encouraged a non-linear, montage-based approach to history that may have been influenced by epic theater. Benjamin believed that, since it is impossible to efface the present and “show things as they really were,” the historian should show history as “time filled by the presence of the now.”21 In other words, the historian must brush history against the grain because traditional history, treating the past as if it exists in itself, reifies the past and thus engenders mystification. In a passage reminiscent of Brecht’s belief that traditional (with-the-grain) realistic drama encourages passive (rather than active) spectatorship, Benjamin observes that “the history which showed things ‘as they really were’ was the strongest narcotic of the century.”22 Similarly, a “faithful” (i.e., traditional) (re)production of a hundred-year-old play which purports to show the work “as it was meant to be” could narcoticize spectators into thinking that they’re seeing “what really was,” and thereby discourage them from becoming aware of a work’s dialectical tensions, as well as its relationship to their own historical moment, and vice versa.
Herbert Blau, evoking the distancing techniques of both Brecht’s epic theater and, indirectly, Benjaminian historiography, suggests that directors should exploit theater’s inherent tensions by taking “things [including plays themselves] out of perspective, restoring them to history.”23 Brecht wrenches conventional perspectives away from spectators by disrupting their empathetic identification with the play’s characters, and by utilizing montage-like juxtapositions that require the audience to fill in gaps in order to find meaning. While lacking—at least on the surface—Brecht’s interest in social change, the Wooster Group’s experimental aesthetics similarly disrupt conventions, but in more extreme ways that move performance even further beyond traditional realism. Although a Wooster Group-style production of a play by O’Neill will inevitably show the text in a new light, it is important to keep in mind that even realistic productions of a particular work will always create, from production to production, a somewhat different experience for the play’s respective audiences. As Marvin Carlson observes,
a dramatic author…must recognize that his characters are in a much more radical sense only partly his own, since in the theater they will be embodied by persons whose views of reality will be necessarily different…and when the play is created [or mounted] in another chronotope its discourse will necessarily move even further from his own. In addition, the whole production apparatus, including the director and potentially a whole range of contributing artists working on scenery, lighting, sound, costumes, and so on, will provide yet other views of reality and fresh “voices” in the articulation of the produced play.24
New contexts always create, according to Carlson, a “fresh perspective on an inherited expression, the play and its performance tradition.”25 Yet performance contexts, which can include a different time period than that of the dramatic text and/or radically different approaches to theater-making, vary widely, as do the levels of “freshness”—or staleness, as the case may be—of productions of the same play. Thus, one must distinguish conventional productions, those that attempt to reproduce the (often realistic) play in ways intended by the author (and genre), from more experimental work that opens up interpretive possibilities. Experimental theater companies such as the Wooster Group, for example, will often foreground (rather than conceal) theater’s signifying processes in order to complicate dramatic representation, which is never as simple or transparent as many spectators assume.
Dramatic realism, on the other hand, limits a production’s ability to help audiences gain new insights. Rather than creating a performative environment that explores and makes visible the dialectical tension between past and present, actor and character, realism smooths over such tensions while helping to perpetuate the (apparently stable and thus unchangable) status quo. Indeed, realistic dramatic form, even moreso than a work’s content—radical or otherwise—encourages the audience to continue seeing theater, and thus the world, through the lens of hegemonic ideology. As Elin Diamond points out, “Brechtian hindsight” enables us to see that traditional realism
mystifies the process of theatrical signification. Because it naturalizes the relation between character and actor, setting and world, realism operates in concert with ideology. And because it depends on, insists on a stability of reference, an objective world that is the source and guaranator of knowledge, realism surreptitiously reinforces (even if it argues with) the arrangements of the world.26
Paraphrasing Derrida, Diamond suggests that realism “is mimesis at its most naive—its positivist moment.”27
Revivifying Early O’Neill:
The Postmodern Turn
In order to circumvent realism’s aesthetic and ideological limitations, a contemporary theater company could, like the Wooster Group, radically undermine a dramatic work’s realistic conventions. Such a move could, according to Michael Vanden Heuvel in his book on experimental theater, help to
revivify traditional textuality by incorporating avant-garde idioms and performance strategies as a language within the dramatic text, an idiom appropriate to the theatricalized and transformational sensibilities of the present day.28
Or a theater company could begin with an already experimental text which, due to its “avant-garde idioms,” offers greater potential in itself for the destabilization of conventional representation and thinking. Unsurprisingly, the Wooster Group has—as suggested above—been drawn to O’Neill’s early, more experimental works, which they’ve presented without inserting other written scripts into the plays (as they are wont to do), or radically cutting-up the original, although the Wooster Group still subverts realistic elements and traces that these plays contain.
The Wooster Group productions that utilize more or less realistic texts—such as L.S.D.: Just the High Points, brief sections of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible or, in Routes 1 & 9, parts of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, as well as the previously discussed Long Day’s Journey Into Night (Point Judith)—usually feature only brief, cut-up samples of those texts, which the company radically juxtaposes with other texts and performance forms while imploding illusionistic conventions. O’Neill’s early texts such as The Emperor Jones and The Hairy Ape—much more theatrical than realistic—remain more amenable, “as-is,” to innovative theater productions, which could help to explain why the Wooster Group has chosen to present those plays, unlike the more realistic plays they’ve worked on, in their entirety.
I do not mean to suggest, however, that these plays can be simply put onstage, unembellished by revivifying performance strategies, in the twenty-first century. The Emperor Jones, for example, features an African-American protagonist, Brutus Jones, whose language—which dominates the play—is sometimes not far removed from turn-of-the-century blackface minstrelsy. Rather than alter the written text, however, the Wooster Group altered how the text was performed by having Kate Valk, a white, female performer, play Brutus Jones. While Valk’s race and gender destabilized conventions of realistic representation, any claims to “authenticity” implied by the dramatic text were further subverted by Valk’s onstage appearance, which included blackface make-up, her neck painted red, and a colorful, clearly non-Western costume from the highly stylized Japanese theater form of Kabuki.
Surprisingly, at least for me, Valk did not see the Emperor’s dialogue as being at all problematic. During a 2013 interview (published in chapter seven), she told me that she’s widely read in African-American literature, of which she’s very fond—she especially likes Zora Neale Hurston’s work—and she views Jones’ language as a “white man’s take,” which she nonetheless finds to be both musical and highly poetic. Positively responding to the play’s dialogue upon first reading the role aloud with the Wooster Group, Valk found the Emperor’s words to be “like an aural hallucination. It was like music to me,” she recalled. Additionally, she experienced a strong attraction to Jones himself: “I felt it deeply that I had to play that character… There was no distance; it was me the first time I read it.” I still assumed, however, that she might have
