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AGAINST THEATRE: CREATIVE DESTRUCTIONS ON THE MODERNIST STAGE. Edited by Alan Ackerman and Martin Puchner. Performance Interventions Series. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006; pp. xii + 259. $85.00 cloth.
Most theatre scholars are familiar with Jonas Barish's influential 1985 study, The Antitheatrical Prejudice, which explores the history of attacks on the theatre from the time of Plato to the fascist antitheatricalism of the twentieth century. Building on and then questioning or reframing Barish's arguments, Against Theatre looks at the anti-theatrical tendencies evident in many modernist and postmodernist movements. The major premise of this collection is that "anti-theatricalism always emerges in response to a specific theatre and, by extension, that the modernist form of anti-theatricalism attacks not theatre itself but the value of theatricality as it arose in theoretical and practical terms throughout the nineteenth century" (2).
By exploring the attacks on traditional theatre forms made by a wide variety of playwrights, poets, artists, and directors, the works in this collection explore the ways in which anti-theatrical destruction can also be a creative tool for reshaping the theatre. As Ackerman and Puchner note, "anti-theatricalism presents itself as a paradoxical way of affirming the capacious powers of the theatre: far from fearing its own extinction, the theatre can host its own critique and profit in the process" (15). Combined with the strict historical grounding of the various chapters here, this focus on the means by which theatre uses anti-theatricality to drive the creation of new forms pushes the essays here beyond the "trans-historical notion of anti-theatricalism" (2) seen in Barish's work.
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