More
Big Fat Reference Books!
By Jonathan Kalb
The Oxford Encyclopedia of
Theatre & Performance
Edited by Dennis Kennedy
1559 pages, 2 vols.
Oxford University Press
$275
In this age of specialization, the specialized
encyclopedia may be the most embattled type of reference book.
Since dictionaries confine themselves to defining terms, they
may be attacked for inaccuracy but are rarely the subject of loud
debate about the value of defining their terms. Almanacs and other
periodical compendiums (such as annual Best of… and This
Year in… series) avoid controversies about value by concentrating
on ephemeral and drily factual data. Encyclopedias, however, particularly
those issued by prestigious publishers, invariably give the appearance
of valorizing selected knowledge as timeless and monumental, even
when their editors duly acknowledge that they are products of
a particular time. Encyclopedias always come off as authoritative
time-capsules, whatever their disclaimers, and time-capsules invite
arguments over the representativeness of their contents.
I suspect that Dennis Kennedy, editor of
the two-volume Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre & Performance,
will be spared the sort of heated disputes over selection and
accuracy that currently swirl around, say, Brill's Encyclopedia
of Islam. Nevertheless, Kennedy has entered notoriously unsettled
territory--the still uncertain relationship between theater studies
and performance studies--where flare-ups, and occasionally full-scale
battles, still occur. There is a sort of unspoken diplomatic frisson
to this enormous project, which (as its title implies) is premised
on the notion that the rift between the two disciplines is no
longer real or important, or at least that whatever gulf remains
can be bridged by mutual understanding. Only "time will tell,"
as Beckett's addled academic Lucky says, himself a victim of re-allocated
resources in a market-driven environment indifferent to high-minded
ideas. Meanwhile, Kennedy's prodigious and intelligently conceived
volumes--1559 double-column pages with credited entries by 317
distinguished contributors--are likely to be welcome succor and
sustenance to those most victimized by academic turf wars: graduate
students.
Kennedy says in his preface that The
Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre & Performance (OETP) is conceived
to serve both specialists and non-specialists. The work encompasses
both brief, just-the-facts entries and longer, discursive articles
that dispense with the appearance of objectivity to aim at capacious
historical and critical assessment. I can't discern any rule about
which subjects receive longer entries--people, places, concepts,
theories, or traditions--but most of the biographies are very
brief (150-200 words) and, it must be said, unambitious. The non-specialist
turning to the OETP for such entries would find few qualitative
reasons to prefer them over those in any of the "Companion to
Theater" volumes now available (though the OETP's range of entries
is greater). The real editorial love and care in this work has
gone into the longer contributions.
For those interested in plays, the gold
standard for essay-articles in smaller English-language encyclopedias
has long been The Reader's Encyclopedia of World Drama,
edited by John Gassner and Edward Quinn. Published in 1969, this
incisive single volume was guided by the old post-war assumption
that drama, if it merited serious study at all, was best regarded
as literature. The same was true of The McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia
of World Drama, which appeared in 1972 and devoted large
portions of its four volumes to plot summary. Interestingly enough,
by the time both these works appeared, theater studies in the
U.S., Britain, and Germany had already evolved to the point of
sophisticated consideration of performance as a primary subject.
Unfortunately, though, no essayistic encyclopedia of world theater
(as distinct from drama) ever appeared that could meaningfully
complement Gassner and Quinn--including the five-volume 1984 revision
of McGraw Hill, which wasn't nearly as "conceptually
improved" in this respect as it claimed.
Now, several decades later, the picture
is vastly more complicated. Happenings, performance art, performance
studies, cultural studies, inter- and multiculturalism, the ascendancy
of critical theory, and much, much more have intervened to render
the very notion of a single field quaint. The biggest question
in any new work attempting comprehensive coverage is: what are
the new boundaries? Another stickler is: how is comprehensiveness
to be judged? Among many American and British academics, the rigid
old "all drama is literature" bias has now been displaced by an
irresponsibly loose "everything is theater" openness. Thus, the
framing choices of an editor like Kennedy are very much under
the microscope. To my mind, he deserves enormous credit just for
producing a landscape that seems coherent for the moment, for
the sake of argument.
