HISTORY IN POSTMODERN THEATER: HEINER MÜLLER, CARYL CHURCHILL, AND

SUZAN-LORI PARKS
Author(s): Sanja Bahun-Radunović
Source: Comparative Literature Studies , 2008, Vol. 45, No. 4 (2008), pp. 446-470
Published by: Penn State University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/25659684

REFERENCES
Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/25659684?seq=1&cid=pdf-
reference#references_tab_contents
You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms

Penn State University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access
to Comparative Literature Studies

This content downloaded from

93.242.132.219 on Tue, 07 Feb 2023 20:15:48 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 HISTORY IN POSTMODERN THEATER: HEINER MULLER,
CARYL CHURCHILL, AND SUZAN-LORI PARKS

Sanja Bahun-Radunovic

A play is a blueprint of an event: a way of creating and rewriting history

through the medium of literature.
?Suzan-Lori Parks

History becomes a human history only to the extent that it involves the
human, that it is accentuated by and refigured through human activity;
thus goes the conclusion of Paul Ricoeur's three-volume discussion of the
ways in which the order of human temporality and the world of action
get transformed into a narrative.1 In theater, one may extend this line of
thought, history becomes "humanized" and "workable" by/in the very act
of performance. The latter is always a "state of emergency," the chronotopic
point at which our personal and social being is excited, ex-centered, and
sometimes, Bertolt Brecht hoped at least, brought to awareness of its his
torical condition. This refiguration of historical time into "human time," or
"time of initiative" happens even when the aims of a play are professedly
apolitical, indeed even when a play is denied (by its author or its critics) its
own status as a work of theater and/or work of history, as often happens in
recent theatrical production.2
This article argues that the recent reassessments of history in postmod
ern theater address what is also the crucial tension-point in contemporary
philosophy of history and historiography: the attempt to fuse the history of
long-time spans and the history of events. Alongside the much-discussed
exposure of the narrative character of history (cf, the important work of
Michel Foucault, Hayden White, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Paul Veyne, and
others), the ethical primacy of the history of long-time spans over the history of
events has been the second major topic in the debates about history since the

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES, VOL. 45, NO. 4, 2008.

Copyright ? 2008. The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.

446

This content downloaded from

93.242.132.219 on Tue, 07 Feb 2023 20:15:48 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 HISTORY IN P6STMODERN THEATER 447

1950s. The latter debate was initiated by the proponents of "devaluation" of

great historical events (most notably, the Annales School) who claimed that
the hegemonic history of events deprived us of any notion of a time which
was not the time of our, i.e. human, "making" and "record." They proposed
in its stead the concept of "long-time spans," a conceptual framework which
would allot discursive attention to a much broader field of natural history and
implicitly recognize the multiplicity of differently embodied histories. Other
thinkers, such as Paul Ricoeur, warned that a history of time-spans might
sever historical time from the (human) understanding of the past, present,
and future, thereby also precluding human initiative in time. Thus they argued
for a revised, activist history of events, a continuously re-transcribed history
which would account for our multiple temporalities and examine historical
events?recorded and unrecorded?in their complexity. Surprisingly, the
presence of this debate in postmodern drama and performance has remained
largely unnoticed. I would argue, however, that this effort to think out the
hyphens of the history of long-time spans and the history of events presents
one of the major structuring themes in contemporary theater.
Postmodern theater approaches the revision of the concept of history
through the questioning of teleological stories and linear patterns. Much
in evidence in contemporary theater, the ruptures in dramatic linearity
have made the multiple temporalities of theater performance conspicu
ous, but they have also elicited an awareness of the simultaneous existence
of heterogeneous histories. What has been abandoned in these artistic
attempts to recognize the multiplicity of differently "paced" global histories
is W. F. Hegel's very working site: the comprehension of the world history
as a completed whole, as the "realization of the Spirit in history," guaranteed
by the agency of Reason.3 In fact, postmodern theater is interested in its
very obverse: those for whom the great whole of history has proved to be a
"great hole of history."4 To advance this critique, postmodern theater texts
compulsively, and frequently traumatically, invoke axial historical events
and attendant historical gaps, probing the ways in which these re-inscribe
identities; this summoning is performed through the re-enactments of the
event or examinations of the event's effects on the lives of the participants
or their heirs. The experimental strategies most often deployed to this end
include the intertextual inclusion of archival and quasi-archival material;
the introduction of long-term, supra-historical patterns which subtend and
subvert the storyline; the presentation of historical events as fragmented,
compressed, and disjunctive units; and the compulsive repetition of events
and quasi-events in the performative present.

This content downloaded from

93.242.132.219 on Tue, 07 Feb 2023 20:15:48 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 448 COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES

All these strategies have found a compelling expression in three plays

under discussion in this article: Heiner Miiller's Hamletmachine, Caryl
Churchill's Mad Forest, and Suzan-Lori Parks's The America Play. Coming
from markedly different (sub)culrural and aesthetic provenances, the dra
maturgical practices of the German playwright Heiner Miiller, the British
dramatist Caryl Churchill, and the African-American author Suzan-Lori
Parks are linked by the postmodern theater impetus cited above: the pre
occupation with the questioning of text and theatricality, coupled by the
paradoxical impossibility of abandoning these practices completely, so con
vincingly described by Herbert Blau.5 For this reason, the "dramatic" and
"postdramatic" practices are entwined in Miiller's, Churchill's, and Parks's
performative pieces: the authors' implicit or explicit denouncements of text
as a repository of authorial power are accompanied by virtuosic linguistic
performances; their dramatic characters are unstable, even ex-topic to the
play, and intertextually decentered, yet many of them also function more or
less traditionally as coalescing points for the spectator-performer connection;
in effect, the stage becomes a force-field for transparency and metaphoric
ity, in which metaphor is everything but flattened out. In this context, it is
important to identify that, despite the observable divergences in theatrical
poetics and cultural frameworks, for all three authors the (possibility of)
representation of history has become the practice through which these post
modern and creative hyphenations are lived out. It is this shared concern
across diverse cultural experiences and practices that is my major interest
here, as I argue that postmodern theater globally has developed some of
its most innovative performative strategies by re-examining the concept of
axial historical event.
In this light, the following analysis is conceived as a three-step move
ment appreciative of both cultural-historical-aesthetic divergences and
principal commensurability of the pieces under discussion: I will progress
from Miiller s critique of written history, based on the re-enactment of the
axial event in the turmoil of personal memory, through Churchill's relativ
ization of the Event in juxtaposition with personal experience, to Parks's
serial re-enacting of the Event aiming to elicit, replicate, and authenticate
an unrecorded history. My analysis will unfold in increments which will
gain comparative force as they progress, for only such a strategy could honor
the authors' different visions of theatrical practice and yet emphasize their
shared effort to forge a representation of history in a time that does not favor
representations. My discussion of these pieces will show that an exponential
play with and around the voids of history is one of the most fruitful and most
widely utilized means to capture our discordant, heterogeneous history/ies in

This content downloaded from

93.242.132.219 on Tue, 07 Feb 2023 20:15:48 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 HISTORY IN POSTMODERN THEATER 449

performance and offer a vision of history that avoids reification. The three
performance texts under consideration will be disclosed as having the same
working principle: to renounce the traditional "history of victors" but leave
space for human initiative.

