Modern Drama: Defining the Field ed. by Ric Knowles, Joanne Tompkins, W. B. Worthen (review)

Ric Knowles, Joanne Tompkins and W . B. Worthen, eds. Modern Drama: Defining the Field. Toronto: University o f Toronto Press, 2003. $27.95". The twelve essays in this book, all previously published in two issues of the journal Modem Drama, represent the proceedings of the “Modern: Drama” conference held at the University of Toronto in May 2000. Organized “with the express purpose of interrogating the terms ‘modern’ and ‘drama,’ and of initiating the process of (re) ‘defining the field,”’ the conference sprang from newly appointed editor Ric Knowles’ desire to re-examine the titular terms of Modern Drama in light of the significant shifts in critical discourse, methodology, and attitudes towards canonization that have occurred since its founding in 1958. The fragmentation and deconstruction of modernity and of drama itself, once assumed to be stable, transparent, and culturally neutral concepts, have largely drained the terms of their meaning and authority. If what was once Renaissance is now Early Modern, how can the era from 1850 to the present be “modern”— especially if the present is post-modern? Moreover, Knowles asserts, changing scholarly perspectives have taken us a long way from drama, which some time ago came to be seen as “the somewhat quaint residue” of theatre. In turn “the concept of ‘theatre’ itself” has come “under attack by scholars ... as the reposi­ tory of cultural reproduction— the reinforcement of currently dominant and oppressive social structures and naturalized ‘realities.’” Thus theatre studies, having lost its innocence, gives way to cultural and performance studies, and the very notion of “modern drama” begins to seem naive, if not reactionary. The impressive international roster of invited essayists, somewhat heavily weighted with Americans, had broad latitude to interrogate the terms and redefine the field, so the essays range widely in their approaches and conclusions (as well as their readability and usefulness). Even in the absence of anything like a consensus regarding definitions or limitations, certain through-lines do appear. And numerous mainstays of the dra­ matic modern pretty much disappear— Ibsen, Chekhov, Shaw, O ’Neill and Glaspell, Williams and Miller seem to have gone the way of Hauptmann, Meyerhold and Maeterlinck. Beckett barely gets a mention. Strindberg has a walk-on in Elin Diamond’s provocative take on dramatizations of modernity, in which Aphra Behn gets top billing as a playwright whose comedic strategies comprise “a refusal of modernity’s historical mandate.” O f the formerly canonical, only Brecht remains seriously in play in this conversation. And his fate is put into focus by Sue-Ellen Case, who valoBook Reviews | 187 rizes Mme Blavatsky’s “performances” of occultism as avatars of internet art, anticipating the work of “cyborg sha(wo)man” Karen Wendy Gilbert, while poor Brecht’s “performance theories suit a consideration of a now dated modern drama.” Among the book’s most popular recurring tropes is dis/embodiment— the physical body in its various manifestations and absences on the mod­ ern stage. Stanton B. Garner, Jr. argues rather abstractly for the centrality of Zola’s theories of the medicalized body in the development of natu­ ralism. Josephine Lee systematically recuperates the racially fetishized body in the theatrical context of African-American cultural nationalism. And in one of those juxtapositions of the ludicrous and the sublime that sometimes make contemporary scholarship so wildly entertaining, Loren Kruger explores notions of embodiment and sensation from the theories of Hegel to the “ordeal art” of Ron Athey, whose The Solar Anus concludes with the performer “insert[ing] dildo-shaped high-heels into his own anus,” to the strategies of puppetry used to dramatize apartheid-era torture in Ubu and the Truth Commission. The threat of bodily pain is only the most extreme generator of the condition most endemic to modernity in these essays: anxiety. The modern age and its theatre, however defined, appear unbearably anxious about race, gender, class, history, coloniality, time, and much else. Garner even attributes to “the modern” a self-conscious anxiety of its own: “an anxiety of legitimation, a fear that the values and goals by which it grounds itself may not prove adequate.” David Savran accounts for what he calls “the ghost plays” of both the European 1890s and the American 1990s...