Microdramas: Crucibles for Theater and Time by John H. Muse (review)

It is tempting to think of modernity as an age of gigantism, of not only skyscrapers, steelyards, and world wars, but also the Ring cycle, Mahler's Symphony no. 3, and In Search of Lost Time. And yet it was also, and not so incidentally, an age of the miniscule, of not only viruses, atoms, and telegraphic speech, but also Satie's Gymnopédies, Pound's "In the Station of the Metro," and the tales of Kafka and Musil. John Muse's Microdramas: Crucibles for Theater and Time is a study of theatrical reduction—more specifically, of modern plays clocking in at less than twenty minutes. Muse demonstrates that this wide terrain, which includes works by Strindberg, Maeterlinck, Marinetti, Beckett, Parks, and Churchill, constitutes, if not a subgenre, then at least an important lineage of theatrical form.

The book's historical argument begins in chapter 2, which focuses on that famous yin-yang of fin-desiècle aesthetics, naturalism, and symbolism. While the former drew inspiration from faits-divers (the quick news items that peppered French tabloids) to construct fifteen-minute microdramas on workaday sensations, the latter offered the gauzy lyricism of gnomic dreams. And yet Muse shows how, despite their obvious differences, these two movements actually shared significant common ground—not only in the sense that they both rebelled against the grandeur of so much nineteenth-century culture, but also, and more subtly, in the sense that both experimented with ways to thicken dramatic structure by compacting it into a "small but cohesive block of time, a singular moment, redefined as a dramatic whole" (50). In the last decade or so of the nineteenth century, this strategy of compression was aided by technological developments such as the adoption of controlled electric lighting, which enabled theatre artists to spotlight and thereby intensify the world of the stage.

This strategy of temporal compression set the stage for the Futurists, who wrote and performed hundreds of microdramas (some as short as a few lines) that are the focus of chapter 3. While Marinetti and company argued for the microdrama as a way of intensifying the entire theatrical event to a single moment of explosion, in fact, as Muse demonstrates, Futurists' performances often exhibited greater ambiguity than was dreamt of in their philosophy. The chapter culminates in a brilliant analysis of Francesco Cangiullo's Detonation and Lights!, the former of which is perhaps the most "micro" microdrama ever written, consisting of a single place ("Road at night, cold, deserted"), a single character (a bullet), and a single action (a minute of silence followed by a gunshot). Muse unpacks this atom of a play to demonstrate, convincingly, that it "stands at a crossroads in the history of dramatic form" (82). Marking the endpoint and reductio ad absurdum of Aristotle's unity of action on one hand, it points toward the all-but-deserted "Country Road" of Godot on the other.

In chapter 4, Muse takes up the necessary question of Beckett, whose attempts to escape the gravitational pull of Joyce and Proust recall Maeterlinck's earlier attempts to slip free of Wagner and Tolstoy. One of the many astute insights of this chapter is the revealing connection Muse draws between Beckett and the pre-Socratics, whose fragmentary writings inspired Beckett to question, through his microdramas, "the logic by which small parts or small moments ever become wholes" (119). As so often in this book, Muse is sharply attuned to unintended ironies. He argues, for example, that Beckett's turn to increasing compression was in part motivated by a desire for increased order and control, and yet this led him to a form that "ultimately revealed the instability of theater, space, and time" (97). Concluding with a close reading of Beckett's often overlooked one-acter, That Time, Muse shows how Beckett's atomization of action serves less to clarify "the logic by which a succession of instants coheres into an event" (18...