Theatrical Expression Research Articles

Reluctant Ally: United States Foreign Policy Toward the Jews from Wilson to Roosevelt (review)

Book Reviews 129 and a clear understanding of the link between the Jewish way of life and non-naturalistic forms of theatrical expression. These many memories unfold like a great epic film, and though the transitions from one section to the next often show their seams, this is an unforgettable saga that breathes life into history. When we approach the final sections, it should be noted, the narrative seems to leave us a bit empty. Perhaps we're in denial, unwilling to accept the missing voice of Mr. Joseph Buloff, whose accounts are so filled with life that we don't want them to end. Thanks to the work of Ms. Kadison, we need only turn back the pages. Richard Stockton Rand Department of Visual and Performing Arts Purdue University Reluctant Ally: United States Foreign Policy Toward the Jews from Wilson to Roosevelt, by Frank W. Brecher. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992. $47.95. Recent scholarship has not reflected kindly upon either American attitudes toward the Jewish struggle in Palestine or the American response to the Nazi persecution of Jews. Franklin Roosevelt, whose presidency spanned the entire Nazi era as well as most of the critical years of the Palestine conflict, emerges as a leader who never permitted humanitarian considerations to override the political advantages of ignoring both the Holocaust and the idea ofJewish statehood. Penetrating studies by Monty Penkower and David Wyman, as well as a host of related works by other scholars, have told the story in considerable detail.? To challenge such a formidable array of scholars is a daunting task, particularly for someone who is not an historian by training. Nonetheless, Mr. Frank Brecher, a veteran State Department officer, leaps into the fray with Reluctant Ally and comes down squarely on the side of FDR and the State Department. Of the four essays in this slim volume, two deal with Woodrow Wilson's Middle East policies, and a third surveys the career of Charles R. 9Monty Noam Penkower, The Jews Were E:vpendable: Free World Diplomacy and the Holocaust (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983); David S. Wyman, The Abandonment of theJews: America and the Holocaust 1941-45 (New York: Pantheon, 1984). 130 SHOFAR Summer 1994 Vol. 12, No.4 Crane, who briefly cochaired a post-World War I U.S. survey mission to the Mideast. Brecher's chapters on Wilson are interesting, if unexceptional. Because he relies so heavily on Wilson's published papers and on the Foreign Relations of the United States series (as opposed to unpublished documents), there are not many surprises here. Wilson's sympathy for Zionism is recounted, and the impact of his foreign policy on European Jewry is traced through his role in the Paris negotiations leading to the Minorities Treaties. Brecher has fresher material to offer on the rise and fall of the King-Crane Commission, which Wilson sent to the Mideast in 1919, and which returned with anti-Zionist recommendations that were never implemented. A subsequent chapter sheds some interesting light on Crane's activities in the years after the Commission, although Brecher fails to demonstrate that Crane had any real influence on U.S. policy. While claiming that Crane "exercised an important influence on the personal attitudes toward the Middle East of many leading Americans," Brecher names just one person who was actually influenced by Crane-Virginia Gildersleeve, the preSident of Barnard College, who was not exactly a major force in the shaping of American foreign policy. Brecher surveys the U.S. response to early Nazi atrocities, then suddenly digresses into a long discussion of U.S. policy towards the Vichy French administration in North Africa. Brecher's attempt to portray the Vichy episode as a microcosm ofAmerican policy towards European Jewry is not persuasive. Brecher wanders even further afield in the conclusion to his section on Vichy: "American policy [during the Holocaust] did reflect the country's natural humanitarian concern over the fate of the European Jews" since "there was no official interest in the U.S. government to see them destroyed." Such a broad definition of "humanitarian" might easily encompass an assortment of unpleasant individuals and regimes whose policies toward Jews in recent centuries fell short...

