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Spring 1989 3

The Iconic Stage

Marvin Carlson

Semiotic analyses of theatre have often given particular emphasis to theextreme imp ortanc e in this art of a particular type of sig n- th e icon. Accordingto C.S. Peirc e, who established this as a key semiotic term , "anything whatever,be it quality, existent individual, or law, is an Icon of anything, in so far as itis like that thing and used as a sign of it." 1 The theatre more than any otherart deals in things that are like other things, offering, in the words of PeterHa ndk e, light which is brightness pretending to be anoth er brightness, a chairpretending to be an other chair, and so on.2 Ne vertheless, this ability, one mighteven say this tendency , of the atr e to invest pieces of reality with its pa rticularartistic significations is not only a distinguishing featu re of this art, bu t, as Be rtStates has argu ed in a fascinating essay on this subject, a source of particu larartistic power.3

In every historical period there has been an interplay between iconic andother types of sign pre sen tatio n o n stage, bu t different perio ds an d differenttraditions have varied greatly bo th in the d egree of iconicity on stage and in therelationship betw een th e icon and its referent. Ind eed the stylistic differencesbetwe en different theatrica l traditions may often b e described in term s of theirdifferences in iconicity. T he W est ern realistic trad ition is of cou rse highlyiconic. Indeed one might define theatrical realism as an attempt to create asiconic a perform ance as the med ium would allow. Th e costumes the actorswear, the properties they manipulate, the furniture they use, are carefullyselected or created to app roxim ate such objects in the world outside the th eatre

Marvin C arlson, Sidney E, Conn P rofessor of Theatre Studies at the Graduate Cen ter of the CityUniversity of N ew York is the author of a number of books and articles on theatre theory andhistory, his most recent bo oks bein g Theories of the Theatre and The Italian S hakespearians. Twonew books are scheduled to appear in 1989: Signs of Life: Essays in the Semiotics of Theatre(Indiana) and Places of Performance: The Semiotics of Theatre Architecture (Cornell).


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4 Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticismas closely as possible. In m ore stylized theatres , most notably those of theclassic Orient, symbolization often replaces iconicity-a table represents amountain, a flag an army, a piece of cloth a river.Although one might say that realism is a style in which everything onstage is presented as an icon, a distinction could nevertheless be made betweendifferent types of iconic representation within a realistic production. Althoughtheatre theorists tend to think of icons in Handke's terms "chairs pretendingto be other chairs," Peirce's definition is much more general, requiring onlythat the icon be "like that thing" it stands for. Thus a chair painted on a canvasbackdrop (a common sight in prerealistic theatre) would be as legitimate anicon as a real chair, one of States' "pieces of reality" appropriated by thetheatre for its own purposes. We might thus make a distinction between thegeneral iconic feature of similarity and the common situation in theatre whereobjects actually are the things they represent, a situation to which Kier Elamhas given the name "iconic identity.'*In any theatre, even when it is highly realistic, the degree of iconic identityof different elements will vary. The one element which almost invariablyinvolves iconic identity, no matter how stylized the production, is the actor, ahuman being who represents a human being. The most notable exceptions tothis, shadow or puppet plays, are generally considered distinct and separatesub-genres of theatre . Predictably, iconic identity on stage is next mostcommonly found in those elements most closely associated with and mostutilized by the actorthe crown he wears, the fan she carries, the furnishingsthey sit upon. In realistic drama, both contemporary and historical, the iconicidentity of such items is of major importance, and on occasion has exceededeven the normal idea of iconic identity. Sometimes for purposes of publicity,sometimes for a more disinterested motive of artistic verisimilitude, directorsand designers have placed on stage objects which did not simply resemble real-life objects, but were in fact the objects themselvesactual contemporary orperiod costumes or furniture, borrowed from homes or museum s, real flowerson real tables, real food really eaten, even, when it could be afforded, real goldand jewelry on the leading ladies.The stage element which historically has most resisted representationthrough iconic identity, even during the realistic era, has been the physicalsetting, the scenery (as opposed to p roperties). There are obvious practicalreasons for this. Clearly the presentation of a real Louis XIV chair, or a realpearl necklace, or even a real horse presents far fewer problems than a realtown square, a real forest, or even a real architectural interior. The interiorswere of course what the realistic theatre favored, but in fact they wereconstructed the same way that town squares or forests were-from woodenframes, canvas, and paint. The doors and the pictures on the walls might bereal, and great care might be taken to assure that the walls did not sway whendoors were vigorously slammed, but the walls were not real walls, the roomwas not a real room in the same way that the chairs were real chairs. The


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Sp ring 1989 5scenery was iconic in Peirce's g ene ral sense, bu t it did not participa te in iconicidentity.

Nor was this necessarily a shortcoming, even for the most doctrinaire ofrealists. Clearly a certain ple asu re of the atr e placing great stress onverisimilitude is appreciation of the art required to create this impression.When Belasco recreated the interior of a Child's restaurant on stage, thefascination of the audien ce was obviously not in seeing in total an d auth enticdetail the interior of such a restau ran t. They could, of course, walk into anyrestaurant in this popular chain without paying admission and have thatexperience. Th e fascination was in seeing this familiar scene recre ated onstage with an indistinguishable blend of an iconic setting and p rop erties w hichmight be either iconic or actually be the objects repre sen ted. Pa rt of thepleasure involved h ere is simply tha t of app recia tion of the technical skill of thescenic artist, seemingly overcoming the particular intractability of theatricalscenery to the sort of iconic identity so common in other aspects of theatreproduction. But there is also a m ore complex audience response at work.

