Performance Script Research Articles

Yiddish theatre: new approaches

edited by Joel Berkowitz. Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2003. 269 pp. $59.50. Much has been written on the rich history of Yiddish theatre. Indeed, a bibliography compiled by Joel Berkowitz for the book under review includes 35 pages of references. However, with the exception of a handful of scholarly books and articles, most of the writings on the Yiddish theatre have been hagiographical, impressionistic, polemical, or anecdotal. With the emergence of the academic study of Yiddish theatre, though, this is beginning to change. One of the turning points in the maturation of Yiddish theatre studies has been the International Workshop on Yiddish Theatre, Drama and Performance held at Oxford University in July 1999. conference, organized by Berkowitz and Dov-Ber Kerler, was the inspiration for the book under review. published volume presents a sampling of the papers presented at the conference together with an introduction, written by Berkowitz, that helps place the papers within the context of Yiddish theatre studies and suggests directions for future research on the topic. One of the book's best attributes is the ability of its contributors to place their subjects within larger European contexts. Ahuva Belkin's The `Low' Culture of the begins the volume with a discussion of the role of profanity, obscenity and the grotesque in traditional Purim Plays. Drawing upon Bakhtin, she shows that the Purimspil played a carnivalesque role in Jewish society by parodying orthodox mythologies and subverting social conventions. Nahma Sandrow, in her contribution, also places Yiddish theatre within a non-Jewish European context, this time by arguing that Yiddish theatre paralleled the historical development of the Romantic Movement. Sandrow demonstrates how Yiddish playwrights such as Hirschbein, Peretz, and Gordin borrowed attributes of melodrama, rebelliousness, nationalism, and merging of theatrical conventions from Goethe, Schiller, and Ostrovsky. Similarly, Paula Bertolone focuses on one particular play -- Goldfadn's Kishefmakherin (The Sorceress) -- to show how the operatic form could be implemented. Her article discusses several different productions of the play, showing the evolution of Yiddish theatre through the spectrum of one of its most famous texts. evolution of theatrical texts is also the subject of Seth Wolitz's chapter on the Soviet interpretation of two of Goldfadn's later plays -- Shulamis and Bar kokhba. Wolitz argues that Shmuel Halkin, who adapted the scripts for performance in Soviet Russia, did so by removing the religious and nationalist underpinnings of the texts and reinterpreting the positive and negative in the plays' protagonists. Significantly, though, Wolitz points out that both Halkin and Goldfadn were drawing from the same cultural inheritance of both Jewish tradition and European culture. Three articles deal with regional centres of Yiddish theatre. Brigitte Dalinger presents a survey of Yiddish theatre in Vienna from 1880 to 1938, drawn largely from her book on the same topic. She shows that the city boasted a durable Yiddish theatre scene populated mostly by East European immigrants. David Mazower brings us to London's East End and particularly to the playwright Joseph Markovitsh, whose self-described melo-deklamatsyes (dramatic poems set to music) established a novel theatrical convention. …

Regime Change: King Lear in Los Angeles, George Bush in Iraq, Americans in France

