Reviewed by: Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment Sara Brady Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment. By Rebecca Schneider. London: Routledge, 2011. Cloth $135.00, Paper $34.95. 272 pages. Written with expertâand extremely attentiveâscholarship, Rebecca Schneiderâs Performing Remains is not only a âparadigm-changing book about re-enactment,â as Jerome de Groot describes it, but arguably a book that reinvigorates theatre and performance studies. The work is carefulâthe author consistently defines her terms and examines them again and again. By âweav[ing] a crosshatched path in multiple directions between performance art, United States Civil War reenactment, performance theory, theatre events, photography, statuary, and all manner of âlive art,ââ Schneider investigates âthe temporality of reenactmentâ (1). âI wonder,â she asks, ânot only about the âas ifâ but also about the âwhat ifâ: what if time (re)turns? What does it drag along with it?â (2, emphasis original). Schneider succeeds in âtroubl[ing] the prevalence of presentism, immediacy, and linear time in most thinking about live performanceâ (6). By doing so, she consciously questions some of the primaryâif not foundingâprinciples of performance studies, including the ephemerality of performance, the relationship of the live to the mediated, and the binary of text/performance. She does all this with an approach to temporality and linear time that is as refreshing as it is innovative. But whatâs most exciting about the work is that she theorizes not in opposition to or in contest with other theories of and around performance; rather, she works through the theories of others, asking questions, offering analysis, and asking more questions. The book is anchored by a Foreword âwhich is not oneâ; that is, the opening essay âtakes kaleidoscopic turns in intersecting directions, touching on multiple times, variant places, and overlapping fields of academic inquiryâ (1). Civil War reenactors often âfight not only to âget it rightâ as it was but to get it right as it will be in the future of the archive to which they see themselves contributingâ (10). Schneiderâs use of such performersâindeed, an example of what might be called âlowbrowâ in some circlesâactually works quite well at challenging antitheatrical bias. These and other questions consume Chapter One, âReenactment and relative pain.â Schneider pays close attention to history and to those who repeat history. She even unpacks that famous and almost always misquoted sayingâpointing out that the correct text, written by George Santayana in 1905, is: ââThose who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat itââ (40). What Schneider makes most interesting is her question: âwouldnât remembering historyâs mistakes necessitate wrestling with mistakes in the remembering? And what does remembering mistake, like mistaken memory, get right about history in the replaying?â (42). In Chapter Two, âFinding faux fathers,â Schneider continues to investigate the faux, the second, the fake, the mistake, using Suzan-Lori Parksâs America Play [End Page 223] and Topdog/Underdog and Linda Mussmanâs Cross Way Cross. Both playwrights include Abraham Lincoln as a character and expressly play with the not and not not: âIn jazz, one cannot accurately say that a tune is misplayed by the riff. So too the history is not mistold via the riff by which Parks retells it. In fact, playing in difference might be one way to get those notes rightâ (65). Mussmanâs Lincoln is in drag, but she is also an example of âtemporal drag,â which, like photography, can âdrag a historical scene into the liveâ (75). Schneider adapts the term âtemporal dragâ from Elizabeth Freemanâs work and returns to it throughout the book, most interestingly in her investigation of performance and photography in Chapter Five. The third chapter of the book is a revision of Schneiderâs 2001 essay âPerformance Remains.â The chapter both explains and performs a key argument: that â[t]he afterlife of the written word, set down and yet changing hands, jumping from body to body, eye to mouth, as text is interjected into text, is not entirely dissimilar to the promiscuous tracks of actorly actsâ (88). Schneider uses Hamlet and Gertrude Stein in a most interesting...