In his famous essay on psychical distance early in this century, EdwardBullough gave particular atten tion to the atr e. Briefly, it is Bulloug h'scontention that an apprehension of Distance is necessary to appreciate anywork of art, indeed even to experience it as art. This apprehension may belost if the D istance bec om es too great or too small, and th e theatre ru ns a particular risk of the latter, "owing to the material presentment of its subjectmatter,"5 in oth er words, to its strong reliance upo n iconic identity. A t th esame time, Bullough recognizes that particular satisfaction can be attainedfrom this decrease of Distance, provided it remains controlled: "both inappreciation and in production, most desirable is the utmost decrease ofDistance without its disappearance."6 Even when nothing on the stage itselfserved to distance the aud ience from the reality of Belasco's setting, the factthat it was on a stage, displayed, or in Eco's useful term, ostended for itspublic's contemplation, provided precisely the minimum distancing Bulloughdemanded, and created an agreeable tension between the audience's knowledgeof illusion and their app recia tion of its effectiveness. How ever com plet e thestage illusion, the audience necessarily remains aware of it as illusion. Theyare aware intellectually that beyond the plate-glass windows of Belasco'srestaura nt setting is not a Ne w Y ork s treet bu t the back wall of the stage, an deven mo re directly, they ar e a wa re physically that they are sitting in a the atreauditorium as members of an observing audience.The production tradition that reached its high point in such masters ofdetailed iconic representation as Belasco is generally styled realistic and isobviously reinforced by the bourg eois interest in authenticating realistic detailand material culture, but romanticism also contributed importantly to thistradition, anticipating the atte ntio n of the realists to the exact repro duc tion ofall aspects of contemporary life by carefully researched reconstructions ofhistorical scenes and dedication to local color. Pe rha ps now here was this


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6 Jou rna l of Dramatic Theory and Criticismromantic/realistic devotion to iconic production more striking or morechallenging to theatrical resources than in the nineteenth century tradition ofShakespearean production.In an actual Elizabethan performance, of course, a street scene, a forest,or a chamber would have been as far from any iconic representation of theoriginal as the neutral settings of the French classic stage, but now Shakespearebegan to be presented according to the new vision of the historically accuratesetting. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century this becam e themain line of Shakespearian interpretation, exemplified by such major directorsas Kean, Irving and BeerbohmTree in England, Daly and Booth in America,the Duke of Saxe-Meiningen in Germany, and Antoine in France.The logistics of presenting multi-scene plays like those of Shakespearewithin detailed iconic settings proved formidable indeed, straining the resourcesof Europe's largest and best equipped theatres and the imaginations of thefinest engineers and designers aided by all manner of revolving, sliding, andelevating stage areas. Few directors since the early years of the twentiethcentury have attempted to return to the sort of stage filled with authenticbushes and rabbits which was a specialty of Beerbohm-Tree, although anoccasional production has attracted attention as a novelty by unusual concernin this direction. The graphic decadence of the 1933 New York production ofTobacco Road (earning it a highly unusual run of more than seven years) wasemphasized by the real dirt, weeds, and filth which covered the stage.Audiences and critics were so fascinated by the detailed duplication of atenement facade on a New York stage of Elmer R ice's Street Scene, and themore recent creation of the side of a mountain for Patrick Meyers' K2 thatthese settings dominated both contemporary reactions to these productions andthe memories of them.

Despite a few such striking exceptions, detailed illusionistic settings of thissort have rarely been seen in the modern theatre, partly in reaction to the turnof the century excesses in such production, and partly due to a feeling that suchdisplay distracted from other and more important values of the dram atic work.Perhaps the major reason, however, has been that the evolving cinema offereda far more effective way of placing before the viewer's gaze any location in theworld as desired without the problems of shifting stage scenery. The gain inflexibility and accuracy of scenic detail was considerable, even though animportant sacrifice was also involved~the phenomenological essence of theatre,its physical presence. Cinema as an art is as heavily iconic as theatre, but thetheatre's shifting mixture of iconicity is necessarily absent in film . There canbe no physical iconic identity of actors or objects. All icons become thesame-projected images of absent realities. Christian Metz makes this pointclearly in "The Imaginary Signifier:"

The perceptions that theatre and other spectacles offer to the eyeand ear are inscribed in a true space (not a photographed one), the


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Sp ring 1989 7same one as that occupied by the public during the performance;everything the audience hear and see is actively produced in then-presence, by human beings or props which are themselves present.This is not the problem of fiction but that of the definitionalcharacteristics of the signifier: whether or not the theatrical playm ime s a fable, its action, if nee d be m ime tic, is still m ana ged by realpersons evolving in real time and space, on the same stage or "scene"as the public. The "other scene," which is precisely not so called, isthe cinem atic screen (closer to fantasy from th e ou tset): whatunfolds there may, as before, be more or less fiction, but theunfolding itself is fictive: the actors, the "decor," the word s one he arsare all absent, everything is recorded (as a memory trace which isimmediately so, without having bee n som ething else before), and thisis still true if what is recorded is not a "story" and does not aim forth e fictional illusion pr op er . Fo r it is th e signifier itself, and as awhole, that is recorded, that is absence.7M etz ' observation, perce ptive as it is, still require s a certain qualification.

