Theatre Journal

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...