Remaking American Theater

An account of contemporary theater practice in its most collaborative and dynamic form, this is the first book-length study of two of the most important American theater artists at the start of the twenty-first century. For twenty-five years, Mee and Bogart have pursued independent but sympathetic visions of theater rooted in the avant-garde of the 1960s, guided by a view of art and culture as a perpetual process of “remaking.” Since 1992, the SITI Company has pioneered the unique combination of three training practices (Viewpoints, Suzuki, and Composition) as the basis for collective creations that layer language, gesture, and image in a complex and often stunning fashion. This study provides both a general introduction to Mee's unorthodox playwriting, Bogart's innovative directing, the ensemble work of the SITI Company, and an in-depth case study of their work together on bobrauschenbergamerica, a piece inspired by the art of Robert Rauschenberg.

SCOTT T. CUMMINGS teaches courses in dramatic literature and playwriting and directs plays in the Theater Department of Boston College. His productions there include Charles L. Mee's A Summer Evening in Des Moines, Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors and Beckett's Endgame. As a theater critic and arts journalist he has written for American Theatre, the Boston Globe and the Boston Phoenix. His scholarly essays and reviews have appeared in Theatre Journal, Modern Drama and Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, among others.

CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN AMERICAN THEATRE AND DRAMA

General Editor

Don B. Wilmeth, Brown University

Advisory Board

C. W. E. Bigsby, University of East Anglia
C. Lee Jenner, Independent critic and dramaturge
Bruce A. McConachie, University of Pittsburgh
Brenda Murphy, University of Connecticut
Laurence Senelick, Tufts University

The American theatre and its literature are attracting, after long neglect, the crucial attention of historians, theoreticians, and critics of the arts. Long a field for isolated research yet too frequently marginalized in the academy, the American theatre has always been a sensitive gauge of social pressures and public issues. Investigations into its myriad of shapes and manifestations are relevant to students of drama, theatre, literature, cultural experience, and political development.

The primary intent of this series is to set up a forum of important and original scholarship in and criticism of American theatre and drama in a cultural and social context. Inclusive by design, the series accommodates leading work in areas ranging from the study of drama as literature to theatre histories, theoretical explorations, production histories, and readings of more popular or para-theatrical forms. While maintaining a specific emphasis on theatre in the United States, the series welcomes work grounded broadly in cultural studies and narratives with interdisciplinary reach. Cambridge Studies in American Theatre and Drama thus provides a crossroads where historical, theoretical, literary, and biographical approaches meet and combine, promoting imaginative research in theatre and drama from a variety of new perspectives.

Books in the Series

I. Samuel Hay, African American Theatre

2. Marc Robinson, The Other American Drama

3. Amy Green, The Revisionist Stage: American Directors Re-Invent the Classics

4. Jared Brown, The Theatre in America during the Revolution

5. Susan Harris Smith, American Drama: The Bastard Art

6. Mark Fearnow, The American Stage and the Great Depression

7. Rosemarie K. Bank, Theatre Culture in America, 1825–1860.

8. Dale Cockrell, Demons of Disorder: Early Blackface Minstrels and Their World

9. Stephen J. Bottoms, The Theatre of Sam Shepard

10. Michael A. Morrison, John Barrymore: Shakespearean Actor

11. Brenda Murphy, Congressional Theatre: Dramatizing McCarthyism on Stage, Film, and Television

12. Jorge Huerta, Chicano Drama: Performance, Society and Myth

13. Roger A. Hall, Performing the American Frontier, 1870–1906

14. Brooks McNamara, The New York Concert Saloon: The Devil's Own Nights

15. S. E. Wilmer, Theatre, Society and the Nation: Staging American Identities

16. John H. Houchin, Censorship of the American Theatre in the Twentieth Century

17. John W. Frick, Theatre, Culture and Temperance Reform in Nineteenth-Century America

18. Errol G. Hill, James V. Hatch, A History of African American Theatre

19. Heather S. Nathans, Early American Theatre from the Revolution to Thomas Jefferson

20. Barry B. Witham, The Federal Theatre Project

21. Julia A. Walker, Expressionism and Modernism in the American Theatre: Bodies, Voices, Words

22. Jeffrey H. Richards, Drama, Theatre, and Identity in the American New Republic

23. Brenda Murphy, The Provincetown Players and the Culture of Modernity

24. Katie N. Johnson, Sisters in Sin: Brothel Drama in America, 1900–1920

25. Scott T. Cummings, Remaking American Theater: Charles Mee, Anne Bogart and the SITI Company

Remaking American Theater
Charles Mee, Anne Bogart and the
SITI Company

SCOTT T. CUMMINGS

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK
Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York

www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521818209

© Scott T. Cummings 2006

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without
the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2006

Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress cataloging in publication data
Cummings, Scott T., 1953–
Remaking American theater: Charles Mee, Anne Bogart and the SITI Company / Scott
T. Cummings.
p. cm. – (Cambridge Studies in American Theatre and Drama)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0 521 81820 6 (hardback)
1. SITI Company. 2. Theater – New York (State) – New York – History – 20th century.
3. Mee, Charles, 1938 – 4. Bogart, Anne, 1951– I. Title. II. Series.
PN2277. N5C86 2006
792.09747′109045–dc22
2005032570

ISBN-13 978-0-521-81820-9 hardback
ISBN-10 0-521-81820-6 hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

for Janet
with abiding love

She would not say of any one in the world now that they were this or were that. She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged. She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on. She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day. Not that she thought herself clever, or much out of the ordinary.

Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (1925)

Carlo watched this silly madness with slitted eyes. Finally he slapped his knee and said, “I have an announcement to make.”

 Yes? Yes?”

 What is the meaning of this voyage to New York? What kind of sordid business are you on now? I mean, man, whither goest thou? Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?”

 Whither goest thou?” echoed Dean with his mouth open. We sat and didn't know what to say; there was nothing to talk about any more. The only thing to do was go.

Jack Kerouac, On the Road (1957)

 My art is just about paying attention – about the extremely dangerous possibility that you might be art.

Robert Rauschenberg (Interview by Barbara Rose, 1987)

Contents