The Theater of Transformation: Postmodernism in American Drama (Postmodern Studies 37)

231 Pages·2005·0.97 MB·English

by  Kerstin Schmidt

The Theater
of Transformation
Postmodern Studies 37
Series
edited by
Theo D’haen
and
Hans Bertens
The Theater
of Transformation
Postmodernism
in American Drama
Kerstin Schmidt
Amsterdam - New York, NY 2005
Cover photo:
Jay Pritzker Pavilion (designed by F. Gehry), detail, Chicago’s public
Millennium Park. Photo by Kerstin Schmidt.
The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO
9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents -
Requirements for permanence”.
ISBN: 90-420-1895-X
©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam – New York, NY 2005
Printed in The Netherlands
Contents
I Introduction: The Postmodern Condition of Drama 9
Postmodernism, an Assessment for the Theater 13
The Repoliticization of Postmodernism 22
Survey of Selected Secondary Studies 25
II Theorizing Dramatic Form: Aspects of Transformation in Postmodern
Drama 31
II.1 The Postmodern Sense of Self 44
II.2 The Dramatic Text, Performance, and Postmodern Authorship 53
II.3 Theatrical Space and Mediatized Culture 73
III Jean-Claude van Itallie: Mediatized Culture and the Postmodern Self 87
III.1 Transformative Selves in "Interview" 99
III.2 "TV": The Screen Takes Over 110
III.3 "Motel": Cyborgean Visions of American Motel Culture 115
IV Megan Terry and Rochelle Owens: Transformation and Postmodern
Feminism 129
IV.1 Megan Terry's Keep Tightly Closed in a Cool Dry Place:
Transforming the Prison House of the Self 138
IV.2 Emma Instigated Me: Rochelle Owens's Play "in the process of
becoming" 152
V Suzan-Lori Parks: "Rep & Rev" Postmodernism 173
V.1 Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom: "Histironical
Amendments" and the Third Space 181
V.2 The America Play: Playing America 198
VI Works Cited 213
VI.1 Primary Sources/Plays 213
VI.2 Secondary Sources 217
Acknowledgments
"The theater," says Thornton Wilder in "Some Thoughts on Play-
wrighting," "is an art which reposes upon the work of many collabora-
tors." This condition applies in many ways to a book about theater as
well. This book grew out of my own personal interest in both theater
and theory, but among the first collaborators on the project was my
dissertation advisor, Prof. Dr. Manfred Pütz, who, luckily for me,
shares both of these interests and whose insightful and critical com-
ments accompanied every stage of the project's development.
Such a book also travels a lot and is, in many ways, a transna-
tional, or at least a transatlantic endeavor. Its journey began as a dis-
sertation at the University of Freiburg's Institute for North American
Studies. A two-year research scholarship by the German Endowment
for the Humanities and the University of Freiburg ("Graduierten-
förderung") enabled me to devote my entire time to the project, undis-
turbed by the expediencies of making a living. Then the DAAD
(German Academic Exchange Service) helped me set sail across the
Atlantic in order to dig into the rich archives of the New York Public
Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, particularly the
excellent Billy Rose Theatre Collection, and the Schomburg Center
for Research in Black Culture. I would like to thank the staff of these
excellent research institutions for their invaluable support, their
friendliness, and professional expertise. As for New York City, I am
greatly indebted to my friend Sherry Kane who shares my passion for
theater and explored with me even the remotest theater locations and
vanguard projects. The present project also took many detours that,
though important, did not develop into actual chapters of the final
book. The superb collections of the W.E.B. DuBois library at the Uni-
versity of Massachusetts/Amherst are such a case in point, and I am
grateful to Ute Bargmann, librarian of special collections, whose un-
derstanding for the idiosyncrasies of academic writing and whose
unconventional ways let me discover a variety of material that will in
due time certainly turn into another book project.
I then accepted a position as assistant professor of English and
American Studies at the University of Bayreuth/Germany. The intel-
lectual, professional, and personal climate of the University's Faculty
of Languages and Literatures―and especially in our depart-
ment―provided a lively and stimulating environment where interdis-