Certainly as compared with the cinema it is true to say that public andperform ance in th ea tre occupy the sam e "true space," bu t in ter m s of receptionit is equally important to remember that normally speaking, audience andperformance do not in fact occupy the same space but two contiguous spacessimultaneously, th e space of th e viewer and the space of the viewed. In alm ostevery period of the atre h istory the disjuncture b etwee n the se spaces has be enemp hasized by physical m ean s, and often by actual barriersm ost comm onlythe raising of the ac tor's space ab ove that of th e aud ience, but also by the u seof curtains, proscenium arche s and frames, the "mystic abyss" of the W agn erianorche stra pit, by all sorts of railings and balu strad es, and so on. As A nd rBazin has observed, theatre "of its very essence must not be confused withnatu re und er penalty of being absorbed by her and ceasing to be," and that toprotect this essential division, the architecture of the stage "has varied fromtime to time without ever ceasing to mark out a privileged spot actually orvirtually distinct from nature."8 Althou gh Bullough stresses that the Distancehe is considering is mental rather than physical, he does remark that actualspatial distance, especially in an art like theatre, contributes to the mentalprocess which interests him . H e even goes so far as to suggest that "the actualspatial distance separating objects of sight and hearing from the subject" hasbeen one of the major rea sons why the arts appealing to the e ar and eye havebee n developed in a way that p oten tial gustatory, olfactory, or ha ptic arts havenot.9

The theatre, as a particularly tangible art, has always drawn an importantpart of its power from its physical presence even when actors and audienceswere spatially separated. Du ring the twentieth century, when the eme rgenceof film has by contrast called particular atten tion to this quality of the atre , we


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8 Jou rna l of Dram atic Theory and Criticismhave seen an unusually rich variety of productions which in fact brought actorsand audience into the "same space." One may call this, as Metz does, thesame "true" space, to distinguish it from the photographed space of the film ,but "true" is a potentially misleading word here, since space, like any other"true" reality, can be readily iconicized by the theatre. Actors may certainlyshare the same "true" space as their public, even capitalizing upon thosesensory connections deprecated by Bullough, as when the Bread and Puppetcompany comes into the audience to share food with the spectators, or whenPeter Brook's Midsumm er Night's Dream company left the stage to clasp handswith the public.

Actor and audience spaces may be shared in a quite different way,however, if the actors do not invade the audience's space but require theaudience to enter the iconic space of the performance. Two importantpioneers in such experiments were Max Reinhardt and Nikolai Oklopkov. Forone of his most famous productions, The Miracle, Reinhardt in the 1920sconverted the entire in teriors of theatres in several cities, such as the Centuryin New York, into vast Gothic Cathedrals, with the audience seated in thenave. In the 1930s Oklopkov in Moscow converted the entire interior of histheatre into a hillside where the audience sat among the actors as if "encampedwith the Red Army in thefield."10In such productions, audiences most oftenare accepted by the actors as non-speaking sharers of the iconic space.More recent interest in such experimentation doubtless owes much to thework in the early 1960s of the extremely influential Polish director JerzyGrotowski, who followed Oklopkov in mixing actor and audience spaces indifferent ways for different productions. For Kordian his small theatre becamea m ental hospital with beds for both actors and audience and for Dr, Faustusthe audience was seated at two long refectory tables as guests at Faustus ' finalbanquet. In Am erica, performances of this sort were sometimes called"environmental," a term firs t applied to a 1967 production of Ionesco's VictimsofDuty at the Petit Thtre du Vieux Carr in New Orleans where the entireauditorium and stage was converted into a living room inhabited by both actorsand audience.11 As Reinhardt and Oklopkov demonstrated, either interior orexterior space may be treated in this manner. When Peter Stein producedShakespeare's As You Like It in 1977 he did not, as Irving or Daly would havedone, create an iconic woodland on stage inaccessible to the audience, butbrought the audience into a space which they shared with actors, containing apond, a field of corn, and real trees, with bird calls coming from all sides.12In each of these examples, the introduction of the audience into theillusory iconic space of the production emphasizes in a powerful way thetangible reality, the "thing-ness" of the theatre, especially in contrast to amedium like film , but the iconic space itself is not essentially different fromthat of nineteenth century realism. The pond and trees may be real, butStein's woodland itself is not (even the birds are recorded). The furnishingsin Victims ofDuty may be real, but the living room itself is not. In short, such


