The following conversation has been edited for clarity.

Allow me to introduce Martin Harries and his new book Theater After Film (University of Chicago Press, 2025), about the ways postwar theater responded to and remade itself amid the influence of cinema. Martin has been advising my dissertation at the University of California, Irvine, where he has helped me make sense (or nonsense?) of thinkers from Plato to Walter Benjamin, pointed me toward important currents of political theater in premillennial London, and been a great theatergoing buddy for productions at the REDCAT in Los Angeles. I’m excited for Theater After Film because its attention to theories of spectatorship complicates the narrative of the death of theater at the hands of cinema, and because—in what I think are really important ways—it makes the case that postwar drama was constantly repurposing texts from all kinds of media and turning them on their heads. .

I sat down with Martin to ask him about zombies, Tennessee Williams, Waiting for Godot, the 1970s, and why he’s disappointed that his argument is so intelligible. Hi, Martin—will you introduce yourself?

MARTIN: Sure. I’ve been a professor teaching literature for over thirty years, first at private universities on the east coast and, since 2012, at UC Irvine. I commute from LA in part so that I can see what’s on in Los Angeles, where there is more going on in the theater than some in my former stomping grounds suspect.

MADELEINE: I struggled with what to call Theater After Film. It is a narrow history, or a close reading, or perhaps an archaeology of the theatrical imagination in an era dominated by film. Perhaps in each of these modes, the book takes as its archeological, historical, and analytical subject a current of postwar aesthetic thought that you call “zombie theories of cinematic interpellation.” What are these zombie theories, and what was it about their context in the sixties that made them so persuasive?

MARTIN: I think this gets to what, for me, is a crucial point about the book. Certain theories of cinema’s subject-making force were part of a kind of common sense among artists and intellectuals in the postwar period, and that set of theories imagined that cinema had a hegemonic force in the making of subjects that had to be considered and, if possible, countered. A book I don’t cite is The Authoritarian Personality, but cinema was seen as part of the way in which authoritarian personalities were created. This has a lot to do with the way in which fascist regimes—and not only fascist regimes, other political formations, too—during World War II had become a worry in the postwar period.

So, yeah—“zombie theories of interpellation”—It’s a phrase to summarize this whole set of beliefs about cinema’s power. I don’t fully subscribe to that model myself, but it’s important to me to stress that this is a historical argument about the way in which people saw the power of interpellation. Yeah, “zombies” is an exaggeration. But the figure of the zombie is under the control of some massively powerful, mind-warping force and goes on to do things without thinking.

MADELEINE: You don’t cite The Authoritarian Personality, but you do cite texts by Adorno and by others—Raymond Williams, Jean-Louis Baudry—writing in the 1960s who coalesce around that set of theories.

MARTIN: I don’t think a history of the discourses surrounding this dark, hegemonic version of cinema’s power has been done. There are pieces of it, and I still think that Andrew Ross’s early No Respect has some important chapters on the way in which intellectuals saw mass culture in the period, but if anything, I’m sparing in the number of references I offer about that fear that cinema had turned people into zombies. But it’s everywhere. It’s just everywhere. 

MADELEINE: For some, theater becomes a tool in response to those theories, or it gets refigured as the medium that is going to undo or resist the zombie effects of cinema. Why theater? Why did it seem like such an obvious mode for that kind of resistance?

MARTIN: Well, first I would say I can imagine versions of this argument—and some of them already exist, of course—about other art forms, too. But I also think that because theater and film each saw the other as its doppelganger, theater felt pressure to differentiate itself from cinema in a way that was even more powerful than for other forms: the fact that both use human actors, that both very often include plots about human actors, that cinema is directly indebted to theater, which gets worked out in various books that I cite, and on which my title is kind of playing—Nicholas Vardac’s Stage to Screen and more recently Ben Brewster and Lea Jacobs’ Theater to Cinema. Those books are both classic demonstrations of the ways in which early cinema drew from theatrical models, and so my title is meant to make no sense in a certain way. Theater comes before film, but the whole point of the book is that the formation of theater that I’m interested in does in very meaningful ways come after film.

MADELEINE: In this mode of thinking about cinema that emerges especially in the postwar period, Hollywood becomes the foil to theater. It is the ultimate degradation. It’s where theater goes to die. How does your account challenge this opposition between theater and film, as well as the zombie theories that support it?

MARTIN: Part of what’s crucial here is that in different ways, each of the playwrights that I focus on—and the ones that I only have little pieces about as well—all of them acknowledge that they are not outside the power of cinema. They’re not pretending that theater can be untainted by cinema. It’s worth mentioning the book’s deep debt, a debt that it shares with a lot of work on twentieth-century art and culture, to Andreas Huyssen’s argument that there’s a dialectical rather than a simple oppositional relationship between so-called high and so-called low. I am working out how that helps to understand the theater–film relationship, which has taken me time. But I think that clue from his work has been crucial.