The Personal and the Historical in Heiner Mailer's Hamletmachine

Heiner Miillers play-text Hamletmachine (1977)1S an eignt Page l?ng con"

densation of his 200-page dramatic commentary on Shakespeare's Hamlet,
the work which coincided with Heiner Muller and Matthias Langhoff s
translating of Shakespeare's Hamlet for Benno Besson at the Volksbiihne in
East Berlin.6 According to Alexander Karschnia, "Shakespeare's time," that
of war and revolution, provided Muller with the perfect material to explore
communist history in the cold war stalemate.7 Muller became particularly
absorbed by the character of Hamlet, which he interpreted (Nietzsche
anly, Brechtianly, and autobiographically) as the embodiment of a modern
intellectual being "loath to act."8 This fascination is vivid in what may be
seen as a summation of the play's various referential threads: through long
monologues by characters of transient or multiple identities, Hamletmachine
explores, inconclusively, the dilemma of the (post)modern intellectual faced
with both futility of existence in a world at the verge of annihilation and his
own complicity in this annihilation.
Characteristically for Miillers mature production, the five sections of
the play ("FAMILIENALBUM" ["Family Scrapbook"], "DAS EUROPA
DER FRAU" ["The Europe of Women"], "SCHERZO," "PEST IN
BUDA SCHLACHT UM GRONLAND" ["Pest in Buda/Battle for
Greenland"] and "WILDHARREND/IN DER FURCHTBAREN
RUSTUNG/JAHRTAUSENDE" ["Fiercely Enduring/Millenniums/In
the Fearful Armor"]) consist of the "synthetic fragments" of general and
personal histories.9 In clash and clamor, these fragments interrelate his
torical events such as Hitler's coming to power (1933) or Ulrike Meinhof's
suicide (1976) and Muller s private history (the arrest and incarceration of
his father in 1933, and the suicide of his first wife, the poet Inge Muller, in
1966), as well as his personal reading-history (Dostoevsky, Eliot, Holderlin,
Shakespeare, his late wife, and many others). Yet, while Hamletmachine is
replete with political, philosophical, literary, and personal allusions, verti
cally overlaid, it contains few characters/actants (Hamlet, Ophelia, and
their transformations) and only vague remnants of plot. Instead, the play is

This content downloaded from

93.242.132.219 on Tue, 07 Feb 2023 20:15:48 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 450 COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES

structured by two possible responses to the turmoil of history: intellectual

refusal to act (Hamlet) and terrorist/revolutionary action (Ophelia). The
opening line, "Ich war Hamlet" (545) ["I was Hamlet" (53)], introduces a
historical subject intent on withdrawing from the accumulation of histori
cal and personal inscriptions, various historical possibilities that are further
explored in Scene 4; this is matched by Ophelia/Elektra's ending monologue
which presents the absurdity of the historical status quo. Having abandoned
personal suicide as a means of revolt?"Gestern habe ich aufgehort mich zu
toten" (547), she claims ["Yesterday, I stopped killing myself" (54)]?Oph
elia/Elektra performs the ultimate rebellious act: historical and ontological
"suicide." As the play closes, she announces: "Ich stofie alien Samen aus, den
ich empfangen habe. Ich verwandle die Milch meiner Briiste in todliches
Gift. Ich nehme die Welt zuriick, die ich geboren habe" (554) ["I eject all the
sperm I have received. I turn the milk of my breasts into lethal poison. I take
back the world I gave birth to" (58)]. This rejection of paternalism renders
Ophelia/Elektra a potentially more operative agent of historical change than
her male counterpart, allowing for the widely accepted interpretation of the
play as a record of two opposing historical trajectories: Hamlet's movement
through the continuity of (pre)written history (gathering records, archiving
them, rejecting them), which decreases in tension from Scene 1 to Scene 4,
and Ophelia's explosive probing of the potentiality of historical gaps, which
increases in tension from Scene 2 to Scene 5.10
However, Ophelia's rebellion is relativized, too: hugely agitated but
paralyzed, wrapped in gauze by men in doctors' coats, she delivers her ending
speech from a wheelchair. Indeed, her last words have already been prefigured
in the opening scene, where the capitalized text has announced the wishful
revocation of birth by the entity of "former Hamlet": "DER MUTTER
SCHOSS IST KEINE EINBAHNSTRASSE" (547) ['A MOTHER'S
WOMB IS NOT A ONE-WAY STREET" (54)].This structural merger of
characters with seemingly disparate levels of activity into the same conscious
ness, where one part is the desire of the other, has been noticed by scholars
but it has been rarely focused on; by contrast, this conflation has informed
casting decisions in many notable productions of the play, such as that of
TheaterAngelusNovus (Vienna) in 1984 or Robert Wilson's 1986 production
(New York).11 Out of the contradictory desires of this synthetic entity, out of
the agglomeration of (abortive) actions and betrayals, the relation of history
and the historical subject emerges as doubly destructive in Miiller's play: on
the one hand, the historical experience destroys, scatters subjectivity; yet,
in order to enter historicity, the subject has to accept this destruction of its
own assemblage.12 As the "tearing of the author's photograph" indicates,

This content downloaded from

93.242.132.219 on Tue, 07 Feb 2023 20:15:48 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 HISTORY IN POSTMODERN THEATER 451

hope?if hope that is?lies in the performative abnegation of all authorial,

logocentric structures, including one's own subjectivity (57).
Hence, to understand the vision of history proposed in Hamletmachine,
one should heed less what we can divine of the play's content than its status
as a play that depicts precisely the failures of drama to take place. The epony
mous performative body refuses the traditional role of father's avenger?"Was
geht mich deine Leiche an" (546) ["What's your corpse to me?" (54)]?and,
after a number of psychotic-political identifications and identity re-inscrip
tions, he withdraws from drama-action in Scene 4. The Actor Playing
Hamlet explains that he does not want to "take part anymore" because his
drama means nothing to people (56); the consciousness cannot identify itself
with the subject/hero/dramatis persona if history does not represent itself as
drama anymore. This rejection implies that the historical present is petri
fied and so are dialectical movement and hope. Thus the historical subject
has assumed the form of machine. In effect, the only subversive act left to
Hamletmachine/Heiner Muller is to heed Walter Benjamin's advice and
try to speak to the dead.13 Because of the temporal incongruities implied in
such a conversation, this communication can only take form of a series of
monologues, linked associatively rather than communicatively. As numerous
interpreters have pointed out, Muller's reduction of dialogue and its dispersion
through multiple playing bodies is linked to his Artaudian mistrust of the
text. Yet, this reduction and dismembering of the dramatic dialogue should
also be recognized as an articulation of the playwright's disenchanted view
of contemporary history: the position of a historical subject torn between the
impending failure of communism, which Muller could easily foresee, and the
alienating wheels of capitalism, whose traces were ubiquitous. It is in this vein
that we should understand Muller's assertion that "no substance for dialogue
exists anymore because there is no more history."14
If this historical pessimism may strike one as unproductive, it is precisely
this state of post-history (which, as we shall see, is still a pre-history for the
Marxist Muller) that allows the author to explore the relation between the
historical subject and history. This examination finds expression in a repetitive
invocation of historical terror, horror of which is felt so essential to reality that
it becomes ontological in Artaud's sense.15 The concept of history as a series
of long-time spans invoked by this repetition of horrors effectively dismantles
the history of "privileged" events in Muller's Hamletmachine. The play further
refutes the progressivism of the Hegelian model through the simultaneous
deployment of ancient, Shakespearean, and postmodern myths, as in the
overlay of female incarnations: Elektra-Ophelia-Ulrike Meinhof-Susan
Atkins. Through these synthetic entities, the performative body, the body

This content downloaded from

93.242.132.219 on Tue, 07 Feb 2023 20:15:48 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 452 COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES

of humankind, is revealed as inscribed by history to the extent of bleeding.

The traces of this inscription are disguised by the layers of written history,
plastered by the Comfortable, "false reality" of new-age commodities, and this
is why materiality of historical suffering shapes the play The visceral gush
ing forth of blood, flesh, and secretion in Hamletmachine bespeaks urgency,
a Benjaminian belief that "every image of the past that is not recognized by
the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably."16
The only productive means to settle accounts with our bloodstained history is
a disruption of the plastered series of events by an intentional opening of old
wounds, by "forcing open [ones] sealed flesh" (57). To reclaim the traumata
of the past means to recognize and act upon the concerns of the present,
Miiller's borrowings from the theater of cruelty indicate.
While no (rationale for) traditional drama exists in the age of "pre
fabricated babble" (57), the play is nevertheless punctuated by what Miiller
perceives as dramatic moments, axial historical events in which multiple
temporalities coalesce: the October Revolution (1917), Hitlers coming to
power (1933), Stalin's death and the strike of construction workers in East
Berlin in 1953, the Hungarian uprising (1956) and the deferred state funeral
of a Hungarian foreign minister (Laszlo Rajk, executed in 1952, rehabilitated
and given the state funeral in 1956), and Ulrike Meinhof s death in 1976.
Superimposed on the long-time span unfolding of myths, these events
traumatically reverberate across disparate chronotopic and textual planes
(Shakespeare's England, the Soviet Union, East Germany, Hungary, the
vast landscapes of America, the sea shore of Hamlet's entry, and the deep
sea of Ophelia/Elektra's exit) and through diverse players/historical subjects
(Hamlet, Ophelia, and their multiple performative incarnations, such as two
Hamlets and four Ophelias in Miiller's staging of the play in 1990).17 While
these events have clear historical referents, Eva Brenner is correct to point
out that Miiller does not treat historical references as data or information,
but as non-chronologically ordered "material" to be digested in/through
performance.18 Yet, one may argue that their referential flow is not drain
either; continuously fragmented and re-assembled, these references function
as indices of the time when "the continuum of history explodes."19 They are
historical signals with which spectators are expected to interact.
To foster this interaction, Miiller fuses historical indices with auto
biographical events and dynamics. Hence, the record of the historical is
simultaneously the re-enactment of personal memory in Hamletmachine\
through citations and quasi-citations, repressed private experiences (the
suicide of Miiller's wife, his father's life, Miiller's own position as a hesitant

