Theatre in Crisis? Performance Manifestos for a New Century ed. by Maria M. Delgado and Caridad Svich (review)

Reviews women, clueless about the true complexities of race, class, ethnic and religious background, and gender. Instead, Jackson is respectful of the depth of commitment and humility required of these Progressive Era women to live (borrowing from Bourdieu) as "fish out of water," to learn as much from immigrant neighbors as they taught them, and to fail with some endeavors, like the Public Kitchen, as spectacularly as they succeeded with others, like the oft-cited legislative and policy reforms in areas such as child labor, occupational safety, and public health. As her chapter titles indicate, Jackson fleshes out many of Hull-House's everyday practices that have not been fully explored in traditional histories, which have measured the success of HullHouse in terms of legislation passed and national or local social service institutions generated. Jackson's performance historiography allows her to interweave a variety of nineteenth-century and contemporary theories and gives the experience of "settling" much of the complexity that it must have had for Addams. If there is a drawback to this approach, it is in the difficulty of sustaining a focused argument about such a multifaceted institution as HuJlHouse , or of "seeing the forest for the trees." Jackson gives fascinating, complex readings of many "trees" in the Hull-House "forest," which assuredly complicate our understanding of the institution of Hull-House but do not leave us with much sense of narrative satisfaction or closure. This ending is consistent with her approach to the practice of history as performance; it invites us to pen the next line in the dialogue of performance historiography. MARIA M. DELGADO and CAR lOAD SV ICH, eds. Theatre in Crisis? Peljormallce Mantfestos for a New Century. Theatre: Theory Practice Performance Series. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002. Pp. xii + 273. US$74.95 (Hb); US$27.95 (Pb). Reviewed by Sean Carney, McGill University In his contribution to Theatre ;n Crisis? Peliormance Mam!estos for a New Century, Paul Heritage remarks, "[ lJt is in the 'failures' as much as in the successes that performance truly reveals its promise" (179). This contradictory, hopeful comment is representative of much of the logic of this remarkable volume, edited by Maria M. Delgado and Caridad Svich, for Manchester University Press's Theatre: Theory Practice Peliormallce series. Like eartier contributions to the series, Theatre in Crisis? stages a dialogue among critics, academics, and theatre practitioners. The result is thirty-three pieces from forty contributors and the editors, pieces that speak across several national horizons, between generations, and from within and without the academy. The sweep of the collection is not global, but it is international. Boundary crossing of all kinds is an avowed theme here. Heritage, for example, teaches REVIEWS at the University of LonQon but writes movingly of performing Shakespeare with juvenile offenders in a Brazilian reform institution. In exploring the question of "Whither Theatre?" in the twenty-first century, a major argument of the book is that the future of theatre may lie in the hybrid figure of the artist academic. How will the ephemeral substance of theatre remain culturally alive? Ann Furst suggests that "we practitioners who work in academia are a kind of walking race-memory. We can operate as live storytellers, translating academe into lived experience, the jargon .of critical theory into that of the rehearsal room" (69). She also points out "that whilst subsidy for the arts has been radically cut [in the last[ thirty years [... [ conversely scholarly interest in performance in its widest sense has grown and opportunities for study and training at tertiary level along with it" (65). As the title of the book hints, the idea of "crisis" is thoroughly interrogated in these pages and dialectically infused with a kind of pragmatic hope. The four sections of the book group the essays in the form of a rough narrative : we move from "Crisis as Practice: Strategies. Concepts and Working Decisions." in which the state of theatre is surveyed and the possibilities inherent in crisis advanced, to "Theatre and Identity: Negotiating Doubt and Passion," where 0.0. Kugler and Len Berkman suggest that a new theatre should demystify the process of rehearsal for audiences and provide the opportunity to witness the...