In Street Scenes: Late Medieval Acting and Performance, Sharon Aronson-Lehavi presents her fresh translation of the antitheatrical A Treatise of Miraclis Pleying (c. 1380–1425) and argues that a careful reading of it offers access to an aesthetic discourse of the theater upon which late medieval religious performances were based. Street Scenes is important for its articulation of the relationship between formal elements and ideology in late medieval theater, particularly, “aesthetic attitudes regarding questions such as how one should or should not enact holy subject matter” (18). Aronson-Lehavi argues that medieval theater has been primarily examined for its religious and social aims, with little recognition of medieval acting conventions as a “coherent and intentional aesthetic” (8); she blames this disregard on the “interest in verisimilitude and illusionist techniques” (8) that has dominated Western theater since the English Renaissance, a mimetic aesthetic antithetical to late medieval street performance and self-referentiality. Throughout, Aronson-Lehavi establishes parallels between nonmimetic (and antimimetic) concepts of performance, such as those of postmodern performance theorists Richard Schechner, Marvin Carlson, and especially Bertolt Brecht, and the governing aesthetic of medieval theater with its emphatic, purposeful tension between “the performing and the performed” (3), the live event and the scripted dramatic narrative. The medieval aesthetic included maintaining the tension between actor and character, particularly important in the representation of Christ. Aronson-Lehavi's main argument is that “liveness” is a key dramatic principle in both medieval and postrealist twentieth-century theater: “action that takes place in the present and has real implications on the present rather than a mimetic function only” (21).

In chapter 1, Aronson-Lehavi establishes the Treatise's objections to miracle playing. These pivot on the difference between the serious and the real (Christ's works), and play and game, that is, representation in the live medium of plays, considered nonserious because they are done for and with pleasure, and unreal because they are only signs, not the thing itself. While miracle play defenders argue that “by watching the devil leading himself into hell because of his own behaviour one can learn a lesson” (28), the Treatise contends that “participating in ‘miraclis pleyinge’ does not help to convert but rather takes away the fear of hell because of the false and unreal status of the performances” (29). As Aronson-Lehavi notes, “[P]eople might doubt the realness of concepts that cannot be ‘really’ demonstrated” (29); the Treatise assumes the failure of mimesis. Liveness is also at issue when the Treatise distinguishes between performances of God and painted images of him, approving painted images as helpful for reading the truth. Aronson-Lehavi smartly assesses the Treatise's distinction as anxiety over “the intervention and interruption that might occur when the artistic medium is not mute or transparent as in painting, but, rather, lively and potentially uncontrollable as in performance” (31), and she speculates on various ways performances could open up dangerous spaces. Chester's Noah play, for instance, “gives a face and a voice to victims of the flood” (35); furthermore, the possibilities for farce and laughter, whether scripted, ad libbed, or unintentional, within live performance could distract audiences from serious moral messages and present sources of bodily pleasure.

Chapter 2 extracts and explains the four concepts of performance Aronson- Lehavi locates in the Treatise: contrariety and simultaneity; performance, signification, and efficacy; emotionality; and communality. Unfortunately, the explanations of the first three concepts are significantly repetitive of content from chapter 1. The simultaneous contrarieties of the first concept hinge on the “presence of the performing function” (the actor) alongside “the performed function” (a biblical character within sacred history) (56); it is an aesthetic of actors present in their impure flesh while enacting sacred roles, as well as audiences witnessing eternal truths while enjoying themselves with their senses. For the Treatise writer, this duality is problematic: no man can effectively hear the voice of the Lord and enjoy fleshly pleasure simultaneously. The concept of performance, signification, and efficacy returns us to the Treatise's critique of the unrealness of the plays: performances are “signs,” imitation as opposed to the actual event, biblical character, or place. Whereas defenders saw performance as efficacious through its devotional, ritualistic power, detractors believed its unreality made it incapable of converting participants, who, as Aronson-Lehavi reiterates, “might think that concepts such as hell and punishment are unreal as well” (68). The Treatise also objected to audiences's loud emotion, arguing that crying audiences shed tears not for Christ's suffering or their own sins but for their bodily and earthly travails and because it was difficult to watch a suffering body; for the Treatise, “weeping at such a sight is an easy way out of real contemplation” (76).

Aronson-Lehavi's final concept of performance, communality, is a twofold one, involving both communal social energies of “material production, cost, [and] finance ” (57) and the devotional and social significance of the performance “derived from communal identification and local anachronisms and references” (57). Both aspects are areas of research with rich literatures, but the former's relationship to medieval performance aesthetics is left unexamined here and the latter is treated obliquely. Scholars who have worked on intersections of communality and aesthetics, such as V. A. Kolve, Anne Higgins, Jonathan Gil Harris, and others, are mostly not engaged nor acknowledged. Indeed, in general, Street Scenes is inadequately situated within the contextualizing critical conversations about medieval drama and religious iconography in the Middle Ages, a significant flaw.

Chapter 3 addresses specific instances of epic and total acting, mostly in the York Cycle. Epic acting—the deliberate exposure of the distinction between character and actor—was achieved through the use of masks, gestures, and “the episodic structure of the cycle that leads to the casting of many actors for the same role” (86), with, for instance, “at least ten actors play[ing] the adult Jesus in different scenes” (100). This, Aronson-Lehavi argues, allows the “iconographical image of Adam and Eve [to] remain fixed and remote because it cannot be associated with any particular likeness” (100). One wonders, however, if guilds used the same actors—who might have an aptitude for a part—over subsequent years, or whether Records of Early English Drama evidence that actors were sometimes paid for particular parts suggests that particular talents might have “owned” a role for a period of time. Aronson-Lehavi neither considers these possibilities nor offers much evidence and scholarship to support her own very reasonable claims; Street Scenes, again, is frustrating for the extent to which it is underresearched. Total acting engages an entirely different aesthetic than epic; it entails a theatrical focus on the corporeality of the actor's body, and the border between actor and character becomes blurred through the brutal treatment of the actor's body dictated by the narrative. While the epic mode is the overriding aesthetic of the mystery plays, in the passion sequence total theatricality dominates, and spectators “might become emotionally involved” when viewing the difficult, physically demanding work of raising the cross or “the real infliction of pain” (117, original emphasis) on the actor performing Christ.

Aronson-Lehavi concludes that the “contradictory collusion of epic and total theatre aesthetics” is “the tension that best typifies concepts of acting and performance in late medieval religious theatre” (124). Religiosity demanded maintaining the “fixedness and remoteness” of religious figures and events, but “the liveness and eventness of the performance . . . creates its meaning for the participants.” Because of this latter aspect, “another signification system, one that belongs to the contemporary lives of the participants[,] simultaneously signifies, acts, and performs” (125). These are compelling and important claims; unfortunately, Street Scenes is undermined by the insufficiency of its research and by its tendency toward repetition rather than development of examples and arguments.