This content downloaded from

93.242.132.219 on Tue, 07 Feb 2023 20:15:48 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 HISTORY IN POSTMODERN THEATER 453

intellectual) become inseparable from historical "ghosts" (Hitler and Stalin

implicitly, and Marx, Mao, and Lenin explicitly). Both Hamlet-player and
Ophelia-player have to face this proliferation of ghosts and decide whether
to act or not. These nodes of personal and general history are, then, dissemi
nated throughout the play in the form of images of synthetic brevity, highly
material, cruel, compressed, and overdetermined: blood, flesh, machines, axe,
murder (personal and political), and rape (personal and political). Genuinely
historical, they are always Benjamins dialectically loaded images?snapshots
pulled out from the continuum of time, crystallizations of prior and posterior
history. Shocking, "awakening," and therefore cognitive, they take place in
the interstices of time: "It is not that the past casts its light on the present
or the present casts its light on the past," Benjamin has argued, "rather, an
image is that in which the has-been comes together in a flash with the Now
to form a constellation. In other words, image is dialectic at a standstill."20
In the physical instrumentarium of Miillers Hamletmachine (knives, axes,
hearts, clocks, flesh, machines, body secretion . . .), each image becomes
the congealed eventfulness of history. Not unlike what Brecht admired in
a Chinese play, a knife on the stage comes to stand for the general notion
of war. Yet, in Muller's piece, such an image is also particular: it represents
each historical and personal event in its irreducibility.
A similar attempt to isolate images may be observed in the more
extended, poetic, and "spatialized" fragments such as the opening monologue.
Hans-Thies Lehmann recognizes in scenic poems such as the "Family Scrap
book" section a drive to "de-semanticize" language, and thus to problematize
the traditionally logocentric understanding of dramatic discourse.21 While it
is true that Muller's dramaturgy draws heavily on the spatial poetics of the
avant-garde, it is important to note that this formal contrivance simultane
ously questions the traditional concept of history, namely, its reliance on the
methodology of logocentric record. The real function of such iconic frag
ments in Hamletmachine is to transform the states of mind/body?"nausea
Nausea," "gemutlichkeit" or "forcing open one's flesh"?into historical sites.
Thus the identity crisis introduced in the first monologue is bound to ques
tion the authenticity of recorded history, of the historical written as such.
Likewise, uprising, the axial event of history for Muller, occurs only when
the subject "forgets her [prescribed and prewritten] text" (54). Informed by
an understanding that both the author of a history record and the seemingly
free creative author are "slaves" of logocentrism, Muller's distrust in words
finds expression precisely in the opposition between unrecorded and written
history. The throwing of books at the "University of the Dead" (Scene 3) is

This content downloaded from

93.242.132.219 on Tue, 07 Feb 2023 20:15:48 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 454 COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES

the most explicit gestus towards this dual renunciation of the written. History
cannot be understood from history books, but only felt as an instantaneous
and painful perception of past-in-the-present, Miiller insists.
It is, finally, Ophelia/Elektra's discontinuous and fractal history, the old
fashioned archive of which is impossible, that is the site of the non-recorded;
rife with repetition, bound to omission, and replete with incongruities, this
history is structurally opposed to the order of words, logos, and patriarchal
power. Brenner has astutely linked Ophelia's differently paced history with
Miiller's belief in the emancipatory potential of the "Third World" and
his rejection of revolutionary models embodied in the European Enlight
enment.22 The last scene of the play finds Ophelia transformed into an
Elektra who aborts (written, progressive, teleological) history, who reaches
beyond subject-specific revolt to reject the exploitation of women, colonized
peoples, and the Earth itself. As already indicated, however, the last scene
reveals both the power and weakness of this unrecorded historical subject:
Ophelia/Elektra's terror is expressed in words, but, as her gradual silencing
in the scene implies, hers is a "revolution" of the silenced. Yet, even as such,
her history is a pre-history, and thus also a living history-to-be, opposed to
the loquacious but "dead European concept of history."23 It is this perfor
mance of revolt and silencing that may linger longest in spectators' minds;
the performance of revolt and silencing that is, perhaps, the most convincing
response to the horrors of history.
For real-life terror, after all, is not the answer to the "cessation" in history.
Though seemingly feeble, theater still possesses an "emancipator function"
which Miiller tries to rescue.24 By invoking the images of history which
would otherwise flit by, theater can produce an active form of despair. It is
for this reason that the cruel, multi-dimensional metaphors of Hamletmachine
make spectators aware of history and aware of themselves; they perform the
Benjaminian "Jetztzeit"

Caryl Churchill as a Wandering Foreigner: Mad Forest

"Mein Drama, wenn es noch stattfinden wiirde, fande in der Zeit des
Aufstands start" (550) ["My drama, if it still would happen, would happen in
the time of the uprising" (56)], the Actor Playing Hamlet proclaims. Caryl
Churchill's Mad Forest (1990) is firmly situated in just such time. The play
was developed in a semi-ethnographic workshop which included an "on the
spot" familiarizing with Romania in 1989/90, a procedure characteristic for

This content downloaded from

93.242.132.219 on Tue, 07 Feb 2023 20:15:48 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 HISTORY IN POSTMODERN THEATER 455

Churchill's collaborative projects. Attending to contemporary rather than

past or future revolutionary potentialities, Churchill's group went to Bucha
rest merely three months after the revolution (March 31-April 7,1990); the
end result was the play which gives a singularly inconclusive account of the
Romanian happenings of December 1989, namely, the overthrow and execu
tion of the communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife.
Churchill's examination of the dense social texture of this historical
event takes the form of a series of tightly focused, sometimes elliptic, scenes,
organized in the tripartite "before-during-after the Event" structure.25
The first and the third acts follow the interlaced dramas of two Romanian
families, the working-class Vladus, and the middle-class Antonescus, before
and after the uprising, and these two series of actions are oriented by two
weddings; the second act utilizes the same actors for an entirely different
set of characters (students, flower sellers, soldiers, artists, etc.), who give a
montage-like account of their experiences of the revolution. The play is
prefaced by a note from a history book revealing that, in the place of today's
Bucharest, there used to be a forest "impenetrable for the foreigner who did
not know the paths"; to indicate the impossibility of navigation, the place
was named the "mad forest."26 The latter phrase becomes an emblem for
both historical uncertainty felt by the play's ethnographic subject, Roma
nian people, and the hermeneutic impenetrability of Romanian cultural
space as experienced by Churchill and her collaborators. But the circuitous
and thorny routes of the Romanian "mad forest" have a personal relevance
for Churchill, too. Informed by the playwright's perspective as a socialist
feminist, yet the first of her plays developed in a (post)socialist-communist
" country, Mad Forest also presents a personal watershed for the playwright:
her coming to terms with the failures of the implementation of socialist
communism. Thus the sense of confusion which permeates the play signals
not only the problems of historical and cultural interpretation, but also the
uncertain operative value of the socialist project itself.
It is this sense of an almost oppressive inconclusiveness, reinforced
by Churchill's economic calibration of directness and haziness of political
image that, surprisingly, makes the play highly affective. Despite the earnest
effort to unmask mimesis and make reception physically and cognitively
difficult through the use of various Brechtian devices (e.g., Churchill's
exploitation of bilingualism, or the use of high decibel music, cigarette
smoke, and uncomfortable seating arrangement in the Wing-Davey
production), Mad Forest usually generates a strong emotional response
in the audience, a reaction that Churchill herself chronicled at the play's
world premiere at the Teatrul National, Bucharest. In a journal entry dated

