines the intersection of poetics and new media in the twentieth century. He is currently at work on a project called “The Poetics of Intermediality,” which studies cultural impacts of new media through the lens of twentieth-century vanguard poetics. 32 Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism in its affectivity, that is, in its ability to produce and organize structures of desire.”4 Here we confront a very different aspect of music’s communicative force, one that cannot be explained the usual way via theories of linguistic meaning (semantics), signification (semiotics), or symbolism (hermeneutics). In its appeal to supplemental dimensions of melody and rhythm—those two intensely affective qualities that make it such a visceral medium—popular music signifies in a more complex way than language alone does. The songs Wasserstein chooses not only telegraph information which the audience can use to make sense of the drama, but also provide somatic links to a wellspring of involuntary affect, Proustian madeleines evoking worlds of experience and feeling. This strange brew of information and affect creeps into the play, flowing through the mise en scène in an evanescent but very powerful way, providing us with a form of exposition that informs and moves us at the same time. An analysis of Wasserstein’s use of music in the play necessarily takes us out of the semantic/semiotic/hermeneutic fold, and the strictly textual field presupposed by literary studies methodology, into a sphere that is characterized by what I will call “intermediality”: that zone of contact where the expressive resources of one medium meet those of another to form a hybrid. Plays are by definition intermedial works because they function as a hybrid of text and performance. Wasserstein takes the de facto intermediality of theatre...