A cute, single paragraph appeared yesterday in the Theater section of The Times online. The headline is “Speechless Actors Roam London Stage.” The piece is listed as “Compiled by Lawrence Van Gelder.” The paragraph concerns a current London staging of Austrian writer Peter Handke’s The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other, in which, reportedly, twenty-seven “actors” perform for an hour and a half without speaking.

The piece got my attention, not only for the coyness of its almost gossip-column short-form, but because Peter Handke is one of a handful of theater artists who are recurrently referenced in a book some dear friends of mine recommended to me that I have been worming my way through over the past couple weeks: Hans-Thies Lehmann’s Postdramatic Theater, a text that has been available to most of Europe and other parts of world for nearly a decade, but that has just this year been published in an English translation.

The book concerns the strains of theater from the 1960s to the present that step out of the traditional dramatic relationship with theatrical texts and presentation. From what I’ve read, Lehmann’s idea is that the conventional idea of “drama” is foregone (at least to a large degree) in favor of a more conspicuous theater of materiality that is less concerned with promoting the illusion of a contained universe separate from the reality of the audience, but is in fact more interested in using concrete realities, which can include text and emphasizes recognizing the performer/audience relationship, to establish a purely theatrical form that is not subjugated to the expectation of conventional narrative.

Elizabeth LeCompte and The Wooster Group are New York’s leading practitioners of this kind of theater. They are already frequently mentioned in Lehmann’s text. My own reaction to The Wooster Group’s “Hamlet” confirms Lehmann’s descriptions of what he considers postdramatic (no hyphen). In the sense that an actor is called to generate and encapsulate a false other, that is, to play a character, Scott Shepherd’s “Hamlet” cannot actually by called his Hamlet, in the way you would say “I liked so-and-so’s Hamlet,” which is a way of saying you liked his interpretation of the fictional dramatic character. In “Hamlet,” The Wooster Group’s performance is mediated (mostly) by Richard Burton’s iconic filmed stage version. That is, their performance substitutes, for a script, an edited version of the film, which you see simultaneously. So the primary source of direction is from the sound and images from the film (including the camera work), rather than from Shakespear’s text. You are, in fact, not watching “Hamlet.” It’s a trick for The Wooster Group not to change the title, which they normally do when tweaking the classics. A trick that apparently duped The New York Sun’s Eric Grode, whose review descends deeper and deeper into reminiscent histrionics.

Grode seems unable to adjust to the new mode of viewing. He writes, “The core company does what it can to carve out its own vision of “Hamlet.” Mr. Shepherd…has none of Burton’s fleshy voluptuousness; instead, he gives his Hamlet a more laconic, vaguely Southern intonation…” Again, I have to argue that not only can’t we call Mr. Sheperd’s performance a version of “Hamlet” the character, we also cannot call The Wooster Group’s production any kind of “vision of ‘Hamlet.’” It simply is a different object altogether, one that is not bound to the drama that we know as “Shakespear’s Hamlet.”

Another writer who is mentioned by Lehmann is Sarah Kane, whose most notable theatrical text is probably 4.48 Psychosis, which came to BAM in 2005 in an infamous French adaptation starring Isabelle Huppert, a performance that a close friend of mine calls the worst thing she has ever seen in her entire life, but that I liked very much.

4.48 Psychose, as it was billed, used Kane’s text as a primary source, which makes it markedly different from The Wooster Group’s approach, the cause being that Kane wrote her text with a postdramatic idea in mind, even if she had not yet come to know or accept Lehmann’s term before her suicide in 1999, whereas Shakespeare’s work is the quintessence of a drama-theater text.

In his review in The New York Times, Charles Isherwood quotes Sarah Kane as writing “Just a word on a page and there is the drama,” which seems to imply that Kane still liked the idea of drama. Isherwood’s review also presses a thumb on the conflict Kane’s play presents to both theater makers and audiences alike. How do you separate the theatrical from the dramatic when staging a postdramatic text, and how does the audience relate to it?

Isherwood seems to suggest that it isn’t possible to achieve a postdramatic situation onstage. He writes, “Ms. Kane took negation to such a strange extreme that her “play” seems to function, for this critic at least, as a renunciation of theater itself.” This passage quite literally exposes Isherwood’s conviction that drama is analogous to theater, and that by dispensing with one (the play), you necessarily lose the other (the theater). These kinds of critical stresses are particularly evident of a postdramatic aesthetics, because they attempt to objectify theater, thereby separating out drama (or traditional narrative) as merely one of several modes of theatrical communication, which can be dizzying to the observer who cannot let go of the expectation of dramatic narrative.

