Beat Drama: Playwrights and Performances of the "Howl" Generation ed. by Deborah R. Geis (review)

Who, or what, was "Beat"? That's the underlying, perhaps ultimately unresolvable question at the heart of Deborah Geis's expansive, eye-opening collection of essays. It's a measure, perhaps, of this volume's refreshing inclusivity that its most compelling single description of Beat style appears in a quotation not from Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, or William S. Burroughs but from Diane di Prima, recognizing in the poetry of John Wieners "many of the effects that I was also at work on: the street language flowing so smoothly it seemed effortless, the almost-cliché shining and made new. A taut nervy lyricism that fooled you – it looked so easy" (264). The fact that di Prima and Wieners were also playwrights, and among the early contributors to New York's emerging (and distinctly street-level) off-off-Broadway movement at the turn of the 1960s, is indicative of the border territory between literature and theatre that this volume seeks to scope out.

Geis has assembled no less than twenty-four essays (two of them her own) ranging over a wide variety of artists and topics. Among these are quite a few that are not really about "drama" per se: as her subtitle indicates, the spirit of inclusivity extends across a broad spectrum of "performance," with essays analysing everything from poetry readings (notably Ginsberg's first performance of Howl in San Francisco in 1955) to Burroughs's notoriously misjudged "William Tell act" – the 1952 incident in which he shot and killed his wife, Joan Vollmer. (William Nesbitt's excellent essay on this vaudeville routine gone wrong presents it, also, as a traumatic event repeatedly re-rehearsed across Burroughs's subsequent oeuvre.) Even so, there's an irony in the fact that, in considering performance and performativity more broadly alongside playwriting, this volume occasionally veers into a weird anti-theatricality. Indeed, the very first essay, Tim Hunt's "Mediation and Immediacy: The I and You of Jack Kerouac's Theatre of Voice," argues that the improvisatory performativity of Kerouac's writing could not translate effectively to the stage (in his only play, Beat Generation), because there is a lack of "immediacy" about actors sticking to a script. An effective translation across media, Hunt suggests, would require "the incorporation of ensemble improvisation" (20) – that is, actors spontaneously making up their own words. This notion, echoed by others in this volume, suggests a very limited understanding of the actor's craft. It is also implicitly contradicted in the next essay, on performances of Ginsberg's poetry by other speakers. When we revocalize poems like Howl, argues John Whalen-Bridge, "[w]e become musicians of the phrases ourselves" (29).

It is one of the strengths of this book that its authors so often appear to be in open disagreement. Geis has, wisely, not attempted to frame or guide these various voices toward any consistent narrative. Yet her arrangement of the essays into five main sections implicitly re-entrenches some historically shaped attitudes that perhaps needed challenging. Part One, on "The 'Canonical' Beats," lines up Kerouac, Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Burroughs as primary figures for consideration, with Anne Waldman sneaking in at the end as the sole "canonical" woman. We then move into Part Two, on "The 'Afro-Beats.'" Given the undisputed importance of African-American culture to the emergence of Beat aesthetics, was it necessary to ghettoize Amiri Baraka, Ted Joans, Bob Kaufman, and Adrienne Kennedy in a section implicitly subsidiary to all those white folks? I found myself wishing for a more provocative chapter sequencing, as for example in Carl Lavery and Clare Finburgh's recent (2015) anthology, Rethinking the Theatre of the Absurd (for the same book series, Methuen Drama Engage), which begins with an essay not on Beckett or Ionesco but on Caryl Churchill.

The concluding Part Five of the book, "Film and Beat Performance," is mostly about various film versions of Kerouac...