The Philosopher, the Playwright, and the Actor: Friedrich Nietzsche and the Modern

Drama's Concept of Performance

Author(s): David Kornhaber
Source: Theatre Journal , MARCH 2012, Vol. 64, No. 1 (MARCH 2012), pp. 25-40
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41411274

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 The Philosopher, the Playwright, and the
Actor: Friedrich Nietzsche and the Modern
Drama's Concept of Performance
David Kornhaber

August Strindberg7 s preface to Miss Julie aims to illuminate the themes of the pl
that "will be of lasting interest," but the author's brief notes on the role of the actor
that work may prove to have the most lasting importance.1 Although he touches onl
quickly on the subject, Strindberg presents a vision of the actor's art that, if not a ful
executed manifesto, is at least a fantasia on a new model of theatrical composition th
he imagines might yet come about:

[I]n order to give the actor a chance, for once, to work independently, free for a mome
of the author's authority, I have sketched in the monologues rather than worked them o
in detail. Since it is irrelevant what someone says in his sleep or to a parrot or to a cat, f
this has no influence on the action, a talented actor, absorbed in the mood and the situ
tion, perhaps can improvise the monologue more effectively than the author, who cann
determine in advance how much may be spoken, and for how long, before an audien
senses that the illusion is broken.

As we know, some Italian theatres have returned to improvisation, producing actors

who are creative in their own right, although in accordance with the author's intentions. Th
could be the beginning of a fertile new art form, something worthy of the name creativ

In these short reflections, Strindberg enacts a fateful negotiation of how actor and
author might newly relate. Strindberg means to liberate the actor, to give her an op
portunity ("for once") to contribute not just to the enactment of the story, but to it
conception, acknowledging by implication that theatrical creation happens in
moment of performance, that it is not just an execution of a previously conceived an
practiced artifice.3 The actor's, of course, is a subordinate act of creation: actors may
be given freedom only where "it is irrelevant what someone says" and they mu
act "in accordance with the author's intentions."4 But even if their purview is small,
Strindberg's imagined actors are not just keepers of the moment of performance, bu
co-conceivers of it. To grant actors this status is for Strindberg to aim at nothing le

David Kornhaber is an assistant professor of English and comparative literature at the University
Texas at Austin . He has served as an assistant editor of Theatre Survey, as a contributor to the t
atre sections of the Village Voice and the New 'brk Times, and as an affiliated writer «¿Amer
Theatre. He is currently at work on a manuscript titled The Birth of Theatre from the Spiri
Philosophy: Friedrich Nietzsche and the Development of the Modern Drama.

1 August Strindberg, "Author's Preface to Miss Julie/' in Strindberg: Five Plays , trans. Harry G. Car
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 64.
2 Ibid., 72.
3Ibid.
4 Ibid.

Theatre Journal 64 (2012) 25-40 © 2012 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

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26 / David Kornhaber

than a "new art form/' one that seems to imagine the theatrical event not as an instance
of enactment, but as a moment of shared construction.5

The imagined realm that Strindberg sketches in his preface is not unique to his
dramaturgy, but is emblematic of a broader change in the conceptualization of per-
formance and consequently of the actor-author relationship among a number of dra-
matists during the early development of modern drama.6 Observers past and present
have noted the critical rethinking of the actor's traditional role that would come to
mark this era. It is a schism that has been aptly characterized by Hans-Thies Lehm-
ann as a movement from a "dramatic theatre" that is "subordinated to the primacy of
the text" and concerned with "the formation of illusion" and a "fictive cosmos" to a
"postdramatic theatre" wherein "the progression of a story with its internal logic no
longer forms the center" and the theatre is finally "confronted with the question of
possibilities beyond drama."7 What most accounts of such trends and counter-trends
tend to overlook is the degree to which these developments were preceded by - and
in many ways presaged by - a powerful rethinking of the actor-author relationship
in the minds of many of the playwrights who would create the dramatic material
upon which the modern theatre grew. It was a rethinking premised in large part on
relocating theatrical invention from the playwright's desk to the actor's stageboards,
expanding the concept of theatrical authorship so as to encompass in some way the
work of the actor-artist. From George Bernard Shaw's declaration that playwriting
must serve foremost "to provide an exhibition of the art of acting" to Eugene O'Neill's
claim that his theatrical work was meant to serve actors in uncovering "undeveloped
possibilities of their art," the figure of the new modern actor - at least in her most
generalized and idealized form - frequently took on a newfound prominence in the
theatrical imagination of the modern playwright.8

More than a longing for a new way of producing plays, what playwrights like
Strindberg, Shaw, and O'Neill evince is a desire for a new kind of theatricality where
author and actor must take on new roles, what Strindberg calls a "fertile new art form,
something worthy of the name creative."9 It is a desideratum with as many influences as
it has manifestations, but one of its most consistent, most powerful, and most frequently
underexamined instigations is the theatrical vision put forth by Friedrich Nietzsche in
The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner, philosophical works that were profoundly
concerned with rethinking the idea of the theatre and that were just beginning to reach
a broad audience in Europe and America at the time of modern drama's emergence.

5 Ibid.
6 The term "modern drama is used here only to demarcate those dramatists, across a wide spectrum
of ideologies and approaches, who held themselves in self-conscious opposition to the popular melo-
dramas and well-made plays of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For a dialogue on the
possibilities and impossibilities of modern drama as a field of study, see Rie Knowles, Joanne Tompkins,
and W. B. Worthen, eds., Modern Drama: Defining the Field (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003).
7 Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre , trans. Karen Jurs-Munby (New York: Koutieage, zuuö;,
21, 22, 26.
8 George Bernard Shaw, "Preface to The Six of Calais/' in The Complete Prefaces of Bernard Shaw (Lon-
don: Paul Hamlyn Ltd, 1965), 776; Eugene O'Neill, "A Dramatist's Notebook," in Modern Theories of
Drama: A Selection of Writings on Drama and Theatre, 1850-1990, ed. George W. Brandt (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1998), 157.
9 Strindberg, "Author's Preface," 72.

