To Act, To Do, To Perform: Drama and the Phenomenology of Action (Theater: Theory Text Performance)

168 Pages·1994·15.9 MB·English

by  Alice Rayner

To Act, To Do, To Perform
THEATER: Theory/Text/Performance
Enoch Brater, Series Editor
University of Michigan
Around the Absurd: Essays on Modern and Postmodern Drama edited by Enoch Brater and Ruby Cohn
Tom Stoppard and the Craft of Comedy: Medium and Genre at Play by Katherine E. Kelly
Performing Drama/Dramatizing Performance: Alternative Theater and the Dramatic Text
by Michael Vanden Heuvel
The Plot of the Future: Utopia and Dystopia in Modern Drama by Dragan Klaic
Shaw's Daughters: Dramatic and Narrative Constructions of Gender by J. Ellen Gainor
Tragicomedy and Contemporary Culture: Play and Performance from Beckett to Shepard by John Orr
How Dramas End: Essays on the German Sturm und Drang, Biichner, Hauptmann, and Fleisser
by Henry J. Schmidt
Critical Theory and Performance edited by Janelle G. Reinelt and Joseph R. Roach
The Actor's Instrument: Body, Theory, Stage by Hollis Huston
Acting as Reading: The Place of the Reading Process in the Actor's Work by David Cole
Presence and Resistance: Postmodernism and Cultural Politics in Contemporary American Performance
by Philip Auslander
lonesco's Imperatives: The Politics of Culture by Rosette C. Lamont
The Theater of Michel Vinaver by David Bradby
Rereading Moli.re: Mise en Scene from Antoine to Vitez by Jim Carmody
O'Neill's Shakespeare by Normand Berlin
Postmodern Theatric(k)s: Monologue in Contemporary American Drama by Deborah R. Geis
The Player's Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting by Joseph R. Roach
Theater at the Margins: Text and Post-Structured Stage by Erik MacDonald
To Act, To Do, To Perform: Drama and the Phenomenology of Action by Alice Rayner
Tom Stoppard in Conversation edited by Paul Delaney
After Brecht: British Epic Theater by Janelle Reinelt
Directing Beckett by Lois Oppenheim
Susan Glaspell: Essays on Her Theater edited by Linda Ben-Zvi
The Theatrical Gamut: Notes for a Post-Beckettian Stage edited by Enoch Brater
Staging Place: The Geography of Modemrn Drama by Una Chaudhuri
The Aesthetics of Disturbance: Anti-Art in Avant-Garde Drama by David Graver
Toward a Theater of the Oppressed: The Dramaturgy ofJohn Arden byJaved Malick
To Act, To Do, To Perform
Drama and the Phenomenology of Action
ALICE RAYNER
Ann Arbor
THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN PiuRESS
Copyright © by the University of Michigan 1994
All rights reserved
Published in the United States of America by
The University of Michigan Press
Manufactured in the United States of America
@ Printed on acid-free paper
1997 1996 1995 4 3 2
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rayner, Alice.
To act, to do, to perform : drama and the phenomenology of action
/ Alice Rayner.
p. cm. - (Theater-theory/text/performance) Copyright© by the University of Michigan 1994
Includes bibliographical references (p. 157-61) and index.
ISBN 0-472-10537-X (alk. paper) All rights reserved
1. Drama. 2. Act (Philosophy) in literature. I. Title. Published in the United States of America by
II. Series.
The University of Michigan Press
PN1647.R39 1994
792'.01-dc20 94-3828 Manufactured in the United States of America
CIP
9 Printed on acid-free paper
1997 1996 1995 4 3 2
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rayner, Alice.
To act, to do, to perform : drama and the phenomenology of action
I Alice Rayner.
p. em.- (Theater-theory/text/performance)
Includes bibliographical references (p. 157-61) and index.
ISBN 0-472-10537-X (alk. paper)
1. Drama. 2. Act (Philosophy) in literature. I. Title.
II. Series.
PN1647.R39 1994
792'. 01-dc20 94-3828
CIP
I(HIG P ESS
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
Chapter 1. Gravedigger as Theorist 11
Chapter 2. To Act: "Did That Never Happen to You?" 41
Chapter 3. To Do: "I'll Do, I'll Do, and I'll Do" 59
Chapter 4. To Perform: "We Must Work!" 83
Chapter 5. How to Go about It 107
Notes 131
Bibliography 157
Index 163
Acknowledgments
There are many people who will see the effects of their help in this book, and
I cannot hope to give them sufficient thanks. Each one deserves a story apart.
