Expectation, Confutation, Revelation: Audience Complicity in the Plays of Sam Shepard

Abstract

For over a decade now Stanley Fish and his fellow Readers have been settling back within the warm confines of an established critical school , not so much to read books as to describe their own responses to books. Those who wish to describe audience response to performance texts, however, still remain out in the cold. Even Hans Robert Jauss's five modalities of "identification," Wolfgang Iser's "implied reader" and the many other useful and provocative tenets of German "reception theory ," though they touch on the reception of dramatic texts, provide little information concerning the reception of performance texts. Although reader-response and reception theories are certainly not simple constructs, an aesthetic of theatrical audience reception is far more complex. The writer-text-reader relationship becomes the writer-text-directordesigners- perfonners-spectators relationship, and , of course, all these participants bring their own codal baggage: their personal histories, their cultural givens, their literary and theatrical precursors, their theatrical conventions, their expectations, their fears, etc.