Terminal : The Text as History

Abstract

Terminal: The Text as History THOMAS 1. TAYLOR Experimental theatre groups of the last two decades often proceeded without a prescriptive text as their generative source. The collective performances, based on rehearsal exercises, group examinations of personal themes, and other innovative material, relied not on the structure of a play script, but rather on theatrical structures inherent in the groups' performance philosophies. But the best works of the Living Theatre, Open Theater, Performance Group, and their contemporaries have long since passed into theatre history, leaving behind some rather disorganized and unreliable documentary evidence - notebooks, production photos, interviews, reviews, and occasional critical analysis. By far the most important article of documentation, however, is the postscriptive performance text, the printed and published recording of the performance event, now anthologized with considerable frequency. ' Unfortunately, the performance text has not always been prepared with the necessary attention to the reader's requirements for identifying the essentials of the performance which the text claims to preserve. Documenting fugitive performance begins with a careful recording of the play text, whether prescriptive , postscriptive, or generative (derived from classical or historical sources). The apparatus for discussing performance texts is now in place; previous work in building a vocabulary from the disciplines of semiotics, speech-act theory, social theatricality, theatrical structuralism, and related analytical methods, enables us to examine specific texts to determine what performance information has been made available to the reader.2 I agree with dramaturges and other spokespersons of performance groups that attempts to include detailed stage directions and descriptions would at best "provide inaccurate hints of what actually happened during performance,"3 but feel that the editor or "preparer" of the postscriptive text has not exhausted tbe possibilities for description and clarification. It is in its function as a document of theatre history that the performance text finds its reaSOD for being, since it is inadequate as script (from Terminal: The Text as History 13 which a perfonnance can be generated) or literature (from which the aesthetic experience can be reproduced). A perfonnance's structure, imagery, action, "theme," and range of expression can be recorded, and its place on several continua - representational to presentational, concatenative to independently fragmented, literary to a1iterary - could be charted, if sufficient infonnation were made available in the text. The reader's goal is to imagine or reproduce in the mind, or otherwise "make sense of," the perfonnance by referring exclusively to the text, in which certain kinds of infonnation are embedded: verbal utterances, whether linguistically concatenative or nonsemantic; stage description, lighting, and the like; stage direction (instructions for movement or activity on stage); interpretive material, explanations, exposition, conceptual statements, ideologies and manifestoes; and other printed infonnation, including typographic idiosyncrasies, segment titles, identification of perfonners by name or "character" name, variations (insertion, contingency, and accident) from perfonnance to perfonnance, even production credits. Because it contains so many of the elements of a typical perfonnance text, the text under scrutiny is Terminal, edited by Karen Malpede and published by Drama Book Specialists (1974) in Three Works by the Open Theater, with Mutation Show and Nightwalk, and with a portfolio of photographs by Max Waldman.• The Open Theater perfonned the work numerous times, in the United States and in Europe; with The Serpent, the four works are considered the most mature efforts of the group guided by Joseph Chaikin until 1973· The play text prepared, assumedly, by Karen Malpede, but credited to several writers, especially Susan Yankowitz, is at the same time complete and partial - complete in the recording of words spoken and sounds uttered, but partial in stage description and direction. The interpretive material includes a long explanatory preface that details the style and mood of the perfonnance, and numerous descriptive and interpretive passages interspersed within the dialogue. The utterances, too, are varied in kind: some are normative discourses , following the rules of speech-act construction; others are songs and chants; some are repeated words and sounds whose meanings are reduced by repetition to nonsemantic "music"; still others bridge the gap between fictive speech "in character" and direct presentational address to the audience.5 INTRODUCTION TO THE TEXT Before the text begins, credits and an extended foreword prepare the reader for the...