This content downloaded from

93.242.132.219 on Tue, 07 Feb 2023 20:15:48 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
456 COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES

September 17,1990, she wrote: "Full house, aisles full of people. Laughter of
recognition, silence very thick, some people cry. A little group of middle aged
men leave without clapping . . . most people seem moved and shocked."27
But this "affective character" is also due to a theatrical strategy which
Churchill shares with Miiller. Comparable to the author of Hamletmachine
and in contrast to the prevalent practice of the British mainstream political
theater in the early 1990s, Churchills examination of epistemic changes in
Eastern Europe relies on the juxtaposition of general history and personal
experience.28 Eschewing description of politically recognizable figures
and their actions, Churchill approaches the axial historical event from the
perspective of ordinary Romanians whose lives and dreams are shaped by
history. The pronounced absence of any direct depiction of "recorded" politi
cal events, events that nonetheless dominate the everyday life depicted in
these vignettes, emphasizes the opposition between the "recorded," "official"
history and personal memory. This epistemological conflict configures the
dramatic structure of Mad Forest as a simultaneous upholding and relativ
ization of the Event. It also serves Churchill to distance her play carefully
from the widespread "gothicization" of Eastern Europe, specifically, from
the "vampirization" of Romanian historical experience in the mass media
and arts of the early 1990s.29
Like Miiller, Churchills experimentation with dramatic form should
be understood as a means of reinforcing "unrecorded" alternatives, of pro
fessing the simultaneity of optional histories. The device of cross-casting
and the attendant decomposition of characters in Mad Forest are a good
example here, because they signal both the breakdown of the Romanian
political scene and the disintegration of the traditional notion of Europe. In
a Brechtian manner, this strategy of cross-casting lays bare the act of acting,
thereby undoing mimesis and drawing the attention of the audience to its
own role in socio-political processes.30 It also serves Churchill to relativize
the dichotomy of historical heroes and victims and to enact a pointed critique
of cultural, gender, and social stereotypes. More important still, the unstable
casting performs the heterogeneity of history. The "agents" and "non-agents"
of history swiftly trade places, enacting multiplicity of different (and, for
Churchill as a leftist feminist, future, possible) histories. In this way, the
formal experimentation becomes a marker and instrument of possibilization.
Approached from this perspective, the loose and circuitous paths of Mad
Forest are revealed as leading to a center which is axiologically unstable but
replete with potentialities. To capture this volatile geography means?in
Churchills metaphorical crossover?to enact a history of possibilities.

This content downloaded from

93.242.132.219 on Tue, 07 Feb 2023 20:15:48 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 HISTORY IN POSTMODERN THEATER 457

These possibilities are tested on two historical stages: the plane of the
actual historical event and the plane of a slow mythic undercurrent which
is both intimate (nightmares and dreams) and general (the perennial suc
cession of weddings and bloodbaths). The first "historical" time is the time
in which the uprising and social dramas of the two families take place; it
is enclosed by two weddings and punctuated by revolution in the middle.
The "other time" subtends this historical development "by leaps": here the
characters' everyday lives and "personal" histories unfold over and extend into
the longue duree. In the first and the third act, Churchill depicts the effects
of the Event on the history of everyday life through the social and personal
dramas of the Vladus and the Antonescus. The two families are introduced
in a series of elliptic scenes that reveal a wide range of economic, physical,
and emotional deprivations before the revolution. In an oppressive, forcefully
silent atmosphere (ironically marked by the high volume of the radio), the
Vladus deal with Lucia's marriage to an American, preciousness of eggs,
and the imperative of acting as Securitate informers. While the Vladus are
silenced, the Antonescus are deprived of vision: the power cut disturbs rela
tive complacency of the Antonescu family. Behind serenity, the tensions are
revealed: Mihai Antonescu works on an ever-lasting project of Ceausescu's
People's Palace; his wife, a history teacher, is intimately troubled by her own
faithfulness to the regime; the two disapprove of their son's wish to marry
the Vladus' daughter, Fiorina. In this "taking pulse" of the time leading to
the uprising, Churchill singles out the role of laughter as a propeller of the
irrepressible movement toward a great historical event (compare the scene
"The bottle of wine is on the table").
The third act focuses more sharply on the history of events, presenting
the disillusionment of the youth (which carried on most of the revolution) and
the older generation's more or less painful adaptation to novel circumstances:
it appears that, with Ion Iliescu's coming to power, the basic functions of the
communist regime are preserved, much like Mihai's speech-patterns which
remain the same and utilizable to any political ends. The first suspicions
about the nature of the axial event are professed, not incidentally, by a brain
damaged patient: "Did we have a revolution or a putsch? Who was shooting
on the 21st? And who was shooting on the 22nd? . . . Where did the flags
come from? Who put loudhailers in the square? . . . Why did no one turn
off the power at the TV?" (Churchill, 54).31 While the (personal and politi
cal) freedom of choice gained by Lucia is understood as one of the major
positive consequences of the Event, the physical and psychological trauma
of revolution is also emphasized (Gabriel's and Rodica's slow recoveries),

This content downloaded from

93.242.132.219 on Tue, 07 Feb 2023 20:15:48 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
458 COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES

and the play puts on view the newly invigorated Romanian hostility toward
the Hungarians and the Gypsies. Finally, the set of questions concerning
the function of television posed in this act (most Romanians watched their
revolution on TV; Lucia repeats and "freezes" the scenes of revolution on
a video-tape, trying to recognize someone) problematizes the reality and
uniqueness of the Event. Aptly, a wedding dance set to incongruous music
closes Mad Forest, giving characters a chance to repeat their most important
thoughts on the revolution in a mish-mash fashion. The function of the axial
event of history is thereby both accentuated and relativized.
The second act of the play adds complexity to this history of events. An
ironic homage to gathering records, the act consists of short accounts on the
course of the revolution that are taken almost verbatim from the interviews

that the group conducted in Romania in the first phase of work-shopping.

Despite its documentary value, the act has frequently been seen as too
long, too fragmented, or caricature-like.32 Still, these testimonies supplied
Churchill with a unique kaleidoscope of views and emotions; sentiments
build rhythmically around the historical event, underscoring the incapabil
ity of both Romanian citizens and the workshop group to put the Event in
perspective. Here we can see that Churchills and Miiller's notions of the
axial event are, in fact, disparate. In Miiller's piece, historical events gush
forth from the purposely-opened wounds of history and are legitimized as
ontological, psychological, and political truths by the very virtue of their
horror; yet, for Churchill, the notion of truth (and possibility of claiming
truth) of historical events is already dubious: the revolution is problematized
in Mad Forest through both its enactment and its memorial reenactment. At
the same time, the second act of Churchill's play provides spectators with
an outstanding picture of the "moment of the Event," the time when "the
continuum of history explodes." With the help of the material obtained from
interviews, Churchill presents the revolutionary moment as that of external
and internal transformation: "I see a friend and at first I don't know him,
his face has changed, and when he looks at me I know my face is changed
also," says one interviewee; "I had an empty soul. I didn't know who I was,"
claims the other (35,38). The reversal of previously established hierarchies is
expectable in such a state ("The doctors and ordeals were equal," 43), as is the
bolstering of the spirit of the crowd. As interviewees suggest, identification
with the mass generates an enormous amount of energy as well as a blind
movement forward. The paradoxical nature of this condition is indicated
by the oppositional prefix in many testimonies. One interviewee says: "But
when you're with other people you keep walking on;" the other explicates:
"But in a crowd you disappear and feel stronger" (41).