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 NIETZSCHE AND THE MODERN DRAMA'S CONCEPT OF PERFORMANCE / 27

Strindberg, like many other dramatists of the era, directly acknowledges the linkage
in a particularly salacious self-genealogy offered in a letter just after the composition
of Miss Julie : "The uterus of my mental world has received a tremendous ejaculation
of the sperm from Friedrich Nietzsche, so that I feel like a bitch with a full belly. He's
the man for me!"10 One could rightly attribute much of Strindberg' s exclamation to the
intense concord that he found between his own deep prejudices and Nietzsche's icono-
clastic philosophy, and yet the Nietzschean work that Strindberg was arguably most
influenced by and most enthusiastic about was The Case of Wagner, which explicates the
hallmarks of Nietzsche's morality, metaphysics, or epistemology not at all. It is rather
a book-length attack on Nietzsche's former idol Richard Wagner: on his musicianship
most especially, but also on his dramatic craft, his histrionics, and his very concept of
the theatre. A work that ends with an invocation "that the theatre should not lord it
over the arts" is perhaps an unusual favorite for a professional playsmith, but perhaps
less so for one committed to discovering from within the encrusted traditions of the
nineteenth-century theatre a "fertile new art form."11

Strindberg's attraction to Nietzsche is not unique among the modern dramatists,

nor is the specificity of his interest in Nietzsche's theatrical writing. Yet much of the
critical attention on Nietzsche's relationship to modern drama has focused on the
reverberations of the philosopher's moral and metaphysical schema, what Robert
Brustein calls the modern drama's "most seminal philosophical influence" grounded in
a series of "radical demands for a total transformation of man's spiritual life."12 Brus-
tein's landmark study of Nietzsche's place among the modern dramatists, The Theatre
of Revolt, mentions The Birth of Tragedy only once, noting it as an important influence
on O'Neill's "concept of tragedy."13 And yet Nietzsche is quite obviously interested
in translating the new genealogies and ontologies of tragedy and philosophy that he
lays out in The Birth of Tragedy and echoes in The Case of Wagner into the specifics of
theatrical practice in passages throughout those works, and he goes to notable lengths
to explicate their implications for a variety of theatrical crafts-persons - most especially
for the dramatist and the actor. The traces of this aspect of Nietzsche's philosophy of
the theatre, the way in which its broad outlines are actively turned into specific alloca-
tions, can be discerned in the rethinking of theatrical composition that marked much
of the writing on and about the theatre by some of modern drama's most influential
playwrights. To understand the specific implications for theatrical practice embedded
in Nietzsche's broad theatrical concerns is critically important to the theatre historian:
it is to understand one of the origin points for the rethinking of the theatrical event
that would mark the period of the modern theatre's emergence.

10 Letter, August Strindberg to Edvard Brandes, 4 September 1888, in Strindberg's Letters , vol. 1,
1862-1892, trans, and ed. Michael Robinson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 283.
"Friedrich Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, in The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner, trans. Walter
Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), 180.
12 Robert Brustein, The Theatre of Revolt: An Approach to the Modern Drama (Boston: Little, Brown, 1962), 8.
13 Ibid., 329. Brustein's sidelining of any practical impact of The Birth of Tragedy even while extolling
Nietzsche's larger influence on modern drama is echoed also in J. L. Styan, Modern Drama in Theory
and Practice 2: Symbolism, Surrealism, and the Absurd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981),
and David Krasner, A History of Modern Drama, vol. 1 (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012).

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28 / David Kornhaber

Nietzsche's Concept of the Theatre

Perhaps the most fundamental insight into the theatre that Nietzsche would pres-
ent is that there exists a degree of ontological equivalence between the work of the
tragedian and the work of the philosopher - that the theatre is, if not exactly a form
of philosophy itself, at least a powerful precursor to it. Nietzsche defines an opposi-
tion between traditional philosophy and theatrical art, but it is not the Romantic an-
tagonism of divergent world approaches so much as a competition of equals for the
same intellectual space. The Birth of Tragedy is essentially the starting point of what
Jürgen Habermas calls Nietzsche's career-long project to bid "farewell to the dialectic
of enlightenment/' with tragic art - specifically, and vitally, tragic art as performed
onstage - figured in its pages as reason's necessary transmutation.14 As voiced by the
figure of Socrates in The Birth of Tragedy , the foundational premise of philosophy is
simply this: a "belief that the nature of things can be discovered."15 But it is a faith that
Nietzsche deeply doubts, a doubt for which he takes tragedy as his alibi. Eventually,
Nietzsche says of the rationalist, "to his horror, he sees how logic curls up around itself
at these limits and finally bites its own tail" - at which point, inevitably, "a new form
of knowledge breaks through, tragic knowledge, which, simply to be endured, needs
art for protection and as medicine."16

In Nietzsche's philosophical narrative, reason is guaranteed to failure, and when that

failure happens only tragedy can protect us. For the core premise of theatrical inquiry is
something like philosophy's opposite, that "there is a kingdom of wisdom from which
the logician is banished," but where it is still possible, through performance, to turn
"repulsive thoughts about the terrible or absurd nature of existence into representations
with which man can live."17 It is, in Julian Young's figuration in Nietzsche's Philosophy of
Art , a presentation of the world wherein our attention lies "not in what is represented
but in the way it is represented," allowing the world to be rendered for us as "terrible
but magnificent."18 It is, in other words, a concept of theatrical aesthetics as antidote to
reason's failures - a concept of "the sublime, whereby the terrible is tamed by artistic
means."19 And it is a concept that ultimately demands an oppositional relationship:
"[i]f ancient tragedy was thrown off course by the dialectical drive towards knowl-
edge and the optimism of science, one should conclude from this fact that there is an
eternal struggle between the theoretical and the tragic views of the world," Nietzsche
writes.20 What Nietzsche essentially posits in The Birth of Tragedy is theatrical art as the
equal-but-opposite antithesis to philosophical reason, a move that necessarily ascribes
to it the same ontological status.

Pivotal to translating such principles to something as practical as the work of play-

wrights and actors is the degree to which Nietzsche's idea of the theatre is bound up in
his unique conceptualization of the structure of performance. Theatrical performance,

14 Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures , trans. Frederick G.
Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), 86.
15 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy , in The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings , trans. Ronald
Speirs, ed. Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 74.
16 Ibid., 75.
17 Ibid., 71, 40.
18 Julian Young, Nietzsche's Philosophy of Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 43.
19 Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 40.
20 Ibid., 82.

