Review

Reviewed Work(s): Binodini Dasi, "My Story" and "My Life as an Actress" by Rimli
Bhattacharya
Review by: Kathryn Hansen
Source: Theatre Journal , Dec., 1998, Vol. 50, No. 4 (Dec., 1998), pp. 555-557
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/25068613

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authors look at the work of specific individuals.
Joel Schechter explores the contributions of
dramaturgs from Lessing to Brecht and beyond.
Allen Kuharski and Mira Rafalowicz each look
specifically at dramaturgy and Joseph Chaikin's
work. While Norman Frisch and Marianne Weems
together examine the Wooster Group, Gregory
Gunter talks about working with Anne Bogart.
The history of dramaturgy in educational pro
grams is introduced by Robert Brustein. Many
other essays in the volume, notably those by Art
Borreca, Mark Bly, and Oscar G. Brockett, pick up
on this theme as they detail the development of
programs at places like Yale or Iowa and explore
pedagogical concerns. Jane Ann Crum, for one,
argues that not only are the tools of the dramaturg's
craft teachable, but that they offer the essence of a
liberal arts education in their synthesis of theory
and practice.
As the profession becomes more credible and as
dramaturgs begin to join the ranks of the paid staff
at theatres, Michael Lupu offers a cautionary warn
ing to dramaturgs to resist institutionalization and
calls for the field to remain open-ended and flex
ible. "I find it important to distinguish," he writes,
"between the prevailing organizational practices
set in place by various theaters that have dramaturgs
on staff and the essence of the creative and critical
activity called dramaturgy" (111). He argues that it
is the "activity," not the job itself, that must con
tinue to develop. Leon Katz begins to define the
activity of dramaturgy in his list of the many and
varied characteristics of the "compleat dramaturg,"
and Geoffrey S. Proehl explores the role of the
dramaturg through metaphors.
Numerous other "activities" of dramaturgy run
through the essays. The multifaceted investigation
of the intersections of theory and practice, arguably
present in each essay, is a particularly rich area of
discussion. John H. Lutterbie, Cary M. Mazer, and
Tim Sanford all highlight the insights that literary
and theatrical theory can bring to the production
process. Lee Devin encourages a return to the
insights of Aristotle, while Stephen Weeks ques
tions the "wisdom of the Poetics." All the articles in
the sections on collaboration and on new play
development offer practical advice on the "activi
ties" of dramaturgy and the craft of the dramaturg.
Some authors in other sections describe the role of
the dramaturg in making the production relevant
to a contemporary audience. Susan Jonas, Jayme
Koszyn, and Jim Niesen examine ways to adapt the
canon for today's audiences. Harriet Power and
Elizabeth C. Ramirez raise another issue as they
explore the benefits and hurdles of multicultural
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BOOK REVIEW / 555
productions. Others, like Carl Weber and James
Magruder, examine the issues and pitfalls of trans
lation. These are just a few of the threads of
investigation in the essays.
The value of this groundbreaking anthology can
not be overestimated, in large part because it high
lights the need for further investigation. The essays
and the organizational structure encourage the
reader to continue to define the role of the
dramaturg and thus leave room for the field to
expand. Dramaturgy in American Theater: A Source
Book not only emphasizes the importance of dra
maturgy, whether it is professional, academic, or
community-based, to theatre, but also illustrates
how the impact of dramaturgy is just beginning to
be felt in a wide range of arenas.
SUSAN CHANDLER HAEDICKE
The George Washington University
BINODINI DASI, MY STORY AND MY UFE
AS AN ACTRESS. Edited and translated by
Rimli Bhattacharya. New Delhi: Kali for
Women, 1998; pp. xii.+ 277. Rs. 300 cloth.
Binodini Dasi (1863-1941) performed on the pub
lic stage of Calcutta for only twelve years. Re
cruited from the prostitutes' quarters at age eleven,
she soon became the leading actress of several
major theatrical companies, appearing in eighty
roles during her meteoric career. Although her
autobiographical writings were composed and pub
lished many years later, they form a rare testimony
to the talents and travails of the first generation of
Bengali actresses, who came to the theatre from
impoverished, disreputable families. Playing the
roles of warring heroines and self-sacrificing satis,
these working women embodied middle class aspi
rations for moral purification and national glory,
and struggled to find economic and social refuge in
their own lives.
Bhattacharya has scrupulously contextualized
Binodini's writings and her theatrical world, offer
ing both ample documentation and a set of interpre
tive reflections that decenter any simplistic reading.