This content downloaded from

93.242.132.219 on Tue, 07 Feb 2023 20:15:48 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 HISTORY IN POSTMODERN THEATER 459

It is this revolutionary momentum, "moving faster and faster" from the

private sphere into the public history, that connects the incidence of a his
torical event with its slow, powerful undercurrent, a long historical span (91).
This "other" historical plane, where surreal dramatic elements predominate,
serves Churchill to explore both the logic of historical terror and the realms
of illusion and hope. It is marked by the repeated occurrence of characters
such as Archangel Michael, a vampire, a talkative dog, a disenchanted priest,
a Sore Throat, and a couple of ghosts and nightmares (Flavias grandmother,
two soldiers in Radica's nightmare, and others), and it has frequently been
decoded through the opening scene of the third act?a grotesque encounter
of a lonely vampire and a masterless dog. These characters lend themselves
to easy political reading: unproblematically, the Dog has been interpreted as
"a stand-in for the oppressed common man" (Gussow); the Vampire, whose
reiterated admission that insatiable hunger for blood has brought him to the
site of revolution ends the play ("Your limbs ache, your head burns, you have
to keep moving faster and faster," 91), has been read as either a "vampiric
image of the past as a bourgeois visitor in a long topcoat" (Reinelt), namely
Ceausescu, or "a new blood-sucking owner" (Aston).33 Yet, these readings, for
all their applicability and attention to Churchill's use of Brechtian iconics,
do not give credence to the playwright s intense effort to eschew simplifica
tion; indeed they make ChurchilFs play vulnerable precisely to the charge of
gothicization, the dynamics which she was trying critically to put on view
through her examination of the "ethnography of the Other."34 Thus, it may
be more useful to read this scene in conjunction with other scenes involving
supernatural elements, such as the historian Flavias conversations with her
dead grandmother. Once the interior links between the scenes have been
recognized, the plane generated by their interaction emerges as neither a
stand in for (past or present) reality nor a mere repository of surreal images,
but as a challenge to the Western teleological concept of history: a steady,
inexorable time of nature that is historical precisely due to the accumulation of
dead bodies. It is an enduring historical time of the past, present, and future,
a history without beginning or end?the time of "the undead," "the unsettled"
and "the unfinished," and thus also the storehouse of possibilization.
It may be that undecidability is depicted as the main characteristic of
the Event in Mad Forest precisely to promote this work of possibilization.
But, if the "truth" of a historical event inevitably slips by, what possibilities,
what active work, are left to the historical subject? The fractured, open-ended
structure of the play precludes not only the postulation of "final words" on
the revolution, but also the prospect of using words as adequate signs for
historical events in general. Churchill's use of overlapping speech and, even

This content downloaded from

93.242.132.219 on Tue, 07 Feb 2023 20:15:48 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
460 COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES

more prominently, her incorporation of tourist-book-like phrases, read

first in Romanian, then in English, and in Romanian again, are instruc
tive here. As Thomas, Reinelt, Diamond, and others have suggested, these
phrases function as Brecht s placards, ironic summations of the gestus of
the scene.35 In an illuminating defiance of epic dramaturgy, however, these
lessons in Romanian also emotionally flesh out something that is central to
the forthcoming scene (thematicaUy, structurally, or metaphorically), such as
the signifier "egg" in the introductory sentence to the first scene: "Lucia are
patru oua. Lucia has four eggs" (17). Christine Kiebuzinska has observed that
these sentences underscore the limits of our "vocabulary" for understanding
the real meaning and value of these signifiers (here, eggs in a country over
whelmed with economic deprivations).36 Indeed, these limitations of view
have been confirmed by the director Mark Wing-Davey, who commented
on the phrase-book introductions and linguistic inflections as signals of the
missteps and displacements which the British theater group faced in their
work on the Romanian subject.37
While the introductory phrases certainly cast an ironic light on inter
cultural projects of various kinds (including Churchills own), one is tempted
to interpret them in another fashion, too. For it is remarkable that so many
critics have highlighted Churchill s debt to Maria Irene Fornes s 1982 play, The
Danube, but no one has heeded one equally probable intertextual addressee
of Churchills bilingual play: Romania's most distinguished (if voluntarily
exiled) playwright and one of the founders of the modern dramatic avant
garde, Eugene Ionesco. Churchills use of language-learning "patches" mim
ics the memorable device employed by Ionesco in his 1950 play, The Bald
Soprano. The latter is itself an expanded translation of Ionescos Romanian
play Englezestefara professor (1943-1948) [English without a teacher], a per
formative piece in which actors pass to each other lines from (or, as if from) a
teach-yourself-English manual. These multilingual, multi-identity dynamics
may very well have appealed to Churchill who, like Ionesco, dissects language
from a foreigner s perspective (his, Romanian/French, hers English). In both
cases, the analysis of the limits of human communication most powerfully
illuminates and indeed moves beyond the work of cultural stereotyping. Put
in this context, the Romanian-English-Romanian phrases in Mad Forest
can be interpreted as palimpsestic references that bridge cultures rather than
testify to their severance, an intertext that designates not only a lack, but
also a surplus of perspective. Contemplating her play after the discussion
with the audience at the last Bucharest performance, Churchill admits the
privilege of exotopy: "Afterwards, I think were not that good at writing about
our own situation. Maybe if a Romanian company came to London, they

This content downloaded from

93.242.132.219 on Tue, 07 Feb 2023 20:15:48 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 HISTORY IN POSTMODERN THEATER 461

could hold us a mirror."38 The multilingual trails of Mad Forest suggest that
it is this mirror, bridge-path, or, simply, effort to understand and perform
that rescues a historical event from meaninglessness, even when its semantic
contours are blurred.

Holes, Enactmentsy and Found(/)ing Fathers: Suzan-Lori Parkss

The America Play

One additional machine for reproduction of history, a play-within-a play, is

set to work in the third act of ChurchilFs Mad Forest. To celebrate Gabriel's

coming home, his friends re-enact the Ceausescus' trial and execution. This
re-enactment duplicates the Event, reassuring the participants that "the death
of the Father" really happened and that now they can exercise freedom of
speech (and performance). A similar "re-membering and staging [of] histori
cal events" through a series of quasi-authenticating re-enactments configures
Suzan-Lori Parks's The America Play (1990-1993).39 It is, again, the death of
the Father that is replicated and re-negotiated in this process: the first act
of Parks's play, "Lincoln Act," revolves around multiple re-enactments of the
assassination of Abraham Lincoln, where an African-American gravedigger
named The Lesser Known, alias The Foundling Father, who paradoxically
boasts close resemblance to Lincoln, enacts the latter's death for a penny
fee.40 The frequency of these re-enactments, in which patrons assume the
role of the assassin John Wilkes Booth and make "great black holes" in
Lincoln's head, indicates the popularity of the show. The action takes place
somewhere in the West of the United States, in "a great hole" "in the middle
of nowhere," which is "an exact replica of the Great Hole of History" (158).
The Lesser Known's "inverted-minstrel" performances contrast sharply in
mood with Churchill's play-within-a play. Witty, hilarious, and pungent,
they strip re-enactment of almost all the vestiges of the signified: space and
time, and fixed psychological motives.
The second act of Parks's The America Play ("The Hall of Wonders")
transfers this dynamic of historical holes onto the personal plane, an undis
closed number of years afterwards; it follows The Foundling Father's wife
Lucy and their son Brazil as they perform an archeological search for the
now dead impersonator. Searching for the remains of the father who left
him when he was five years old enables Brazil to recover his lost origins;
or, at least, their traces. It is perhaps due to Suzan-Lori Parks's initial wish
to become a physicist that we can thank the extraordinary figuration of
the remnants unearthed by Lucy and Brazil: these fanciful relics (a bust

