In Defense of the String Quartet: An Open Letter to Richard Schechner

Abstract

First of all, may I say what a genuine honor and a privilege it is to have been asked to contribute to this volume – initially commissioned to celebrate your 75th birthday (Happy Birthday!) – and thus to this latest reconsideration of the performance studies paradigm that you were so instrumental in establishing. I must admit, though, to a degree of apprehension about the editors’ invitation, since I’ve little doubt that it has come about largely because of an essay I wrote a few years back, which was widely interpreted as an attack on you. Actually my concerns in that piece, “The Efficacy/Effeminacy Braid,”¹ were somewhat broader and less personal than many assumed, but as I have discovered, we all love a good intradisciplinary spat. Since the editors of this volume – and perhaps you yourself – would probably be disappointed if I didn’t continue to play the role of minor irritant, I will try to oblige. But if, in what follows, my tone seems a little combative, please understand that this is intended not as hostility, but as homage: this letter is intended in a spirit of playful, polemical provocation similar to that which you yourself have frequently employed. Again, moreover, my real target is somewhat broader than may initially be apparent. My argument, in a nutshell, is that the so-called “broad spectrum approach” to performance studies downplays to a counter-productive, and even destructive, degree the text-based drama paradigm on which academic theatre studies was founded. If that sounds a little retrograde of me, I hope to persuade you otherwise by the end of this letter.