March 01 2004 Regime Change: King Lear in Los Angeles, George Bush in Iraq, Americans in France Una Chaudhuri Una Chaudhuri Professor of English and Drama at New York University. She is the author of No Man's Stage: A Semiotic Study of Jean Genet's Plays (UMI Research Press, 1986) and Staging Place: The Geography of Modern Drama (University of Michigan Press, 1985), editor of Rachel's Brain and Other Storms: The Performance Scripts of Rachel Rosenthal (Continuum, 2001), coeditor of Land/Scape/Theater (University of Michigan, 2002), and guest editor of a special issue of Yale's Theater magazine on “Theater and Ecology” (25:1, 1995). Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Una Chaudhuri Professor of English and Drama at New York University. She is the author of No Man's Stage: A Semiotic Study of Jean Genet's Plays (UMI Research Press, 1986) and Staging Place: The Geography of Modern Drama (University of Michigan Press, 1985), editor of Rachel's Brain and Other Storms: The Performance Scripts of Rachel Rosenthal (Continuum, 2001), coeditor of Land/Scape/Theater (University of Michigan, 2002), and guest editor of a special issue of Yale's Theater magazine on “Theater and Ecology” (25:1, 1995). Online Issn: 1531-4715 Print Issn: 1054-2043 © 2004 New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology2004 TDR/The Drama Review (2004) 48 (1 (181)): 86–94. https://doi.org/10.1162/105420404772990691 Cite Icon Cite Permissions Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Search Site Citation Una Chaudhuri; Regime Change: King Lear in Los Angeles, George Bush in Iraq, Americans in France. TDR/The Drama Review 2004; 48: 1 (181), 86–94. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/105420404772990691 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAll JournalsTDR/The Drama Review Search Advanced Search This content is only available as a PDF. © 2004 New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology2004 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Gender and Politics in Greek Tragedy (review)

486Comparative Drama Michael X. Zelenak. Gender and Politics in Greek Tragedy. Artists and Issues in the Theatre Series 7. New York: Peter Lang, 1998. Pp. 156. $23.95. This is a puzzling book. In his introduction, the author says he wants to help his audience recover "some of the immediacy which I believe the original audiences experienced" by dispelling "the reverential mist that continues to keep [Greek plays] distant from most readers and enthusiasts of drama and theatre" (1). Since Zelenak teaches drama, I assumed that his way of recovering immediacy would be to discuss ancient plays as scripts for performance, either in their original production context, or now, or both. In The Greek Sense ofTheatre (1996), a volume as compact as Zelenak's, J. Michael Walton shows what valuable insights into ancient drama can be offered by a scholar who combines training in classical studies with a theater practitioner's perspective. Zelenak's project is more ambitious, however. He wants to offer an overview of tragedy as an Athenian institution, including its connection with democracy and the relationship of particular plays to their historical context, particularly the Peloponnesian War, and he is especially interested in tragedy's representation of gender. Athens was a deeply patriarchal society with strong restrictions on women's political and social power. The tragedies were written , produced, performed, and possibly viewed exclusively by males. So why do so many tragedies feature strong, transgressive female characters and raise questions about the nature and role ofwomen? Studies such as J. J. Winkler and F. Zeitlin's Nothing to Do with Dionysos? Athenian Drama in its Social Context (1990) depict tragedy as a state-sponsored institution that allowed Athenians to debate important civic issues, including gender. Zelenak, however, apparently regards this view as part of the "reverential mist" that he aims to dispel. He takes a strongly polemical position, arguing that Athenian tragedy is a massive example of bad faith. It only pretends to raise questions about gender while actually reinforcing male dominance . It does so by offering a psychological escape valve that "provided the male citizen audience with the imaginative inoculation against any guilt they might have felt about their gender ideology" (67). After three introductory chapters on tragedy and democracy, the female as a category invented by males, and drama as a masculinist institution, he discusses individual plays, including Aeschylus's Suppliants and Oresteia, Sophocles' Antigone and Philoctetes, and Euripides' Alcestis, Medea, Helen, Orestes, Iphigenia at Aulis, and Bacchae. Zelenak's position resembles that of Sue-Ellen Case in the first chapter of her Feminism and Theatre (1990; not cited by Zelenak), but he goes much further. The complex question of tragedy's origin is solved: it began as "a male-bonding ritual" (2). A monolithic collaboration between authors, pro- Reviews487 ducers, and audience, tragedy "is not ideologically subversive" and "does not celebrate chaos but order" (14). This reductive view leads him to disregard complexities and contradictions both within individual scripts and between different plays. Aeschylus's Suppliants is "not about women's rights or feminism . . . not addressed to women . .. not concerned with understandingwomen but defining and controlling die female" (56). Antigone's "life is meaningless, a total waste. She dies a zero, a nothing" (80). He is especially fond of binary oppositions: for example, all female characters in Athenian tragedy fit into one of two categories—the "passive, suffering 'female' victim" and the "active, destructive, 'male' woman." As a result Antigone is grouped with Clytemnestra and Medea in the second category (22). Male protagonists, however, are not criticized: Agamemnon "does not emerge as evil" (61); "Creon's values were not wrong ... just too extreme" (78). Fortunately, in his discussions ofPhiloctetes and Euripides, Zelenak moves beyond his simplistic categories. Admetus in Alcestis is "an embarrassingly honest representative of the male egocentrism of his audience" (96), Jason in Medea is "not only discredited but also ridiculed," while Medea "gives voice to the suffering and rage ofall the nameless and faceless oppressed ofAthens" as "a new dramatic sign ofthe female" (107-08). Zelenak sees Euripides in his last plays confronting "the deepest anxieties and nightmares of the Athenian experience" and re-encoding and empowering the female "with almost...

