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.