Among the many lucid and mind-opening essays
in the OETP are those on "Toilets" (by Tracy Davis and Peter Holland),
"Pornography and Performance" (Kim Marra), "Film and Theatre"
(David Mayer), and "Interculturalism" (Brian Singleton). These
combine with excellent 500-1000-word articles on such matters
as "Riots" (Jim Davis), "Cyber Theatre" (Matthew Causey), and
"Historiography" (Thomas Postlewait). The breakdown of scholarly
borders over the past several decades is fairly and fruitfully
represented. Standard theater topics that receive penetrating
longer treatment include "Molière" (Roger Herzel), "Lighting"
(John Barnes), and "Scenography" (Matthew Wilson Smith).
Among Kennedy's most original editorial
decisions was to dispense with articles on national traditions
(which he says are adequately treated in other works, and that's
true--see Don Rubin's World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre,
for instance) in favor of long entries on cities and regions that
are important centers of theatrical activity. This, he says, creates
a focus "on performance as an expression of society and locality,
from contributors with deep connections to the area." He might
have added that the approach also generated some of the encyclopedia's
best writing. The fine, multiply-authored entries on London, New
York, and Paris, as well as the shorter ones on Berlin, Moscow,
Algiers, and Mexico City are all full of fresh observations and
will repay study even by readers familiar with the cities.
Inevitably, some readers will also be irritated
by certain choices. The spirit of interdisciplinariness certainly
prevails in the OETP, but some types of interdisciplinariness
are more equal than others. Cross-pollinations of theater with
anthropology or ethnography, for instance, are considered much
more important than those of theater with psychology and psychotherapy.
Victor Turner and Richard Schechner are in; psychodrama and sociodrama
are out. Another bias follows a pervasive trend in the humanities
over the past several decades in preferring political questions
to aesthetic ones--no entry on humanism and nothing on conceptions
of beauty (by region or era), or even on its quasi-political iterations
in kitsch or camp. Furthermore, Marxism is curiously muted in
this political universe--no entry on "Lehrstück," and a major
article on "Race and Theatre" lacks a counterpart on "Class and
Theatre" and/or "Revolution and Theatre."
Still another bias in the OETP--odd only
in light of its claim to serve non-specialists--has to do with
a too strictly academic gauge of which living artists are important
enough for inclusion. Particularly directors. Avant-gardists like
JoAnne Akalaitis, Peter Sellars, and Anne Bogart seem assured
of a place, as does anyone whose iconoclasm (or formal innovation,
or history of public controversy) has been useful to college seminars
over the past 10-15 years. Directors who have merely excelled
at the craft of interpreting plays, however, or who have earned
respect among their peers for other practical or technical prowess,
or for psychological perceptiveness, occupy an unmentioned sub-category.
Here is the famous gulf between the theory and praxis of contemporary
theater, which ought to unsettle every scholar. I don't dispute
Kennedy's inclusion of anyone--I happen to revere many of the
avant-gardists he covers--but I do question the exclusion of yeoman
artists such as Jack O'Brien, Mark Lamos, Michael Greif, Jonathan
Kent, Arthur Penn, James Lapine, and Joe Mantello.
Every encyclopedia, despite the time and
widely shared effort needed to produce it, is in the long run
a panoramic snapshot of a particular historical moment. The OETP's
snapshot is both fascinatingly self-contradictory and wonderfully
ambitious: it records both an explosion of performative knowledge
in our time and intense post-post-Enlightenment hopes for disciplinary
solidarity. The work is rooted strongly in the culture wars of
the past two decades, and while it's true that students today
cannot survive in academia without understanding this intellectual
heritage, it's also true that, for the most original thinkers
of the future, poring over that heritage will be comparable to
generals preparing for the last war. A prodigious work like this
tells us much about where we are, and no doubt also points unequivocally
to where we're going, if we only knew how to read it that way.
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