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 NIETZSCHE AND THE MODERN DRAMA'S CONCEPT OF PERFORMANCE / 29

Nietzsche claims, is at bottom a marriage between two artistic countermodes that to-
gether offer a kind of bifocal pathway for understanding the world. What Nietzsche
famously calls the Dionysian is the originary artistic mode: "the eternal and original
power of art" that presents creation-in-itself and "has no need at all of images and
concepts," an artistry that is best embodied in the nonrepresentational arts of music and
dance.21 The Dionysian is an "intoxicated reality" and not a representation or ordering
of something beyond itself - akin to the "unmediated artistic states in nature," a state
in which "[m]an is no longer an artist, he has become a work of art."22 That which
Nietzsche calls the Apollonian is this art form's inevitable reaction: endeavors like
sculpture, painting, and literature that draw from our lived world for their component
materials, or, as Young puts it, those art forms that are "concerned with the beauti-
ful representation of phenomenal reality."23 For Nietzsche, the theatre is more than a
simple co-arrangement of these artistic modes, as in Wagner's gesamtkunstwerk; it is a
powerful, even alchemical synthesis of divergent artistries into something altogether
new, the Dionysian and Apollonian "stimulating and provoking . . . one another to
give birth to ever-new, more vigorous offspring," culminating in a "work of art" called
Attic tragedy.24 What Nietzsche calls the work of art (or "art form") that is tragedy is
a gloss on theatrical performance itself, the means by which Attic tragedy was mani-
fested to its audience and the only means by which it could achieve what Young calls
its "mysterious penumbra, a 'comet's tale' of significance."25 For it is the theatrical
presentation of tragedy that allows for the vital synthesis of art that is real-in-itself and
art that is real-in-representation, the performed music and dancing of the chorus met
with the literary and visual representations of dialogue, costume, and scenography.

In Nietzsche's account, the moment of performance is vitally important, for it is in

that moment that the theatre is able to at once invite us into its own new reality, and
simultaneously represent that new reality to us from afar, to present what we might
call experiences of embodiment alongside what Nietzsche calls images that lie "out-
side" ourselves and can only be seen "with contemplative eye."26 In the Dionysian
ecstasy of performance we are given "individuality being surrendered by entering
into another nature," while at the same time the spectator "in his transformed state
. . . sees a new vision outside himself which is the Apolline perfection of his state."27
Theatrical performance gives to us both the internal experience of the Other and the
external contemplation of the self, or, as Nietzsche calls it in The Gay Science , "the art of
regarding oneself . . . from a distance and as it were simplified and transfigured - the
art of 'putting oneself on stage' before oneself."28 Only in the theatre is the audience
able to regard "a pure and finished image of what, in the tumultuousness of its own
becoming, it never has the opportunity to see clearly ... for the purpose of its own
self-recognition."29 This self-recognition is possible for Nietzsche because the theatre is

21 Ibid., 115,36.
22 Ibid., 19, 18.
23 Young, Nietzsche's Philosophy of Art, 35.
24 Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 14.
25 Young, Nietzsche's Philosophy of Art, 37.
26 Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 43.
27 Ibid., 43, 44.

28 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Josefine Nauckhoff, ed. Bernard Williams (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001), 79.
Friedrich Nietzsche, "Schopenhauer as Educator/' in Unfashionable Observations, trans. Richard T.
Gray (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 213.

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30 / David Kornhaber

profoundly and uniquely capable of being at once experienced and understood, and
through this duality proffers insights that no other single artistic form can attempt,
offering what Young calls "a hidden metaphysical curriculum" and showing us truth
that otherwise "cannot be illuminated," so that "the path ... to the innermost core of
things, is laid open."30

For Nietzsche, this dualistic vision of theatrical performance provides a means of

understanding the process of theatrical creation itself, over which Nietzsche sets two
distinct guardians: the actor and the dramatist. It is in the coordination of these two
artistic types that the Dionysian and the Apollonian come to life, and it is through the
confusion of their roles that the power of the theatre can be forestalled. " Schauspieler "
is Nietzsche's preferred term when speaking of actors, a word that comes closest to the
English "player," though in German carries connotations of pageantry or spectacle; the
schauspieler is inimitably tied to the moment of theatrical performance. " Dramatiker " is
Nietzsche's term for playwright or dramatist, and he typically uses the term "drama"
(the word is the same in English and German) when he means to speak of plays; it
is a critical choice, for schauspiel could also be used to mean play or drama, with all
the connotations of theatrical performance that Nietzsche evokes in discussions of the
actor. But drama, according to Nietzsche, is the more appropriate term, for as he notes
in The Case of Wagner, the Doric origin of the word connotes "event," "story," or "hap-
pening."31 In other words, if the actor is tied to the moment of theatrical performance,
the dramatist is tied not to that same moment, but to that which orders and directs it,
that which the theatrical performance represents.

Although Nietzsche never ties the actor exclusively to the Dionysian or the playwright
to the Apollonian (it is in the combination of their two artistries that these two states
come into being in the theatre), the linkages are clear enough. The actor, who exists
only in the theatrical event, is a Dionysian force that "does not need the image and
the concept" - his performance itself and not what he actually performs is his art, or
in Nietzsche's terms, he "is no longer an artist, he has become a work of art."32 That
which the actor performs is the work of the dramatist; unlike the act of performance,
it is not constituted in its execution, but in its reference to and reshaping of the world
beyond the stage. Hence Gilles Deleuze's outright equation of Apollo and dramatist in
his reading of The Birth of Tragedy, observing that "it is Apollo who develops the tragic
into drama, who expresses the tragic in a drama."33 For Nietzsche, the combination of

30 Young, Nietzsche's Philosophy of Art, 37; Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 75, 76. Gilles Deleuze sees
the unique insights proffered by tragedy as closely anticipating Nietzsche's later philosophy in Thus
Spake Zarathustra, specifically in the ways that tragedy, contra Socrates, "affirms all that appears" and
offers "[m]ultiple and pluralist affirmation" (17). See Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh
Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).
31 Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, 174n.
32 It is important to distinguish Nietzsche's treatment of the actor in the context of theatrical per-
formance in The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner contra his discussion elsewhere of what Paul
Patton calls "the figure of the self as actor" - that is, the actor as a lived state of being outside the
containment of a theatrical structure (172). As Patton makes clear in his essay on The Gay Science and
Thus Spake Zarathustra, this other actor is a new figure in Nietzsche's later thought, not an artist, but
a social being who approaches life "with the role faith of actors" and, in the confusion of the social
and the aesthetic, "anticipates much that has been written about 'postmodernity'" (179). See Patton,
"Nietzsche and the Problem of the Actor," in Why Nietzsche Still?: Reflections on Drama, Culture, and
Politics, ed. Alan D. Schrift (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 170-83.
33 Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 12.

