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The Lines Between the Lines: How Stage Directions Affect Embodiment

2022; Penn State University Press; Volume: 43; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/eugeoneirevi.43.2.0193

2161-4318

Jennifer Buckley,

Theatre and Performance Studies

Had the New York Neo-Futurists done to Eugene O’Neill’s plays what Uta Hagen told her acting students to do to scripts—“cross out” the stage directions “and let your own sense of the character guide you”—they would not have been able to create two of the last decade’s most unconventional and entertaining productions of the dramatist’s work. As readers of this journal likely know, the Neos performed only the stage directions of twelve plays across The Complete and Condensed Stage Directions of Eugene O’Neill, Volume 1 (2011) and Volume 2 (2014). At the time Bess Rowen (in Theatre Journal [2012]) and other reviewers emphasized the hilarity produced by the Neos’ distinctive approach to enacting O’Neill’s directions. While an onstage narrator read the (many) lines aloud, the rest of the cast performed most of the described actions in a presentational style that set the characters and their extreme emotional states into amusingly sharp relief. Rowen noted then that director Christopher Loar voiced an assumption shared by many: that playwrights’ stage directions, especially those that closely detail the physical and emotional world of the play and the interior lives of its characters, constitute an attempt to control directors, actors, and designers by limiting their capacity to make creative choices in the theater. Like Hagen, whose well-known advice to actors Rowen cites in this book’s introduction (6), Loar privileges the embodied interpretive work done by artists in and of their own time and place over that of the playwright.In The Lines Between the Lines, Rowen makes an important contribution to this long-running discussion by demonstrating that many kinds of modern stage directions—including O’Neill’s most and least concrete descriptions—prompt embodied interpretive processes that can shape a wide variety of creative responses. Presenting a series of concise case studies of acclaimed twentieth- and twenty-first-century plays, Rowen argues that even stage directions that seem exhaustive or “impossible” can stimulate theater artists and readers to see, hear, feel, and think “alongside” dramatic texts in ways that enable imaginative, inclusive, and culturally specific performances (8, emphasis in original).Rowen states the book’s argument clearly, early, and often: rather than treating stage directions as literary intrusions or as instructions to be accepted or rejected, theater artists, scholars, and readers should use the information the text provides about the play’s tangible and intangible components to inspire performances inflected by the identities and experiences that they themselves bring to the work. Those performances are always embodied, she insists, whether they occur in theaters or in the minds of readers. Like scholars Karin Littau (2006), Christopher Grobe (2016), and Daniel Sack (whose ongoing Imagined Theatres project this book briefly addresses), Rowen argues that the act of reading is a bodily encounter that engages the senses. The book’s introduction briefly but persuasively responds to field-shaping accounts—including Martin Puchner’s (2002) and W. B. Worthen’s (2005)—that emphasize how modern dramatists used writing and publication to assail and/or circumvent the theater of their time. Modernism is not really Rowen’s focus, and so she is perhaps less responsive than she might have been to the aspects of Puchner’s and Worthen’s arguments that stress how productive “modernist antitheatricality” (Puchner’s term) was for the theater. Major modern playwrights who are often credited with expanding the forms and functions of stage directions—namely Ibsen, Shaw, and Chekhov—get a mention here, accompanied by a brief summary of the shifts in print culture that enabled such innovations. But of the canonical white male modern dramatists, O’Neill is of the most interest to Rowen, in large part because he created such striking examples of what Rowen calls “affective stage directions.”This is a capacious and diverse category that includes O’Neill’s famous description of the Little Formless Fears in The Emperor Jones (1920); the last, thoroughly ambiguous line in The Hairy Ape (1922); the “thought asides” in Strange Interlude (1928); and the Clerk’s long, unspoken internal monologue in Hughie (1941). “Affect” is the key term here, and Rowen uses it as a noun and as a verb. Applying a methodology that draws on recent theories of affect as well as J. L. Austin’s speech-act theory, and writing in a serviceable prose style, Rowen analyzes “unusual” stage directions that demand active interpretation to make things happen in the mind or on the stage (12). Affect (n.) provides Rowen with a conceptual term that grounds her argument about how particular people living in particular bodies in particular times and places might encounter the unspoken and often ambiguous subtexts of dramatic works. How these particularly embodied people interpret such stage directions can significantly affect (v.) a play’s performance and its effects. Far from limiting theater artists’ choice-making capacities, Rowen shows, these stage directions can and must “catalyze creativity” (7).In different hands, this argument could have been too general in its assertion of the “possibility” and “potentiality” in written descriptions of feeling, tone, and mood (13). But there is also an ethical component to Rowen’s methodological approach: she encourages a way of reading stage directions that attends to how those lines encode assumptions about interpreters’ identities and experiences, and she demonstrates how active interpretations of those very same lines can expose and challenge those assumptions. Affective stage directions provide theater-makers—including those who are minoritized and/or marginalized due to their race, gender, sexuality, or ability status—with opportunities to stage difference differently than playwrights may have ever imagined (looking at you, Edward Albee Estate). Indeed, the role that identity markers play in her argument is so crucial that Rowen