14 - Performance Theater in the Age of Post-Drama

Summary

Interaction between European and American performance theater after 1968 has increasingly provoked the very institutions and languages of established theater practice on both sides of the Atlantic. In earlier periods of the twentieth century such interaction was defined above all by the arrival of one or another renowned playwright whose work or style would, in turn, open up new possibilities for theatrical modernism within what was still understood primarily as a dramatic form of expression. The New York productions of Bertolt Brecht's The Mother in 1935 and The Three Penny Opera in 1954 challenged political avant-garde theater in the United States, just as Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot in the 1950s stunned and fascinated an American theater ensconced in the realism of a Tennessee Williams or the theatrical style of Stanislavski-dominated method acting.

The emergence in the 1970s of what has variously been called performance or postmodern theater, both in the United States and Europe, has destabilized the historically generic boundaries of traditional drama just as it has threatened the very notion of representation itself. One particularly interesting example of such theater is the work of American director Robert Wilson, East German dramatist Heiner Muller, and West German choreographer Pina Bausch, all of whom performed or were produced in both the United States and Germany, in both mutual cooperation and as separate productions.