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Spring 1989 9productions still follow the normal practice of nineteenth century realism,utilizing iconic identity for actors, costumes, and properties, placed within anillusionistic setting. From the point of view of the audience, there is noquestion that either bringing actors into the public space or bringing the publicinto the iconic space of the performance will almost certainly bring about animportant diminishing of both spatial and psychical distance, with the resultthat audience members may suffer the disturbance of under-distancing. Thatthis does not happen m ore often is surely because the performance event stillprovides its own distancing through the audience's viewing of it as such anevent. The proscenium arch and the familiar auditorium may havedisappeared, but in each of the productions just mentioned, the audience cameto a familiar structure, a theatre building, within which they were accustomedto find prepared illusions. Even when the performance sought to absorb themin its own iconic space, they remained aware that that space was in turnabsorbed within the overarching space of the thea tre building itself, which bothcontained and legitimatized this illusory world.A more radical spatial organization occurs when this sheltering structureis given up entirely or in part, and the audience is asked to relate in somemanner to real external space. In an interesting early experiment in thisdirection, Goethe assembled the W eimar court one evening in a small outdoorpavilion on the royal estates. The back wall had been removed and theaudience were seated facing it as if it were a proscenium opening. What theyobserved was a wooded glade and the bend of a stream. Under thesecircumstances, a boat coming down the stream with lanterns and a singingoarsman seemed quite magical, as did such effects as the bobbing of otherlanterns carried by actors through the woods.13 Unlike the garden theatres ofthe baroque period, which sought to impose the artificiality of the theatricalimagination upon nature, Goethe's "Muse's Cottage" utilized nature for anauthenticity impossible to achieve in a theatre setting.As an interest in theatrical iconicity increased along with the growingtaste for realism during the nineteenth century, the particular difficulty ofrepresenting iconic exterior scenes on a conventional stage encouraged anumber of producers to offer plays as Goethe did, in actual woods andmeadows. One of the first groups in England to offer such productions, thePastoral Players, presented scenes from As You Like It and Fletcher's TheFaithful Shepherdesse in the Coombe Woods in 1884-85. The resultingcomments from Era magazine make clear the appeal of these experiments:"Not only did the m ounting leave nothing to the imagination, more even thanimitating reality with photographic accuracy, it was reality itself."14 In theopening years of the twentieth century, open-air theatres offering "reality itself'enjoyed a great vogue in Europe and America. Probably the most famous ofthese was the Germ an Harzer B ergtheater, founded in 1903 for the productionof dramas drawn from Teutonic mythology but in fact most successful in theperformance of A Midsummer Night's Dream.


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10 Journ al of Dram atic Theory and CriticismA very different reception dynamic is involved in the apparently verysimilar Peter Stein and Pastoral Player's presentations ofAs You Like It, both

bringing their audiences into direct contact with real natural objects, and thisreception dynamic results from the difference between the simple iconicity ofStein's actual performance space (a theatre interior which resembled a realexterior space) and the iconic identity of the P astoral Players' space (an actualwoods ulitized as a woods). In simple iconicity, the professed aim may be toencourage the audience to forget that it is in a theatre, but in fact the moredetailed and accurate the reproduction of external reality is, the more likelythat an important part of the audience's reaction to (and pleasure with) theproduction will involve a sense of wonder at the authenticity of the illusion.An important element of almost every review of Reinhardt's The Miracle wasthe wonder felt at the seeming conversion of a theatrical space into a gothicinterior. Typical was the reaction of the New York Times which under theheadling "Scenic Miracle Wrought" assured its audiences that what they wouldexperience at the Century Thea tre was "not a mere contrivance of canvas andpaint, but a solid structure of wood and iron and concrete and seemingstone."15 As we have noted, similar reactions greeted the productions in lateryears of Tobacco Road, Street Scene, and K2.When the drama moves out of the theatre into iconic settings such as theCoombe Woods, a quite different audience reaction may be observed. HadReinhardt carried out his plans to produce The Miracle in Milan Cathedralone would hardly have expected any audience member tofindany fascinationin how much this interior resembled an actual cathedral. The source ofpleasure here is of a quite different sort, in a certain sense almost a reversalof the source within the theatre . In the theatre, one might say, we see illusionand amuse ourselves by pretending it is reality, while in the Coombe woods wesee reality and amuse ourselves by pretending it is theatre.It is only by such pretending that we can maintain in the Coombe woodsthe distance from reality that makes theatre reception possible at all. Twocenturies after Goethe's court entertainment, Bruce Wilshire attended anexperimental theatre in New York offering a very similar phenomenologicalexperience. H ere the audience was seated in a warehouse space and the mainwarehouse door before them was opened to reveal the street outside, framedby gossamer curtains. The normally banal spectacle of passing traffic wasconverted into something strange and fascinating.

. .. cars appeared occasionally, framed by the door, as they passedon the street directly outside. Appeared, but appeared transfigured,as if a spell had been cast over them . Details of their shape andmovement, ordinarily not noticed, leapt out, as if from a numinousaura. It was as if cars were being seen for the first time.16


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Sp ring 1989 11Clearly the theatrical "frame" provided by the open door, and the traditionalsepa ration of the seate d pub lic from the "scene" within this frame serve tostimulate in the audien ce the feeling that it is watching no t reality bu t th ea tre ,and everything observed b eco m es infused with iconicity. O nce again we se ethat although distancing occurs in the mind, in situations where theatre andreality come dangerously close, some specific spatial framing device may beemployed to preve nt m isinterpre tation. O ne of the most astonishing uses ofthis "framing" of reality in the th ea tre I have ever witnessed was in L yubimov'sproduction of Chekov's Three Sisters at the Taga nka The atre in Moscow. Asection of the th ea tre wall opens to reveal th e traditionally off-stage m ilitaryband playing. Th en the wall behin d them open s to reveal the actual outsideworld-the "Moscow" that was the unattained dream goal of the play'scharacters. T he ironic contrast is staggering, since the rea l Moscow is revealedas no dream city, but a dark jumble of unattractive lots and low buildingsagainst a skyline of grim apartment buildings.

