Theaters of the Everyday: Aesthetic Democracy on the American Stage by Jacob Gallagher-Ross

Abstract

Reviewed by: Theaters of the Everyday: Aesthetic Democracy on the American Stage by Jacob Gallagher-Ross Dorothy Chansky Theaters of the Everyday: Aesthetic Democracy on the American Stage. By Jacob Gallagher-Ross. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2018; pp. 248. On the morning I started this review, Dictionary. com's "Word of the Day" was transmundane, defined as "reaching beyond or existing outside the physical or visible world." The everydays in Jacob Gallagher-Ross's stunning, highly original book are relentlessly dependent on the physical or visible (and auditory) world in which we are enmeshed, yet they are simultaneously the stuff of magic, epiphany, and wonder—precisely the transmundane. Gallagher-Ross's four chapters plus a coda parse the alchemical workings of an unexpected quintet of artists whose deployments of the ordinary yield what the author unabashedly calls the re-enchantment of the quotidian. The book opens with the iconic question posed by Emily Webb at the end of Thornton Wilder's Our Town: "Do human beings ever realize life while they live it?—every, every minute?" (3). Gallagher-Ross is neither interested in nostalgia nor traditional American realism, which depends on a representation strategy built on "a consensus view of what constitutes the real" (48) and that privileges "hegemony over the quotidian" (7). His subjects locate art in the ordinary, "finding meanings in habitually invisible or abject phenomena" (27), mostly bypassing narrative and eschewing "reified depth psychology" (29). They work with the idea that "the world [End Page 435] we know is a shifting point orbited by uncountable minds, all an equal claim on reality" (60). If I have understood Gallagher-Ross's project, then, his detailed and perceptive descriptions of the work of Wilder, Lee Strasberg, Stuart Sherman, Nature Theater of Oklahoma, and Richard Maxwell expose only half of the materials from which they spin their gold. The overlooked materiality and aurality of the quotidian come to life and acquire significance in the theatre only when these intersect with the other half of the ingredients: the subjectivities—no two alike—of the spectators whose sensibilities the material components can awaken to wonder and to feelings too easily brushed aside in the glut of sensory overload that too often passes for all there is of the everyday. Accordingly, "reimagining spectatorship" (35) drives both the objects of study and Gallagher-Ross's own thinking. The rubric under which all the unexpectedly magical everydays in the book take place is technology. Wilder used speed and the passage of time to explore and inspire new ways of seeing. In Pullman Car Hiawatha and The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden, via movement in modern vehicles (trains and automobiles), the ever-changing landscapes—natural and human-made—rushing by and visible through windows prompt ever-shifting responses. In Our Town and The Long Christmas Dinner, putative mimesis is undone by the time travel the playwright uses to remind us that "everything solid melts away into time" (70). Gallagher-Ross's takeaway is that "the act of perception, of noticing, creates the aesthetic experience" (67). Life may be precious and fleeting according to Wilder, but that idea is of little consequence absent an audience to ratify it. Strasberg's influence on American acting training is, refreshingly, not the focus of the chapter called "Mediating the Method"; rather, Gallagher-Ross examines how Strasberg's relentless use of tape recorders coupled with his awareness of the importance of film work for his trainees brought "orphan sounds into theatrical speech" (76). You want "truth"? The unvarnished version is captured—warts, tics, and all—best by the wholly impartial means of the electronic recording device. Ironically, "the Method's immediacy was deeply mediated, its mediations intended to provide access to unmediated reality" (82). This mimesis was in the service of portraying truthfully a world increasingly noisy, distracting, and chock full of mechanically produced stimuli. Sherman's weird and wonderful performances present what Gallagher-Ross labels (borrowing from philosopher Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei) an "ecstatic quotidian" (105ff.). Sherman called the pieces "spectacles" (ibid.), offering a rich series of them between 1975 and his death in 2001. His strategy was to use commercially produced items such as plastic figurines, fake...