Sots and Snots: The Specter of Authenticity in Performance Scripts

In Shakespeare'sThe Comedy of Errors, the first time Adriana and Luciana meet the Antipholus and Dromio from Syracuse, Luciana exclaims to Dromio:

"Have You Heard the One about the Lesbian Who Goes to the Supreme Court?": Holly Hughes and the Case Against Censorship

These words conclude the introduction to Clit Notes, a 1996 collection (or Sapphic Sampler as the book's subtitle puts it) of the plays and performance scripts of Holly Hughes. Hughes assumed her role in the Culture War in June of 1990 when John Frohnmayer, then chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, rescinded four solo performance grants that had been unanimously recommended by the NEA's panel of peer reviewers. Each of the performers whose grants were rescinded? Hughes, Karen Finley, John Fleck, and Tim Miller?dealt explicitly with issues of sexuality in their work and each, save for Finley, was lesbian or gay.

On being an exemplary lesbian: My life as a role model

This essay and performance script chart the connections between the burdens of exemplar imposed upon the author first as “preacher's kid,” and then as a lesbian. The performance operationalizes the parallels between these roles through reflections on the politics of representation that attempt to counter lesbian invisibility.

Nursing mother and articulating absence

This essay and performance script poetically explore the similar politics of women's experience in Western health care (particularly in the transitional moments of birth and death) and a performer's complicity with the deadening force of textualizing what was once enfleshed, visceral enactment.

Silesian into Scots: Gerhart Hauptmann's The Weavers

It is commonplace in British theatre to find translations described as "translated by," "adapted by," "in a version by," or "from the original by." Such credits can be appropriately descriptive but they are also often used in an interchangeable and inexact manner. This is a reflection of the pragmatic attitude toward theatre-making that is characteristic of British theatre, where, so far as translation is concerned, the finished script is more important than preoccupations about the process of achieving it. It is a reflection, too, of the reality that there are relatively few playwrights who are fluent in a given foreign language, so theatres often supply a literal translation from which the commissioned writer fashions a performance script. The word "translation" therefore tends to be used in a relaxed and semantically loose manner in British theatre.

Chaucer's Rehersynges: The Performability of "The Legend of Good Women"

Proposes a significantly different assessment ofChaucer's poem by considering it as a script to be performed.William Quinn argues that the F-version of Chaucer's unfinishedpoem was written as a script for live performance before acourtly audience.

Assimilation and contrast effects in performance ratings: Effects of rating the previous performance on rating subsequent performance.