I should like to consider one further refinem ent of iconic space which haslong provided an important and rather different variation both on the theatreexperience and on th e me an s by which distance is achieved. Iconic space was,as I have already observed, a particular concern of m any rom antic dram atists.Victor Hugo championed the use of such iconicity in his opposition to thetraditional neoclassic unities, arguing tha t unity of place forced the dram atistto falsify his action by placing it in incorrect settings:Exact locality is one of the first elem ents of reality. T he speakingor acting characters alone do not engrave on the soul of thespec tator the faithful imp ression of facts. T he place w her e such acatastrophe occurred becomes a terrible and inseparable witness ofit, and the absence of this sort of silent character makes the greatestscenes of history in the dra m a incom plete. W ould the poet dare toassassinate Rizzo elsewhere than in Mary Stuart 's chamber? stabHenri IV elsewhere than in that rue de la Ferronerie, obstructedwith drays and carriages? burn Joan of Arc elsewhere than in theold marketplace? 17For the romantics, this l ine of argum ent suppo rted what seeme d to be the

practice of Shakespeare, placing each scene in its proper setting, as opposedto Racine, with his famous single neutral ch am ber. Clearly when H ugo assertsthat the poet must assassinate Rizzo in M ary Stuart 's cham ber and burn Jo anof Arc in the old marketplace, he is insisting that scenes in the theatre mustshift iconically to these locations instead of relying upon the neutral spaces ofthe Fre nc h classic stage. O ne m ight take his advice literally however,perform ing a dra m atization of the se events in their actual historical locationsinstead of on stage, or in a sett ing like the Coombe Woods or the HarzMountains which is "real," but which is not in fact the actual location of the


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12 Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticismplay's action. The Tell-Spiele organized in 1912 at Interlaken in Switzerland,for example, performed Schiller's epic drama in a small village and woodsetting against an Alpine background which was offered, with a certain stretchof the imagination, as the authentic location for at least some of the scenes ofthe play.To take a more recent example, a very popular production of the 1980shas been John Krizanc's Tamara, offered first in Toronto and subsequently inLos Angeles and New York. For this production, ten large rooms withconnecting halls and staircases m ust be found in an available building (in NewYork, the Park Avenue Arm ory). These are furnished to represent IIVittoriale, the country villa of Gabriele d'Annunzio, in 1927, and audiencemem bers are allowed to follow any one of the play's characters through theserooms during the evening, thus experiencing only that part of the total actionin which that character is involved (the play's producers call it a "livingmovie"). H ere walls, staircases, windows, room s are represented by real walls,staircases, windows, and rooms, not by painted canvas, but one could imagineanother performance of the same work actually staged in the villa of IIVittoriale, where the physical surroundings could authentically fulfill Hugo'srole of silent witnesses to these events.

"Iconic identity," seemingly a fairly precise concept, does not allow us tomake this distinction, which is of considerable importance in reception. Justas we have distinguished already between simple iconicity (a flat scenicelement cut and painted to resemble a tree) and iconic identity (an actual treeappearing in a signifying context), I would like to further distinguish betw eengeneral iconic identity (a real forest representing a forest in a play) andspecific iconic identity (the actual forest mentioned in the script, if it exists,being utilized as a setting for that play). Although general iconic identity iswhat we normally encounter in theatre, there is no element of theatre whichhas not at one time or another utilized specific iconic identity as well. Theactor, the theatrical elem ent most closely involved with general iconic identityis perhaps the element least likely to utilize specific iconic identity, since the"playing" of someone "other" seems to lie at the very basis of theatre.Nevertheless, the history of the theatre offers many examples of actorsappearing as icons of themselves. The experimental tradition of the twentiethcentury, from Pirandello to the Living Theatre, has often employed thisstrategy (Robert Brustein's 1988 production of Pirandellos's Six Charactersemphasized this by having the actors play themselves), but it is by no meansa development tied to the contemporary passion for self-reflexivity. Adam dela Halle appeared as the central character in his own play, the fascinating latemedieval Jeu de lafeuille, and Molire and his fellows appeared as icons ofthemselves in his Impromptu de Versailles. Nor is this phenomenon only aproduct of artistic self-consciousness or experimentation; quite strikingexamples may be found in less literary or artistic sources. Late nineteenthcentury variety entertainments often featured famous or notorious persons who


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Sp ring 1989 13did not perform, but m erely app ea red to expose themselves to the public gaze.In a more traditional theatrical context appeared William F. Cody, playinghimself in countless spectacles of daring deeds in the old W est. R ob ertD arn ton analyses a fascinating exam ple of this ph eno m en on in an improvisedentertainment among printers' apprentices in Paris in the 1730s.18

