In 2014, Alchemist Theatre in Milwaukee mounted a production of David Mamet's Oleanna in which they cast a male actor in the role of Carol, a female college student accusing her professor of sexual harassment. The theatre insisted that they had maintained the character's gender and instead pursued the idea of gender fluidity that they claimed to find in the text of the play itself. By approaching the script as an engagement with ideas rather than a strict set of instructions, the theatre found a way of performing the text that was transformative while still, in the theatre's eyes, honoring the play and the playwright. Bess Rowen explores and advocates for these kinds of possibility within playtexts in The Lines between the Lines: How Stage Directions Affect Embodiment by focusing on what she terms “affective stage directions” (4) and how they might open up space for new modes of engagement with and execution of scripts.
Describing herself as a connoisseur of “unusual stage directions,” Rowen assembles a stunning but not overwhelming number of examples from a wide variety of plays (2). She uses these examples to constitute and illustrate the concepts central to her book. She defines affective stage directions as “stage directions written in a manner that aims to engage the actor affectively in the thoughts, feelings, and/or mood of a given moment, character, scene, or overall play” as opposed to stage directions that simply tell actors where to move or what to do there (72). These concepts work toward a categorization of stage directions rooted in both theory and practice.
Though the book engages with affect theory, it owes at least an equal debt to speech-act theory and related discourses of performativity. Rowen seems particularly indebted to J. L. Austin, evinced not only in her frequent use of the word “felicitous” and its variations but also in her overall argumentative arc. Like Austin, she starts with a special case (here it is affective stage directions in place of Austin's performative utterances) that she initially separates out, ultimately only to deconstruct this distinction and suggest that all stage directions might be affective. In one particularly effective moment, Rowen eschews the conventions of formal academic argumentation to tell a story about a bird trapped in her parents’ garage. The anecdote argues for the power of affective text while simultaneously offering an example of it (106).
Rowen employs a scaffolded structure not only to flesh out her theoretical arguments but also to offer suggestions for modes of practice that engage with stage directions in new ways. Each chapter includes somewhere in its first few pages an italicized, rigorous definition of the major concept that it seeks to define. Chapter 1 establishes the affective possibilities for stage directions by pointing to examples where stage directions—or, perhaps more precisely, dialogue in the style of stage directions—are spoken out loud by the actors. Chapter 2 then pursues a rigorous definition of affective stage directions with a rich assortment of examples ranging from Sara Ruhl to Neil LaBute to Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. The next three chapters then delve deeper into particular subspecies of affective stage directions: choreographic, multivalent, and impossible. She offers rigorous, concise, and thoroughly useful definitions for each of these terms, and it is not hard to imagine them becoming shorthand for interested readers ranging from undergraduate students to theatre professionals.
The book pulls off an astonishing feat by being both a typology of stage directions and a stirring call to action. Rowen's hortatory tone drives the prose, performing the criminally uncommon feat of marrying theory and analysis to practicable suggestions and provocations toward performance and production practices, as evinced by her desire to “marshal the forces” of theatre and her call at the end for readers to “do what you think is right with all these potential directions forward” (230–1). These exhortations, however, should perhaps come with a warning. To return to that Alchemist Theatre production of Oleanna, exciting as it may be in its affective engagement with the text, Mamet shut it down with a single cease and desist letter after only one performance, which forced the theatre to offer refunds for tickets for the rest of its run. Alchemist, like many other theatres that find themselves in such a position, decided it was far better for them financially to lose the revenue for that production than to try to fight the cease and desist by arguing they had not, in fact, changed the script. Many of Rowen's most exciting and intoxicating ideas might benefit from a fuller acknowledgment of the real risks theatre companies take in being playful with stage directions along with the opportunities of productive resistance to norms. Playwrights and their estates hold virtually all the cards when it comes to the legal authority governing how copyrighted scripts are performed and whether performances violate production agreements. The current intellectual property regime in theatre, in other words, tends toward reproducing norms, power structures, and hierarchies associated with dominant ideologies and does so with real teeth. Theatre companies who pursue the kind of important, necessary, and revolutionary work for which Rowen advocates should be aware of the risks that come from a system that invests the author with virtually unchecked omnipotence.
One day it would be nice to see a theatre company fight one of these cease and desists on the grounds that they had, in fact, followed the stage directions, but such a fight would need to be planned and well-funded, as intellectual property cases can cost millions to litigate. In the meantime, any theatre company or student director stirred or moved by Rowen's effective arguments and calls to action—a highly likely possibility given Rowen's passionate writing style and effective rhetoric—should operate with an awareness of the very real imbalances in legal power in the contemporary theatre landscape.