This study examined the effects of rating previous performance on ratings of subsequent performance. Participants (N = 214) reviewed a performance script depicting either good or poor performance and then reviewed and rated another script depicting average subsequent performance. Approximately half of the participants rated the previous performance immediately after reviewing it, and the other half did not rate the previous performance. As expected, a Performance Level x Existence of Ratings interaction was found. When they had not rated the previous performance, raters were biased in favor of recalling behaviors consistent with their previous impressions, suggesting an assimilation effect. However, when they had rated the previous performance, raters provided ratings inconsistent with their previous ratings, suggesting a contrast effect. These effects were stronger for ratings from a behavioral expectation scale than for those from an ability rating scale.

Constraints and possibilities of performance elements in drama translation

Abstract The double nature of theatre texts (as both literary texts and performance scripts) renders drama translation into a particularly complex task, as the translator does not only have to deal with a linguistic system but with a complex set of other sign systems. The feedback effect that every receptor produces on a translator will also be more complex than in other translation activities, since in drama texts this effect will not only come from a hypothetical reader but also from a potential director, actor and audience. As in other genres of an essentially oral nature, the communicative process in drama texts will be marked by an impression of temporariness, and the phonological level of language will make its presence felt in translation decisions, as it will have an important effect on factors such as running‐time, body‐gesture and tempo. Drama translation is also characterised by its economy since all the sign systems that constitute the play may be combined in order to solve translation problems.

Editing the Comedia , II (review)

Reviews117 is both seductive and productive; and it is likely to engender yet another generation ofcritical progeny. Barbara Simerka Davidson College McGaha, Michael D. and Frank P. Casa. Editing the Comedia, II. Ann Arbor : Michigan Romance Studies, Vol. XI, 1991. Paper 165 pp. $10.00. The general approval with which the publication in 1985 of Editing the Comedia was greeted, called for a complementary volume to expand and enrich the offerings ofthe first volume. The editors, Frank P. Casa and Michael D. McGaha, have this time assembled essays dealing primarily with the issue ofwhat constitutes a critical edition. The first contribution by Carol Bingham Kirby is a lucid and practical introduction to solid investigation based on the experience of medievalists. For the author a critical edition is "the reconstruction of the lost archetype, the text from which all extant versions must derive and the version closest to the original of the author" (p.2). We shall see that other scholars view this subject from a different perspective. J. M. Ruano de la Haza, after a lengthy discussion of what is meant by the original ofa dramatic text (one that reflects the author'sfinal intention), makes a convincing, handily illustrated and copiously annotated case for the eclectic method of editing. He reaches a clearcut, workable conclusion according to which "The author of a critical edition is not just a clerk who must confine himselfto transcribing the original; on the contrary, he should use his faculty to choose, alter, add or omit readings, as long as he does so in keeping with clearly defined criteria and indicates what he has done in a footnote or by means of a facsimile reproduction ofthe text. What is never permissible is silently altering the original" (p. 61). This echo of Don Cruickshank's example of an editor who ventures beyond textual criticism sounds very encouraging to a would be practicioner who finds little satisfaction in a mere facsimile reproduction now that technical means are available to do that with relative ease. Margaret Rich Greer makes a plea for printing multiple authorial versions of a play where they exist and, as far as possible, employing the facing-page format. This strategy enables the student to see and understand the predicament of the theatre director who had 77??BCom, Vol. 46, No. 1 (Summer 1994) to create a script for performance from various sources and to appreciate this complex social process when dealing with the comedia. A handy list of "Sources ofInformation on Golden Age Actors and Actresses" supplements her study. The many problems posed by sueltas are enumerated and discussed by Don W. Cruickshank who provides a very helpful list of books, pamphlets and articles on the subject. The thorny issue of attribution of plays is introduced by Constance H. Rose. Although a great variety of strategies have been employed, many Golden Age plays have remained unassigned. Therefore the very last sentence : "Each play and each author has his own demands, and each requires patience" (p.133) is very valid. For those who are considering using microcomputers to edit comedia texts, Charles Ganelin provides an introduction to the Macintosh computer and appropriate software, explaining its suitability for this type ofwork. Finally, John B. Wooldridge has appended a list ofpublications on editing comedia texts. This practitioner oícomedia editing wishes he had studied some ofthese suggestions before embarking on his chore. It may not, however, be too late for many who are new to the field to learn from the valuable experience of their learned colleagues. Florian Smieja University ofWestern Ontario Profeti, Maria Grazia. La vil quimera de este monstruo cómico. Estudios sobre el teatro del Siglo de Oro. Kassel: Edition Reichenberger, 1992. Maria Grazia Profeti offers, in this collection, nineteen of her articles on Golden Age drama published since 1980 (with the exception of one published in 1976) encompassing a wide range of critical methodologies. The essays are a testament to the breadth and depth ofProfeti's critical and editiorial acumen. They offer the broadest possible view of the trajectory of her scholarship—from the theater of Juan del Encina to Alberto Arbasino's twentieth-century rendering oí Elprincipe constante (?principe costante); from Golden Age...

