Acts: Theater, Philosophy, and the Performing Self by Tzachi Zamir (review)

One of many recent works examining the frontier between performance and philosophy, Tzachi Zamir’s Acts: Theater, Philosophy, and the Performing Self offers an expansive philosophical treatment of acting that moves through the domains of traditional dramatic theatre (predominately contemporary imaginings of Shakespeare) to the realm of everyday life (e.g., the visceral performances of anorectics and masochists). While this treatment lacks a substantive historical dimension, it accomplishes a great feat in its assembly of source materials. To demonstrate the expansive scope of the book, here’s a list of keywords and subject titles that readers moving from cover to cover will discover: Shakespeare, John Gielgud, Kenneth Branagh, embodying fictions, becoming-object, Pinocchio, Winnie the Pooh, Pygmalion, Sisyphus, ethics, Jenna Jameson, Linda “Lovelace” Marchiano, The Ultimate Guide to Anal Sex, Social Role-playing, masochism, anorexia.

What allows Zamir to gather such an array of materials between the covers of one book-length study? In terms of structure, the study holds together quite easily. The volume has four parts: Life on the Stage, Staging Fictions, Between Life and Stage, and Life as Stage. The titles for each part describe their content, which moves from text-based and classical European theatre to the extra-theatrical dramatization of literature more generally, and from there to situations in which actors’ biographies blur the line between art and life and, ultimately, to the open arena of daily life. To bridge each of these environments and modes of performance, Zamir develops a definition of acting that transgresses the tired inside-out/outside-in arguments rehearsed by advocates of Stanislavsky’s and Grotowski’s systems. This definition forwards acting as “existential amplification” (17). “Acting,” he argues, “is an aesthetically-controlled embodied imaginative transformation” (12). It is an “expansion of one’s sense of being alive” (17). That is, “Actors [...] amplify their own lives by imaginatively embodying alien existential possibilities” (18). This requires not only embodying new identities but also detaching from one’s own biographical identity: “An actor’s work into an alien role is, simultaneously, a migration from his biographical embodiment” (25). Indeed, the first sentence of the book states the scope of the entire study: “To reflect on acting is to rethink identity. It is to examine the playful withdrawal from established connections between self and embodied agency” (1).

Within this scope and astride this novel definition of acting, Zamir consistently implicates the spectator of such amplification so that all discussions of acting must also include a discussion of the audience. Thus, all discussions of acting carry with them an ethical dimension. In fact, another big claim in this book is that spectators — always active — participate in performance in order to watch the actors act and/or perform: “[B]y allowing itself to respond to an enacted fantasy, the audience accepts — not just intellectually but in what it itself performs — the ability to actualize possibilities that lie outside the limits of one’s identity” (48). The ethical dimension of such claims becomes clear when the reader casts herself into the role of a spectator encountering the performance of an anorectic seeking to let herself die by withholding nourishment or, more casually, consuming the spectacle of a porn star’s perceived sexual enjoyment.

To substantiate his claims and support his movement through such an eclectic collection of materials, Zamir consistently relies on first-person, autobiographical accounts of actors and other performers. In the first 50 pages of the book, for example, he excerpts passages from the autobiographies of John Gielgud, John Barrymore, Michael Gambon, Laurence Olivier, Marlon Brando, Kenneth Branagh, Simon Callow, and John Hurt. In the next 50 pages or so, however, he also relies on autobiographical accounts of the famous porn stars Joey Stefano, Wakefield Poole, Jenna Jameson, and Linda Marchiano, thereby perplexing any reader who might imagine that Zamir’s familiarity with performance is restricted to canonical dramatic fare. Zamir subjects all of his materials to the same level of philosophical...