Theatre Topics

Having coedited two prior anthologies on Augusto Boal, Mady Schutzman uses her newest book, Radical Doubt, to delve into a less celebrated but essential foundation of Boal's work: The Joker System. The joker system is a dramaturgical method that activates audiences to consider their role as change agents. In both form and substance, the book represents the theoretical foundations of Boal's Joker-actor methods that underpin his Theatre of the Oppressed.

The book's structure resists stale academic conventions. Schutzman's creative style exemplifies joker system principles—she regularly switches roles from scholar to autobiographer and entertainer. Challenging consistency of form, her book includes an eclectic mix of light jokes, personal anecdotes, and academic and theoretical musings. The discrete chapters vary in genre from autobiographical storytelling and encyclopedic essays to playwriting and theoretical discourse. Across these chapters, Schutzman embodies the role of a joker protagonist by providing introductions and clarifications to integrate what might be described as a "healthy disorder" of independent genres (9).

Throughout the book, Schutzman relies upon the power of example rather than direct instruction to illustrate how humor in theatre can be applied to reveal and disrupt inequities while promoting social justice and healing. A central thesis of the book is the value of humor as a form of radical pedagogy to resist "dualistic thinking and impermeable borders," but without the polarization that often occurs in more conventional forms of opposition (10). Each chapter challenges the reader to consider how to apply the joker system to envision new strategies of "nonoppositional resistance" that can complement Theatre of the Oppressed and related methods (12).

The book is divided in two main parts. Part 1 takes readers on a journey through the dramaturgic application of Boal's techniques in community theatre. In the first chapter, Schutzman critiques her experiment using collective pedagogy techniques with Latino youth when developing an original joker system play. This chapter illustrates how critical empathy and ambiguity embedded in joker system plays can put a human face on violence, racism, and oppression while concurrently emboldening social change. In the second chapter, Schutzman reproduces a forty-five-page copy of the play to encourage readers to engage in their own process of "radical doubt" by critically applying these principles to their individual and collective performances.

Part 2, "The Joker System off the Stage," focuses on performances that occur in less formal domains—where the application of humor, paradox, and ambiguity can help reveal and resist private and public injustices. As a social work scholar, I rarely find myself reading books on applied theatre studies. This second part of the book, however, inspired deep reflection on how the performance of jokester principles can transcend siloed areas of practice, each working to catalyze personal or communal changes.

In chapter 3, "Being Approximate," Schutzman juxtaposes the qualities of trickster characters with Ganser syndrome patients who use distorted logic and misdirection to resist harmful psychological diagnoses. Doing so, she revitalizes Boal's notion of resonance, which refers to the reflected images, feelings, and thoughts that emerge in one's body and mind after witnessing a performance. As a response to resonance, this chapter stresses the value of rehearsing and practicing resistance in one's imagination, arguing for "[b]ecoming a reader of one's own cultural 'character' and revealing, perhaps reveling in, the creative space between face and mask" (91). At the level of personal performance, Schutzman suggests that such rehearsed experimentations, or approximations, can be applied to resist power-laden categorizations of all stripes (sexual, racial, ethnic, pathological, or otherwise).

The comparatively dense chapter 4 is an academic discussion on the value of the joker system for radical community building by experimenting with comedy, play, shared jokes, and laughter. It draws parallels between the logic of rituals and jokes to disrupt and reinvent community traditions and identities.

Chapter 5, "Encyclopedia of Radical Doubt," is a miniature and meandering anthology of thirty-three interdisciplinary narratives that tacitly manifest creative patterns of the joker system. As the...