Tomas Schmit: A Fluxus Farewell to Perfection: An Interview

Tomas Schmit was born on 13 July 1943 in Thier in the Rhineland, near Cologne and Diisseldorf. He chose not to follow a formal academic training, but rather to go through a practical apprenticeship by collaborating with such Fluxus artists as Nam June Paik, George Maciunas, George Brecht, Addi Koepcke, and Ludwig Gosewitz. Schmit became one of the core members of the Happenings and Fluxus movements of the I96os. Although some of his performances and pieces (his name for a performance script) bear resemblance to Happenings, his main activities were always in the Fluxus genre. He was personally involved with the first official Fluxus event, Paik's Neo-Dada in der Musik concert on I6 June 1962, and four of the major Fluxus festivals. As he explained in an interview conducted on 9 April 1992, he was at that time a young man who had just left school. He had taken an interest in avantgarde art and music and gained some theatre experience through occasional work as a supernumerary at the Cologne municipal theatres. At that time, the Rhineland possessed the most active and innovative art scene to be found in Germany.' All the latest trends coming over from the U.S.A., France, and Great Britain were exhibited in Cologne or Diisseldorf. But Schmit was not too impressed:

The End Crowns All: Closure and Contradiction in Shakespeare's History by Barbara Hodgdon

REVIEWS Barbara Hodgdon. The End Crowns All: Closure and Contradiction in Shakespeare's History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991. Pp. xviii + 309. $39.50. Endings are historians' most conspicuous fictions. At the close, more than anywhere else in their narratives, they tip their hands. Herbert Butterfield witheringly characterized as "Whig interpretations" any histories with happy endings, regardless of the historian's particular political affiliation. Renaissance historians, Shakespeare and the chroniclers of his sources among them, could choose between two major modes of structuring the past. One, looking back over the bloody period of the Wars of the Roses, could see this as a punitive interlude, brought to a close with the miraculous accession of the Tudors; the other, grimly cyclical rather than providential and teleological, could see the power struggles of the past endlessly repeated in the present. Most often, both Shakespeare and his sources blended these two ways of seeing. Nowhere is the result of this blending more regenerative, Barbara Hodgdon proposes in The End Crowns All, than in the closing moments of Shakespeare's history plays. Closure in drama is both more decisive (plays must end) and more tangential (audiences continue to ponder what they saw long after the spectacle's close) than the leisurely summings-up of historical narratives. Hodgdon focuses in this intricate book upon Shakespeare's histories both as playtexts (scripts for performance) and as performance texts (well-documented productions, most of which she has herself seen more than once). The playtexts themselves often provide divergent endings, as she demonstrates through careful comparison of Quarto and Folio versions of the Henry VI plays. The productions she selects for discussion diverge, too, in their readings of the playtexts, as some directors stick closely to a Quarto or Folio (or to a modern composite edition) and others, like John Barton, run the modern editors one better by compiling alternatives, conflating variants, and even contributing lines and scenes of their own. Hodgon surveys the almost infinite variety possible in the moments of the close. Like Philip McGuire, to whose Speechless Dialect she is indebted for much of her methodology, she proposes a kind of dramatic analysis that relates to ordinary literary analysis of plays as quantum mechanics relates to classical Newtonian physics. McGuire found an enormous potential for variability in the "open silences" in Shakespeare's plays, where characters on stage are present and their responses are of vital importance to the play but where the playtext gives no hint as to what those responses must necessarily be. Hodgdon finds extraordinarily rich potential in the closes of the history plays, both in their inconclusive status as playtexts and in their multifarious incarnations as productions. 73 74Comparative Drama She realizes that, in the present climate of critical opinion, to raise the flag of stage-oriented criticism is to challenge Harry Berger's dismissal of that kind of criticism as reductive, time-bound, and local. "By assuming that the theater cannot perform a critique of its own mimetic processes," she argues, "Berger's post-Lacanian methodology slips strangely into a pre-Brechtian phase where it is both theoretically and practically impossible for either a staged representation or its spectators to perform such deconstructive moves." On the contrary, Hodgdon points out, no cultural practice, not even theatrical performance, "achieves absolute 'coercive power' " over its audience; rather, "the production and framing of meaning are constantly open to negotiation and renegotiation, including critique and resistance" (p. 16). It is in these processes of negotiation and renegotiation, as they occur in the playtexts themselves, in subsequent critical discussions of the texts, and in selected performance texts that Hodgdon is primarily interested. "The single constant in this fluid exchange of texts and methodologies of historical discovery is the figure of the ruler," Hodgdon states (p. 12); "closure in the history play constitutes a territory that generates and seeks to legitimize new kings, operating as a magnification mirror for the values and ideology of absolutism as well as for the incoherence of those beliefs" (p. 13). The multitude of different endings possible for each play reflects the multiplicity of each play's engagement of the pivotal issue of sovereignty. Hodgdon begins her study with King John...