I would consider Nature Theater of Oklahoma a practitioner of postdramatic theater, as Lehmann describes it. Their critically hailed “No Dice,” which I reviewed here, found its text in the transcripts of phone conversations. But the key factor in determining their “postdramatic” status is that they did not manipulate the transcripts in order to supply a false sense of narrative continuity, as, say, happens in the collage theater of Charles Mee (see our review of Iphigenia 2.0). Instead, NTO allows a purely theatrical form to emerge without bending to the needs of traditional dramatic necessity. And yet, the work had its own thrust, its own logic that carries from beginning to end, effectively generating a unique theatrical identity that is still able to communicate meaning.

It’s also interesting that a lot of the ideas I’m coming across in Lehmann’s book are evident in much of contemporary dance. No doubt, the innovation of dance-theater has allowed at least a couple generations of dance artists to approach theater from a mainly physical direction, which can effectively preempt the formation of “character” as dramatic theater understands it. One could also argue that dance is a predramatic form, meaning, the anthropological origins of dance can probably be traced to an age before the idea of drama had even been invented. Perhaps, however, the same could be said of theater.

But all genres of theater–including music–underwent the dramatic overhaul at some point in Western culture. Ballet took it to new extremes until Balanchine broke out of it with abstraction, whereas Martha Graham’s dance seemed to cement the necessity of drama in dance. Merce Cunningham obviously razed that habit, and there went the rest of post-modern dance.

But the dispensing of narrative is only one step dance has had to take in order to break with dramatic expectations, or to narrow it down to one, the expectation of theater (even dance) to invent an autonomous reality on the stage. Dance has done this mainly by homogenizing the physical attitude of dancers, or, by inventing style. You find this from Merce to Brown to Morris and in a lot of other, even more contemporary artists; Jeremy Wade’s instinct in his first ensemble piece, “..and pulled out their hair,” was to train his performers to learn how to imitate the style of his own solo work. But there are other dance artists that, while maybe making their performers do the same actions on-stage, they are not enforcing them to do it in a homogeneous way, or through mannerism.

Tonal homogeneity seems essential to expectations of dramatic theater. And dance has historically adopted this expectation, thereby adding one more layer of connectivity to drama. One of the chief characteristics of “No Dice” was that each performer adopted their own idiosyncratic manner of performance, donning disparate accents that came and went randomly, proving that by breaking the expectation that a performer’s tone will be consistent from beginning to end of the work, the viewer’s attention is drawn to the fact that the adoption of manner is a choice, and therefore, material.

Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring) is probably one of the most mulled-over works of dramatic dance literature. Artists who take up the work have not only to deal with its history, but with the fact that is was designed with a story. What is interesting is that, when contemporary artists stage “The Rite of Spring,” they always use Stravinsky’s music, but frequently dispense with that narrative. Yvonne Rainer and Xavier LeRoy’s “Rites” abandoned the fable of the virgin sacrifice, although this choice alone did not guarantee either success in the end. (I understand that Yvonne Rainer was attempting to do something similar to The Wooster Group, by using the soundscore of “Riot at The Rite” as her score, but she did not, as The Wooster Group does, use it as a fundamental text. In RoS Indexical, the film’s audio component was simply draped over an already limp performance.)

Nicholas Leichter’s “Rite of Spring,” performed with the Brooklyn Philharmonic in 2007, totally eschewed the traditional story and came up with its own abstract substance (if that isn’t the paradox at the center of postdramatic theater: abstract substance).

By the time I saw Stijn Celis’s “Rite,” staged in January at Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet, I wasn’t even looking for Stravinsky’s original plot. And for me, it wasn’t there. But that didn’t stop Alastair Macaulay at The New York Times from doing so, writing, “Do you like how nothing happens in this ‘Rite’ but suspense? The dance of death in other ‘Rites’: so vieux chapeau! Ah, but yes, you have seen why we have five women but only four men! No Chosen Maiden — we end by leaving one maiden unchosen, and yes, she was the loner at the start too, so yes, this is a cycle.””

It would be a mistake to assume that perhaps the ultimate postdramatic take on Stravinsky’s work would be to stage it without either using the original story or the original music. Because postdramatic technique seems not to be about negation, as Charles Isherwood sensed, but is rather about the positivization of a text source that is not traditionally dramatic, be it an original text or media source.

Is Lawrence Van Gelder’s paragraph a positive sign that a postdramatic dialog might be creeping into New York’s critical discourse? Well, not on its own. Because what is important for us to ask about the rumors of Peter Handke’s piece, where the performers have no dialog, is, Then what are they doing on stage? They could just as easily be miming a very traditionally structured narrative (which is what bad dance-theater can end up being). Here again, it is not simply the absence of spoken language that would make this work postdramatic. How is Handke’s script composed? What relationship does it assume with the audience? How does it utilize theater to convey experience? These are the questions New York’s critics need to be asking in order to seriously engage these new ideas, not just gossiping about an idea that on the surface seems sensational.

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