“For man is a giddy thing, and this is my conclusion”: Fashion and much ado about nothing

Given the fact that the text of Much Ado About Nothing constantly employs fashion metaphors in connection with the play‐world's social conventions, this article explores the ways in which a director may use costuming to interrogate the workings of Messina's patriarchal system. Performance can reveal how the elder males of this community competitively “fashion” truths out of costumed theatrical fictions in an attempt to subvert or maintain the social order. This communal hierarchy is based on class, gender, and age distinctions expressed in the text through the metaphor of clothing, which may achieve concrete manifestation in the characters' costumes or costume changes. However, behavioral norms, like fashions, shift with the passing of time, and society must constantly adjust its social conventions to suit the needs of a maturing younger generation. Examples from the modern stage history of Much Ado offer various approaches to the theatrical expression of the idea that Messinian society deals with violati...

La escuela bolera

These words1 of Angel Pericet Blanco, senior member of the third generation of the Pericet family of dance artists and teachers, express perfectly the goals of the historic international conference held in Madrid from November 16 to 22, 1992.2 Some 250 Spanish dance artists, teachers, critics, historians, and musicologists, along with colleagues from Europe and the Americas, met to investigate and celebrate escuela bolera-the bolero school-the Spanish dance genre that by the early nineteenth century had developed from traditional regional dances into a heightened national theatrical expression. Sponsored by the Instituto Nacional de las Artes Escenicas y de Miisica of Spain's Ministry of Culture, this encuentro internacional was truly an encounter, an active confrontation (for the most part friendly) among different disciplines, experiences, viewpoints, intense beliefs, and loyalties. The event was conceived, organized, and moderated by Roger Salas, a dance critic and historian. His motivation: to promote research on la Escuela Bolera as the true genesis of Spanish theatrical dance, as the true Spanish ballet . to once and for all wake it up from its prolonged siesta.3

Directing as Analysis of Situation

Directing as Analysis of Situation Richard Trousdell What Do Directors Do? For most of us, directing is an unmapped art or an academic discipline with almost no fixed landmarks. Unlike acting, where we have many theories and methods to guide us, directing offers few schools of thought about its nature, preparation, or technique. Most directors learn their art through practice, often serving as an assistant director before developing their own craft by trial and error. Even in formal classes, directing is taught mostly in critiqued workshop and fleshed out by methods borrowed from the visual arts, acting, or literary criticism. The earliest American attempts to teach directing stressed visual composition through the physical translation of text into patterns of movement. Given almost formulaic authority by Alexander Dean at Yale,1 the physical approach had its roots in 19th century stage practice whose diverse conventions included Goethe's neoclassical rules, the compositional verisimilitude of Saxe Meiningen, the scenic naturalism of Zola and Antoine, and Wagner's aesthetic ideals as developed by Appia and Craig. In all these models, the placement of the human figure in space, commonly called "blocking," is seen as a key to theatrical expression and therefore the primary focus of a director's craft. As Helen Chinoy suggests, the idea of directing as a physical function has roots that reach back in Western theatre as far as the choric dancing patterns taught by Aeschylus and Sopocles.2 A rich tradition of practical knowledge gives the physical approach to directing the advantages of clear content with predictable results. That the process and its results may also be manipulative and mechanical accounts for the low status the method of physical composition currently enjoys. Meanwhile, some of the most expressive contemporary directors, including Ingmar Bergman, Robert Wilson, and Richard Foreman, begin their rehearsal work with blocking. Stanislavski's early directing career also began with prearranged movement in imitation of Saxe Meiningen's example. However, as his conviction grew that 25 26 Richard Trousdell truthful acting was the essence of theatre, Stanislavski began to search for a psychological technique that would bring the actor into spontaneous contact with text and audience. As Stanislavski moved away from the preplanned mise en scene of production and into the improvisational world of the acting studio, he redefined the director's role from physical composer to teacher of acting. In the process, he provided directors with analytical tools to uncover the motivational impulses that propel dramatic action, that respond to the contextual details of the play's given circumstances, and that point toward the motivational spine connecting the units of action. The advantages of Stanislavski's acting system, beyond making the director the actor's collaborator, include its detailed vocabulary, its history of producing animated and engaged stage behavior, and its nearly Aristotelian analysis of dramatic structure through motivational units.3 Despite persistent conjecture that a psychological approach necessarily reduces all theatrical styles to naturalism, and miscasts the director as therapistguru , most contemporary directing curricula use some form of Stanislavski's acting system to teach technical vocabulary, textual analysis, and approach to production.4 A third borrowed technique is literary analysis, which has been widely used to teach directors textual interpretation. From the close readings of the New Critics to the Marxist analyses of social and economic forces at play upon the text, and the deconstructed readings of post-Freudians and Feminists, directors have been systematically schooled in the analysis of idea, image, and structural pattern. Just as the physical approach assumes that the director is a hybrid sculptor-architect-choreographer, or the psychological approach assumes that the director is a proto-actor, so does the literary approach assume that the director is an analogue of the playwright-critic, while the function itself might be described as a secondary form of interpretive writing—what the French call écriture scenique.5 From a literary perspective, the director is a rhetorician of the stage who must master genre, period style, historical context, and the extensive vocabulary of conventional devices that playwrights employ. In its most articulated form, the literary approach to directing produces the auteur director whose personal "reading" or "concept" of a text forms an independent thesis...