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 NIETZSCHE AND THE MODERN DRAMA'S CONCEPT OF PERFORMANCE / 31

artistries is critical: the actor's Dionysian act of performance can help us move beyond
the individuated self and into an experiential state where we are most susceptible
to the Apollonian contemplations that the dramatist asks of us. Pure performance,
like that of the Attic chorus, is for Nietzsche "given the task of infecting the mood
of the audience with Dionysiac excitement to such a pitch that, when the tragic hero
appears on stage, they see, not some grotesquely masked human being, but rather a
visionary figure, born, as it were, of their own ecstasy/'34 Nietzsche essentially bisects
the theatrical event at a remarkable point of demarcation: not between the literary or
theatrical per se, but between the act of performance itself and that which is actually
being performed. The actor here becomes not the figure who conveys the dramatist's
work, but the figure who allows for its very existence.

The strength of Nietzsche's conviction is best seen in the vehemence with which
he addresses those who supposedly disregard his vital demarcation - a line of attack
repeated in similar terms against Euripides in The Birth of Tragedy and Wagner in The
Case of Wagner. Euripides is figured as the first to challenge theatre's hybrid structure,
attempting "to expel the original and all-powerful Dionysiac element from tragedy and
to re-build tragedy in a new and pure form on the foundation of a non-Dionysiac art."35
It is an attempt to eliminate the necessity of performance and craft a drama that, in its
rigorous narrative logic and unassailable explicability, works as well in the imagination
as it does on the stage. But to attempt such a feat is by force to make oneself not just
a dramatist, but a dramatist and an actor at once. Euripides, Nietzsche says, "is the
actor with the pounding heart, with his hair standing on end; he draws up his plan as
a Socratic thinker; he executes it as a passionate actor. Neither in the planning nor in
the execution is he a pure artist."36 The fact that Euripides' drama relies supremely on
the spectator's analytical function, what Nietzsche calls "cool, paradoxical thoughts - in
place of Apolline visions," ultimately forestalls theatrical artistry, whether Apollonian
or Dionysian, from taking hold.37 "[I]t is impossible for it to achieve the Apolline effect
of epic poetry," Nietzsche writes, "but on the other hand it has liberated itself as far
as possible from the Dionysiac elements."38 As there is no actual experience to such a
play, neither can there be images to contemplate. It cannot truly be a drama, for even
if it describes a happening, it never truly gets to happen.

In The Case of Wagner, the attack is reversed, as Nietzsche accuses Wagner not just
of being an actor, but of not being a dramatist, shirking his narrative responsibilities
in favor of his histrionic proclivities: "In projecting his plot . . . Wagner would think
approximately the way any other actor today thinks about it: a series of strong scenes,
one stronger than the other. . . . With such a sense of theatre for one's guide, one is in no
danger of unexpectedly creating a drama. Drama requires rigorous logic; but what did
Wagner ever care about logic? . . . Wagner is no dramatist; don't be imposed upon!"39
If Euripides was too much the dramatist, Wagner is too little the dramatist. He thinks
his work through as only an actor would, creating a vehicle for spectacular moments
of performance without much consideration for what is being performed. Thus while

34 Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy. 45.

35 Ibid., 59.
36 Ibid., 61.
37 Ibid., 62.
38 Ibid., 61.
39 Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, 174-75.

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32 / David Kornhaber

there is much to experience in a work by Wagner, there is little to contemplate. If

Euripides is the dramatist who has usurped the role of the actor, Wagner is his mirror
image - a purported dramatist who is actually "an incomparable histrio, the greatest
mime," only interested in the act of performance itself.40 "Wagner marches with drums
and pipes at the head of all artists of delivery, of presentation, of virtuosity," Nietzsche
writes.41 Wagner, like Euripides before him, has broken what seems to Nietzsche to be
an almost sacred division between the role of actor and dramatist, one in which the
performer is greatly and newly empowered, but not to the exclusion of the playwright.

Nietzsche's formulation is not entirely new: to give the actor dominion over the
realm of theatrical performance and to declare such performance essential to the full
consummation of written drama is no radical proposition. It is in the degree to which
Nietzsche makes the figure of the actor full copartner to the playwright in the construc-
tion of theatrical meaning that he offers a reconceptualization of the theatrical event,
one that would allow the playwrights of the modern drama to take the actor as an
accomplice in a broader project of theatrical transformation. As Austin Quigley has
observed, the rise of modern drama marks a shift from "a nineteenth-century tradi-
tion that gave priority to entertaining and instructing audiences, to a modern tradi-
tion that gives priority to offering audience members the opportunity to participate
in a particular mode of social inquiry."42 But it would be a shift based not just in a
new dramaturgy, but in a larger rethinking of the theatrical event, "linking reform in
the structure of the drama with reform in the structure of the performance environ-
ment."43 The rise of modern drama is, in Quigley' s account, marked by an undoing of
the divide between the literary and the theatrical, modeling the modern play not just
as a narrative vehicle, but as a tool for writing the theatrical space itself, "organizing,
controlling, and rendering meaningful the various portions of that space."44 Its meaning
would not be reducible simply to an execution of its text, but would self-consciously
exist in what William Worthen calls an "intersection between the text and the institu-
tions that make it producible - and so, readable - in the practices of the stage."45 In
other words, modern drama was marked by a coemergence of a profound sense of
the theatre's new philosophical purpose matched to a belief that such philosophical
communication can only take place in the moment and the space of performance itself.
Insofar as the earliest playwrights of the modern drama found a cohesive intellectual
prompting to the new directions that Quigley and Worthen describe, it was in large
part in Nietzsche's writing on the power and pitfalls of theatrical composition - a world
where the actor must at last be liberated from an executionary role and elevated to a
place of intellectual coauthorship.

Strindberg and the Liberated Actor

In significant ways, it is Nietzsche's theatrical conception that lies behind Strindberg's

avid statements on the creative abilities of the actor, expressed in varying degrees of

40 Ibid., 172.
41 Ibid., 179.
42 Austin Quigley, The Modern Stage and Other Worlds (London: Methuen, 1985), 53.
43 Ibid., 5.
44 Ibid., 7.
45 W. В. Worthen, Modern Drama and the Rhetoric of Theatre (Berkeley: University ot California rress,
1992), 2.

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 NIETZSCHE AND THE MODERN DRAMA'S CONCEPT OF PERFORMANCE / 33

detail in his preface to Miss Julie , in the essay "On Modern Drama and Modern Theatre,"
and in his later memoranda to the members of the Intimate Theatre: self-reflections
that seek to position his work as a writer and theoretician of the stage as an effort
to "give the actor as much freedom in his work as possible."46 Strindberg was a self-
proclaimed "disciple" of Nietzsche who shared an impassioned letter exchange with the
philosopher toward the end of the latter 's life, and the Nietzschean conceptualization
of the theatre as a meeting of coequal artistries can be seen to animate Strindberg's
self-chronicled effort to enable the modern actor's artistic liberation.47 As he states in
the preface to Miss Julie, Strindberg means in his play to at least partially release the
artistry of the actor's work, an artistry as fecund as any writer's invention and able to
"work independently ... of the author's authority."48 It is a powerful, if preliminary,
acknowledgment of the theatrical event as a joining of creative acts, rather than a
moment of unidirectional transmission from the literary art of the playwright to the
performative art of the actor.

