Robert Cohen - Theatre, Brief Version-McGraw-Hill Education (2016)

Theatre 271
In Karin Henkel’s radically adapted 2011 production of Shakespeare’s
Macbeth at the Munich (Germany) Kammerspiele (Chamber Theatre),
the bloody Macbeth is played by the female actor Jana Schulz (left),
with Katja Bükle playing his Lady—as well as one of the witches. The
production emphasizes Lady Macbeth’s famous “unsex me here” line,
making gender as well as political points as it goes, and the production’s
languages are also mixed, including German, Flemish, Swiss-German, and
English. Despite the startling text and plot changes, the production was
still titled “Macbeth von William Shakespeare,” making clear that German
(and Eastern European) theatergoers no longer expect productions of
classic plays to always stick to their original texts. © Silke Rossner
revolution, other genres of theatre today have taken up his
call. Perhaps the most lasting kind of theatre inspired by
Artaud is the performance art that emerged in the 1980s
and continues to this day.
PERFORMANCE ART
Performance art is a kind of theatre that is primarily
conceptual, and not “dramatic” in the traditional sense
of having clear narrative, character development, or
structure. Successful performance art can be meditative,
arresting, shocking, political, and provocative—
oftentimes all at once. The movement became prominent
in a famous presentation by noted performance
artist Karen Finley in the late 1980s in which she
smeared her naked body with chocolate to represent
the exploitation and sexual abasement of women. This
performance led to the National Endowment for the
Arts (NEA) revoking the funding they had awarded
her, and several other performance artists, in 1990. For
her subsequent Shut Up and Love Me, Ms. Finley again
smeared herself with chocolate, this time inviting audience
members to lick it—at twenty dollars a lick—to
compensate for the loss of her NEA grant. By confronting
viewers with their own lust and disgust—and their
desire to be part of an outrageous news story—Finley
created a vividly memorable unease.
Many other performance artists are active today,
among the best known being Laurie Anderson, a master
of many voices, musical instruments and original ideas
since the 1970s; and Serbian-born Marina Abramović,
whose 2010 performance entitled “The Artist Is Present”
at New York’s Museum of Modern Art consisted
of her sitting, in complete silence, all day every day,
for a month and a half—716 hours and 30 minutes in
all—while museum-goers took a seat across from her
one at a time to have a “silent conversation” with the
woman many call “the mother of performance art.” All
around her, performers reenacted many of her famous
pieces, such as “Imponderabilia,” in which the audience
member passes between a nude man and woman in a
doorframe. This kind of art is more of an “event” than a
play, but it is certainly a kind of theatre and, in its own
way, spectacular.
VERBATIM THEATRE
Theatre has always dealt with the politics of its day.
Plays can be made quickly, relative to film, and can
as a result promptly respond to recent events. But the
twenty-first century has seen a virtual explosion of upto-the-minute
dramas performed on major stages, particularly
in England. Many of these may be called forms
of verbatim theatre because they are developed from
transcripts of real-life speeches and interviews. Here are
a few examples:
• Arguendo, by the performance group Elevator Repair
Service, enacts the transcript of a Supreme Court
case that determined the limits of free speech rights.
The play begins as a straightforward depiction of