This content downloaded from

93.242.132.219 on Tue, 07 Feb 2023 20:15:48 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 462 COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES

of Lincoln, Washington's wooden teeth, bills of sale, peace pacts, medals

for "faking," and so forth) function similarly to the evidence of the black
hole.41 Like the occluded histories, the black holes, those massive, dark
condensations in which space and time are the exact opposite of what we
"know," can only be observed through their effects: the distortion of light,
the unusual behavior of atoms. Once in such a hole, a potential observer
would see objects and events transmogrified by the work of a contrasted
space-time in which the past comes after the future, and the minor comes
before the grand?a constellation yearned for by The Lesser Known. Yet,
this imaginary visitor would never be able to relate these events/objects to
those outside the hole, as Lucy's reiterations of "Cant say, cant say" forcefully
confirm (182,183 et passim).
In rune with Parks's general effort to replace symbols with literalized
metaphors, the black-hole-like setting of The America Play renders explicit the
problematic which has been stylized with Miiller and Churchill: an important
part of world history has been occluded. The estranged chronotope of The
America Play "awakens" the audience to the experience of African-American
history as that of absences and holes: not only does the Great Whole of
History perceive the history of black Americans as an empty space, but it
is also conceived in that way by African Americans themselves?see, for
one example, The Lesser Known's exultation at the "historicity" and "the
order and beauty" in the parade of the Greats (162). But the black holes are
full of compressed/repressed matter: the Great Hole of History is thus also
a repository of "unrecognized" histories unfolding over a long-time span.
Its status extends to that of a potentially eventful place in which the past,
present, and future are condensed into a dynamic presence?a place where
the recorded and unrecorded meet in the performative juncture of linear
time and circularity.
Yet, this setting is already a replica of itself. We never get to see the
"original" Great Hole of History theme park which Lucy and The Lesser
Known visited as newlyweds, and where The Foundling Father learned
(historical) mourning?the "formal stances" such as "the Wail," "the Weep,"
"The Sob," "the Moan," and "the Gnash" which he confides to his son before
setting out west (182). For Brazil at least, these stances/gestures acquire
meaning only after being re-performed in the replica of this hole, which is
exactly what he does as he progresses with the digging out of his father's
bones (186-190). This replicative performance discloses a further similarity
between Parks's, Miiller's, and Churchill's dramatic poetics: the dissolution
of dramatic character is used as a means to problematize historical narra
tives. As Brazil, Lucy, and The Lesser Known become gesturing "shadows,"

This content downloaded from

93.242.132.219 on Tue, 07 Feb 2023 20:15:48 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 HISTORY IN POSTMODERN THEATER 463

the "heroes of history" such as Lincoln are cast in a similar light.42 This
dramatic "shadowing," simultaneously an imitation and distortion of the
historical subject, is the device by which Parks underscores her mistrust
in historical heroes and deeds. It mirrors the general structure of her play,
which rests on the Rep&Rev (repetition with revision, a concept integral
to the jazz aesthetic) of actions, words, and sounds, on the ritualistic
moments of "restored behavior" outside of the narrative continuum. Such
an organization of text or theater piece presupposes a repetitive movement
forward (A^A^A^B-^A rather than A -? B) through which the
refiguration of the initial stage (A) is achieved. This practice is noticeably
anti-teleological: when history is measured by gunshots and their echoes,
historical time "stretches" into spatiality, and an alternative, fractal, and
circular history is affirmed.
In thus delineated space-time, the activity of digging out bones and relics
(so that they can be given a proper burial or places in the Hall of Wonders) is
rather an archaeological/epistemological search than a Mullerian opening of
the old wounds. If Parkss "excavation-work" is indeed comparable to Miillers
"forcing the flesh open," there is, still, a significant difference between the
two plays; the difference lies in the depth of digging, one is tempted to say.
For Muller, the inscriptions of history under our "plastered" skin are to be
read and emphasized in horror so that we may re-write history as recognition
of our own political, psychological, and metaphysical cruelty. Yet, Parks has
to dig deeper in history, to dig through all the layers of blood and flesh of
Western/White universal history in order to reach the bones of her ancestors
and put in perspective the series of identifications and displacements that
African Americans have undergone. This is why the image of bones is nei
ther shocking nor realistic in Parkss play. Rather, bones are epistemological
signs to be dug up: if discovered, they will "tell us what was, is, will be" and
re-member the scattered body of history ("Possession," 5).
Joseph Roach perceptively notices that Parkss "archaeology" disturbs as
much the fragments of the history of events as those belonging to the history
of everyday life over the longue duree.^ In The America Play, both official
records and memories/enactments of everyday life are transformed into an
interplay of quasi-facts and quasi-memories whose truth-value is impossible
to ascertain. For, while it is not difficult to recognize that Parks uses this
profusion of facts and quasi-facts to cast doubts on recorded history, what
should replace it is hard to pin down. Jeanette Malkin has argued that Lucy
and Brazils metaphoric archaeology in the second act indicates that "black
history [is] not lost' in some irretrievable kingdom ... [but] . . . buried by a
historical narrative."44 Yet, this hole is filled with not only (or not primarily)

This content downloaded from

93.242.132.219 on Tue, 07 Feb 2023 20:15:48 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 464 COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES

"working" metaphors, but also with footnotes, quotations, misquotations,

dictionary entries, and quasi-entries, all of these configured through chiasmus
and pastiche, the principal markers of ones embeddedness in the language
of the Other. The latter proliferate to such an extent that the retrieval of
what is underneath appears to be hardly possible. While the excavated relics
certainly do not offer shortcuts to the recovering of "lost" histories, Parks's
repetitive fragments nevertheless, as Elam and Rayner have argued, "confront
history without nostalgia."45
This may be one of the reasons why Parks's excavation of unrecorded
knowledge/history relies on the humorous investigation of chasms and fis
sures of language rather than on the depiction of (metaphorized) things. The
playwright's particular interest lies in the historicity of semantic structures,
in the processes of their emergence, varied (sound and meaning) configura
tions, and dissolution. Thus, the main device of Parks's archaeology is ety
mology, a study of meanings ostracized from both history of "great" events
and everyday life. This brings us back to the scientific interpretation of the
black hole and what is left to us of its representation: the production of a
play out of the effects of a hole, out of the very stases in repetition, out of
the gaps of language, cleavages in representation. Reluctant to convey the
insubstantiality of records and historical truths either through syncretic frag
ments of known history (as Miiller) or through a play of perspectives on a
historical event (as Churchill), Parks opens up the space for refiguration of
history out of absence itself, out of the Great Hole of History of those to
whom Hegel's dialectics do not apply.
It is thus appropriate to close this inspection of Parks's play with the
final stage of her Rep&Rev chain: the last enactment of Lincoln's death,
a concluding refiguration of the Event. Not insignificantly, this enactment
is performed by a ghost. For Parks, like Miiller and Churchill, conflations
between the longue duree and the history of events occur only in liminal
spaces and exceptional moments. The authenticity of this commissure is,
however, immediately questioned by the African-American playwright,
since the ghost is nothing more than a televised replica of The Lesser
Known, a performance of performance. What the Father, a "living dead"
bestowing meaning on history of the occluded, "says" is merely another
re-enactment of Lincoln's death, another repetition. This may be, for
Parks at least, the most honest way to speak of performative recovery of
lost histories: not as mimicry or an actual resurrection of the lost, but as
a miming effort. It is in this vein, I believe, that we should understand
Peggy Phelan's reminder in Unmarked, the descriptive recovering of a lost
object, fundamental to performance, "does not reproduce the object," but

This content downloaded from

93.242.132.219 on Tue, 07 Feb 2023 20:15:48 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 HISTORY IN POSTMODERN THEATER 465

"helps us to restage and restate the effort to remember what is lost . . . ,

reminds us how loss acquires meaning and generates recovery?not only
of and for the object, but for the one who remembers."46 It is in this way
that we should interpret Parks's archaeology, too. Parks's description of her
own practice is revelatory: "Theatre," Parks claims, "is the perfect place
to 'make' history ... I'm working theatre like an incubator to create "new"
historical events. I'm re-membering and staging historical events which,
through their happening on stage, are ripe for inclusion in the canon of
history" ("Possession," 4-5).