And it is, significantly, a theory of the actor's art that stands in contrast to the most
common understandings of naturalist acting with which Strindberg was associated
during this time. The naturalist actor was in Émile Zola's term the embodiment of
"physiological man," a figure who must be "skilled at being rather than performing"
in Robert Gordon's summary.49 Hence the naturalist interest, described by Strindberg,
in the untrained amateur who has "not yet acquired the spurious taste of the stage"
and perhaps can be "persuaded to be for a few hours what she represents."50 But the
way in which Strindberg takes issue with such a conception of the actor's art is im-
portant: to him, a person "playing himself" is not an instance of acting, but "clearly
something else again."51 There is still an art to the actor's craft that makes "being"
onstage ontologically different from "being" in the world. Strindberg agrees with the
naturalists that the actor "finally becomes the figure he is going to play," but to him
such a feat is achieved through a Nietzschean abandonment of individuation and not
the apotheosis of uninflected though still hyperindividuated selfhood that is the ama-
teur's purview.52 The actor's state of being is an artistic state of being; the actor has "the
gift of imagining the character and the situation so vividly that they take shape," but
only when the actor "falls into a trance, forgets himself. ... It is like sleepwalking."53
In other words, even if the actor is to lose herself, she must do so through the act of
performance and not by circumventing the performative act like the amateur. For it
is through the act of performance itself that the actor "hypnotises his wide-awake
public," prompting them to the same kind of abandonment of individuation that the

^August Strindberg, "Memorandum to the Members of the Intimate Theatre from the Director/'
in Strindberg on Drama and Theatre, trans, and ed. Egil Törnqvist and Birgitta Steene (Amsterdam:
Amsterdam University Press, 2007), 133.
47 Letter, August Strindberg to Friedrich Nietzsche, 4 December 1888, in Strindberg's Letters, 295.
Robinson translates the word as "catechumen."
48 Strindberg, "Author's Preface," 72.
49 Robert Gordon, The Purpose of Playing: Modern Acting Theories in Perspective (Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press, 2006), 35.
50 August Strindberg, "On Modern Drama and Modern Theatre," in Selected Essays, trans, and ed.
Michael Robinson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 79.
51 Strindberg, "Memorandum," 129.
5¿ Ibid.
53 Ibid.

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34 / David Kornhaber

actor has undergone, toward Nietzsche's "surrender of individuality and a way of

entering another character/'54

According to Strindberg, such an approach to the actor's art is as impossible for

"old-style actors" as for amateurs, as it demands a new relationship to the playwright's
art.55 Strindberg rejects the simple notion of an actor-centered theatre, a "back-to-front
method of creating a theatre and a drama [where] writers were asked to produce roles
for star performers";56 but equally does he reject the notion of an inviolable playtext:
the actors of Strindberg's dramas must be able to "[t]amper with" and "stretch" the
text, just as his new author must at times "admit that he is wrong."57 To Strindberg, the
relationship between writer and actor is not so much about the enactment of a literary
text as the achievement of a reality that can exist only in performance. Both collabora-
tors are equally worthy of the suffix "hypnotist" in Strindberg's descriptions of the
author-hypnotist and actor-hypnotist, both contributing to a hallucinatory refiguring
of our external reality.58 It is a version of what Nietzsche calls the Apollonian "dream-
reality," but one that we actually inhabit with our bodies - the Apollonian experienced
through the Dionysian in the co-creative acts of actor and author.59

George Bernard Shaw and the Virtuosic Actor

George Bernard Shaw's debt to Nietzsche's theatrical thought runs parallel to Strind-
berg's, both centering on the dignity and necessity of the actor's artistry, but with a
critical difference in inflection: whereas Strindberg saw an actor in need of liberation,
Shaw saw an already independent artist in no great need of rescue. Shaw, like Strindberg,
took inspiration from Nietzsche and made no secret of his source, though he viewed
himself as more of a peer or even a critic than a disciple: "I want the Germans to know
me as a philosopher, as an English (or Irish) Nietzsche (only ten times cleverer)," he
told his German translator.60 "Brer Nietzsche" - Brother Nietzsche - is how Shaw took
to calling the philosopher, not so much expressing their kinship as Nietzsche's simple
ubiquity in Shaw's writing at the turn of the century: two book reviews of Nietzsche's
collected works in English, multiple references in the later editions of The Quintes-
sence of Ibsenism, and starring roles (intellectually, at least) in Man and Superman and
Major Barbara.61 Shaw's reflections on Nietzsche's theatrical thought are thin - his only

54 August Strindberg, 'The Battle of the Brains/' in Selected Essays, 25.

55 Strindberg, "On Modern Drama/' 80.
56 Ibid., 78.
57 August Strindberg, " Julius Caesar. Shakespeare's Historical Drama. Together with Some Remarks
about Criticism and the Art of Acting and an Addendum about the Theatre Crisis and the Theatre
Muddle," in Strindberg on Drama and Theatre , 152; and "Memorandum," 132.
58 See Strindberg, "Author's Preface to Miss Julie, 71; and The Battle ot the Brains, 25.
59 Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 15. It is worthwhile noting that Strindberg s particular treatment
of the actor's art anticipates in many significant ways a similar "liberation" accomplished in Anton
Chekhov's dramaturgy, particularly in his utilization of the dramatic pause - what Richard Gilman
calls a moment of "silent speech" that turns theatrical creation over from playwright to performer
(48). Chekhov seems to have developed this technique in isolation from Strindberg and without direct
influence from Nietzsche, to whose writing he had limited exposure. See Gilman, Chekhov's Plays: An
Opening Into Eternity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995).
^Letter, George Bernard Shaw, "To Siegfried Trebitsch," May bury Knoll, lb December ivuz, in bernara
Shaw Collected Letters 1898-1910, ed. Dan H. Laurence (New York: Viking, 1985), 298.
61 It is important to note that the degree of Shaw's actual philosophical debt to Nietzsche has often
been overestimated, particularly around the concepts of the Superman and the Übermensch. For a dis-