Kantor, Memory, Memoire

The Polish director Tadeusz Kantor died in December 1990 at the age of seventy-five. Also a poet and painter, who designed his own work for the stage, Kantor brought to the traumatized and Stalinized post-war Polish theatre a sensibility saturated in the pre-war avant-garde: but he was only able to give theatrical expression to this after 1956, when a marginally more liberal climate allowed him to form his own company. For this company, Cricot-2, Kantor created a sequence of scrupulously orchestrated works in which he was always present, half witness, half auteur – works which were redolent of an apocalypse that had already occurred, yet remained eternally imminent. The Dead Class, Wielopole Wielopole, Let the Artists Die, and, most recently, Today Is My Birthday all toured widely, evoking for their audiences a past at once scrupulously ‘real’ in its physical texture yet macabre in its experiential pain. Kantor's fellow countryman and near-contemporary Jan Kott here evokes the distinctive sources and qualities of memory in Kantor's work. An advisory editor of New Theatre Quarterly and of Theatre Quarterly, Jan Kott has been a frequent contributor to both journals, most recently with a study of ‘The Gender of Rosalind’ in NTQ26, which extended the line of thinking of his seminal study, Shakespeare Our Contemporary.

Staging "King Lear" in India, 1989: "King Lear" as the Indian Maharaja

King Lear has been a challenge to actors all over the world. Charles Lamb decreed that the play was unfit for the stage. Nineteenth-century directors shelved it. But in the 20th century, Lear has surfaced as the highest theatrical expression of the Bard. The story is embedded in the fables of both East and West. In an Indian legend, a temperamental aging maharaja wants to divide his kingdom among his three daughters and asks them how much they love him. The eldest daughter compares her love to honey, the second to nectar, and the third-the most beloved one-to salt. The maharaja flares up, banishes his third daughter, and divides his kingdom between the older sisters, retaining his crown. Tragedy follows. I happened to see four or five famous performances on the British stage. John Gielgud's Kabuki-flavored Lear (1950) was whimsical, his crown resembling an inverted hat-stand mocked by London viewers. But Bertolt Brecht recommended his actors to witness this profound production for its alienation effect, its chiseled speeches directed toward the audience's reason rather than emotion. Charles Laughton in a Shakespeare Memorial Theatre production (I959) was a plump FatherChristmas Lear who could not comprehend the political intrigues of his court nor the perfidy of his daughters. Paul Scofield's Lear (1962), seen through the eyes of Goneril and Regan, was a senile, irrational, impossible father, unfit to rule. He refused to take the responsibilities of the crown, yet stubbornly held onto it. The older daughters treated him with fear and caution lest he turn his mad anger on them. Laurence Olivier's Lear (an opulent TV production in 1984) was a despotic Khan with a neatly trimmed gray beard, egocentric, and terrifyingly stubborn. In the opening scene his courtiers kneel and lie flat on their bellies, kissing the earth in abject obedience. Due to age and the flatterers around him, he has lost his ability to discern good from bad. Cordelia refuses to feed his demands for flattery. He banishes her. In the last act, the doddering Lear is stripped of everything. Shivering and feverish, soaked in mud and rain, lying unconscious, he is picked up by Cordelia's advancing generals and made to rest. He is washed, his clothes changed, his beard shaved off. He is divested of his majesty, his kingly absolutism. From the depths of misery, Lear regains his humanity and balance.