Binodini's life narratives, enveloped in layers of
commentary, comprise the core. The glosses, in
cluding the editor's three essays and notes, the
matize central problems thrown up by her career as
an actress and author and present a richly textured
digest of Bengali-language source materials. This
critical apparatus far extends the significance of the
volume, which both illustrates the usefulness of
556 / Book Review
actors' autobiographies and contributes substan
tially to South Asian performance studies.
The tone of the autobiographies differs measur
ably. Translation cannot fully register the formal
and colloquial styles they respectively employ, but
the translator's skill makes the rich emotive effects
of Binodini's pen come alive. My Story is written in
grief at the loss of the three most important indi
viduals in Binodini's life: her protector; her mentor,
playwright and actor Girish Chandra Ghosh; and
her daughter. Formulas of lament and self-denigra
tion thus open her narrative, but even here the
actress's lack of faith and her frank, even hostile
pronouncements underscore some resistance. For
instance, she later tells of her momentous contribu
tions toward establishing the Star Theatre in Cal
cutta, and her lingering sense of betrayal at not
having the theatre named after her as promised.
Descriptions of her heightened imagination off and
on the stage and her intense, trance-like states
while enacting religious plays enable readers to
visualize the drama of her life and performances.
My Life as an Actress, although more truncated,
covers the same terrain in a lighter vein. Particu
larly delightful are the travel accounts, based on
the tour of the Great National Theatre in 1875 to the
"foreign" realms of Delhi, Lahore, and Vrindavan.
Binodini sees herself as a vivacious, affectionate
child who thrived in the family-like atmosphere of
the theatrical company. Her later sorrow stands in
contrast to the initial innocence of her explorations
of the world and of the characters whose essence
she intuitively grasps.
In her introduction, Bhattacharya traces the back
ground of the nineteenth-century Bengali theatre,
noting the participation of three groups: aristo
cratic patrons who founded the first stage or "babu
theatre," social and religious reformers who guided
its agenda, and the middle-class "misfits" who
substituted devotion to theatre for more conven
tional professional pursuits. She explores the
anomaly of the actress, whose class position was so
different from these upper- and upper-middle
class males, and yet whose presence was essential
to theatre's commercial success. It was this class
position that also separated Binodini from other
Bengali women who were beginning to write. The
public actress was arguably even at a disadvantage
with respect to the older courtesans (baiji, tawaif)
who at least enjoyed the protection of performing
in private. Also important to an understanding of
the autobiographies is Bhattacharya's analysis of
the theatre journals in which they were published,
filled primarily with the male-authored "autobiog
raphies" of fictional actresses, and her description
of the existing models for Bengali autobiographical
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writing from which Binodini appears to draw in
spiration.
In "Notes on the Bengali Public Theatre," Bhatta
charya pursues in detail the specific character of
the theatrical performances in which Binodini ex
celled. These were geetinatya, musical spectacles
called "opera" in English by the public and per
formers to add an aura of refinement. The produc
tions incorporated elements of older genres such as
the rural jatra, and actresses like Binodini had to be
extremely versatile in order to satisfy audiences'
ever-changing tastes. As a site for the formation of
middle-class Bengali identity, the theatre favored
narratives of national valor and historical and
mythological themes that escaped British censor
ship. Bhattacharya notes the large number of plays
in which the performance of a sati, complete with
flaming pyre, formed the centerpiece of the spec
tacle; Binodini recounts how she was severely
burnt once in such a scene. Nationalism was ex
pressed by lauding female self-sacrifice or by tar
geting women who transgressed traditional roles,
even as women became an important sector of the
audience with the coming of devotional (bhakti)
dramas.
A lengthy afterword explores the iconization of
Binodini during her own lifetime. She was cast in
the "discourse of redemption" following her im
personation of the medieval saint Chaitanya, for
which she received a blessing from Ramakrishna,
regarded by many as a living saint. This section
then examines the representations of Binodini's life
story in dramas and productions from the 1960s to
the 1990s and reproduces the full text of Ghosh's
preface to My Story, published with the second
edition. Appendices include a chronology of
Binodini's publications and roles, a list of plays
based on her life, and a biographical directory.
The assembly of texts makes this an extremely
important book for specialists in South Asian the
atre. The work will also be a strong addition to
courses on gender and performance and women's
writing. My one regret is that a wider audience was
not intended from the start. The present book
speaks almost exclusively to a readership knowl
edgeable about South Asia, although Kali for
Women, the premier publishing house for feminist
scholars in India, has co-published most of its
recent list in the United States and intends to
continue doing so. (The American co-publisher for
this book is not known as of the time of writing.)