Waiting for Godot by Lawrence Graver, and: Waiting for Godot: Form in Movement by Thomas Cousineau

306Comparative Drama mine the value of the rest of the book. The real strength of Gibson's work lies in its sensitive evocation, through historical example and period image, of the devotional spirit that infuses East Anglian plays like the Marian sequence in the N-town "cycle." If, in our secular age, we would seek to understand the audience of these plays better, we should welcome Gail Gibson's Theater of Devotion as a perceptive guide. SALLY-BETH MACLEAN Records of Early English Drama Lawrence Graver. Waiting for Godot, Landmarks of World Literature Ser. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Pp. 114. $19.95. Thomas Cousineau. Waiting for Godot: Form in Movement, Twayne's Masterwork Studies. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1990. Pp. 136. $18.95 (cloth); $7.95 (paper). Though efforts to democratize the canon are not encouraged by "landmarks" and "masterwork" designations, enough residual respect for classical texts remains to produce a consensus that neither Cambridge University Press' "Landmarks of World Literature" series nor "Twayne's Masterwork Studies" would be complete without volumes on Waiting for Godot. Both series offer handy access to Beckett's play: Cambridge's intends a close reading, an account of the play's historical, cultural, and intellectual background, a discussion of its influences, and a guide to further reading; Twayne's intends a "lively critical reading," discussions of the work's influence, historical context, and critical reception, and a bibliography. Lawrence Graver's seems the more useful for the student or general reader; Thomas Cousineau's, though quirky, would appeal to those already familiar with the play. Graver has already published a book in the field. Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage, co-edited with Raymond Federman in 1979, collects reviews of early productions of Godot, many of which are revived in "Genesis and Reception," Chapter 1 of the present study. For a substantial portion of the book (54 of the 114 pages), Graver walks the novice through the literary landscape of the play, attending to each of the characters and to the unseen Godot as well as to the philosophical, linguistic, and dramatic patterns of the play. He offers a sturdy and informative reading, disappointing only in its virtual neglect of the play as performance script. His comparison of the French and English editions (Chapter 3) should prove suggestive to the first-time reader, though not all scholars would agree that Beckett's shadings, rendered to make Godot more "stageworthy," did little to alter the play. The concluding chapter rehearses the performance history of Godot, then moves to comparisons with plays by other contemporary writers, most notably Pinter, Stoppard, Fugard, and Mamet. Seasoned Beckett scholars will pass on this volume, but students will be grateful for it Cousineau's Waiting for Godot: Form in Movement is an uneven work, a combination of underdeveloped chapters and pedestrian readings , on the one hand, and exciting, sustained insights, on the other. Reviews307 Three chapters that precede the reading that occupies most of the volume's 136 pages are little more than gestures at documenting "Historical Context," "The Importance of the Work," and "Critical Reception ." Joyce, Proust, the surrealists, and Artaud get glances in the first of these, but literary history—such as it is—replaces any reconstruction of time and place implied by the chapter title. Similarly, the account of the play's critical reception becomes a survey of literary approaches to the play; though one would expect audiences to take center stage here, the public's early inhospitality is eclipsed by one premature reference to Beckett's being "more distressed than pleased by the popular success of his play" (p. 11). And Cousineau's assessment of Godofs importance offers brief acknowledgment of its place in the history of modern theater, then slips into a critical reading of the play as a "questioning of the legitimacy of patriarchal society" (p. 8). However provocative the reading, it hardly identifies the contribution Godot has made to the history of thought and of theater. Following this inauspicious beginning, Cousineau moves to the main portion of the study, which, the series promises, will be a "lively critical reading." Here I found the author's critical divisions odd—"Christianity," "Truth," "Language," "Causality," "Memory and...

