Review by Choice Review
Culminating his decades-long work in theater studies, Rozik (emer., Tel Aviv Univ.) offers a far-ranging work that unites and intertwines theater semiotics, phenomenology, and performance theory. He calls the play-script a "deficient text" that "presupposes its final performance." This "performance-text" focus does still require semiotic analysis, but semiotics is a "substratum" of performance that requires "other structural strata, which require additional poetic, aesthetic, and rhetoric disciplines of research" for a full understanding. The book opens with a dense, precise, state-of-the-art introduction, and the author divides the chapters that follow into three parts: "Semiotic Substratum," "Additional Strata and Disciplines," and "Examples of Performance Analysis." The most engaging is the last, in which Rozik looks at Robert Wilson's H. G., Habimah's production of Euripedes' The Trojan Women, and Woyzeck 91, directed by Rina Yerushalmi. Rozik's detailed, unified, "scientific" methodology requires a patient reader, but the effort will be rewarding: the study is thorough, intelligent, and willing to challenge the acclaimed giants of the semiotic tradition. Of interrelated interest are Rozik's engagement with J. L. Austin's speech-act theory, Bert O. States's phenomenology, and Richard Schechner's performance theory. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. W.W. Demastes Louisiana State University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