Événement dramatique et dramatisation théâtrale, la prise de la Bastille sur les tréteaux français et étrangers

This study deals with the manner in which July 14th immediately became a subject for commemorative drama recorded in word and images. The patriot Palloy's efforts to publicize the memory of Bastille Day is only the best known of many such campaigns. A specific rhetoric of dramatization developed and is analyzed here in relation to theatrical expression at the time in France and abroad. When brought to the stage the storming of the Bastille became total theater where a new sense of imagination could have full play.

The Drama of the Holocaust: Issues of Choice and Survival

One of the ways in which Jews and others have sought somehow to assimilate the knowledge of the Nazi Holocaust has been through the theatrical expression of the appalling dilemmas it posed. Implicitly or explicitly, however, the process of ‘shaping’ that this involves forces an attitude to be taken by the dramatist towards the meaning of ‘choice’ in such circumstances, and the ‘acceptable’ price of possible survival. In his anthology The Theatre of the Holocaust (1982), Robert Skloot assembled four plays which exemplified the possible ‘attitudes to survival’, and here he relates them to the ideas of Bruno Bettelheim, Terrence Des Pres, and other writers on the subject, in an attempt to assess how fully and honestly theatre is able to reflect the issues involved. Robert Skloot is Professor of Theatre and Drama at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and was Fulbright Lecturer in Israel in 1980–81. He has also edited a collection of essays, ‘The Darkness We Carry’: the Drama of the Holocaust, due for publication in the spring of 1988.

