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Maria Irene Fornes's Promenade, though now often forgotten in considerations of the playwright's work, ought to be remembered as a representative landmark of the 1960s Off-Off-Broadway movement. Careful reconstruction of this play's evolution reveals significant dynamics in the relationship between a text and its performance. This study demonstrates the unusual process by which the play was written, its formal and thematic emphasis on performativity, and its presentation in three different productions.
In recent years there has been much concern in both critical circles and experimental theatre practice over the relationship of dramatic text and theatrical performance, particularly in the light of poststructuralist arguments about the traditional, "theological stage," and its supposed interpretive enslavement of actors and directors to the transcendental, god-like dominance of the playwright's word.1 The ramifications of this debate were perhaps most clearly set out in Michael Vanden Heuvel's 1991 study, Performing Drama/Dramatizing Performance, which traces the attempts of avant-garde theatre and performance artists first to exclude the writer from the creation of the event altogether (1960s and 1970s), and latterly-in light of the realization that the performer's "presence" was itself coming to represent another kind of metaphysical authoritarianism-to re-admit writerly texts to the process in a consciously problematized form. In particular, Vanden Heuvel points to the development in the 1980s of what he refers to as theatrical "dialogics," seeing this as a possible way forward. A dialogic production (and this is quickly to gloss a complex argument) would be one in which textual and performative elements co-exist in creative tension, a kind of double exposure in which each informs but also, to some extent, "makes strange" the other, with neither being ascribed ultimate precedence or authority.
Vanden Heuvel's is an important intervention, but I would take issue with one area of his analysis in particular. Like many other contemporary critics and theoreticians, he adopts a shorthand view of the development of American theatre which assumes that the only important experiments of the 1960s were those conducted either by the visual artists who began making Happenings and other forms of live performance, or by the director-led, physically-oriented ensemble companies such as the Living Theatre, the Open Theatre, and The Performance Group (Richard Schechner's somewhat self-mythologizing accounts of TPG's importance have themselves...