It was Robert Cohen's production of Hamlet at the University of California,
Irvine and the student who played the gravedigger that set me to thinking
about a single line from the play and its implications for the whole. John
Gronbeck-Tedesco gave me great encouragement by publishing the essay
"Grammatic Action and the Art of Tautology" in Journal of Dramatic Theory
and Criticism, an essay that has expanded into two chapters here.
Responses from students at various stages have led me continually to
rethink and rework, and I am most grateful to Miranda Joseph and Lance
Miller for their insightful comments on early chapters; Miranda was good
enough to see the political implications in the abstract theory. Jarrett Walker
read an especially unwieldy draft and asked the pertinent questions that
helped to shape the whole. I am very lucky to have worked on related
dissertations with Zander Brietzke and David Saltz, whose work was so
pertinent to my own. Brietzke's "Nothing Is but What Is Not: Chekhovian
Drama and the Crisis of Representation" has thoroughly explored the artifice
of Chekhov's realism, an issue that I only touch upon in my chapter on
Chekhov. Saltz's "The Reality of the Theatre Event: Logical Foundations of
Dramatic Performance" rigorously examines the use of a game model of
action and places it in the context of aesthetics, with a similar aim of breaking
down false dichotomies in the concepts of action on the stage. David also
gave the manuscript a careful proofreading in a tight time schedule. I am
most grateful to them both and know they will see the fruits of our exchanges
here.
To Charles R. Lyons I owe special thanks for seeing my work through
a long process. He read this manuscript at various stages and gave me the
benefit of his tact and insight. His knack for seeing what it needed without
intruding upon the development of my own ideas has been a great gift.
The influence of Bert O. States will be clear to anyone who knows his
work, but he cannot be blamed for either the influence or the shortcomings
of the book. As a teacher, he gave me the happy sense of discovering ideas
independently when in fact they had been there long before, and I can't think
Viii
Acknowledgments
of a better way to learn what phenomenology might be. As a reader, he has
encouraged me to keep my theoretical excursions in perspective, the text in
view, and the voice my own. He has been an extraordinary mentor.
For pulling the manuscript out of virtual reality after hard-disk crash, I
owe thanks to Ron Davies in the Stanford Department of Drama. His com-
puter expertise is impressive, but his extraordinary good will and apparently
tireless care for making the manuscript presentable are incalculable. LeAnn
Fields, Executive Editor at the University of Michigan Press, has given me
support and encouragement for this project and I am extremely grateful for
her sustained efforts in seeing it through.
Finally, it is friends and relations who have given me the support to
complete this project. My sisters Jeanne and Betsy have encouraged me
throughout the long process. To Bill and Sue Rayner, Mike, Kristen, and
Kelly, I owe thanks for summer refuge at Lake Tahoe and long discussions
on the specific mysteries of procrastination and the uncanniness of change.
Jonathan Berkeley has helped me keep various distortions in perspective.
Tom Caldarola has given friendly readings and long-term support in the
bleaker moments. Lastly, my son, Eric Quandt, has been my model for the
solution to the theoretical problems I outline here. He continues to show me
grace in action.
Introduction
This book investigates the phenomenon of action. It began when I
tried to understand a line in Hamlet in which the clown identifies
three branches of an act: to act, to do, and to perform. Initially, the
line seemed to be a useful way of talking about the problem that
Hamlet was having all along: how to move from an idea of an act into
action and how to account for the change. At the same time, it was a
nice joke. The apparent analysis of an act into its parts was turned
into a useless tautology by the clown's logic. The combination of
analytic categories and tautology, however, gradually appeared as a
contradiction that became basic to my understanding of action itself.
For if the terms act, do, and perform are truly self-defining, why have
different words? What do those differences identify if those words
are virtually interchangeable? In discussing one term, the others al-
most necessarily come into play so that even while trying to draw
conceptual differences and to anatomize action into constituent parts,
I found it difficult to sustain their differences except in the most
theoretical way. Practical action, in other words, is conceptually di-
visible but in pragmatic terms would appear to be one thing that,
precisely because it is practical, marks the difference between mental
and material fields. The contradiction between the analytic division
and the self-defining terms suggested to me that within action there
may indeed be both a system of differences that keeps it open to
redescription and a tautological element that makes action a unitary,
self-representational system. It is a combination that finds its way
into the theater.
