Performing Opposition: Modern Theater and the Scandalized Audience (review)

Abstract

series of short stories. The book also features twenty-six illustrations of the lesswell -known ¤gures, which helpfully supplement those essays. Several images of women cross-dressed are especially compelling. Some of the essays left me hungry for more; for example, I wanted more (and more evocative) details about Michael Bennett’s style of choreography and his unique working processes. Occasionally, I disagreed with a reading; for example, I was not persuaded that West Side Story’s “overt emotionality” is evidence of Bernstein’s “gay sensibility” (61). A helpful listing of the entries by their occupations appears at the end of the book. Since the essays are arranged chronologically, I would have appreciated an additional cross-referencing list by¤gures’ dates. Finally, since this book will be an important resource for further exploration of these artists’ lives and work, I would have appreciated more substantial bibliographic information. Each entry cites the sources used for the research, but only those that use primary materials note their location. I would love to know where various ¤gures’ papers are held or if different libraries have collections dedicated to others, which would help to encourage further research. “Our larger project,” the editors write, “has been to examine how societal and cultural attitudes shaped our subjects’ sense of sexual difference in their respective periods and the inter-play of their on- and offstage lives in this context ” (2). In this way, this book (along with the ¤rst two volumes) entirely succeeds . —STACY WOLF University of Texas at Austin \ Performing Opposition: Modern Theater and the Scandalized Audience. By Neil Blackadder. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2003. xvii + 228 pp. $76.95 cloth. In Performing Opposition: Modern Theater and the Scandalized Audience, Neil Blackadder takes a novel approach to anatomizing the “theatre scandal”—the moment when an aesthetic or ideology on the stage leads to uproar in the audience—during the late 1800s and early 1900s. Typically, the rowdy audiences in and around the performances that Blackadder approaches are described as evidence of the radically modern invention of the play they attacked and of the public’s hesitancy to embrace a new kind of theatre. Rather than acquiescing to this traditional, text-centered reading of the protesting audience as a BOOK REVIEWS { 165 } united, in®amed, and spontaneous body of outraged bourgeoisie, however, Blackadder anatomizes the con®icts among the groups protesting a particular performance and examines the unique strategies of resistance discovered among audience members in each instance. This approach is thoroughly researched ,and he covers a great deal of material with impressive detail.Ironically, his careful and thorough analyses of these raucous events, while wonderfully clear and convincing, sometimes take the life out of the scandals, like a close explanation of a dirty joke. In order to further his project of seeing these events as “counter-performances of affronted spectators” (ix) instead of violent and chaotic outbursts, Blackadder almost completely excludes the term “riot” from his discussion. This re¤guring is especially bold when considering the historical precedence of using the term “riot” for a range of means of audience protest since the eighteenth century, but it does open up the possibility of seeing the performance of opposition by audiences extending beyond whistles and thrown vegetables. Blackadder’s examination of audience response to the Freie Bühne’s production of Hauptmann’s Before Sunrise in 1889 Berlin, the subject of his ¤rst chapter, offers the most straightforward reading of the performative nature of a theatre scandal. At ¤rst the audience’s outrage appeared uni¤ed and spontaneous , but as the audience soon found lines of difference among themselves, their outrage decreased as their level of performativity increased. The selfconsciousness of the audience’s outburst is clearest in Blackadder’s analysis of the three modes of protest employed by the most famous protestor of the evening , Dr. Kastan, and how degree of disruption was measured by both the audience and the courts according to degree of theatricality. Blackadder’s next chapter discusses how the carnivalesque nature of the 1896 production of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi in Paris elicited equally carnivalesque modes of response from its audience, remarking how the scatology of the play provoked anxieties about cleanliness...