Performance spaces with specific iconic identity relate to their audiencesin quite different ways than do o the r types of iconic stages. In literal examplesof Hugo's physical locations which have been "silent characters" in historicalevents, the aud ience 's contact with such locations seems to provide a m eas ureof contact with the reality of the events them selves. T he earliest knownexam ples of theatric al activity w ere all in sites with rich historical an d religiousme anings. Every faith ha s established holy places with rea l or legendaryassociations to the great events in its development, and there is often a closeconnection between these observances, especially if they have a dramaticelement, and the legendary or mythical events which contributed to thesanctification of this plac e. Ab ydo s in Egyp t, a pilgrima ge site for n early 3000years, offered mystery plays dealing with the story of Osiris upon the veryisland which was honored as his place of burial. 19

Quasi-theatrical performances were also found from a very early date atthe Christian shrines in Jeru sale m . Th e most detailed repo rt of an earlypilgrimage is that of Eg eria in 381-84. A t such locations as the U pp er Ro om ,the Mount of Olives and Golgotha, the faithful gathered on appropriate daysto hea r the gospel account of events in that place read. Th e recurring phra se"on the sa m e day in the very place" indicates the im porta nce of the setting toEg eria's experienc e. Som e cerem onies came especially close to dram aticreprese ntation, such as the bishop read ing the news of the resurrection to thecongregation assembled before the tomb where the angel had presented thesame words to the three Marys, or the Palm Sunday procession, wherepilgrims an d townsp eople welcom ed the bishop into the city with palmbranches and songs of "Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord." 20The re-enactment of religious scenes on the site of their presumedoriginal occ urrence is still found in the co ntem pora ry world, in tradition al sitesin the Holy Land and in new pilgrimage locations such as Hill Cumorah inupstate New York, whe re since 1937 the M orm on church has presented a hugeoutdoor pageant on the site where Joseph Smith is said to have found thetablets establishing the M orm on faith. Fo r ma ny spec tators attenda nce at suchspectacles may still provide something of the religious experience felt bymedieval pilgrims like Eg eria, but in this mor e secu lar world, a portion of thespectators m ay be expected to bring a primarily historical rathe r than religiousinterest to such re-cre ations . In ma ny respects the m od ern tourist may beconsidered the direct descendent of the medieval pilgrim and for both thedesire to visit the place where important events actually occurred hasencouraged the develop m ent of dram atic or quasi-dram atic activities in thoseplaces reinforcing their historical "reality."


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14 Journa l of Dram atic Theory and CriticismThe Swiss Tell-Spiele may be taken as an early example of the historical

dram a, frequently pe rform ed in an outdoo r the atre, which can now b e foundin many locations in the United States. The Lost Colony, begun in 1937 inManteo, North Carolina, and The Common Glory, begun in 1947 inW illiamsburg, V irginia, w ere early exam ples of a kind of celebration of localhistory which has since been offered in dozens of locations, many repeatingthese performances every year. In a variation of the type of perform ance, theSound and L ight Show, the s etting is no lon ger a silent character , but, with th eaid of m od ern electronics, the principle indeed, the sole theatrical perform er.Audiences seated before such mon um ents as the Acrop olis, the Pyramids, orthe Palace of Versa illes witness a dram atization of the history of that setting,recoun ted by taped m usic and sound and accom panied by lighting changes onthe monument .

The actual re-creation of historical events on the site of their occurrencehas be en a widesp read activity during the twentieth century. Th e post-Revolutionary Russian theatre, probably under the influence of the greatnational festivals of the Fre nc h Rev olution, und erto ok such stagings on a scalenever before attem pted . Th e most famous and spectacular of these was TheTaking of the Winter Palace on 7 November, 1920, a dramatic re-enactmentof that major Re volution ary event, involving over 8000 particip ants. Th edirector, Nikolai Evreinov, laid much stress on the fact that this work was"performed in the actual place wh ere the historic event occurred."21 A peak insuch activities came in the United States between 1961 and 1965, thecentennial of the C ivil W ar , and in 1975-76, the bicenten nial of the Rev olution.Countless battles and other historical events were re-created in their originallocations with actors in authentic costumes attempting to follow with varyingexactness the actions of a centu ry or two befo re. T he re-cr eation s ranged frommajor battles such as Gettysburg, Antietam, and Bull Run to more modestevents such as Washington crossing the Delaware, the inauguration ofJefferson Davis, Paul Revere's ride, Anthony Wayne's cattle drive to relievethe troops at Valley Forge, Grant 's homecoming to Galena, Illinois, andLincoln's address to the N ew Jersey L egislature in 1861. Organizations suchas the New York-based Brigade of the American Revolution provided historical advice, skilled performers, and authentic costumes to groups in manycom mu nities wishing to stage a local ba ttle. In all of thes e re-crea tions , theboundary between theatre and reality is reinforced not spatially, as istraditionally the case, bu t tem porally. T he settings are taken to rep rese ntthemselves at an earlier point in time.