Granville Barker and the Dream of Theatre by Dennis Kennedy

Reviews371 Dennis Kennedy. Granville Barker and the Dream of Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Pp. xiv + 231. $39.50. A welcome, reassuring, fastidious piece of old-fashioned historical scholarship, this work merits praise for the singularity of its purpose and the richness of its details. Peppered, littered, strewn (lavishly, fascinatingly , interestingly) with facts, dates, play titles, cast lists, rare and familiar illustrations and photographs, and rounded off with an exhaustive appendix cataloguing its subject's productions, here is theatre history at once revealing, informative, instructive, and documentative, or at least as much as theatre history can ever tell us about the elusive, enigmatic man known as Harley Granville Barker. What we have here also is the presentation of a dream, of what the theatre could and can be, a journey the end of which is now visible at the RSC and National Theatre of Great Britain. Here too is the sharply centered and psychologically sensitive picture of Barker and his artistic tenacity, professional commitment, aesthetic beliefs, and fierce drive for theatrical excellence, for something more than the dulling, mindless commercialism of a kind of theatre he began in and came to loathe. If this book is also a worthy tribute to its complex topic, it completes in its unique, indispensable way the "strange case" of Barker, a story begun three years ago with Eric Salmon's enthusiastic, overly speculative biography which supplanted irrevocably C. B. Purdom's sentimental journalism of 1955. Incidentally, to Salmon's restorative efforts must now happily be added his thoroughly edited collection of Barker's selected letters (Wayne State University Press, 1986) which provides many more sides to this peculiar man of many parts. To clarify, however: Professor Kennedy's book is not a biography, revisionist or otherwise; rather, it concentrates on Barker's ideas as presented in successive productions, fleshing out and finishing up with prescient particulars the course of Barker's practical stage work and his later magisterial writings. And the reader should also be aware that in a straightforward, plain, engaging style, the author leapfrogs through chronology in a most sophisticated fashion very much in control of his material. Thus the text has breaks in action, variety, flow, and pace while avoiding the narrow rigidity often common to more pedestrian narratives. In sum, then, Barker breathes, and we have not another show business story, but the many aspects of a man's career in the playhouse, an arena not for the faint of heart. If Salmon gave us hagiography, Kennedy offers instead the sight of a brilliant comet coursing through the heavens whose bursts of light and showers of sparks illuminate a myriad of astonishing activities from a multi-talented, multi-faceted personality, only to extinguish itself, deliberately and purposefully, at mid-career. Perhaps this remarkable versatility has been the worst enemy of Barker's reputation; but Kennedy's commentary does focus precisely on the most urgent matters which probably made Barker abandon the theatre at forty (to become, as Lewis Casson said, "a mere professor") : the absurd censorship and banning by the Lord Chamberlain of Barker's play Waste; and the failure to establish a national theatre; and probably most importantly, Barker's escape from these theatrical frustrations into 372Comparative Drama the security and luxury of a wealthy second marriage to an American millionairess. For some it was a flight from his closest, truest friends into the indolent, spoiled life of a country gentleman, something Shaw said was "a hopeless proposition." Kennedy, like Salmon, argues, however , that Barker did not "give up" the theatre as much as he simply moved on into other forms of theatrical expression. Whatever the truth, or versions thereof, Barker's success, the fulfillment of his dream of theatre , was posthumous, unreaUzed until the opening of the National Theatre in October 1976. On the other hand, his famous work as actor, director, playwright, and manager at the Royal Court (1904-07) and the illustrious Shakespearean presentations at the Savoy (1912-14), clearly and carefully reconstructed and described by Kennedy, show how Barker quite simply returned the theatre to itself: true repertory, a small ensemble of regular actors, no stars, no cuts or elaborate scenery. Here was focus...

Tennessee Williams and Jo Mielziner: The Memory Plays

The conventional reliance upon “memory,” the lyric subtleties of both writing and scenery, and the ubiquitous mood of emotional despair characterize three early Tennessee Williams plays — The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Summer and Smoke — and set them a part from the less “poetic” currents in the Williams canon. The plays are remarkably similar in organic configuration; their shape and texture reveal a theatrical form of considerable distinction. Although they gained articulate theatrical expression under three different directors, the scenery for all three was designed (in the “Broadway” productions) by Jo Mielziner, whose ideas have continued to influence subsequent productions. The unique fusion of the Williams-Mielziner artistry has given the American drama a consummate theatre aesthetic: a vision of dramatic life most subtle in its use of human values and most articulate in its visual definition of mood.

With Brook in Paris: Preparations for an Empty Space

In 1970, American actress Michele Collison was invited to become a founding member of Peter Brook’s Centre for International Theatre Research in Paris. At the time, neither she nor any of the other actors Brook had brought from different parts of the world knew exactly what to expect. They only knew that they were there to work and that the experiment would probably last three years. The ‘work’ part turned out to be true but the time estimate turned out to be rather optimistic. After nearly 10 years, the ‘work’ is still not finished. Indeed, it probably never will be. Throughout that period, the company changed and grew, travelled around the world seeking root forms of theatrical expression, experimented with shape and language and played in the Middle East, in Africa, in North and South America, as well as in Europe. Other than Brook himself, one of the ‘constants’ during this period was Ms. Collison, and Brook used her consistently both as a performer (Brook’s Ubu production with Ms. Collison as Mere Ubu was examined in CTR 16). This past year, however, life began to change for Ms. Collison. First she married (a Canadian), then she made the decision to leave the Centre. With her new husband, she moved to Toronto and began teaching privately. At the invitation of York University’s Theatre Department, Ms. Collison—now using her married name, Michele George—held a series of master classes for students, and actors already working in the profession. In the following two pieces—the first, an interview with Ms. Collison-George; the second, a report on those Toronto classes—this fine actress shares her recollections and her insights about life at the Centre and discusses how her own aesthetic—and her mentor’s —developed during this fascinating and still generally undocumented period.