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 NIETZSCHE AND THE MODERN DRAMA'S CONCEPT OF PERFORMANCE / 35

published comment on The Birth of Tragedy is that the Apollonian and Dionysian form
"useful . . . instruments of thought/' while his comments on The Case of Wagner consist
primarily of indignation at the philosopher's admiration for Georges Bizet.62 But the
pressure of Nietzsche's theatrical model on Shaw's own dramatic imagination is front
and center in the statements the playwright presents on drama's origins and its impact
on the actor-author relationship. For Shaw, all drama - even and especially his drama
of ideas - is the inheritor of distinctly nonliterary origins. In the same critical breath
with which Shaw insists that a play be judged by "the quality of its ideas," he also
insists that in his drama, he is "going back atavistically ... to the tribune stage, to the
circus, to the didactic Mysteries, to the word music of Shakespeare, to the forms of my
idol Mozart, and to the stage business of the great players whom I had actually seen
acting."63 To a degree that is too frequently overlooked, Shaw celebrates the theatre's
connection to forms of performance that have no traction with logic and argument: the
immediate performance reality of the circus act, musicality both literal and verbal, the
histrionics of the star actors who dominated the nineteenth-century stage. As much
as Shaw sees a rhetorical purpose in drama, he turns out to be no Euripides: he also
sees in it a visceral, embodied experience.

At its core, a play for Shaw must be both rhetorically and theatrically viable - a
combination that is more than a simple conjoining of effects; it is instead evidence
of the hybrid structure of the theatre, a structure that originates for Shaw in what
is essentially a prosaic gloss on Nietzsche's Dionysian-Apollonian synthesis. "The
drama," Shaw writes in the 1913 edition of The Quintessence , "was born of old from
the union of two desires: the desire to have a dance and the desire to hear a story."64 In
this model, the theatrical event is not just a concurrence of forces, but a union of two
artistries, one that exists without need of external representation - the dance wherein
the artist "has become a work of art" - and one that depends on the representation of
our external world - the Apollonian "dream-reality" of the story. As in Nietzsche, the
conservatorship of the theatrical event must thus be entrusted not to the playwright
alone, but divided between the figures of author and actor. The playwright is the
inheritor of the "desire to hear a story," for "life as we see it is so haphazard that it
is only by picking out its key situations and arranging them in their significant order
. . . that it can be made intelligible."65 It is the playwright who reorders and represents
our reality back to us, creating a dream world modeled on the external realm. But it
is the actor who is the inheritor of the "desire to have a dance" and allows us to enter
the reality crafted by the author. Shaw's actor is not the sleepwalking hypnotist that
Strindberg imagines, a figure whose invisible art must be freed from the text in carefully
arranged improvisatory moments; rather, for Shaw, acting is an achievement to behold
that takes on a life wholly separate from the text: it is a virtuosic act, an acrobatic act,
an act so exhilarating that it approaches the purely embodied enjoyments of the dance.

cussion of distinctions between Shaw's rationalist Superman and Nietzsche's post-nihilist Übermensch,
see Carl H. Mills, "Shaw's Superman: A Re-examination," in Critical Essays on George Bernard Shaw,
ed. Elsie B. Adams (New York: G. K. Hall, 1991), 133-43.
62 George Bernard Shaw, "Our Book-Shelf: 'Friedrich Nietzsche: The Dionysian Spirit of the Age/"
in Bernard Shaw's Book Reviews, vol. 2, ed. Brian Tyson (University Park: Pennsylvania State University
Press, 1991), 227.
63 George Bernard Shaw, "The Play of Ideas," New Statesman and Nation 39 (6 May 1950): 510.
64 George Bernard Shaw, The Quintessence oflbsenism (1891; reprint, New York: Hill & Wang, 1957), 182.
65 Shaw, "Preface to The Six of Calais," 776.

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36 / David Kornhaber

No matter the talents of the actor, Shaw does not think it possible, or necessary, for
an actor's performance to truly take on any feigned reality beyond the immediate
reality of performance itself. "It is only to very young children that the Fairy Queen is
anything but an actress/' Shaw explains. Yet "the child who would have been cruelly
hurt by being told that the Fairy Queen was only Miss Smith dressed up to look like
one, becomes the man who goes to the theatre expressly to see Miss Smith, and is
fascinated by her skill or beauty to the point of delighting in plays which would be
unendurable to him without her."66 The pleasure of performance for Shaw is not in the
careful erasure of artifice (and, conjointly, the careful erasure of self) as in Strindberg,
but rather in an acute awareness of that artifice itself as a marker of the shared reality
between performer and spectator.

For Shaw, the representations of the playwright and the virtuosic talents of the actor
are indelibly connected: they are together, in a derivation from Nietzsche, what make up
the synthetic form of theatre. To the playwright goes the Apollonian task of founding
a new representation of the lived world: "The beginning and end of the business from
the author's point of view is the art of making the audience believe that real things are
happening to real people."67 And, of course, for Shaw, such representations are often
strictly aligned to discursive ends, such that, as in Christopher Innes's description of
Getting Married , "the play itself embodies a logical pattern of antithesis and accretion
[with] the characters, each presenting one postulate . . . juxtaposed, organized in different
combinations, and conflated in a demonstration of rational process."68 The characters
can, in short, become spokespersons for elaborate (and ultimately extradramatic)
argumentative positions. Yet even in such exacting arrangements, the actor's artistry
is never wholly subsumed to the author's. The aim of the actor is not to demonstrate
that "real things are happening to real people" or even to convince the audience of a
particular debate point, but rather to inspire "the audience to believe that it is witnessing
a magnificent display of acting by a great artist."69 The playwright may try to corral
and contain this impulse, to construct such an exacting script that "you know where
every speech is to be spoken as well as what it is to convey, and where the chairs are
to be and where they are to be taken to, and where the actors are to put their hats on"
so that the actors "cannot improve on your business however little they may like it"
and can "never distract attention from one another."70

Yet even then is the play smith dependent upon the player. Far from eclipsing the
actor's histrionics through such painstaking construction, the playwright only amplifies
its importance. "My plays require a . . . great virtuosity" and a special "exercise of skill,"
Shaw would explain in a 1927 article for the New York Times , and he would even go
so far in some statements as to subsume his authorial prerogative to the actor's art.71

66 Shaw, The Quintessence oflbsenism, 173.

67 George Bernard Shaw, "Make Them Do It Well/' in Shaw on Theatre, ed. E. J. West (New York: Hill
& Wang, 1958), 153 (originally published in Collier's Weekly, 24 June 1922).
68 Christopher Innes, "'Nothing but talk, talk, talk - Shaw talk': Discussion Plays and the Making of
Modern Drama," in The Cambridge Companion to George Bernard Shaw, ed. Christopher Innes (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998), 172.
69 Shaw, "Make Them Do It Well," 153.
70 Ibid., 155.
71 George Bernard Shaw, "Mr. Shaw on Mr. Shaw," in Shaw on Theatre, 185 (originally published in
the New York Times, 12 June 1927).

