Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality and Drama (review)

At last, we can welcome a defense of the theater against both its most passionate enemies and its most ardent lovers. After this study, a lot of polemic energy spent in debate between pro-theatricalists and anti-theatricalists, between adherents of modernism and those of the avant-garde, can be spared. The fault lines between solipsistic and elitist modernism on the one side, and a collaborative and political avant-garde on the other, must be drawn anew. As Puchner brilliantly demonstrates, the radical difference must be thought, first and foremost, along the parameters of anti-theatrical modernism versus the theatrical avant-garde. Whether it is in the case of Mallarmé, Joyce, Stein, Yeats, Beckett or Brecht, the boundaries between anti-theatricality and the theatricality of the avant-garde remain permeable. While the modernist closet drama, for example, maintains its own mode of political intervention, its own communities and utopian hopes, the avant-garde used the theater not out of mere love for the theater itself but in order to "attack modernism's most central values" (11). Their relationship is thus much more than a simple opposition; theatricalism and its modernist rejection are profoundly dependent upon each other.

After Puchner's shrewd readings of key closet dramas by modernist dramatists, the contours of an "anti-theatrical theater" or a "theater without theatricality" become suddenly more than a theoretical construct without life support. The shape of the anti-theatrical closet drama proves to be finely-honed and filled with flesh and bones. Theater studies and literary criticism will now have to deal with this distinct creature that destroys their dearly-held separations and dichotomies. Closet dramas must be understood as the future of theater.

To be sure, books are not theater and the theater is not a book, but through the genre of the modernist closet drama it is possible to study each other's potentials, limitations and cross-overs. The fusion of genres and art forms in the closet drama turns into a resounding appeal to both theater studies and literary criticism. Puchner's study superbly subverts the false alternative that has haunted the fields of theater studies and literary criticism from their inceptions: either to defy the authority of text and writing as foreign to the dynamics of the stage or to purge the book from the contamination of the actual theater. Rather than devoting its zeal to liberating theatrical performance from the authority of the dramatic text, or to yet another bashing of Michael Fried, theater studies would be better advised to learn from the profound anti-theatrical thrust of modernism. And rather than constantly containing the theater within the category of an "écriture générale" or text, literary criticism and semiotics would be better-off acknowledging the thoroughly different boundaries of literature and the theater. The solitary act of reading cannot be superimposed on the structures of watching a play; neither can the much-celebrated metaphor of "theatricality" (gesture, performance, act) in literary theory be simply abstracted from actual theater practice.

Curiously enough, Puchner compellingly argues that the more the armies of anti-theatricalists flex their muscles against the actual theater, the more creative sparks are released for fundamental innovation. "[M]odernist anti-theatricalism does not remain external to the theater but instead becomes a productive force responsible for the theater's most glorious achivements." (13) We owe the most radical reforms and revolutions in the history of the theater to the staunchest anti-theatricalists, from Mallarmé to Brecht and Beckett. In the midst of anti-theatricality occurs the resurrection of a new theater. This understanding of the modernist closet drama as the pioneering motor of contemporary theater is far more than a simple dialectical two-step. The simultaneous resistance of the modernist closet drama to and dependence upon the theater creates a peculiar hybrid of text-theater or book-stage whose rules, norms and regulations...