As twentieth century historians have become increasingly interested in thehistory of the hitherto often neglected low er classes, the atre p ractition ers havealso sought to give a voice to such subjects, and this has resulted in somespecific iconic stagings not at the scenes of great battles or of the deeds offamous leaders, but in the living and working places of the peop le. Arm andGatti, a pioneer in such experimentation, discovered in creating a play about


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Sp ring 1989 15a factory worker that the authentic milieu was as important to this commonlaborer as Hugo felt it was to the proper depiction of kings and saints.Observed Gatti:

[W]ith this kind of subject it's mostly the place y the architecture thatdoes the writing. T he the atre was located not in some kind ofUto pian p lace, bu t in a historic place, a place with a history. T he rewas grease, and there were acid marks, because it was a chemicalfactory; you could still see traces of work; there were still work-clothes aro un d; the re wer e still lunch-pails in th e corner, etc. Inother words, all these left-over traces of work had their ownlanguage. Th ese room s that ha d known the labor of hum an beingsday after day had their own language, and you either used thatlanguage or you didn't say anything. . . . That's why I wrote in anarticle "a play authored by a factory."22

Gatti has realized that a Hugo's "silent character" may be silent in regard tospoken language, but that av ast num ber of other comm unications are providedby physical surroundings.Most of the scripts for performances in historic spaces, with actors andwithout, have been created specifically for such performances, woven out ofinteresting mate rial from local history. Occasionally thoug h, as with the SwissTell play, perfo rm ance s of already existing literary work s have been offered inthe actual or pres um ed sites of their action. In 1934 Re inha rdt p resented TheMerchant of Venice in a Venetian square, the Campo San Trovaso, whichcontained a small bridge und er which real gondolas passed and a p icturesquehouse which, according to R einh ard t 's research, had actually bee n the dwellingof a Venetian me rcha nt in the sixteenth century. Th ree years later the D anishTourist Board began sponsoring summer productions of Hamlet at ElsinoreCastle featuring such leading English theatre artists as Olivier, Guthrie, andGielgud. Fo r a num be r of years beginning in 1962 77ie Miracle Worker, basedon the life of Helen Keller, was produced on the lawn in front of herbirthplace. V erdi 's^lida has bee n performed in Luxor and his Nabucco beforethe ruins of Babylon. Th e best-known production of the Verm ont En sem bleTheatre, an "environmental theatre" company organized in 1984, was theirproduction of Wilder's Our Town with different acts presented in differentlocations around the village green of W ilderesque Middlebury, V erm ont, andwith staged ou tdoo r vign ettes of village life presen ted to the spec tators as theystrolled by lantern-light from one location to another.23 Some communities,instead of formal d ram atic presen tations , offer m ore ela bo rate versions of theMiddlebury vignettes, converting historic locations into a kind of living stagesetting, where tourists may wander through period rooms or among periodbuildings observing inhabitants dressed in historical costume performingactivities of a bygone era.


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16 Jou rnal of Dram atic Theory and CriticismSince theatres also are structures with an historical dimension, they toohave been used as icons of their historic selves. The best known example of

this is Drottningholm theatre in Sweden, a perfectly preserved eighteenthcentury court theatre which offers to summer tourists performances ofeighteenth century opera staged according to the practices of that period, witheven the orchestra members and the ushers wigged and costumed to give thevisitor the sensation of having stepped into an eighteenth century performancesituation.At Drottningholm, as in the case of every other example of specific iconicidentity so far cited, the setting has been selected for its own specificinvolvement, real or imagined, in some historic event or period with which thespectator is to be brought into closer imaginative contact. In semiotic terms,the power of this sort of icon arises from the fact that it is also an index,pointing to the absent and distanced historic reality which interests thespectator. Obviously this is often the case with specific iconic settings, but itis not necessarily so . In situations where the theatre itself has been used as asetting with specific iconic identity, as it has in almost every historical period,it has normally not served also as an index of an earlier historical period, buthas represented itself in the present moment. Among the examples of suchworks we might cite Beaumont and Fletcher's Knight of the Burning Pestle,Rotrou's Saint Gent, Molire's Impromptu de Versailles, Buckingham's TheRehearsal, Sheridan's The Critic, and Pirandello's Six Characters in Search ofan Author or Tonight We Improvise. Since in such works the stage representsitself, not infrequently the characters appearing there also representthemselves, as we have already noted in the case of the Impromptu and of themodern Brustein production of Six Characters.Although non-theatrical settings using specific iconic identity have oftenbeen historically oriented, they may also, like these theatrical examples, simplyrepresent themselves as they presently exist. The already-mentioned Jeu de lafeuille stands as an isolated example from the late middle ages of a playwhose setting is in fact the real area in which it was staged, the marketplaceof the town of Arras. Renaissance court masques and similar entertainmentsoften featured the mingling of performers and observers in a common space.In our own times, perhaps the most striking examples of specific iconic identitywithout the distancing effect of historical reference is in the work ofperformance artists who may be said to have led their audiences through thewarehouse door described by Wilshire into the real world beyond. The DramaReview, with its strong interest in non-traditional performance, has providedthe best documentation of this development, with articles on such performanceartists as Jamie Leo, who has utilized his own apartment for staged events,Danny Mydlack, who organizes shows in homes in Boston, and Anne Bogart,who guides her audiences on "performance journeys" through the streets ofNew York.24