Evaluating the performance of paper people.

Several recent studies of performance appraisal have used the approach, in which raters read performance vignettes and then rate the performance of several hypothetical ratees. This approach may lead to systematically different outcomes from studies in which ratings are based on the direct or indirect (e.g., via videotape) observation of ratees' behavior. One hundred and eleven studies published between 1975 and 1984 were grouped into five major substantive categories, and a comparative meta-analysis was used to contrast the outcomes of paper people studies to those of similar studies in which ratings were based on the observation of ratee behavior. Effect sizes were found to be significantly larger in paper people studies, although this difference was not uniform across all research areas. Results are discussed in terms of differences in signal-to-noise ratios across the two methods. Many methods have been used in research on performance appraisal. One dimension for classifying these methods is based on whether they use a approach, in which subjects read a series of vignettes containing scaled behavior descriptions and then rate the performance of one or more hypothetical ratees, or an approach that is based on the direct or indirect observation (i.e., via film or videotape) of the behavior of one or more ratees. The latter method has been used in studies ranging from those examining annual perfomance appraisals conducted for administrative purposes in organizations (e.g., Cleveland & Landy, 1981) to laboratory studies, in which the ratees are actors carrying out performance scripts (e.g., Murphy, Balzer, Kellam, & Armstrong, 1984). The critical difference between the two approaches is that in a paper people study, subjects receive written descriptions of the performance they are to evaluate, whereas in studies involving behavior observation, subjects must observe, interpret, and recall the behavior of ratees in the process of evaluating their performance. The use of paper people in research on the interview has been strongly criticized (Gorman, Clover, & Doherty, 1978), although Dipboye, Stramler, and Fontenelle (1984) noted that this approach in fact simulates several features of the interview process. There are also grounds for criticizing the use of paper people in performance appraisal research. First, the question of whether raters observe or read summaries of the performance they are to evaluate has a substantial impact on the nature of the rating task. For example, raters' ability to accurately observe, encode, and recall performance is a critical concern in much of the recent research on performance appraisal (DeNisi, Meg

From manuscript to performance script: The evolution of a poem

From manuscript to performance script: The evolution of a poem