David Savran

Toward a Historiography of the Popular

The greatest challenge that theatre scholars face today—as we watch the seemingly inexorable march of U.S. imperialism and capitalist globalization— is to remember, to historicize rigorously and resourcefully, to render events (in Brechts words) “remarkable,” to “expose the worlds mechanism on a grand scale and to copy it in such a way that it would be more easily serviced.” When we practice a mimeticism that keeps “impermanence always before our eyes, . . . our own period can be seen to be impermanent too.” We must remember in order to be able to demystify the pieties disseminated by our politicians, pundits, and journalists who so blithely disregard the brutalities and deceptions that structure the histories they glibly rewrite that one would think they sprinkled water from the River Lethe on their Cheerios every morning. For remembering, as Pierre Bourdieu points out, represents a reconstruction not only of the past but also of the dynamics of disavowal and forgetting. To historicize means to “reconstruct the history of the historical labour of dehistoricization [italics in original quote].” This reconstructive labor seems all the more urgent during a period when theatre scholars (who have long been considered more or less irrelevant within the humanities) must face the increasing corporatization of the universities for which we work, the continuing intellectual paralysis of the Left, the relentless commercialization and retrenchment of American theatre (for better or worse), and the rise of a discipline, performance studies, that is challenging, reinvigorating, and partially displacing theatre studies.

The Death of the Avantgarde

Despite the disappearance of the historical avantgarde before WWII, both scholars and the popular press are reluctant to relinquish the belief in a radical, American, theatrical avantgarde. No other artists epitomize this avantgarde more than the Wooster Group, which, in its 30 years of work, has gradually become recognized as the emblematic avantgarde company. But was the avantgarde that developed in the 1970s ever really an avantgarde at all?

Trafficking in Transnational Brands: The New “Broadway-Style” Musical

In a theatre world increasingly dominated by multinational corporations, in which brand-name companies make the rounds of international festivals and multilingual performances are bankrolled by consortia of state-supported theatres, the national identity of theatrical productions is becoming more and more difficult to decide. This identity crisis is especially pronounced in the case of the one theatre form that for generations has been associated with a single New York thoroughfare that for people around the world symbolizes singing and dancing, glamor and dazzle. The form to which Broadway is categorically linked, the Broadway musical, may have circumnavigated the globe countless times, but a national and municipal identity remains embedded in its name. In the twenty-first century, however, this jet-setting genre needs to be analyzed less from a national or international perspective than a transnational perspective that emphasizes interconnectedness and the cross-border fluidity of cultures and species of capital. Shows such as The Lion King and Wicked may have premiered in New York, but their continuing multibillion-dollar success in cities on six continents suggests that the traffic in the most popular form of theatre in the world can no longer be linked to one metropolis or one national tradition.

The Search for America's Soul: Theatre in the Jazz Age

During the 1920s jazz was by far the most important and controversial form of cultural production in the United States. It was also decisive in separating an emergent literary theatre, which disdained jazz for its alleged social and moral depravity, and musical comedy and vaudeville, which not only embraced jazz but became crucial arenas for its development and dissemination. By analyzing early Gershwin musicals, this essay argues that musical comedy, by ingeniously mixing highbrow and lowbrow, became a privileged site in which the debates about the social, cultural, racial, and ethnic status of jazz were both thematized and enacted.

Professing Performance: Theatre in the Academy from Philology to Performativity. Shannon Jackson.

In Professing Performance, Shannon Jackson provides a genealogy of performance as a disciplinary formation—beginning with George Pierce Baker’s introduction of drama and theatre studies at Harvard 100 years ago. Yet the narrative she weaves is by no means continuous or univocal. On the contrary, she carefully analyzes the many and contradictory epistemologies and institutions that have produced (and been produced by) the capacious field known as performance studies. For Jackson, crucially, performance and performance studies are not set in opposition to theatre, because she sees the latter as an instance of performance (comparable, for example, to the status of linguistics within the more comprehensive field of semiotics). In her view, performance studies and theatre must be understood within “a shared, if internally discontinuous, institutional history” (11). Although Jackson cites Foucault to theorize her genealogical approach, she is, to her credit, an unfaithful disciple. More willing than Foucault to recognize the deterministic force of institutions in the construction of epistemological formations, Jackson rigorously attends to and analyzes the material conditions that produce performance paradigms and practices.

The Theater of Tony Kushner: Living Past Hope. By James Fisher. New York: Routledge, 2001; pp. 274 + illus.

An avalanche of single-author studies has appeared as a result of the expansion of the American university system since the 1960s, the growth of the “theory” industry, the triumph of the specialist and decline of the generalist, the proliferation of small academic presses, and the increasing pressure on professors (even in many small colleges) to publish. These monographs function, as a rule, as part teaching aid, part research tool, and part undergraduate crib sheet. The best-known series of these monographs is probably the Twayne (U.S., English, World) Authors Series, which started in the late 1950s and now includes over 150 authors deemed securely canonical. Routledge’s Studies in Modern Drama is a more modest effort (the front matter of James Fisher’s The Theater of Tony Kushner lists only ten other titles, mostly monographs). Fisher’s comprehensive volume is very much in the Twayne tradition, providing a brief biography of the author, a dash of historical background, a study of the author’s works, a production history, and an extensive bibliography, all rendered in a style accessible to specialist and nonspecialist alike.