Theatre Journal

Clark Lunberry’s new book, his first, begins by identifying a problem of the modern era: “we live in a world, we live in bodies, where there is both too little time and too much time” (xi). This study of the complex relationship between subjects and time in performance follows previous scholarship, such as Marvin Carlson’s The Haunted Stage, Alice Rayner’s Ghosts, and Rebecca Schneider’s Performing Remains, expanding on their work by casting theatre and performances as spaces that foster a perceptual self-awareness. To this end Lunberry discusses works of performance spanning a variety of genres: classical dramatists Euripides and Shakespeare; modern playwright Samuel Beckett; installation artists Ann Hamilton and James Turrell; and experimental composers John Cage and Morton Feldman.

Framing the entirety of Lunberry’s monograph is the image of Cage’s encounter with the anechoic chamber, an “acoustically purified space . . . reconceived as a site of non-silence, a self-reflexive site in which the body within is thus positioned to hear itself hearing, think itself thinking” (xiii). Continually returning to this seminal image, which led Cage to his conclusion that “there is no such thing as silence” (ibid.), Lunberry argues that performance spaces stage time’s passing and produce a temporal self-awareness. Although he echoes existing scholarship in his assertion that there no such thing as an atemporal theatre, Lunberry enriches this observation by self-reflexively analyzing his personal experiences to suggest that spectatorship, and criticism, is always a temporal encounter.

Beginning in section 1 with more traditional theatrical spaces, Lunberry dedicates chapters 1 and 2 to Beckett—first by arguing that objects onstage (specifically Estragon’s boots in Waiting for Godot and Marcel’s boots in Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past) mark time’s entropic passing. More germane to Lunberry’s interest in the spectator’s experience of temporality, his second chapter turns to Beckett’s scripting of silence in Endgame and Breath; he suggests that as Beckett whittles away the stage’s extraneous parts, all that is left is the rhythmic breathing of a self-aware audience—the sound and sense of one’s own breath marking the passing of time and its inevitable end. In chapters 3 and 4 Lunberry places Coriolanus alongside Deborah Warner’s contemporary adaptation of Medea, arguing that both expose the theatre’s inner workings. In a particularly compelling section he figures the labor of Medea’s [End Page 145] stagehands cleaning up leftover blood at the end of the production as an unintentional denouement to the tragedy. By bringing to light constitutive though often hidden backstage elements, Lunberry argues that these productions make spectators aware of performance’s construction and manipulation of “a theatrical time that was, like the stage itself, separate from our time, the real time of us in the audience” (60; emphasis in original).

Shifting the focus away from the conventional proscenium arch theatre, Lunberry’s second section theorizes performance’s temporality in nontraditional performance spaces. Here the argument develops with more consistency, narrowing the focus to the temporal experience of spectators, readers, and critics. Beginning by discussing Antonin Artaud’s letters to Jacques Rivière, Lunberry expands on Jacques Derrida’s work on Artaud to suggest that these letters can be understood as performative spaces, and the act of writing as a performance of trauma. Moving on to his own acts of writing and rewriting, in chapter 6 Lunberry revisits his marked-up copy of Derrida’s “The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation,” reading his highlighting, marginalia, and other marks on the page as artistic works themselves, even reconstituting them visually in the pages of his book as aesthetic works. Lunberry’s most successful contributions are in these moments of self-reflexivity: his own reading and rereading become acts of communion with the past, “a means to read in real-time—‘live’—something of my own dispersal as a reader across past-time” (87; emphasis in original).

Lunberry...