Drama
Between Poetry and Performance

• Draws on examples from major playwrights including Shakespeare, Ibsen, Beckett, and Parks
• Explores the critical terms and controversies that animate the performance and study of drama, such as the status of language, the function of character and plot, and uses of writing
• Engages in a theoretical, disciplinary, and cultural repositioning of drama, by exploring and contesting its position at the threshold between text and performance

Acknowledgments ix

Preface: Drama, Poetry, and Performance xi

Introduction: Between Poetry and Performance 1

i. Shakespeare 3.0 2

ii. Images of Writing/Metaphors of Performance 8

The score 8

The blueprint 12

Information/software 13

Dramatic tools, performance technologies 20

iii. Agencies of Drama: Burke, Poetry, and Performance 22

Writing as agency: “Antony in Behalf of the Play” 29

1 From Poetry to Performance 35

i. Dramatic Performance and its Discontents: The New Criticism 39

Drama, poetry, and “interpretation” 39

“An arrangement of words” 45

Acts of speech 50

Heresy, responsibility, and performance 56

ii. Dramatic Writing and its Discontents: Performance Studies, Drama Studies 64

Antigone’s bones 64

The “theater of acting” 69

Rethinking writing 77

2 Performing Writing: Hamlet 94

i. Hamlet’s Book 97

Playing the book 97

The law of writ 101

Speaking by the card 106

ii. Corrupt Stuff; or, Doing Things with (Old) Words 112

The crux of performance 113

Enseamed beds 118

iii. “OK, we can skip to the book”: The Wooster Group Hamlet 123

Theatrofilm by Electronovision 127

(Re)playing Burton, performing Hamlet 130

3 Embodying Writing: Ibsen and Parks 139

i. Can We Act What We Say?: Rosmersholm 142

Inscribing character 147

Acting the role 150

Confession, disclosure, detour 152

Doing (unspeakable) things with words 158

ii. Footnoting Performance: The America Play and Venus 161

A wink to Mr. Lincolns pasteboard cutout 172

Diggidy-diggidy-diggidy-dawg 178

4 Writing Space: Beckett and Brecht 192

i. Quad: Euclidean Dramaturgies 196

ii. By Accepting This License 205

iii. What Where: Brechtian Technologies 211

Notes 216

Works Cited 239

Further Reading 258

Index 261