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{ 244 } Book Reviews Ameri­ can literature. The ultimate answer to Gray’s paranoia and phobias, in Demastes’s assessment, is prefigured at the end of Impossible Vacation and materialized in the domestic bliss of Morning, Noon and Night (1999): no longer to dwell in the past alone or watch the world from the sideline, neither selfishly to pursue erotic pleasures or the sublimity of perfect moments, what Schechner has called the outdated 1960s “politics of ecstasy” (131, 167). After all, happiness can be found by reaching out for the other and fully embracing the everyday at the confluence of past and present. If this sounds moralistic,“soft,” or “feminine,” it only confirms Gray’s idio­ syncratic position among performance artists and his value in a masculine competitive world. Possibly because of Gray’s unique brand of autoperformance, Demastes provides no comparisons with other storytellers,apart from a cursory reference to Will Rogers and Lenny Bruce (61).As such, Spalding Gray’s America may be profitably read along other recent, more general studies like Sherrill Grace and Jerry Wasserman’s collection of essays, Theatre and AutoBiography (2006), Michael Wilson’s Storytelling and Theatre (2006), and ­ Deirdre Heddon’s Autobiography and Performance (2008). Johan Callens — Vrije Universiteit Brussel \ \ Rediscovering Mordecai Gorelik: Scene Design and the Ameri­ can Theatre. By Anne Fletcher. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2009. xi + 258 pp. $37.50 paper. Scholars too often gloss over, and in many cases completely ignore, the profound impact scene and costume designers have had and continue to have on determining the shape and scope of theatrical expression. Choosing instead to highlight the accomplishments of playwrights, directors, performers, critics, and theorists, researchers recurrently forgo the careful examination of these visual artists’ noteworthy efforts and lasting contributions. While it is true that many of the most eminent theatre designers (for example, Adolph Appia and Gordon Craig; Robert Edmond Jones, Lee Simonson, Jo Mielziner, and Edith Head; Josef Svoboda and the various contributors to Action Design movement; and Ming Cho Lee and Tony Walton) have been given their due in scholarly circles, it is nonetheless also true that scores of other well-­ deserving and talented artists and their significant achievements are mentioned only in passing, { 245 } Book Reviews relegated to the footnotes, or wholly disregarded. With Rediscovering Mordecai Gorelik: Scene Design and the Ameri­ can Theatre, Anne Fletcher adroitly challenges the penchant to overlook these artists and their work by instead giving voice to one such largely forgotten figure from Ameri­ can theatre history. In so doing, she models an approach that might well serve as a template for others interested in documenting the history of design in the theatre. Over the course of fourteen well-­ written and moving chapters, Fletcher meticulously charts Gorelik’s often-­ ignored, decades-­ long career in Ameri­ can theatre, which included an influential apprenticeship under Robert Edmond Jones, more than twenty Broadway designs, the writing of numerous essays as well as the vitally important although now largely forgotten history of theatre (New Theatres for Old), and a late-­ in-­ life, although distinguished, move into the academy. Central to Fletcher’s study is her resolute belief that an accurate rendering of Gorelik’s career must not only include a summation and analysis of his numerous noteworthy designs for productions of scripts by various midcentury luminaries (including Odets, Brecht, and Miller) and the fundamental (albeit often undervalued and unrecognized) role he played in several midcentury aesthetic and/or politically progressive companies (including the New Playwrights Theatre, the Group Theatre, and the Theatre Union), but also must detail his many notable and intermittently problematic efforts as a critic, director , teacher, and playwright. Fletcher ably justifies this far-­ reaching examination by arguing that Gorelik was “a person who lived in the present” (xv) and that his efforts as a scene designer during the mid-­ twentieth century were merely a handful of attempts in his larger, lifelong endeavor to “[fuse] theory and practice” (7). To that end, she convincingly argues that Gorelik was often ahead of his time, intermingling high art and popular culture before it became ubiquitous, and, moreover, bringing to his design work a desire to explore the relationship between scenery and textual theme...

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