In pursuing the line from Hamlet, I realized, furthermore, that I
was taking this understanding from the action I saw taking place in
grammar and began to consider how grammar might be a place
where the problems of action were lurking. Since the project itself
came from a play obsessed by the problem of action, I wondered
2 To Act, To Do, To Perform
whether that grammatical field had any relation to the dramatic one
and decided to use the grammatic as an entry to the dramatic. As I
saw the simultaneous openness and closure of action as the combina-
tion of discursive, material, and performative dimensions, I consid-
ered how the representation of the problem in Hamlet (and the other
plays where the difficulties are represented) might be used to identify
the dismantling of action in a performative present, when a represen-
tation or discursive structure approaches the purely performative or
tautological dimension. That is, could the problems that certain dra-
matic characters have in relation to action illuminate action's appear-
ance over and against its own absence and demonstrate its dissolution
in the very moment of performance? How does the representation
of such a problem in a character like Hamlet intersect with or identify
the apparent contradictions in the relation of text to performance, or
drama to theater?
The first task was to identify the problem. What eventually be-
came clear is that one problem is the word itself. The term action may
apply on the one hand to virtually anything that moves and on the
other hand to a conceptual frame that expressly limits what counts
as action. A full sense of action, then, would need to take the vari-
ations in usage into account. In its limited sense the idea of action is
predicated on the volition of an intending subject, distinguishing an
act from mere motion or from accidental, involuntary, or nonhuman
events. This narrow definition, common to law and philosophy but
identified similarly from Aristotle to Lacan as a structure of inten-
tion,1 has a number of consequences, one of which is to make an act
a construction of language in which an act is identical to the articula-
tion or name: hence it is a self-representation, conditioned by the
position and ideology of a speaker of the word. Action is a language
problem. When, for example, one responds to the question "What
are you doing?" the answer "I'm taking out the garbage" identifies
the act but does not include either all the particularities and contexts
involved or all the other possible designations of the act, such as "I'm
cleaning up your mess." On the other hand, more general sense of
action can refer to anything that moves, like the action of a motor or
a watch, suggesting a purely physical dimension. In some contexts,
the word action distinguishes the sense of actuality from mere ideas,
separating the sense of "really" doing something from just thinking
about it. Here, action is a motion problem. It operates like a differen-
Introduction 3
tial between the mental and the physical. But thinking and speaking
can be actions. The problems become even more complex as the idea
of action implicates questions of volition, the position of a subject in
action, the intersection of speaking and doing.
Reductive methods relating to philosophy and law have had con-
sequences in the history of dramatic literature and criticism, where
it is customary to see a radical separation between text and perfor-
mance, between the conceptual and the actual, and between the
relatively permanent written artifact and the transient theatrical en-
actment. These divisions have interests in common with the methods
of philosophy and law. They similarly limit the definition and con-
ceptual framework for regarding action in order to categorize and
judge. Analytic philosophy in particular seeks to determine the mini-
mal number of elements that comprise a basic action, in order to
identify its essential characteristics and structure. The law of the
court as well as the culture needs a similar reduction of action to its
intentional features because legal and social consequences depend
upon identifying the voluntary, motivational intent of an agent, as
distinct from circumstances beyond the control of the agent. The
separation between thinking and doing, and analogously between
mind and body or text and performance, persists.
In this book I want to expand rather than reduce the concept of
action and to indicate what Gilbert Ryle might call its "thickness."
But that thick description will be in the form of a scheme taken from
the gravedigger's speech. This will necessarily include discussion of
the elements of intention, as well as the act of framing an act, but in
addition to intention as a distinguishing feature, I want to propose a
way of conceptualizing action that includes those features occurring
in practice, which modify the idea that an agent or subject exists prior
to or behind its action. The project involves a reversal of the conven-
tional Aristotelian idea that drama is the medium of action. Instead,
I want to consider action itself as a medium with its own conflicting
tendencies and to examine those conflicts and contradictions. Action,
in other words, is the field that lends its discursive, material, and
social characteristics to the context of theater. The discussion will
not, therefore, describe performances in particular, theatrical prac-
tices, or actual events as they occur on the stage but will include an
idea of performance as one dimension of action itself.
Initially this means outlining how the distinctiveness of action