Theatre Journal

At the end of her sometimes frustrating yet finally marvelous Ghosts, Alice Rayner returns to the scene of her own haunting. She opens her afterword with a brief anecdote about a young colleague who recently remarked that "she was awfully tired of all the talk about loss and death and trauma." "And, indeed," responds Rayner, "it seems these concerns may have run the critical course in academia, especially in the fading light of Derrida and Lacan and poststructural fever" (183). So what, writes the author [End Page 698] to herself, am I doing in this book? Is this discourse about the ghosts that haunt the materiality of the stage, the traumatic effects theatre generates, and the encounter with trauma it produces merely nostalgic? Is it a warding-off of its own loss? Or is it something more?

I appreciated this anecdote, voicing as it did the ghostly question that trails this book that is full of spooks, because I had wondered a few times in its pages whether I was truly reading something new, or whether in fact I was reading the same chapter over and over again. And yet, faced with Rayner facing her own death's double in the form of the spectral question, I found myself shaking my head. In hindsight, I don't think Rayner needs to worry. As she traces theatre's engagement with and complication of human perception, "not so much to give us truth as to enable us to encounter the otherwise unseen, unacknowledged, and denied reality of what is not otherwise apparent" (184–85), her book marks for me a kind of culmination—or perhaps I might more accurately say a joining together—of two recent performance theory preoccupations. The first is the attempt, made iconic by Peggy Phelan in Unmarked, to understand theatre's ontology in terms of the missed, the absent, the disappeared—that which "hides in plain sight" as Rayner often puts it. For Rayner, theatre's specificity lies not in its passing into disappearance, as Phelan famously theorized in Unmarked, but rather in the way it is haunted by disappearance, by what Rayner calls the "ghosts" that raise questions about what we do and do not see when we watch performance—the ghosts that plague our attempts at belief, the ghosts that operate those characteristics germane to all theatre: "repetition, the double, matter, and memory" (xxviii–xxix). The second appears in scholarship that centers on performance's power as a memorial device, its status as a witness to the traumas of history, and its potential as a model or even a vehicle for a better, more inclusive future. Phelan's work in Mourning Sex stands out for me here, but so does David Román's recent Performance in America and Jill Dolan's Utopia in Performance. Rayner might fear that she is writing into an abyss at the tail end of a long and exhausted intellectual tradition, but my sense is that she is, rather, building a bridge between performance as the stuff of loss and doubt and performance's positive, public powers of mourning.

My favorite thing about Ghosts is the ease with which the author assimilates a variety of theoretical and practical discourses. This is a book of phenomenology, philosophy, and psychoanalysis, but it is also a book about the stuff of the theatre and about what things like curtains (chapter 5, "Double or Nothing: Ghosts Behind the Curtains"), curtain times (chapter 1, "Tonight at 8:00: The Missed Encounter"), props and prop tables (chapter 3, "Objects: Lost and Found"), and lighting technology (chapter 6, "Ghosts Onscreen: The Drama of Misrecognition") might have to do with phenomenology, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. All of Rayner's analyses are governed by the trope of ghosting, the notion that the simplest, most seemingly transparent relations produced at the theatre mask an unseen other. The encounter with this other defines theatre as such for Rayner and allows it to act...