With some restructuring, the author could have
exposed the reader to the more preliminary con
cepts and later plunged into more specialized top
ics. The need for cross-references, particularly to

Indian theatrical terms such as bhava, which is
repeatedly mentioned but only defined and dis
cussed on page 200, would thereby have been
minimized. This cavil aside, Bhattacharya has done
a remarkable job of amplifying the poetry of
Binodini's voice. This book deserves to be widely
consulted and enjoyed.
KATHRYN HANSEN
Columbia University
A HISTORY OF POLISH THEATER, 1939
1989: SPHERES OF CAPTIVITY AND
FREEDOM. Edited by Kazimierz Braun.
Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996; pp.
235. $59.95.
Kazimierz Braun's A History of Polish Theater,
1939-1989 was published in 1996 in Poland under a
humbler title, "The Polish Theater 1939-1989" and
its Polish subtitle?Obszary wolnosci I zniewolenia?
put "Spheres of Freedom" before "Spheres of Cap
tivity." It was received there with well-grounded
criticism. Now this text is available in an English
edition that differs in many respects from the
Polish one. While the book provides essential infor
mation on the history of Poland and its theatre
prior to 1939, it leaves out some important ele
ments of the Polish theatre in the last fifty years,
including profiles of contemporary artists who made
considerable contributions.
The two main problems remain the same in both
the English and Polish versions. The first is the
author's treatment of two periods in Polish his
tory?the Nazi occupation of 1939-1945 and post
war Poland?under the homogeneous term "cap
tivity." Braun does not make clear that there is a
substantial difference in the meaning of "captivity"
in wartime and peacetime, even in peace under
totalitarian rule. Imposing the term "captivity" on
such different periods of culture in the life of a
nation can lead to confusion.
Second is the nature of Braun's own involvement
during those recent five decades: his own invest
ment in the Polish theatre has been not so much as
theatre historian or critic, but as a theatre director
who for seventeen years was the artistic director
and manager of one of Wroclaw's theatres. The
book identifies itself as a scholarly work utilizing
"a method that will convey to the reader the
complex truth in the most accurate, objective, and
inclusive way" (ix), but in the same preface Braun
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BOOK REVIEW / 557
admits, "it is also my personal answer to many
questions about the Polish theater that my Ameri
can colleagues and students have asked me" (x).
Although this personal perspective seems only
natural and justifiable in view of the author's
involvement in the process he intends to chronicle,
it begs questions about his objectivity in assessing
this history.
The English version of Braun's History does pro
vide an impressive amount of information about
the post-war theatre; this is divided into several
subperiods: 1945-48, 1949-55, 1956-60, 1960-80,
and 1982-89. Each describes a theatre that is differ
ent in its relationship to political institutions and its
degrees of censorship. For instance, Braun's four
teen-page discussion of the Polish theatre in the
first period describes how theatre during the war
was boycotted by ninety percent of professional
theatre artists in order to avoid servicing German
authorities and thus ceased to exist as an institu
tion. Underground productions, mounted during
the Nazi occupation in Poland and in the Soviet
occupied territories, were acts of heroic will, where
"both the actors and the audience risked punish
ment by imprisonment, deportation to concentra
tion camps, or even death" (16).
Yet much of this information is selective at best.
Braun's account has pro-Catholic overtones, inso
far that as he favors those artists and productions
with specific religious affiliations. Other post-war
theatres are discussed only in brief, or completely
omitted, such as the National Jewish Theater in
Warsaw and its great founder and actress Ida
Kaminska and other ethnic theatre initiatives that
had an important role in the Polish theatre net
work. Also notable is the absence of any remarks
on the significance of theatre historians such as
Zbigniew Raszewski or critics of the rank of
Konstanty Puzyna or Marta Fik.
Braun's treatment of the most renowned Polish
artists, such as Jerzy Grotowski, Tadeusz Kantor,
Konrad Swinarski, or Jerzy Grzegorzewski is also
disappointing. He either assumes that their work is
well-known and doesn't need to be expounded on
in detail, or his descriptions lack the critical vo
cabulary to grapple with their art. However, Braun
provides invaluable information on many artists
whose experimental works and avant-garde pro
ductions have had few introductions to English
readers (such as the inspiring work from the studio
of Iwo Gall and his wife Halina, the innovative
creations of Leon Schiller, or the work of Irena and
Tadeusz Byrski). In general, his book paints a
rather blurry picture of the Polish theatre. If we
were to estimate the importance of Polish artists