Views and Reviews

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: "If the theatre were a verb," Anne Bogart writes in A Director Prepares, "it would be 'to remember'" (22). The bountiful body of scholarship on theatre and memory that has accumulated over the past three decades alone seems to substantiate Bogart's claim, and the views and reviews featured here contribute to this corpus by raising provocative questions about this poetic coupling. But what is an act of remembrance and how does the theatre remember? To remember is to recapture the past in a unique form of possession: it is to bring back before oneself a past event but simultaneously to negate it, to acknowledge that the past is not, in fact, now, nor as it was. We could say that remembering is as much about forgetting: a past event is reclaimed as another is displaced and recedes again into the oblivion of time (which gives another sense to Michel de Certeau's assertion that "memory is a sort of anti-museum" (108)). Remembrance, then, occupies a metaphorical space of analogy and of seeming. If theatre is remembering, as Bogart says, it is because they share the same task: to overcome the inevitable failure to restore the past. If theatre remembers, it does so as a palliative praxis, "exorcising the vertigo time" by "conquering it through repetition" (Ubersfeld 136). If theatre and remembering share the same task, they also share the same structure. As Peggy Phelan writes, "performance plunges into visibility—in a maniacally charged present—and disappears into memory, into the realm of invisibility" leaving "no visible trace" (148-49). The upcoming production of Vancouver's The Only Animal titled Sea of Sand, a site-specific show at Jericho Beach, makes elegiac use of these performative disappearing acts with set pieces made of sand that are swept away by the tide. "The beach," Kendra Fanconi writes in her lyrical treatise "Place Remembers" featured in these pages, "is an amnesiac [...] What we construct is washed away. Within a day, no trace remains." A story about an amnesiac who encounters the washed-up remains of his past life, Sea of Sand dramatizes this ebb and flow of forgetting and remembering. But the piece also invites us to think about the particular ontology of site-specific performance that complicates what we understand as the ephemerality and "tracelessness" of performance. Fanconi reminds us of how place serves as both a context and container of remembrance. "This is our version of public artwork," Fanconi writes, "the memory trace we have left on the landscape" (99). These traces, like the remains washed up on the beach in Sea of Sand or the wheels of recordings in Krapp's Last Tape, save us from becoming complete amnesiacs and forgetting altogether. In an interview with Michael Hays, director Jennifer Tarver shares her insights on Beckett's play after critically acclaimed runs at Stratford in 2008 and Chicago's Goodman Theatre in 2010. Tarver considers the metaphor of Krapp's reel-to-reel player as not merely concrete proof of the past's existence. The tape plays only to be looped in on itself, winding back tightly on a spool—a movement that not only captures a quintessentially Beckettian gesture of moving "forward only to go back" (94), but also the movement of remembrance that allows the past to be reinserted in the present, only to recede once again. For Anne Ubersfeld, performance provides a means of overcoming the forgetting of memory and retrieving what has been forgotten. But if it can retrieve the past, it can also re-inflict its pain. In her examination of the domestic memory play The Walworth Farce in which family members terrorize themselves through a repeated re-enactment of the family's sordid history, Kim Solga examines the "fickle," and potentially damaging, "performatics of memory" (89). Not unlike the movement of Krapp's reel-to-reel, the memory play in The Walworth Farce "fold[s] in on itself " though here, the recounting is "an act of terror" that "consum[es] its witnesses" (90). Solga's review raises important questions about the ways in which theatre can be traumatogenic. That "performance might augment and reproduce, rather than rehearse in order to assuage the...