Reviewed by:

• The Lines Between The Lines: How Stage Directions Affect Embodiment by Bess Rowen
• Tyler Graham

Samuel Beckett’s 35-second Breath makes it easy to see how stage directions can be seen as constraints on directorial creativity. The playlet is composed of three (numbered) meticulously prescriptive stage directions, and detailed notes on every aspect of staging the short piece. What place is there for a director when the playwright appears to have made all of the creative decisions? Perhaps the most obvious and combative response was from renowned acting teacher Uta Hagen, who advised actors to “[c]ross out these descriptions, and let your own sense of character guide you” (6).

Bess Rowen’s book invites a different reading of stage directions. Revisiting Breath with the embodied reading demonstrated in Rowen’s book, one notices that Beckett’s text does not forbid directorial creativity explicitly but rather invites a different kind of engagement from the director. Rowen positions her work firmly against Hagen’s advice as she reframes stage directions as opportunities “to interrogate our embodied assumptions” about a particular text (3). Through her personal readings of notable stage directions from the contemporary and historical Western canon, Rowen reconfigures the theatre artist’s relationship to the playwright, developing a method that invites them to “think alongside [the playwright] instead of in isolation” (9). She presents subjective embodied reading as the foundation for a new kind of creative agency for directors, actors, and designers.

Shifting the emphasis from the effect of stage directions on the realized performance, Rowen’s book analyzes the efficacy of these paratheatrical texts before the embodied work of theatrical creation begins. Rather than acquiescing to the playwright’s intention, Rowen’s method highlights “the particular, individual cultural responses that spring from the playwright’s words into the bodies of readers” (9). She interprets the final theatrical production as the result of a dialogue between body and text, an observation that may resonate with MFA directing and acting students (20). The creative potential of stage directions, particularly affective stage directions, is most fully realized when actors, directors, and designers tend to the “pseudosensation[s]” produced in their own bodies through the act of reading (20). Rowen observes that while affective stage directions can be realized differently across different productions of the same play, it is still possible to tell when they have been ignored altogether by a production team. In such productions, essential information about mood, tone, and genre appears to be missing (71, 157, 188).

From its opening theoretical framing, subsequent chapters progress from a treatment of what Rowen describes as the most “straightforward” examples of stage directions to those she deems “most abstract, and therefore most open to interpretation”: spoken, affective, choreographic, multivalent, and impossible stage directions (22). The categorization suggests a useful taxonomy, even if it also risks creating a hierarchy in which spoken stage directions appear less critically significant than “impossible” stage directions. One might wonder why Elegba’s evocative spoken stage direction from McCraney’s In the Red and Brown Water (2008)—“Legba sneaks off like the moon behind a cloud / Gone but still there”—is implicitly categorized by Rowen as “straightforward” and limited in its range of staging possibilities, for example (61, 22).

To a certain extent, Rowen’s engagement with Sara Ahmed demystifies the “straight” orientation of conventional stage directions, as Ahmed etymologically relates “direct” with “being straight” (82). Rowen devotes the second chapter to a queer alternative, the affective stage direction, which “deviate[s] from norms and interrupt[s] the straight line to cultural reiteration and reification of behavior” (83). Because affective stage directions act upon and demand a response from our historically situated bodies, they offer new opportunities to queer canonized theatrical texts. Rowen does not explicitly return to this observation, but the queer orientation of affective stage directions resonates through each of the subsequent chapters.

While Rowen asserts that embodied readings are important for all members of a production team, the chapter on multivalent stage directions specifically demonstrates the method’s applicability in sound and...

审阅者：

• 线与线之间的线：舞台方向如何影响体现贝丝·罗文（Bess Rowen）
• 泰勒·格雷厄姆

塞缪尔·贝克特的 35 秒呼吸让我们很容易看出舞台指导如何被视为对导演创造力的限制。该小剧由三个（编号）精心规定的舞台指示以及关于演出短剧各个方面的详细注释组成。当剧作家似乎做出了所有创造性决定时，导演还有什么地位呢？也许最明显和最具攻击性的回应来自著名表演老师乌塔·哈根，他建议演员“删除这些描述，让你自己的角色感引导你”(6)。

贝丝·罗文的书邀请人们对舞台指导进行不同的解读。通过罗文书中展示的具体阅读来重温《呼吸》 ，人们会注意到贝克特的文本并没有明确禁止导演创造力，而是邀请导演进行一种不同类型的参与。罗恩将她的工作定位为坚决反对哈根的建议，因为她将舞台指示重新定义为“质疑我们对特定文本的具体假设”的机会（3）。通过她对当代和历史西方经典中著名舞台指导的个人解读，罗恩重新配置了戏剧艺术家与剧作家的关系，开发了一种邀请他们“与[剧作家]一起思考而不是孤立思考”的方法(9)。她将主观具身阅读作为导演、演员和设计师新型创意机构的基础。

罗文的书将重点从舞台指导对已实现的表演的影响转移，在戏剧创作的具体工作开始之前分析了这些副戏剧文本的功效。罗文的方法并没有默认剧作家的意图，而是强调“从剧作家的话语中涌入读者身体的特定的、个人的文化反应”(9)。她将最终的戏剧作品解释为身体和文本之间对话的结果，这一观察可能会引起 MFA 导演和表演学生的共鸣 (20)。当演员、导演和设计师倾向于通过阅读行为在自己的身体中产生“伪感觉”时，舞台指导，特别是情感舞台指导的创造性潜力得到了最充分的实现（20）。罗文观察到，虽然同一戏剧的不同制作中情感舞台指导的实现方式可能有所不同，但仍然可以判断出制作团队何时完全忽略了情感舞台指导。在此类作品中，有关情绪、语气和流派的基本信息似乎缺失 (71, 157, 188)。

从其开头的理论框架开始，后续章节从罗文描述的最“直接”的舞台指导示例的处理发展到她认为“最抽象，因此最容易解释”的示例：口语、情感、舞蹈、多价、和不可能的舞台指示（22）。这种分类提出了一种有用的分类法，即使它也有创建一个层次结构的风险，在这种层次结构中，口头舞台指示显得不如“不可能”的舞台指示那么重要。人们可能会想知道，为什么麦克雷尼的《红与棕水中》（In the Red and Brown Water，2008）中 Elegba 的令人回味的口语舞台指导——“Legba 像月亮躲在云后面偷偷溜走/消失了，但仍然在那里”——被 Rowen 含蓄地归类为“直截了当”，并且在表达上受到限制。其分级可能性的范围，例如 (61, 22)。

在某种程度上，罗文与萨拉·艾哈迈德的合作揭开了传统舞台方向的“直”方向的神秘面纱，因为艾哈迈德在词源学上将“直接”与“直”联系起来（82）。罗恩在第二章中专门讨论了一种酷儿替代方案，即情感舞台方向，它“偏离规范并中断文化重申和行为具体化的直线”（83）。因为情感舞台指导会作用于我们历史上的身体并要求我们做出反应，所以它们为酷儿经典戏剧文本提供了新的机会。罗恩没有明确地回到这一观察，但情感阶段方向的酷儿取向在随后的每一章中都引起了共鸣。

虽然罗文断言，具体解读对于制作团队的所有成员都很重要，但关于多价舞台方向的章节具体证明了该方法在声音和……方面的适用性。