Acts of Poetry: American Poets' Theater and The Politics of Performance by Heidi R. Bean (review)

Acts of Poetry: American Poets' Theater and the Politics of Performance begins with the twinned observations that many major twentieth-century poets were also, surprisingly, dramatists—and that the aesthetic and ethical innovations of some of the century's most adventurous playwrights appear to stem from poetic traditions. At the heart of Heidi Bean's valuable study lie the following questions: "In what ways had the stage furthered the aims of twentieth-century poetry, and in what ways had poetry furthered the aims of twentieth-century theater?" (2).

Bean argues that critical blind spots have thus far prevented either poetry or theatre criticism from making full account of the messy, dynamic art form that goes, in this book, by the name of "poets' theatre." This is in part because the category of poets' theatre remains something of a moving target: "dispersed across scholarly disciplines and artistic eras," she explains, "poets' theater has remained largely invisible even as it can barely be contained" (7). Drawing on scholars such as W. B. Worthen, Sarah Bay-Cheng, Barbara Cole, and Martin Puchner, Bean distinguishes postwar poets' theatre from earlier verse dramas by its striking influences: from the anti-theatricality (and anti-realism) of modernism, on the one hand, to the pro-theatricality of the avant-garde, on the other. Acts of Poetry reveals how the resulting artistic work used "language thickened by … poets' sense of sound, rhythm, and layers of meaning" to thoroughly reconceive of theatre's and poetry's relation to their audiences (10).

As Bean shows, postwar poets' theatres aimed to activate theatrical audiences they saw as typically "complicit in and subject to the representations and politics they were being presented" by embracing techniques like direct address and by joyfully muddying the distinction between onstage and off (24). These institutions likewise sought to disrupt the auratic presence heralded at popular university lectures and public readings by celebrity poets (for example, Gertrude Stein and Dylan Thomas, respectively). In the absence of an always clear connection between political commitments and aesthetic choices, these theatres' dedication to "prodding, critiquing, training, and satirizing the audience" represents their most urgent agenda (9)—one strongly motivated by theories of social performance gaining traction across disciplines at the same time.

Acts of Poetry's first chapter lays the groundwork for a persuasive subclaim that Stein, historical predecessor to the book's main actors, inspired poets' theatres not only through her singular deployment of language, but by presaging their investment in performativity's complexity. In the next three chapters, Bean turns to the postwar era, using thick description to convey how dramaturgical features of playscripts and productions were intended to motivate active reflection by audiences. The book's second chapter chronicles the producorial adventures and literary commitments of the boisterous young Poets' Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts; it also telescopes the valorization of "low culture" art forms by artists who called themselves anti-establishment even as they depended on the resources of major "high culture" institutions. The third chapter repositions the famously antitextual work of Julian Beck and Judith Malina's New York City–based Living Theatre on a new continuum with the literary origins of poets' theatre. Here, Bean highlights strategies for audience activation, ranging from onstage musical improvisation to open-ended interactions between performers and spectators. The fourth chapter, on Amiri Baraka's Black nationalist theatre and the touring production of his play Home on the Range, takes up some of poets' theatre's most coherently politicized approaches to audiences—approaches in this case aimed at co-creating, with spectators, new conditions for Black life. For Bean, the significant challenges of "using poetic multivocality to stake a clear critical claim" are signaled by what she characterizes as the play's critical and dramaturgical failures (124). (While she does not shy from addressing flops in her chapters on the Poets' Theatre or the Living Theatre, the fourth chapter's thematic construction around these so-called...