The Antitheatrical Prejudice by Jonas Barish (review)

we picked a play by an Asian-American, one by a black, two by women, a major new translation, a daringly experimental performance piece, a documentary about the aftermath of Viet Nam and a hyperreal family drama." No need to apologize; the diversity is a strong point. The only thing missing here is a wild card. Most of the plays come from well established theatres and theatre institutions such as the New York Shakespeare Festival, Yale Repertory Theatre, and the American Place Theatre. A play and a place we haven't heard of, or a play excoriated or ignored by critics would have given New Plays USA more vitality, sort of like adding an ornery chromosome to an inbred gene pool. MS The AntitheatricalPrejudice. Jonas Barish. Univ. of California Press, 510 pp., $24.50 (cloth). This hefty volume of over 500 densely-packed pages covers the vast and prolific attacks on the art of the theatre from Plato to our present day. Barish does not so much set out to understand why theatre art (preeminently the art of dissimulation, a sheer artifice carried out by practitioners licensed to fulfill fictive destinies) suffers from the low standing it has among divers arts. He leaves such comprehension to sociologists, psychologists, and culture-watchers. But what he does do is to stake out brilliantly the territory shrewn with acerbic comments by fanatical minds out to rid society of the evils of theatrical imagination. While the book treads familiar ground with philosophers such as Plato, St. Augustine, Tertullian , Rousseau, and Nietzsche, who all wrote attacks on the mimetic aspect of drama (either by placing its ills squarely in the middle of a philosophico-socio-political matrix in crisis or by blatantly suggesting that the representational component of theatre is an attribute of Lucifer himself out to defy that singular manifestation of God-as-sole-Creator), it does so by placing these landmark writings in the ongoing treacherous continuum of aspersions cast on an art form that had (and continues to have) undeniable popularilty. While a large segment of the book deals with the obsessive, maniacal rantings of that antitheatrical preacher of the seventeenth century, William Pyrnne, Barish also includes many lesser known figures of this artistic crusade-the medieval Lollard preacher, La Rochefoucauld, Jeremy Collier, Stubbes, and even from our century the academician-critic Yvor Winters. The twists and turns of their logic is particularly fascinating as each writer, given the cultural prejudices of the time, deftly subverts existing beliefs to justify their dislike of the theatrical arts. Barish is to be complimented for the ease and clarity with which he outlines in depth the subtle differences among the various proponents of antitheatricalism, although he is at a loss to fully grasp the attitudes of an antitheatrical writer as opposed to one who merely sees himself frustrated by the forms and structures of established dramatic tradition. He is particularly good with the medieval and Elizabethan age (Barish is the author of a major and reputable study of 119 Ben Jonson), but when it comes to dealing with modern authors such as Chekhov, Shaw, Handke (even the Living Theatre and Robert Wilson), he flounders embarrassingly. At best, he is partially right (and only insofar as these playwright/directors did attack age-old definitions of drama and theatre), although all innovative artists have held as their credo the urge to establish new forms for new ages. Barish obviously sets out with a foolproof definition of what falls within the rubric of dramatic and theatrical art, a trap that leads him to seeing an antitheatrical bias in all radical forms of theatre practice. Barish is also guilty of certain surprising choices, foremost among them his reliance on Leo Bersani's inadequate book, A Future for Astyanax, when he is writing on the modern theatre. Another glaring omission for this book, which deals conspicuously with a mimetic art form, is Auerbach's revealing study, Mimesis. Despite such qualms (which are better dealt with in an essay format that this book undoubtedly demands), The Antitheatrical Prejudice is essential reading for all who see the theatre as their vocation. Its at times heavyhanded approach may ward off many from staying...