repeatedly calls attention to how her own identity shapes her negotiations with affective stage directions. This emphasis on the cultural specificity of individual and group experience has also prompted her to be refreshingly honest about why she selected the plays she did for the purposes of this study. Rowen describes herself as a white, Irish, Jewish, English-speaking resident of the United States whose playgoing has been concentrated in New York City; for these reasons, she focuses her analysis on contemporary American drama, but she also indicates how others with different backgrounds could draw on her method to inform their own, necessarily different work. It’s a generous approach that I hope will produce a real diversity of responses.Rowen’s swift yet persuasive case studies include plays by well-known artists including O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, Paula Vogel, Sarah Ruhl, Lucas Hnath, Tarell Alvin McCraney, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Mac Wellman, Suzan-Lori Parks, Annie Baker, and Young Jean Lee, as well as less frequently studied and performed playwrights like Harlem Renaissance writer Marita Bonner. Rowen groups the “unusual” stage directions in their plays into five categories and devotes a chapter to each. In the first chapter, on “spoken stage directions,” she uses Welded and Strange Interlude, Hnath’s A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay about the Death of Walt Disney (2014), and McCraney’s In the Red and Brown Water (2008), among others, to show how the soliloquies and asides of previous eras developed into the overtly narrative devices that enable actors to perform actions and feelings while also performing a stance toward the characters and the audience.Chapter 2 opens with an extended meditation on a striking instance of affective stage directions in Ruhl’s In the Next Room, or The Vibrator Play (2009) that requires the actor to perform a nineteenth-century woman’s first orgasm, and her feelings about it, in a way that is uninfected by twentieth-century pornographic depictions—but is otherwise undescribed in the directions themselves. In this example and others in the chapter, Rowen explores how unspoken lines indicating characters’ internal physical and emotional states can empower readers and theater artists to illuminate plays’ subtexts, and even critique them. Neil LaBute, for example, more than deserves Rowen’s sharp take on the gender and racial assumptions voiced in the playwright’s stage directions for This Is How It Goes (2005).The next two chapters detail the kinds of work stimulated by “choreographic” and “multivalent” stage directions. The former, which is the subject of chapter 3, describes the feel of a dance scene without mapping out movements in detail. Rowen is on to something here: there are an awful lot of “dance breaks” in twenty-first-century American plays, and an account of the “corporeal thinking through” that plays like Madeleine George’s Hurricane Diane (2019) and Danai Gurira’s Familiar (2016) require is important for understanding contemporary drama (116). In chapter 4 Rowen demonstrates how the “multivalent” stage directions written by Lee (Church, 2008), Jacobs-Jenkins (Neighbors, 2010), Larissa FastHorse (The Thanksgiving Play, 2018), and others provide only the “parameters” within which a performance moment and its reception could occur, leaving to actors, directors, designers, audiences, and readers the work of determining even crucial details (154).The book’s fifth and final chapter on “impossible” stage directions begins with Rowen’s enjoyable take on the last lines of O’Neill’s Marco Millions (1927), which suggest that, as she says, “any living actor who has ever played Marco Polo . . . is still performing that role and will continue to do so until the day he dies” (191). That play and others studied in this chapter feature descriptions that cannot be performed literally, but, as Rowen rightly notes, that does not mean the plays or those directions cannot be performed at all. Here Rowen departs from many scholarly takes on modern plays categorized as closet drama by emphasizing that the “affective information” communicated by such lines is “translatable and performable” (193, emphasis in original). Rowen makes room for the argument that such physically unfeasible directions are written for readers, but she is correct to emphasize the allure of closet drama and other “impossible” scripts for exceptionally creative theater artists. Can Tristan Tzara’s typographically indicated “dance of the gentleman who falls from a funnel in the ceiling onto the table” in Le Coeur à Gaz (1921, revised 1946) be staged as the directions state? No, but I will note that fact did not stop Big Dance Theater from staging it with great smarts and style in 1997.Finally, in the book’s brief conclusion, Rowen uses a key direction from Jeremy O. Harris’s Slave Play (2019) that enables the actor playing Kaneisha to do “whatever she feels is right” at the play’s climactic moment, which follows an act of sexual violence (299). Ending here might be seen as a risky move on Rowen’s part, because there has been such sharp disagreement among commentators and audience members—especially Black audience members—about how much agency the character and the actor are afforded by the playwright, especially considering that most performances are consumed by majority-white audiences. Rowen likely completed the manuscript before that debate (which involves the playwright) reached a state of maximum intensity, and she does not directly refer to those conversations. However, Rowen does there what she does well throughout the book, showing how an unspoken line can enable artists (and readers) to make creative choices that are rigorously informed by their identities and experiences.Rowen consistently models a scrupulous and innovative method for reading affective stage directions, and the field would be wise to take up her invitation to extend the work beyond this book’s thoughtfully defined parameters. So, too, would twenty-first-century theater artists who feel compelled by but also frustrated with O’Neill and his plays. As Rowen shows, the author’s copious stage directions can provide them with opportunities to exercise a creative authority that is all their own.