Theatre in Theory, 1900-2000: An Anthology (review)

{ 205 } BOOK REV IEWS The “key plays” of Glaspell, which Ozieblo discusses in depth, were written during her almost seven years with the Provincetown Players (1915–22). Although her career extended to Broadway and a Pulitzer Prize with Alison’s House, Ozieblo rightly targets two high points of Glaspell’s playwriting career, Trifles and The Verge, and the conditions that surrounded their writing. From her first solo-authored one-act, Trifles, to her last play written for the Players, The Verge, Glaspell found a sensitive audience, attuned to feminist perspectives, many of whom were members of the Greenwich Village Heterodoxy group. For those “she had come to know intimately,” Ozieblo maintains, Glaspell wrote The Verge and was finally able to “break through the despised ‘patterns’ of Broadway plays” (71). Unlike Glaspell, Treadwell opted for Broadway venues, which, as Dickey argues, often worked against her (107). Never pliant or willing to compromise with male producers, agents, and the entrenched system—or to seek more sympathetic little theatre venues—Treadwell produced two shows on Broadway herself , including her critically acclaimed Machinal. According to Dickey, Treadwell experimented with form in her pursuit of an audience for her plays and in her attempt to sway them to her feminist themes; in Machinal, for example, Treadwell adjusted expressionistic techniques to “creat[e] a new aesthetic, one that might have particular appeal for the female spectator” (150). Treadwell’s stage directions in Machinal, some of which Dickey includes from her earliest manuscript, speak to her objective, Dickey notes, of provoking the consciousness of an audience, “especially . . . women” (149). The volume contributes to the authors’ desire that Glaspell and Treadwell, narrative innovators in drama, are now finally to be recognized alongside American women fiction writers as “melding feminist ideals with experimental form” (2). With their careful scholarship and lively writing, this book goes beyond an introduction and serves as an invitation to revisit and revive the plays. —ANNE BECK Eastern New Mexico University \ Theatre in Theory, 1900–2000: An Anthology. Edited by David Krasner. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2008. xviii + 577 pp. $47.95 paper. David Krasner’s new reader, Theatre in Theory 1900–2000, is certain to be a valuable resource for any theatre scholar or instructor whose beat includes the { 206 } BOOK REV IEWS twentieth century. But for those of us who mourn the out-of-print demise of such classic compendia as Bernard Dukore’s Dramatic Theory and Criticism and Daniel Seltzer’s The Modern Theatre, who supplement Eric Bentley’s Theory of the Modern Stage or Daniel Gerould’s Theatre/Theory/Theatre with course packs of our own devising, and who feel Michael Huxley and Noel Witt’s Twentieth Century Performance Reader is wonderful but thirty chapters too short, Theatre in Theory is manna from heaven, quite simply the most ambitious collection of twentieth-century writing on dramatic theory ever published in one volume. The eighty-two chapters in Theatre in Theory are organized chronologically , from Strindberg’s “Preface to Miss Julie” (1888) to Heisnam Kanhailal’s “Ritual Theatre (Theatre of Transition)” (2004). The chapters are further grouped into parts, each representing a twenty-year period (1900–1920, 1920– 40, etc.) and headed by a two- to three-page introductory note. Accompanying each essay, Krasner provides a brief biography of the author as well as some notes to contextualize the piece. The authors represented include playwrights (Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, Stanislaw Witkiewicz, Sean O’Casey, Ntozake Shange), directors (Vsevolod Meyerhold, Peter Brook, Robert Wilson), critics (John Gassner, Eric Bentley, Martin Esslin, Northrop Frye), semioticians (Karel Brušák, Jindrich Honzl, Roland Barthes), philosophers (Henri Bergson, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler), and public figures (Emma Goldman, Alain Locke, W. E. B. DuBois) as well as a host of major scholars from theatre and performance studies (Michael Kirby, Bert O. States, Jill Dolan, Peggy Phelan, Richard Schechner, Herbert Blau). Some of this material has been anthologized previously—all the essays in Theatre in Theory with the exception of the editor’s introduction are previously published—but the vast majority of Krasner’s selections are not readily available elsewhere, including many rare gems, such Aida Overton Walker’s“Colored Men and Women on the Stage...