ciplinary research is both discussed and actually carried out. I am par-
ticularly indebted to my Bayreuth students whose international
background and admirable curiosity provided a variety of often sur-
prising and refreshing viewpoints. Also, a wide range of German and
international guest speakers in our Colloquium of Literary and Cul-
tural Studies and in the international conference on concepts of space
in American culture triggered many ideas and helped create an intel-
lectually challenging and inspiring environment. In 2003 and 2004,
Prof. Patrick Miller (Northeastern Illinois University, Chicago) and
Fulbright Professors Tracey J. Boisseau (University of Akron) and
Kirk A. Hoppe (University of Illinois, Chicago) joined our faculty.
Their expertise, intellectual response, and enthusiasm saw me through
crucial stages of research and writing. A special note of gratitude goes
to Prof. Dr. Udo Hebel, chair of American Studies at the University of
Regensburg, for his untiring enthusiasm for the project, for his unfail-
ing belief in my work, and for opening up a public forum to discuss
my ideas.
I would very much like to thank my colleagues at Freiburg and
Bayreuth who soon became friends. I am particularly grateful to my
friend and colleague from English linguistics, Sandra Handl, for per-
fect proof-reading skills and for solving many conflict situations be-
tween footnotes and paragraphs late at nights. Also, I would like to
thank Dr. Norbert Oberauer from Islamic Studies for insisting on
proper lunch hours and coffee breaks, even in situations of utter tur-
moil and creative entropy. In more ways than one, I would like to
thank Prof. Dr. Klaus Benesch for sustaining and encouraging me,
particularly during the not-so-easy phases of academic life.
In its final stages, the book traveled once more to the United
States, when a generous scholarship from Indiana University/Bloom-
ington let me do the book's fine-tuning in their excellent libraries.
Finally, my gratitude goes to the editors of Rodopi's series on "Post-
modern Studies," Prof. Dr. Hans Bertens (Utrecht University) and
Prof. Dr. Theo D'Haen (Leuven University), and to Marieke Schilling
of Rodopi.
Perhaps most crucially, I am indebted to my family, Trude, Hans,
Karin, Ursel-Goth, Herta, Michael, Daphne and Noam for collaborat-
ing and traveling with me before, during, and after this project. It is to
them that I dedicate this book.
I Introduction:
The Postmodern Condition of Drama
Quite remarkably, drama and theater play ancillary roles at best in
many of the classic commentaries on postmodernism, as, for instance,
in Jean-Francois Lyotard's Postmodern Condition, David Harvey's
Condition of Postmodernity, or Jean Baudrillard's Simulations. Ihab
Hassan piles up a lengthy roster of artists from various disciplines,
whose names epitomize postmodernism for him; there are, however,
very few playwrights on this list: Beckett, Ionesco, Pinter, Handke,
1
Bernhardt, and only Shepard and Wilson as American dramatists.
French deconstruction and poststructuralism do not yield very differ-
ent results. Jacques Derrida touches only briefly on the Theater of
Cruelty and Antonin Artaud, and Roland Barthes mainly discusses
bunraku and Brecht. "On the whole," as Christopher Bigsby main-
tains, "theatre has commanded very little interest from the major theo-
2
rists or those who have taken up their theories."
In his recent study, Contemporary American Playwrights, Bigsby
once more foregrounds the lack of critical attention given not only to
drama in general, but to American drama and theater in particular:
"There has been a tendency, perhaps now beginning to change, for
3
American drama to find itself marginalised in academe." But the
marginalization of drama, Bigsby claims, is not restricted to the uni-
versity and the adjunct textbook stores. It has to be conceived in wider
cultural terms: "Theatre," he claims, "seemed not quite at the centre of
the culture," in contrast to "the Great American Novel [which] shared

1 Ihab Hassan, "Toward a Concept of Postmodernism," The Postmodern Turn
(Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1987), 85.
2 Christopher W. E. Bigsby, Modern American Drama, 1945-2000 (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 2000), 11.
3 Bigsby, Contemporary American Playwrights (Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
1999), vii.