According to Fredric Jameson, time, the epistemological dominant of mod

ernism, yielded the floor to space in the second half of the twentieth century.
The domination of "spatial logic" in contemporary culture has generated a
"crisis in historicity," a semi-nostalgic, but eventually unproductive mode
which Jameson singles out as one of the major characteristics of postmodern
ism.47 At the same time, postmodernism has revived the nineteenth-century
obsession with history, now reoriented by both modernist problematization of
the notion of time as linear and homogeneous, and the historical experience of
the second half of the twentieth century. The major shifts in the apprehension
of history occurred, however, due to the unveiling (rather than emergence)
of multiple unrecorded histories and the consequential disclosure of the
hypocritical and manipulative nature of "history as we know it." The "others
of history" have claimed their own historicity, too: they have demanded an
active participation in general history and simultaneous preservation of their
identities as the "others" to the Western concept of history, and they have
asserted their right to have this "empty" space of history properly theoretized
and artistically represented.
These concerns energize the attempts of contemporary philosophy of
history to forge a new concept of history, which would address our multiple
written and unwritten histories responsibly by fusing the history of long-time
spans and the history of events; these efforts continue to gain in relevance
as we are increasingly confronted with the heterogeneity, incompleteness,
inconsistency, and discord of our histories. In the last fifty years, the modern
philosophy of history has thus been subject to serious conceptual wavering,
which is not unlike the never-ending debates about theatricality and
anti-theatricality, and/or representational and anti-representational nature of
contemporary theater invoked at the beginning of this article. This structural
proximity should not surprise us. For the latter debates, quintessential to
the development of contemporary drama and performance, are grounded,

This content downloaded from

93.242.132.219 on Tue, 07 Feb 2023 20:15:48 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 466 COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES

like the issue of ethical and philosophical primacy of a historical model, in

the discussion of possibilities: the possibility of the human subject s agency
in the contemporary world and the subject's potential for a non-hegemonic
representation/comprehension of historical dynamics. Hence this discussion
of possibilities also significantly informs the "rethinking" and "reworking"
of history in postmodern theatrical practices.
In their article "Echoes from the Black (W)hole: An Examination
of The America Play by Suzan-Lori Parks," Elam and Rayner correctly
identify the concern which galvanizes not only Parks s, but also Miiller s,
Churchills, and much other postmodern theatrical practice: how to "right
and rewrite history in a postmodern culture that has dismantled the idea of
history."48 As my own analysis of the dramatizations of this issue in Miiller's
Hamletmachine, Churchills Mad Forest, and Parks's The America Play has
demonstrated, postmodern playwrights answer this question by increasingly
addressing one specific concern of the recent philosophy of history: the
challenge to think history outside the traditional notion of (teleological,
recorded) history of events, yet not to deprive it of its human potential.
In my discussion, I have moved from Miillers "synthetic" fragmentation
of historical and autobiographical events (the Hegelian "whole of history"
smashed into fragments), through Churchills relativization of the axial
event of history in personal experience (the whole of history dispersed into
mobile, interactive fragments), to Parks's serial re-enactments of the Event,
replication of historical record which "digs out" and authenticates precisely
what has been omitted (the whole of history as reiterative performance of
the hole of history). Informed by different histories and theatrical practices,
and by much postmodern disillusionment, these playwrights nevertheless
share a belief in what Miiller has called the "emancipator function" of
theater. Hence the most important common denominator of their plays
is indeed their active engagement with that "time of initiative" when "the
weight of history that has already been made is deposited, suspended, and
interrupted, and when the dream of history yet to be made is transposed
into a responsible decision."49 When the cruelty of past events gushes forth
into the present in Hamletmachine, when history explodes in the moment
of social change/personal metamorphosis in Mad Forest, when the mythic
bones of ancestors "sing" in The America Play, when, eventually, theater
performance takes place, the plate of history is reinscribed. As Miillers,
Churchills, and Parkss plays indicate, hopes of this reinscription still shape
theater practice.

University of Essex

This content downloaded from

93.242.132.219 on Tue, 07 Feb 2023 20:15:48 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 HISTORY IN POSTMODERN THEATER 467

Notes
1. See Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer,
3 vols. (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984-88).
2. Ibid, 2: 208. The present article, like much recent scholarship in the field of contemporary
drama and performance, is indebted to the discourse of two interlinked sets of categories, that
of dramatic theater (representational, character-centered narrative) vs. post-dramatic theater
(anti-representational, non-narrative, and ritualistic/interactive), and that of theatricality
(glossed by the reinforcement of the theatrical relationship between the staged act and the
beholder) vs. antitheatricality (self-sufficiency and "presentnessVperformativity, found, diversely,
in modernist painting [Michael Fried], happenings [Richard Schechner], and contemporary
performance art [Josette Feral]). It would lead us astray to probe these conceptual labels here,
so the reader is referred to the following titles: for a discussion of post-dramatic theater, see
Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatisches Theater (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, Verlag der
Autoren, 1999); for inaugurating, if markedly different, discussions of (anti) theatricality, see
Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Chicago:
U of Chicago P, 1980) and Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
U of California P, 1981); on the many forms of antitheatricalism, see Martin Puchner, Stage
Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality, and Drama (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2002); on
various facets of theatricality, see Tracy C. Davis and Thomas Postlewait, eds., Theatricality
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003). The most illuminating and probing of these debates is still
Herbert Blau, "Universals of Performance; or Amortizing Play," in The Eye of Prey: Subversions
of the Postmodern (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1987), 161-188.
3. Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover
Publications, 1956), 341.
4. Suzan-Lori Parks, The America Play and Other Works (New York: Theatre Communica
tion Group, 1995), 159. Further citations in text.
5. See Blau, "Universals of Performance; or Amortizing Play," 161-165.
6. Heiner Muller's Hamletmachine received its world premiere in Brussels, Belgium, in
November 1978, which was followed by a German premiere in Essen (West Germany) and
a French premiere in Saint-Denis, Paris in 1979. For detailed information about the play in
production until 1994, see Eva Elisabeth Brenner, "Hamletmachine Onstage: A Critical Analysis
of Heiner Muller's Play in Production," (PhD diss., New York University, 1994).
7. Alexander Karschnia, "William Shakespeare," in Heiner Muller Handbuch, ed. Hans-Thies
Lehmann and Patrick Primavesi (Stuttgart and Weimar: J. B. Metzler, 2003), 164.
8. For a discussion of Hamlet's dilemma as paradigmatic of the modern subject being
"loath to act," see Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Francis Golffing (Garden
City: Doubleday, 1956), 51. For the influence of this reading on Muller's poetics, as well as
the comparable influence of Brecht's interpretation of Hamlet as a traitor to his mission, see
Jonathan Kalb, The Theater of Heiner Muller (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998).
9. Heiner Muller, Die Hamletmaschine, in Werke, ed. Frank Hornigk (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 2001), 4:545-554, trans. Carl Weber, Hamletmachine and Other Texts for the Stage,
(New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1984), 17,105. Further citations in text will
be keyed to these volumes and editions.
10. See, among others, Arlene Akiko Teraoka, The Silence of Entropy or Universal Discourse:
The Postmodernist Poetics of Heiner Muller (New York: Peter Lang, 1985), and Katharina Keim,
" Vom Theater der Revolution zur Revolution des Theaters: Bemerkungen zur Dramen?und
Theaterasthetik Heiner Miillers seit den spaten siebziger Jahren," Text + Kritik 73 (1997):
86-102.
11. See, for an exception, Genia Schulz, Heiner Muller (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1980), 150.
12. On betrayal as a central theme in Muller's work in the 1970s, see Frank-Michael Raddatz,
Damonen unterm roten Stern. Zur Geschichtsphilosophie undAsthetik Heiner Miillers (Stuttgart: J.
B. Metzler, 1991).
13. Cf., "Necrophilia is love of the future," Muller in Kalb, The Theater of Heiner Muller, 15.