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Spring 1989 17Most of these events have a social or political dimension, but their majoreffect is to "theatricalize" locations in the real world, and their success

demonstrates that the d istancing essential to the theatrical experience can beattained even without any of the traditional devices. All that is necessary isthat the audience decide, as a matter of choice, to view the world about them"theatrically," a choice traditionally encouraged by such devices as framing orostending. Aesthetician R oger Scruton, drawing upon Wittgenstein's usefuldistinction between "seeing" and "seeing as," states that in ordinary perceptionour belief in what we are "seeing" is involuntary, but in imaginative states wewill ourselves to "see as," without the necessity of belief,25 a modernreformulation of that imaginative process which was a central concern of theromantics, and which Coleridge most famously articulated as the "willingsuspension of disbelief."

As theatre, in its continuing colonization of reality, has moved outside itstraditional spaces and renounced the conventional "frames" of elevated stageor encompassing proscenium , the importance of "seeing as" has be comeespecially clear, as has the c lose relationship betw een this process and the roleof the icon in the theatrical experience. Th e conversion of real space intoiconic space, a conversion essential for it to be utilized in theatre, dependsprecisely upon a person, or more commonly, a group of people choosing notmerely to "see" it, but to "see it as," in Wittgenstein's term s. This is whatoccurs when, as Bullough observes, "by a sudden change of inward perspective,we are overcom e by the feeling that 'all the world's a stage.'"26 Although thepractice of traditional theatre would lead us to expect, as even the moreexperimental examples in this discussion have illustrated, that the process oficonization is suggested and stimulated in the public by external "creators" ofthe event, it is clear that the audience itself could create such an experience.Such an activity was in fact suggested in the writings of the early Evreinov,who, a decade before he became involved with such specific iconizations ofhistorical space as The Taking of the W inter Palace encouraged his readers tocreate theatre out of everyday life by viewing reality in this way.27 WhenEvreinov called for a theatricalization of the world, he could as well be said tobe calling for the iconization of it.New York City


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18 Journal of Dram atic Theory and CriticismNotes

1. C.S. Peirce, Collected Papers (Cambridge, Mass., 1931-58), vol. 2 pa r. 247.2. Peter Handke, Kaspar and Other Plays, trans. Michael Roloff (New York, 1969) 10.3. Bert O. States, "The World on Stage," in Great Reckonings in L ittle Room s: On thePhenomonology of Theatre (Berkeley, 1985) 1947.4. Keir Elam, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama (London, 1980) 22-23.5. Edward Bullough, "'Psychical Distance' as a Factor in Art and an Aesthetic Principle,"British Journal of Psychology 5 (June, 1912) 97.6.94.7. Christian Metz, "The Imaginary Signifier," trans. Ben Brewster, Screen 16 (Summer,1975) 21.8. Andr Bazin, "Theatre and Cinema," in What is C inema?, vol. 1, trans. Hugh Gray(Berkeley: U of California P, 1967) 140.9. Bullough, "Psychical Distance" 96.10. Norris Houghton, Moscow Rehearsals (New York, 1936) 23.11. Brooks McNamara, Jerry Rojo, Richard Schechner, Theatres, Spaces, Environments(New York, 1975) 2.12. Michael Patterson, Peter Stein (Cambridge, 1981) 139.13. Gisela Sichardt, Das Weimarer Liebhabertheater unter Goethes Leitung (Weimar, 1957)62-64.14. Era, 6 June, 1885.15. New York Times, 16 January, 1924, 17.16. Bruce Wilshire, Role Playing and Identity (Bloomington, 1982) x.17. Victor Hugo, Oeuvres compltes, 18 v. (Paris, 1967) 3:63.18. Robert Darnton, 77a> Great Cat Massacre (New York, 1985).19. R.T.R. Clark, Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt (London, 1959) 65.20. E.D. Hunt, Holy Land Pilgrimage in the Later Roman Empire, A.D. 312-460 (Oxford,1982) 112-16, 123.21. Nikolai Evreinov, Histoire du thtre russe, trans . G . Welter (Paris, 1947) 146-47.22. Armand Gatti, "Armand Gatti on Time, Place, and the Theatrical Event," trans. NancyOakes, Modern Drama, 25:1 (March, 1982) 7-72.23. Leslie Bennetts, "Staging 'La Strada' in a Vermont Field Requires Invention," New

York Times, July 21, 1987, C13:l. For m ore information on the history and practices ofAmerican outdoor historical drama see George MacCalmon and Christian Moe, CreatingHistorical Drama.24. Jessica Abbe, "Anne Bogart's Journeys," TDR 24:2 (1980) 85-100; Mariella Sandford,"Danny Mydlack: Suburban Cultural Worker," TDR 31:4 (1987) 91-108; Trudy Scott, "TheAudience of One: Jamie Leo," TDR 23:1 (1979) 49-54.25. Roger Scruton, Art and Imagination: A Study in the Philosophy of Mind. (London:Methuen, 1974) 170.26. Bullough 92.27. See the essays collected in Nikolai Evreinov, The Theatre in Life, trans. AlexanderNazaroff (New York, 1927).

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