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 NIETZSCHE AND THE MODERN DRAMA'S CONCEPT OF PERFORMANCE / 37

"There is one function hardly ever alluded to now/' he declares in the preface to The
Six of Calais. "As I write my plays it is continually in my mind and very much to my
taste. This function is to provide an exhibition of the art of acting/'72 For without the
actor's art, the playwright's work is not simply unconsummated or unfulfilled, as in
Strindberg, but even entirely forestalled. To believe in the theatre is always for Shaw
a childish act, and it is specifically in the recognition of the actor's virtuosic craft that
the adult spectator takes on the propensities of the child. If the child loses a sense of
self and becomes absorbed in the stage world through the actor's believability, the
adult finds an equivalent loss of individuation in the thrilling absorption of the actor's
artistry. Thus just as soon as Shaw makes the claim that the great function of drama is
"to provide an exhibition of the art of acting," he attaches to this function a profound
interpretive purpose. "All interpreters of life in action . . . find their instrument in the
theatre; and all the academic definitions of a play are variations on the basic function," he
explains.73 The "exhibition of the art of acting" and the interpretation of "life in action"
are not one and the same, but the former is the keystone to the latter. To interpret life
in action depends on the absorption made possible by the actor's virtuosic presence.
To hear the story, in Shaw's terminology, we must first have the dance, the artistries
of presence and of representation working in concert to reinterpret the world.

Eugene O'Neill and the Masked Actor

For Eugene O'Neill, the actor would prove a deeply problematic figure, able only
to achieve the kind of real-in-itself performance celebrated by Strindberg and Shaw
through a strange diminishment of presence, almost through an elimination from
the theatrical event. But idiosyncratic as it might be, O'Neill's theorization of the
actor-author relationship marked yet another instance of Nietzsche's concept of the
theatrical event entering into the discourse of the modern drama. Indeed, among his
theatrical predecessors and contemporaries, O'Neill was perhaps the most direct in his
admiration for Nietzsche's philosophy of the stage, declaring The Birth of Tragedy "the
most stimulating book on drama ever written" and proclaiming Nietzsche to be his
"literary idol."74 In the essays "A Dramatist's Notebook" and "Memoranda on Masks,"
O'Neill all but recapitulates the basic argument of The Birth of Tragedy, declaring drama's
origins to lie in a pairing of the "inner forces" of human action with the "surface
resemblances" of our world to yield an embodied "poetical interpretation" of life.75 It
is a familiar diagnostic, though differently inflected again: if for Strindberg the theatre
takes on its greatest resonance as a kind of hypnosis and for Shaw in a melding of
the lecture hall and circus, for O'Neill the theatre has its "highest and sole significant
function as a Temple" - a place where action and word are conjoined inseparably in
prayer and where the world as we experience it is profoundly reimagined.

72 Shaw, "Preface to The Six of Calais," 776.

73 Ibid.

74 Eric Mottram, "Eugene O'Neill/' in American Drama, ed. Clive Bloom (New York: Palgrave Macmil-
lan, 1995), 23; New York Sun, "A Eugene O'Neill Miscellany/' in Conversations with Eugene O'Neill, ed.
Mark W. Estrin (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1990), 81.
75 Eugene O'Neill, "Memoranda on Masks," in Modern Theories of Drama: A Selection of Writings on
Drama and Theatre, 1850-1990, ed. George W. Brandt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 154;
O'Neill, "A Dramatist's Notebook," 157.

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38 / David Kornhaber

For O'Neill, however, it is a reimagining that seems, at least at first, strangely

devoid of the actor's contributions; O'Neill's suggestions on theatrical practice seem
actually to mark a profound disparagement of the actor's art. The centerpiece of his
theatrical programmatic is an eclipsing of the individual presence of the actor behind
symbolic masks, "the freest solution of the modern dramatist's problem as to how
... he can express those profound hidden conflicts of the mind which the probings of
psychology continue to disclose to us."76 O'Neill all but admits to wanting to privilege
the playwright and sideline the person of the actor. Speaking of an imagined masked
production of Hamlet , he writes that "we would be able to see the great drama we
are now only privileged to read, to identify ourselves with the figure of Hamlet as a
symbolic projection of a fate that is in each of us, instead of merely watching a star
giving us his version of a great acting role."77 It seems on the surface a culmination
to a highly personal contest between author and actor that O'Neill experienced in
his work as a practicing playwright, a reaction to the "damned poor acting" that he
complained of in his plays.78

But O'Neill's advocacy of masks can also be seen as akin to Strindberg's complaints
against the improper acting of his day, even to Nietzsche's sallies against Wagner's
"theatocracy."79 O'Neill observes in "A Dramatist's Notebook" that the most "splendid
creative energy and skill" that he has seen in actors have come "where the play took
them away from the strictly realistic parts they were accustomed to playing."80 His
hope in a move toward masked drama is to create "a chance for the actor to develop
his art beyond the narrow range to which our present theatre condemns it."81 For
O'Neill, it is a drive ultimately to make the modern American actor more present.
"Usually," O'Neill observes, "it is only the actors' faces that participate. Their bodies
remain bored spectators that have been dragged off to the theatre."82 His demand is
that "their bodies become alive and expressive and participate in the drama" - that
actors take seriously the idea of embodying the roles they are meant to convey.83 It
is, according to O'Neill, "a totally new kind of acting" from which actors may "learn
many undeveloped possibilities of their art."84 And it is dependent on the impact

76 O'Neill, "Memoranda on Masks/' 154. In practice, O'Neill's advocacy of masks would be far more
problematic than his manifestos make apparent, and he would use them in production only for The
Great God Brown and Lazarus Laughed. Nevertheless, from his initial usage of the device in 1926 to
his manifestos in 1932 and 1933 to his declarations in 1946 that The Great God Brown was among his
favorite plays specifically for its employment of the device, the mask as a theatrical ideal retained a
persistent hold on O'Neill's imagination.
77 Ibid., 155.
78 O'Neill, "A Dramatist's Notebook," 157. Paradoxically, O'Neill's greatest praise for an actor would
be reserved for Charles Gilpin, the original star of The Emperor Jones with whom O'Neill had a deep
falling out over his tendency to change or ad-lib lines. Toward the end of his life, he would call Gilpin
"the only . . . actor who carried out every notion of a character I had in my mind" (172). Even here,
though, the actor's contributions are read in terms of achieving an appropriate character representation
and not on the level of creating an embodied reality shared with the audience. For that, O'Neill would
remain convinced of the necessity of de-personalizing masks. See New York Herald Tribune , "Eugene
O'Neill Talks of His Own and the Plays of Others," in Conversations with Eugene O'Neill.
79 Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, 182.
80 O'Neill, "A Dramatist's Notebook," 157.
81 Ibid.
82 Ibid., 156-57.
83 Ibid., 156.
84 Ibid., 157.

