Thinking Through Phenomena: Theatre Phenomenology in Theory and Practice

Phenomenology, a philosophical method founded by Edmund Husserl, brackets Kant’s things-in-themselves (noumena) in order to describe phenomena as they appear to human consciousness. Phenomenologists ask: How do we get behind our prefabricated concepts to what Husserl notoriously calls “the things themselves”?¹ Theatre also frees us from habitual perceptions and ontological presuppositions—what Husserl labels the “natural attitude.” And as Jacques Derrida and others have noted, something remarkably like Husserl’s famous phenomenological reduction (epochē) takes place in theatre when the houselights go down.² Struck by this consonance, between 1980 and the mid-’90s first-wave theatre phenomenologists pioneered a versatile alternative to semiotic, materialist, and poststructuralist criticism that illuminated such topics as role-playing onstage (Bruce Wilshire); settings and furniture in Chekhov (Bert O. States); dramatic action (Alice Rayner); and the visual field in Beckett’s late plays (Stanton B. Garner Jr.).³ Meanwhile Phillip Zarrilli launched his decades-long exploration of the intercultural phenomenology of acting.⁴

In the past decade or so, second-wave theatre phenomenology has flourished both within and alongside the emergent fields of performance philosophy and performance as research.⁵ Two strains, roughly speaking, have emerged. The first pursues generalizable truths about aesthetic experience and favors the methodology and/or aims of classical phenomenology, however contested (Paul Ricoeur wittily defines phenomenology as “the sum of Husserl’s work and the heresies issuing from it”).⁶ As Stuart Grant usefully frames this approach, “[p]henomenology claims access to a fundamental-transcendental level of cognition, perception, intersubjectivity and being which would apply to all humans.”⁷ Some thinkers ally with recent cognitive neuroscience, which promises to validate or at least complement phenomenological insights (thereby inverting Husserl’s original contention that science needs phenomenology, a science of sciences, to undergird its own shaky metaphysical assumptions).⁸

Classical phenomenology as a philosophical tradition suffers from a reputation for Teutonic obscurity, as well as from charges of white male essentialism and the denial of difference; that Heidegger became a Nazi who turned against his teacher Husserl did phenomenology’s reputation no favors. A second strain of contemporary theatre phenomenology privileges historically and/or culturally marginalized experiences, together with more personal modes of elucidation such as auto-ethnography and performative writing. Skeptical of transcultural human truths and transcendental perceptual structures, this camp overlaps with critical phenomenology: a broad movement that draws from feminist, critical race, disability, and queer and trans theories.⁹ In practice, many scholars have a foot in both camps; as far back as 2001, Garner observed that theatre phenomenology has been “a hybridized, dialogic investigation decidedly different from the ‘pure’ or transcendent phenomenology of its Husserlian origins.”¹⁰

The four books under consideration here span the full spectrum between hardline classicism and subjective experimentalism. Designed as an introductory textbook for theatre-makers, Daniel Johnston’s inviting and breezily written Theatre and Phenomenology: Manual Philosophy tends toward the latter, albeit placing its do-it-yourself pedagogical program within a traditionalist conceptual framework. Johnston takes up Heidegger’s investigation of what makes humans Dasein, creatures for whom Being occurs as a problem. For Johnston, phenomenology holds that “knowing is not the primary way in which humans experience the world” (103); freed from metaphysics, Heidegger’s “manual philosophy” (the phrase comes from Lucian of Samosata) returns us to things as we find them in the moment. As a practical philosophy, theatre exemplifies aletheia (truth) as process or Ereignis (“Event”): not a representation of some offstage world, but a process that brings Heideggerian Being itself into view. Phenomenology offers student actors (and others) curious about their own...