MADELEINE: I’m curious that both this book and your last, Forgetting Lot’s Wife, are about twentieth century theories of spectatorship. Lot’s Wife was about the idea that looking can somehow destroy the looker; Theater After Film is, in part, about the idea that cinema has extraordinary power to bamboozle or manipulate the watcher. Not that you subscribe to these theories yourself, necessarily, but you argue that they had an important influence on twentieth century aesthetics. How does Theater After Film follow Forgetting Lot’s Wife?

MARTIN: In one way, in the strict literary-critical sense, it follows it genetically. Originally, Lot’s Wife was part of the same project but split itself off: the first part of that book was about Antonin Artaud and paintings of Lot’s wife, about Lot’s wife in the imagination surrounding his work. And I thought that was it. That was going to be a chapter of this project, but the Lot’s Wife project took on a life of its own. I’ve thought of Lot’s Wife as also a historical book about a formation of thinking about spectatorship, but I didn’t emphasize the historical framework anywhere near as clearly as I hope I’ve now done. So on one hand, the two books are totally intricately related, but on the other hand, I feel that this project much more clearly delineates a historical framework around the argument about spectatorship that I’m making.

MADELEINE: Tell us about your trio. The book has an essay that justifies writing about Tennessee Williams, Samuel Beckett, and Adrienne Kennedy, not playwrights who you often see critics put in conversation with each other. Why? Why do they belong in the book together?

MARTIN: Because in my view, in the Anglophone dramatic world anyway, they are three crucial figures in response to formations of mass culture that I’m interested in. I think they form a kind of dialectically related trio: what happens when you take the wild but also conflicted embrace of cinema and mass culture in Williams, think of that as followed by the austerity of Beckett, and then put those two things together in Kennedy, where she’s working within a kind of avant-garde framework, structurally, formally, but meanwhile she’s also interested in the patterns of fascination with cinema and with stardom and with celebrity that Williams never fully distances himself from.

MADELEINE: Can we talk about each of these three playwrights? Part of what is interesting about Williams is how his work for the stage assimilates and is assimilated by apparatuses of “mass culture,” but how at the same time it complicates and subverts elements of those apparatuses. I love in particular the time you spend with a remediation of A Streetcar Named Desire in a 1947 issue of Life magazine, where captions of photos from the production egregiously misread the play—most wildly in their final moment: “[Blanche’s] sister and her husband can now resume their happiness, proving Williams’ thesis that healthy life can go on only after it is rid of unwholesome influence.” You’re clear that your point here is not just to correct Life’s misapprehensions, though they are—to use your words—“partial, outrageous, misogynist, and stupid.” Why, then, take up this moment of misreading, this adaptation of stage to magazine? How is it related to the mythos of male sexual terror in Hollywood and the peculiar way Williams’ theater comes after film?

MARTIN: First, I really want to do a panel of a conference, or a workshop, on Life and other mass market magazines and the way in which they provided a forum for theater. My guess is empirically more people saw this account than saw the Broadway production. It’s even possible that more people saw this account than saw the Brando film. Because Life was a hugely circulated magazine: it was kind of a lower high-brow—middlebrow, maybe—magazine, and in those years, knowing something about theater was part of being a middlebrow person. You needed to know what was happening on Broadway. And so that’s part of my answer: I think Life and other magazines are part of the way in which people knew about theater, but I’m also interested in the way that that description was part of a continuing mythologization of Streetcar as a place where a certain kind of fantasy of male desire as aggression got solidified or resolidified in US culture.

The performance of Streetcar both on stage and in the film, I think—it’s hard to exaggerate the kind of mythology around that. I use “mythology,” maybe, in the sense that Roland Barthes would use it, as something that appeared to be natural, that any thinking person—and Tennessee Williams, of course, thought of himself as a thinking person—would need to distance themself from that mythology. So here he is, part of the machine that’s producing that mythology, his text, and he needs to deal with the fact that he had become part of the apparatus that, in some ways, I think—consciously, unconsciously, a little of both—he was writing against. And that’s one of the ways Williams is different from either Beckett or Kennedy, neither of whose work ever became the basis of a big Hollywood film. 

A few years ago, Kennedy had a production on Broadway and a lot of the language was kind of like, “at last, there’s fairness!” And I found myself thinking: no, she was always writing against the conventions of Broadway! Being taken up by Broadway doesn’t necessarily mean that her work is being recognized. 

