In the world of contemporary experimental theatre, received opinion tells us that the play has never been “the thing.” Fixed, staid, and hopelessly conservative, the play, we have been told, only needs to be liberated from the stuffy strictures of the page and dominated by performance's messy fleshy radicality, if indeed a play is needed at all. In Writing and the Modern Stage: Theater beyond Drama, Julia Jarcho makes a powerful case for precisely the opposite: that the play is indeed “the thing” because it is the play that has the capacity to overturn, trouble, and subvert the theatre's cherished actuality, the fact that it takes place in the world, here and now. Jarcho, a New York–based, Obie Award–winning playwright and academic, has written an exhilarating and tenaciously argued book that systematically challenges this assumption and other disciplinary blind spots. In a decidedly unfashionable turn, Jarcho takes up Adorno's concept of the “‘primacy of the text’” (14) and privileges the play as a preexisting textual artifact over the live performance event. Putting the text at the center of her thinking, Jarcho makes a persuasive claim for theatre's potential as a disruptive force because of its capacity to launch an assault on the “horror” (15) of the present in which performance operates.

Jarcho enlists a range of writers and artists spanning the early twentieth to the early twenty-first centuries—Henry James, Gertrude Stein, Samuel Beckett, Elevator Repair Service, Suzan-Lori Parks, Mac Wellman—whose work she sees as espousing a theatricality that moves beyond the conventions of drama by attacking theatre's claim on presence and the complementary demands for narrative flow and communication (both intrascenic and between the spectators and the stage). Jarcho has an eye for works that circumvent what she vividly describes as theatre's “same old murderous meet-and-greet” (192). From Adorno's theory of negative dialectics, Jarcho arrives at a concept of “negative theatrics,” of texts that “strain against the world as we have lived it, as we are living it” (xv), a tradition of work that, in treating the present “not as an ideal but as a problem … , negat[es] its own actuality” (58). She is interested in a “negative utopianism” (98) that is neither prescriptive nor hopeful but that imagines what is simply not here and not now. Adorno, who functions as a kind of patron saint of this book, described this urge as “‘the longing for the new, not the new itself’” (13).

Jarcho is simpatico with a theatre that wants to wriggle out of, or flee from, the actual temporal and spatial situation of the medium: the being here, together, now. Her interest as a spectator is not the familiar impulse to connect with the activities of the stage, or even her fellow audience members, but rather a kind of radical separatism, a desire for distance from it all. In Beckett's Waiting for Godot, Jarcho finds a prime example of this drive in his striving for “maximum actuality,” which is not an end in itself as so many critics have claimed, but rather an impulse to “suggest, dialectically, its opposite” (202). The onslaught of the present is so overwhelming in Beckett's work that he pummels us into looking to something else beyond it. Jarcho's reading of Parks is notable for its revision of a broad critical consensus about her “writerliness” that suggests these “difficult” texts require spectator participation in performance to make them work. Instead, Jarcho offers us a playwright who refuses to disappear into performance and demands that the spectator pays attention to both the writer and preexisting text. What if, Jarcho wonders, we “frame Parks's writerly difficulty as a retreat from the audience, rather than an invitation to the audience” (133; emphasis mine) to participate in the creation of the work? Jarcho exhibits perhaps her deepest affection for the strange and prickly works of Mac Wellman—in particular his idiosyncratic family portrait play, A Murder of Crows—as well as his refusal to play nice with drama's demand for communication and his frank distaste for the “‘[g]ood [i]ntentions’” (174) of the bulk of US theatre. Wellman uses monologue not to reel in the audience but rather to bypass them.

One of the book's major achievements is its contribution to the theorization of theatricality. Stein's rejection of a theatre that tries to “‘get acquainted’” (53) with the spectator, her view that “‘anything that was not a story could be a play’” (48), and the popular consensus that her plays are unstageable has led critics such as Martin Puchner (Stage Fright, 2002) to read her work as antitheatrical. For Jarcho, however, this is evidence of a profound theatricality. Her gripe with Puchner is that he ties his theory to a dramatic norm, what he calls “‘the spatial and temporal continuity of the theater’” (64). She makes the same critique of Hans-Thies Lehmann, whose formulation of postdramatic theatre—for all its apparent dismissal of text-based theatre—is still overwhelmingly grounded in the high value that drama places on communication. Jarcho's theory of a “nondramatic theatricality” (150) prompts a larger and essential question for the field of theatre studies: When we talk about theatre and theatricality, what kind of theatre do we have in mind? In Jarcho's refusal to accept the basic tenets of dramatic theatre as the measure of what constitutes theatricality, theatricality itself emerges as an insurgent force that interferes with not only the drama—dismantling its apparatus, clogging up its machinery—but also the present as such. “[T]his-ness” and its “transcendence” (105), as Jarcho amply shows, is a decidedly theatrical relation.

This book is a testament to the importance of scholarly work that not only considers theatre as one of many manifestations in the large bubbling pot of cultural production but also attends to the intricacies of medial specificity. At a historical moment in which “immersion,” “participation,” “interactivity,” “co-creativity,” and sociopolitical “relevance” are watchwords of the discourse around contemporary theatre practice, Jarcho imagines a theatre that goes beyond the celebratory chorus about being in the room together and telling each other stories. This book challenges the field of theatre studies to release itself from being held in thrall to theatre's actuality—the cozy surrender to its happening here and now. A suggestive moment in the book's closing section on Wellman entertains the value of a theatre that dares to leave the spectator abandoned, neglected, and unaddressed, and in so doing, points to a theatre of the future—a theatre that is not for you and me and our current situation, but more mysteriously for unspecified others, “elsewhere, … elsewhen” (83).