Klaus Michael Grüber

Yes, we are exhausted, like commuters from the suburbs at the Gare d'Austerlitz after a day of work. That is what it is all about: to be exhausted without interpreting the exhaustion.Klaus Michael Grüber in an interview, Le Monde, May 15, 1975Klaus Michael Grüber is one of Germany's most controversial theatricalist directors. He has been called elitist, esoteric, artificial, unpolitical and incomprehensible by many critics; his productions have often left the audience—in a half-filled house—thoroughly dismayed and perplexed. But Grüber has also been praised as Germany's most imaginative and original director, a man who conjures up unforgettable visions, a man who like no other director carries theatrical expression to its absolute extremes. This article intends to describe Klaus Michael Grüber's development and some of his major productions and to let a few people speak who have worked with him. Grüber himself has very seldom given public expression to his theories and methods.

A Reading Of Ionesco's The Killer

.IN 1963 IONESCO GAVE A SERIES OF ANSWERS to the question, "Why does a writer write?" One of them was, "[I write] because I wish to understand the world; because I would place, at least for myself, a little order in that immense chaos." Strange words to the ears of those who have come to believe that Ionesco shows us the chaos of the world by putting chaos onstage, who would agree, for instance, with the Dictionnaire de litterature contemporaine, which states that the theater of Ionesco is "the most perfect antithesis one could imagine to the theater of Sartre, where the thought always precedes the theatrical expression," and concludes, "Each play of Ionesco defies critical explication . . . to apply it . . . is to risk making oneself into one of Ionesco's own comic characters." This is quite false; Ionesco is not practising Dada, even in The Bald Soprano; his plays are just as well constructed to transmit ideas as Sartre's, but in a more sophisticated way. The way varies—in Rhinoceros it is very close to allegory; in The Killer, a much more complex work, it is a group of symbolic correspondences. Several of these have been identified in critical articles, generally within a comparative study of several plays, but there has not yet been an attempt to bring them all together and show that they make sense, or "order," together. With mild defiance of Ionesco's remarks about critics, I should like to make such an attempt.

The Fall and After: Albert Camus and Arthur Miller

MOST OF THE RESPONSE TO Arthur Miller's After the Fall focussed upon the autobiographical elements of the work. Miller, in turn, defended it rather well in two articles: "With Respect For Her Agony—But With Love," Life, LXI (February 7, 1964), 66; and "A Forward By the Author," Post (February 1, 1964), 32. All the attention given to the autobiographical elements detracted from the playas Miller rightly observed. This is in one sense the price a writer pays for a well-publicized extra-literary life. And one cannot discount the autobiographical elements which have been amply catalogued by Newsweek, Time, and Life. Yet there are other aspects of this play which need to be examined, aspects which when clarified reveal this play to be a fine humanistic study as well as a masterpiece of theatrical expression.

Players and Painted Stage: Nineteenth Century Acting

In an earlier paper, I undertook to show that the style of acting in the serious drama of the eighteenth century closely paralleled the general interest of the century in the imitation of nature—of nature methodized. Four principal “schools,” varying in technique but not in purpose, were examined: Betterton, the Cibber-Booth-Wilks Triumvirate, Macklin-Garrick, and Kemble-Siddons. The fourth school, with which the paper arbitrarily ended, extends well beyond the eighteenth century and provides a natural introduction to the study of acting techniques in the Romantic and Victorian periods. Like the eighteenth, the nineteenth century is primarily a century of great actors rather than great plays, and it is to the actors, rather than to the playwrights, that we must turn to find the theatrical expression of the spirit of the times. Edmund Kean and William C. Macready represent the earlier and later stages of romanticism as accurately as Shelley and Tennyson, and Victorianism is as plainly marked in Alfred Wigan and Irving as in Ruskin or Trollope.