MADELEINE: Which is kind of the thesis of Theater After Film, with both the easy conversion of Williams from stage to film and the assimilation that gets celebrated when Adrienne Kennedy goes onto Broadway—that that sort of one-way narrative is false, that certain kinds or moments of theater resist the conventional or natural-sounding progression from theater to Broadway to film.

MARTIN: I suppose I should also confess that part of what drives this is my continuing attachment to theater as a form. Maybe it’s a harebrained defense of theater, but it is partly trying to insist that theater onstage is different. I try to engage with what is by now a long argument about problems around the claims to liveness, mostly through Philip Auslander’s Liveness and Peggy Phelan’s Unmarked. But I think without claiming any kind of “ontological difference”—I don’t like the word ontology, so I really would stress that I’m putting that in quotation marks—I think that the situation of theater, a living audience in front of living performers in one place, makes a difference. 

MADELEINE: I want to dwell on a moment in your long essay on Beckett’s film Film, in which you write, “Beckett’s Film—and in my view, his larger body of work for performance—are not stagings of ontological conditions of vision as such, but instead enactments of predicaments concerning the mediated qualities of vision and spectatorship.” (See, I’m picking up on your skepticism of ontology.) This captures the gist of the very fine reading of Film you have been teasing out, but it also seems emblematic of a resistance that animates your whole book: to abstraction, to an essentializing strain in theater criticism, to the tendency to erase historical specificities in the pursuit of questions about ontology. Beckett seems to me the keystone of this book. Why? What about his experiments in medium, vision, and spectatorship—and what about their historical specificity—is so central to theater after film (and to Theater After Film)?

MARTIN: For readers who actually read the whole book, I think that to the extent that the Beckett section is convincing, the book will be convincing, and to the extent that it’s not, the book as a whole won’t be. So I absolutely think Beckett is the central character. His work is the central figure, and that’s partly because it is an absolutely fundamental body of work in the second part of the twentieth century. As to the questions about ontology, well, a lot of Beckett reading remains pretty determined to rest on the ground of certain kinds of ontological claims. Obviously, there is a ton of good historical work on Beckett now; I don’t mean to say that that’s the only strain. But especially because of the interest of philosophers like Badiou in Beckett, there is a continuing return to Beckett as basically the playwright who proves ahistorical deconstructive claims to be correct. And as I understand deconstruction, it was never an anti-historical movement, so I’m troubled by that. I do try at moments to say that I understand why Beckett is taken to be the playwright of fundamental things about human existence. I try to not be too intense about that, but I also think that, even in my own theatergoing experience, Beckett feels different now. Just objectively, even more than before, his work is being linked to stars. The remaking of Waiting for Godot as a classic is fascinating: there’s going to be a production here in LA with a star of The Office.

MADELEINE: So I have seen. Rainn Wilson.

MARTIN: And I think I heard there’s another star-studded one—Keanu Reeves and the other guy from Bill and Ted? It’s become a classic in a way, and partly a classic that can support star turns. And yeah, that means something is happening. There’s this classic essay by Wolfgang Iser called “The Stifled Laugh in Beckett’s Theater.” He was observing the way audiences laughed at Beckett, and there’s something true, I think, in what he describes—but I think that the stifled laugh has become no longer so stifled. If you go to see one of these star turns it’s like “now we’re just supposed to laugh, it’s hilarious.” On the other hand, the first US production of Godot was advertised as “the laugh riot of two continents” or something. So maybe I’m just missing that it’s always been that way.

MADELEINE: It does feel like the status of classic makes a difference. If you go hear a performance of John Cage’s 4’33” now, you know how you’re supposed to react to it. You sit there in appreciative silence as you listen to the noises in the auditorium. We know now that Beckett is supposed to be funny, so unlike early audiences who went not knowing what to expect, our laughter is not stifled.

MARTIN: I saw a production with Nathan Lane, which is, for me, the classic of what I’m talking about. And also there’s the whole question of the size of the theater: Beckett’s plays were basically designed for small spaces, and now they’re being done on Broadway, in much larger spaces than his plays can really accommodate in the right way. But I think it’s fascinating! I don’t mean to sound like I’m policing the way Beckett’s done: if anything, I’d like to see the estate give up on policing productions and let people mess with them and see what happens when they become texts, like other theatrical texts that can be performed in ways the stage directions don’t anticipate.

MADELEINE: When does the copyright expire? Not for another fifty years, probably?

MARTIN: I don’t know. He died in 1989, so plus seventy years, right? I’ll be dead.

MADELEINE: You’ll have to imagine versions for yourself.

