Jill Dolan's Theatre & Sexuality and Erin Hurley's Theatre & Feeling are two recent titles from Palgrave Macmillan's Theatre& series. Edited by Jen Harvie and Dan Rebellato, the Theatre& series examines theatre's intersections with other fields. These slim volumes are designed for a general readership; consequently, they offer an introductory tour of their respective topics and supply straightforward definitions of key terms. Each book also features a foreword from a prominent practitioner: Anne Bogart opens Theatre & Feeling with a discussion of how she approaches feeling in her work, and Tim Miller primes the reader for Theatre & Sexuality by highlighting connections between theatre and desire. For the reader whose appetite has been whetted by these guidebooks, a list of additional resources is included. However, there is one glaring inconsistency between the Theatre& series' mission and Dolan's and Hurley's respective volumes: though Harvie and Rebellato rightly assert in their preface that people working in theatre studies must expand their focus beyond the Western canon, Dolan and Hurley explicitly limit their content to Western theatre—likely for reasons of space and expertise. That aside, Hurley and Dolan prove to be skilled guides.
Dolan is especially adept at conducting the reader through complex ideas with facility. Focused on Western theory and practice from the twentieth century onward, her Theatre & Sexuality provides a rich introduction to the ways in which theatre and performance are permeated by sexuality. Dolan makes clear that the intersection of theatre and sexuality encompasses both a critical lens and an effort to highlight works by or about LGBTQ subjects. She acquaints her reader with the ways in which sexuality is manifest in Western performance and supplies an explanation of what it means to queer a performance. In accord with the mission of the Theatre& series, Dolan takes care to make these ideas legible to a general audience without sacrificing their complexity.
Dolan begins with a historical overview of the theory and practice of theatre as it relates to sexuality. Starting with the early twentieth century, she contrasts the historically open secret of queer sexuality among theatre practitioners with the fact that many plays reinforced the sexually conservative norms of the time. Dolan samples the history of censorship and pathologizing representations of LGBTQ subjects before turning toward the struggle for LGBTQ rights in the United States and the United Kingdom, respectively, and correlates these movements with changing theatrical representations of LGBTQ subjects. Relating practice to theory, she offers the LGBTQ performance–protests of the 1980s and 1990s as one of the factors that prompted academics to examine the relationship between sexuality and performance more closely.
Moving into a performance theory study guide, Dolan provides an overview of social constructionist thought. Included is a succinct introduction to Foucault's and Butler's respective contributions to feminist and queer theory. Dolan also addresses sexuality studies' shifting emphases with regard to theatre studies, from judging the value of representations of LGBTQ subjects to considering the ways in which form resists or reinforces dominant cultural norms. Rehearsing the arguments of Sue-Ellen Case, Lynda Hart, and of her own work, Dolan contrasts the dangers of realism for LGBTQ subjects with the deconstructive potential of Brechtian techniques, deployed by groups such as Split Britches. Theatre & Sexuality also contains brief commentaries on the specific struggles of genderqueer people, trans people, and queer people of color. Dolan then furnishes a catalog of various “landmark” people, places, and productions in American LGBTQ theatre (with a few English and Canadian interlopers), from commercial successes like The Boys in the Band to the avant-garde stylings of the WOW Café Theatre; from Harvey Fierstein to the NEA Four; and from Tony Kushner to Pomo Afro Homos. Along the way, Dolan dispenses many helpful definitions, including of the concept of queering as a critical reading practice. She demonstrates this practice by closing out Theatre & Sexuality with a nimble reading of Split Britches and Bloolips's Belle Reprieve, a queer revisiting of Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire.
Consistent with the larger aim of the Theatre& series, Dolan succeeds in creating a firm foundation for the novice reader. The reading of Belle Reprieve that concludes Theatre & Sexuality is especially useful in that it demonstrates how the terms and ideas explained earlier in the book apply to performance and critical practice. Dolan negotiates the limited space available to her by working within the parameters she sets out in the opening pages of her book. Dolan also points the reader toward ample resources for further study: in addition to the suggestions for further reading at the end of the book, her extensive catalog of people, places, and productions is sure to satisfy the eager novice.
Erin Hurley's Theatre & Feeling is also sure to encourage additional exploration for the budding theatre student. Hurley separates the “feeling” of her title into affect, emotion, and mood. She marshals classical thought on theatrical form and more recent forays into neuroscience to assert that feeling is theatre's lifeblood. To demonstrate further the immediacy of feeling to theatre, Hurley defines theatre in terms of feeling, as “a realm of active emotion” (4). Faithful to the mission of the Theatre& series, Theatre & Feeling caters to a general audience. To this end, Hurley processes the theories and terms she employs with the novice in mind.
She begins by differentiating quotidian emotions from theatrical emotions, identifying intensity as the distinguishing factor between the two, and asserting that theatrical affect and emotions are more heightened for actors and spectators alike. She emphasizes that spectators experience genuine affective and emotional responses to theatre's fictional representations. For Hurley, this “feeling labor”—that is, the intense feelings that theatre strategically or accidentally arouses in a paying audience—is what motivates people to go to the theatre. Additionally, Hurley highlights theatre's intersubjective quality, which imbues it with the capacity to change one's self-perception as well as one's perception of the larger world.
Hurley next guides the reader through the murky waters of affect, emotion, and mood, drawing on the work of Peta Tait, Sara Ahmed, and Brian Massumi. She reminds the reader that it is not just actors who perform feeling labor, but also the mise–en-scène, the components of which are specifically designed to shape a spectator's affective and emotional experience. Hurley then provides neuroscientific perspectives on why people do or see theatre. She follows this section with cultural debates on the purpose of theatre, stemming from Horace's distinction between theatre for education and theatre for amusement. Using Greek tragedy and nineteenth-century melodrama as her examples, Hurley illustrates the ways in which theatrical form governs feeling. In her reading of the seventeenth-century melodrama Black Eye'd Susan, Hurley highlights the influence of evolutionary theory on Western perceptions of feeling. She links this influence to the valuing of emotion over affect, which she then relates to sexism, racism, and a hierarchy of theatrical forms—chiefly, the valuing of tragedy over melodrama. Hurley then moves on to a discussion of how actors prepare to undertake feeling labor, focusing on the ways in which Stanislavsky's method mobilizes the actor's feeling body.
Hurley sets out a vast terrain to cover in Theatre & Feeling, drawing her examples from a theatrical mélange that includes (but is not limited to) classical drama and philosophy, Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, recent cognitive science experiments, and Cirque du Soleil. Though her ambition is admirable, this results in a volume that is less cohesive than Dolan's. Hurley, however, is conscientious in her distinctions among affect, sensation, emotion, and mood. Her writing is clear and direct, and well suited to the Theatre& audience.
Hurley's Theatre & Feeling urges us to consider carefully the role we wish cognitive science to play in the future of theatre studies. Though Hurley recognizes that cognitive science opens up new modes of inquiry for theatre studies, she cautions scholars to be aware of its limits—namely, that it often downplays the influence of culture and the social world. In Theatre & Sexuality, Dolan's catalog raises the specter of a queer countercanon. Though an investigation of the politics of a countercanon is beyond its scope, Dolan's work indirectly invites the question of what it means to countercanonize works that purposefully intervene in the existing theatrical canon. That these books prompt these larger questions while addressing newcomers to the field is a testament to Dolan's and Hurley's expertise. Theatre students will surely find these books helpful.