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 NIETZSCHE AND THE MODERN DRAMA'S CONCEPT OF PERFORMANCE / 39

of the mask, which, in Worthen's words, functions to expose "the actor's histrionic
surface," pressing the actor into "an art out of nature."85 It is an attempt to move the
art of acting away from an Apollonian mimicry of the world and toward something
closer to Shaw's virtuosity and Nietzsche's Dionysian: toward a feat of the whole body,
one that declares its own reality in its own moment of performance. "The mask," says
O'Neill, "is dramatic in itself, has always been dramatic in itself," and so too must be
the actor charged with carrying that mask on her body.86

It is a move designed to deeply align the separate artistries of actor and author,
based around O'Neill's schematization of the mask as the central semaphore of modern
thought. Psychology, he reasons, has given "fresh insight into the inner forces motivating
the actions and reactions of men and women . . . with the masks that govern them and
constitute their fates."87 He even declares a "[d]ogma for the new masked drama" that
"[o]ne's outer life passes in a solitude haunted by the masks of others; one's inner life
passes in a solitude hounded by the masks of oneself."88 O'Neill's dream of a pervasive
American mask drama requires the actor for its achievement, so that in forcing the actor
to perform in mask, O'Neill means not so much to make invisible her stage presence,
but to make literal the reality he saw his drama as trying to convey. The literalness of
the technique thus represents in itself a kind of shared reality between spectator and
performer grounded in the actor's body. The "old . . . standby of realistic technique,"
O'Neill says, "can do no more than, at best, obscurely hint . . . through a realistically
disguised surface symbolism."89 But his mask dramas do not hint: the mask becomes
a point of communion directly between actor and audience, a literal presence so that
though it is itself the very embodiment of artifice, it contains no artifice in itself.
Everything the mask drama depicts is an Apollonian refiguring of the world - O'Neill's
"imaginative interpretation of life" - but the performance itself relies on no "surface
resemblances"; instead, it relies on and is made possible by a shared artistic presence
between actor and spectator that is centered around the very embodiment of the loss of
individuation. For O'Neill, the playwright cannot interpret life until the actor is freed
from servicing that interpretation and allowed simply to embody it.

The Legacy of Nietzsche's Concept of Performance

In The Purpose of Playing, Gordon divides the Western acting theories of the twentieth
century into six categories ranging from "acting as psychological truth" to "the actor as
scenographic instrument."90 It is a schematization that shows deep rifts in the concept
of the actor's art as it has taken hold since the rise of the modern drama, and for many
commentators, the development of modern drama itself is seen as the story of this
schism, a divide in its broadest terms between the sidelining of performance in favor of
other ends and the celebration of performance as an end in itself. But this fundamental
schism can also be seen as a distending of theatrical possibilities, an overdevelopment
of factors that are, at bottom, capable of coexistence. What ultimately allows for debates
on the relative value of theatricalist and textualist approaches to the stage is first and

85 Worthen, Modern Drama and the Rhetoric of Theatre, 114.

86 O'Neill, "Memoranda on Masks," 154.
87 Ibid.
88 Ibid., 155.
89 Ibid., 154.
90 Gordon, The Purpose of Playing, 6.

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40 / David Kornhaber

foremost the establishment of those possibilities themselves: an insistence that the

theatre is born from distinct spheres of artistic composition, that it is a form defined
most fundamentally by its hybridity. It is this concept of the theatrical event, which
found one of its earliest and fullest expressions in Nietzsche, that helped shape the
development of a specifically modern drama, one that reconceptualized the theatre
away from the art of performing plays and toward the art of crafting theatrical events.
In other words, the origins of the schisms that have marked the modern theatre lie in a
moment of attempted unification, a belief that the theatre is comprised equally in the
reality of the actor's performance and the representations of the playwright's material.

For Strindberg, Shaw, and O'Neill alike, the specific conceptualizations of acting
they put forth were pivotal to a new modern praxis and an essential foil to the play-
wright's art. More than a functionary of the playwright's will, the actor becomes,
at last in these theories, essential coauthor of the theatrical experience. Although its
manner of execution is figured differently for Strindberg, Shaw, and O'Neill, for all
of them it is a distinctly nonlinear vision of the creative process in the theatre that is
most energizing - a meeting of forces, rather than a direction of one artistry by another.
For none of these playwrights is the actor merely a vehicle for the delivery of text;
the actor is rather the playwright's most important collaborator. The actor brings not
just a series of performance abilities, but a capacity for achieving moments of shared
existence with the audience, a faculty that is every bit as constitutive to the theatrical
event as the playwright's text.91 For these playwrights, what the modern drama means
to give to the actor is not just a voice, but a vocabulary: a language of performance
that is entirely distinct and independent from the playwright's language, one that is
not only necessary for a play's execution, but is fundamental to the very actualization
of anything we might properly call, in a modern sense, "theatre."

91 The differentness of this approach might be best seen in contrast to other popular conceptualiza-
tions of the stage during the period of modern drama's emergence. In his influential 1913 address
'The Illusion of the First Time/' William Gillette calls the theatrical event a "Life-Simulation" that
is not so much comprised of a dualistic synthesis as it is eternally suspended between a position of
immediacy and of representation (252). The actor in Gillette's formulation in not quite the Dionysian
representative that he becomes in modern drama, but is instead a broker figure who negotiates between
artistic representation and an immediacy that always remains extrinsic to the theatrical event, forever
mediating the "first time" of the world itself and the "illusion" of the playwright's artistry toward the
achievement of what Henry Irving called an "apparent spontaneity" (62). See Gillette, "'The Illusion
of the First Time' in Drama," in The American Stage: Writing on Theatre from Washington Irving to Tony
Kushner, ed. Laurence Senelick (New York: Library of America, 2010); Henry Irving, The Drama: Ad-
dresses by Henry Irving (Boston: Joseph Knight Company, 1892), 62.

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