Let’s move to Kennedy. We’ve talked about this a little, but you say pretty straightforwardly that she is a kind of synthesis of Williams and Beckett. But she’s also quite different from both of them, right? And in your Kennedy section, you spend most of your time with A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White in 1976, which is later than most of the other texts that you talk about for Williams and Beckett. There’s a rough chronological order to Williams, Beckett, Kennedy, but that doesn’t seem to me like the only reason to organize it that way. So why is Kennedy last? What difference does 1976 make? 

MARTIN: I fear that this synthesis model we’ve been talking about gets one part of my book right: I’m interested in the way this history fits together and, in a rough way, we can see these playwrights as responding to the similar conditions differently. But the other thing I wanted to be clear on, though, and I hope I am, is that I think each of them is strange, unique, not assimilable to each other. The last thing I would want to do is to suggest that Adrienne Kennedy, a black woman playwright writing in the US, is somehow the Hegelian synthesis of the Irish-Franco Beckett and Tennessee Williams here in the States. That’s not what I want to do. I wanted to stress their difference from each other, but also their difference from themselves within their work. I don’t think that one thesis exactly covers each of them, and I don’t think their bodies of work are seamless. This gets to the structure of my book: it’s not an introduction, three chapters, and a conclusion, and that partly has to do with my commitment to thinking about these writers as really, radically different, even as I think there’s a meaningful chronological movement (I am interested in that) from Williams to Beckett to Kennedy. But chronology by no means explains everything. Theater After Film is against the idea that media “succeed” each other and utterly wipe each other out, and in the same way, I don’t think there’s a progress, exactly, from Williams to Beckett to Kennedy. 

MADELEINE: Tell us the premise of A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White, including who Clara is to Kennedy in this play, and then we can talk about what you found in the archive.

MARTIN: Clara is pretty transparently a figure for the play’s author. Clara talks about writing plays that have lines from earlier plays by Kennedy, especially The Owl Answers; she incorporates words from that text into the later play. So on the one hand it seems like a kind of wild autobiographical text. On the other hand, the essential method of the play is that white actors who look, we’re told, exactly like particular movie stars speak the lines of Black characters.

One of my sadnesses about the book is that I wasn’t able to get permission to reproduce certain images in time. I have really beautiful photographs of a couple pages from Kennedy’s working drafts of A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White, one of which includes cut-out passages from The Owl Answers. And it took me a while, but I figured out which edition she had cut them out from! Because The Owl Answers was actually reprinted three or four times, and it was the last source that I looked at that turned out to be the one. So she cuts from a Samuel French edition of Cities in Bezique, as it’s called, and pastes it into her text, and then types—there’s typescript and then handwriting all in one page.

MADELEINE: There’s this stage direction: in the published edition, the stage direction is “(Clara reads her play.)” But you found a moment in a draft where the word “my” is written above “her,” as if to say “(Clara reads my play.)” So there seems to be a bit of Kennedy peeking out there: neither of them crossed out, the draft text leaves a little bit uncertain whether Clara is reading Clara’s play or Kennedy’s play. 

How is that related to the way her theater comes after film? What does it have to do with likeness and identity and the thing that is happening in this play where white movie stars speak for Black characters?

MARTIN: It gets us back to where we started, I think, to the power of identification as a theoretical response, an intellectual response, to the postwar world. Kennedy is one of the great writers about that force and about how confusing it is. And here I want to mention Shonni Enelow’s work, which has been really important to me in thinking about the cycles of identification within theater and cinema.

MADELEINE: I do want to return to this question of the form of your book. In the preface you say that you are a little dismayed that it turned out as cohesive as it did. Why? What were you trying to do? Why do you feel like its argument is too unitary, and why do you think that happened?

MARTIN: Just to say plainly: the book is in thirty sections. I think we all need to have more fun with the form of the academic book. I suppose in a certain odd way, my commitment to the book as a form meant that I resisted some of the conventions of the academic book as a form. I’m committed to the Brechtian idea that the gaps between things are where a lot happens. I admire books like Adorno’s Minima Moralia that are truly made up of fragments, and that’s not what this book is—it does have an argument, it’s pretty easy to read the book and find the places where the argument is stated most clearly. I’m a little frustrated with myself that I didn’t write a more rebarbative, fragmentary book, but, you know, I also am trying to contribute to critical arguments and it’s probably a good thing to try to be fairly clear about what your argument is when you’re trying to do that.

MADELEINE: I thought it made for an excellent book. Thanks for telling us about Theater After Film, out in the spring from the University of Chicago Press.

Please leave this field empty

Sign up for our monthly newsletter!

We promise not to spam you! We’ll probably forget this task.

Thank you for subscribing! See you in your inbox