This content downloaded from

93.242.132.219 on Tue, 07 Feb 2023 20:15:48 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 468 COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES

14- Heiner Miiller, Gesammelte Irrtiimer (Frankfurt-on-Main: Verlag der Autoren, 1986),
54, quoted in Kalb, The Theater of Heiner Miiller, 107. On Miiller's gradual abandonment of
dramatic dialogue in Hamletmachine, see Miiller, Krieg ohne Schlacht. Leben in zwei Diktaturen
(Cologne: Kiepenheuer 8c Witsch, 1992), 294-296 et passim.
15. For a substantial discussion of the ways in which various authors, such as Artaud,
Benjamin, Brecht, and others, have shaped Miiller's dramatic art, see Kalb, The Theater of
Heiner Miiller.
16. Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," in Illuminations, ed. Hannah
Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1976), 255.
17. For Miiller's direction of Hamlet/Machine in and against the turmoil of historical events,
see David Barnett, "Resisting the Revolution: Heiner Miiller's Hamlet/Machine at the Deutsches
Theater, Berlin, March 1990," Theater Research International31.2 (2006): 188-200.
18. Brenner, uHamletmachine Onstage: A Critical Analysis of Heiner Miiller's Play in
Production," 64-65.
19. Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," 261.
20. Walter Benjamin, "N [Theory of Knowledge; Theory of Progress]," in Benjamin: Philoso
phy, History, Aesthetics, ed. Gary Smith, trans. Leigh Hafrey and Richard Sieburth (Chicago:
Chicago UP, 1989), 50.
21. Hans-Thies Lehmann, "From Logos to Landscape: Text in Contemporary Dramaturgy,"
Performance Research 2.1 (1997): 57.
22. Brenner, uHamletmachine Onstage: A Critical Analysis of Heiner Miiller's Play in Pro
duction," 73 ff.
23. Heiner Miiller, Germania, ed. Sylvere Lotringer, trans. Bernard and Caroline Schutze
(New York: Semiotext(e), 1990), 16, 229.
24. For an account of emancipatory functioning of Miiller's text, see Joachim Fiebach, Inseln
der Unordnung: FiinfVersuche zu Heiner Miillers Theatertexten (Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1990),
7-40;207-246.
25. The "before-during-after" organization is characteristic of Churchill's "workshopping" of
great historical events; see, Geraldine Cousin, Churchill the Playwright (Methuen: Heinemann
Educational, 1989), 20-21.
26. Caryl Churchill, Mad Forest (London: Nick Hern Books, 1990), 5. Further citations in
text.
27. Caryl Churchill, "To Romania with love," The Weekend Guardian supplement, October
13-14, 1990, 12. For the first critical reactions to the Bucharest performance, see Ludmila
Patlanjoglu, "Padurea nebuna, de Caryl Churchill," Romania literara XXIII, October n, 1990,
16. Before coming to Romania in September 1990, Mad Forest played a limited run at a small
stage of the Embassy Theatre, London, premiering on June 13, 1990. The play had a more
"official" U.K. premiere at the Royal Court Theatre on October 9,1990. Mad Forest was also
filmed for Romanian television and aired on October 15,1990. Parenthetically, here I correct
Mitchell's erroneous dating of the Bucharest performance in Tony Mitchell, "Caryl Churchill's
Mad Forest. Polyphonic Representations of Southeastern Europe," Modern Drama 36 (1993):
510 n.3.
28. In an elucidatory counterpoint, the UK premiere of Churchill's play coincided with those
of Howard Brenton and Tariq Ali's Moscow Gold and David Edgar's The Shape of the Table,
both taking a grand-scale approach to the recent political changes in Eastern Europe. On
Churchill's examination of the personal as a microcosm of larger political issues, see Janelle
Reinelt, "Caryl Churchill and the Politics of Style," in The Cambridge Companion to Modern
British Women Playwrights, ed. Elaine Aston and Janelle Reinelt (Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
2000), 174-193.
29. On the gothicization of Romania and the post-Ceau^escu "vampire narratives" in
the Western media and horror fiction, see Ken Gelder, Reading the Vampire (London and
New York: Routledge, 1994), especially 4-6. Also see Ludmilla Kostova, "Inventing Post-wall

This content downloaded from

93.242.132.219 on Tue, 07 Feb 2023 20:15:48 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 HISTORY IN POSTMODERN THEATER 469

Europe: Visions of the 'Old' Continent in Contemporary British Fiction and Drama," The
Yearbook of European Studies 15 (2000): 83.
30. For Churchill's use of Brecht's epic dramaturgy, see Janelle Reinelt, "Caryl Churchill:
Socialist Feminism and Brechtian Dramaturgy," in After Brecht: British Epic Theatre (Ann
Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1994) 81-108, and Elin Diamond, "Caryl Churchill's Plays: the Gestus
of Invisibility," in Unmaking Mimesis (London: Routledge, 1997), 83-100.
31. These questions, repeatedly voiced in the interviews conducted by Churchill's workshop
group, gave voice to the widespread suspicion that the revolution was the coup organized
by Ion Iliescu. See Ceridwen Thomas, "Not Out of the Wood," Plays and Players, August
1990,19.
32. See, among others, Michael Billington, "Out of the Smoke, into the Smother," The
Guardian, October 13-14,1990, 21; Mitchell, "Caryl Churchill's Mad Forest," 502.
33. Mel Gussow, "Critic's Notebook; A Play That Improves as It Travels From Place to Place,"
New York Times, January 25,1995, http://theater2.nytimes.c0m (accessed July 31, 2007); Reinelt,
"Caryl Churchill and the Politics of Style," 189; Elaine Aston, Caryl Churchill (Horndon: Northcote,
1997), 78. The casting has occasionally promoted "easy" political reading; for instance, Iain Hake
doubled as the Securitate agent and the Vampire in the first production.
34. On the gothicization of Eastern Europe in Mad Forest, see Kostova, "Inventing Post-wall
Europe." On Churchill as an explorer of the "ethnography of the Other," see Mitchell, "Caryl
Churchill's Mad Forest," 506.
35. Thomas, "Not Out of the Wood," 18; Mitchell, "Caryl Churchill's Mad Forest," 502; see
also, Diamond, Unmaking Mimesis, and Reinelt, After Brecht.
36. Christine Kiebuzinska, "Caryl Churchill's Mad Forest Examining Postrevolutionary
Disillusionment," in Intertextual Loops in Modern Drama (Madison, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson
UP, 2001), 232.
37. "Much of the play is about being a Westerner in a foreign place," Wing-Davey explains,
"and the phrase-book sentences that open each of the scenes are there as reminders that
this is simply a partial view; it's not the truth." See Mark Wing-Davey, quoted in Marc
Robinson, "Bracing Grace: Wing-Davey's 'Front Foot' Approach to Mad Forest," Village Voice,
December 24,1991,127.
38. Churchill, "To Romania with Love," 12.
39. Suzan-Lori Parks, "Possession," in The America Play, 4-5. Further citations in text. Su
zan-Lori Parks's The America Play premiered at the Yale Repertory Theatre, New Haven, on
January 22,1994, as the sixth collaboration between Parks and director Liz Diamond. On this
teamwork, see Suzan-Lori Parks and Liz Diamond, "Suzan-Lori Parks and Liz Diamond:
Doo-a-diddly-dit-dit," The Drama Review 39.3 (1995): 56-75.
40. Rebecca Schneider interprets Parks's strategy to cast bodies which cannot "pass" as the
intended characters as an "exercise in error" which awakens the audience to their own racial
and gender resistances. See Rebecca Schneider, "Driving the Lincoln 'Cross History': Viewing
History, Almost, Not Quite," in Un/Sichtbarkeiten der Differenz: Beitrage zur Genderdebatte in
den Kunsten, ed. Annette Jael Lehmann (Tubingen: Stauffenberg, 2001).
41. On Parks's wish to become a physicist, see Suzan-Lori Parks, "Interview with Suzan
Lori Parks," in "Emerging Women Writers," ed. Charles H. Rowell, special issue, Callaloo 19.2
(1996): 310.
42. Instead of the term "character," Parks proposes the following set of terms: "figures,
figments, ghosts, roles, lovers maybe, speakers maybe, shadows, slips, players maybe, maybe
someone else's pulse" in Parks, "Elements of Style," 12.
43. Joseph Roach, "The Great Hole of History: Liturgical Silence in Beckett, Osofisan, and
Parks," The South Atlantic Quarterly 100.1 (2001): 314. Unfortunately, Roach does not develop
this line of argumentation further.
44. Jeanette Malkin, Memory-Theater and Postmodern Drama (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P,
1999), 181-82.

This content downloaded from

93.242.132.219 on Tue, 07 Feb 2023 20:15:48 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 47? COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES

45- Harry Elam and Alice Rayner, "Echoes from the Black (W)hole: An Examination of T
America Play by Suzan-Lori Parks," in Performing America: Cultural Nationalism in American
Theatre, ed. Jeffrey Mason and Ellen Gainor (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1999), 191.
46. Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London and New York: Routledge,
1993), 147.
47. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham and
London: Duke UP, 1991), i&etpassim.
48. Elam and Rayner, "Echoes from the Black (W)hole," 179.
49. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 3:208.

This content downloaded from

93.242.132.219 on Tue, 07 Feb 2023 20:15:48 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms