The Art of Ruth Draper by Martin Dauwen Zabel (review)

406 MODERN DRAMA February (yes, Earnest is present) to The Playboy of the Western World and The Time of Your Life. Two plays experiment with masks: Yeats', and The Great God Brown--and even a third can be said to do so, Man of Destiny. The well-made play (Strife) can be contrasted in manner or structure to The Time of Your Life, or in means to the poetic drama of Yeats or Anderson's chronicle of Elizabeth the Queen. And as two authors, Shaw and Synge, are each represented by a one-act and a full length play, comparisons in mode are possible, too. Some of the plays are rare, even in anthologies, and that is welcome, though the volume wisely does not rely on rarity as a main point. Several of the plays are frequently seen, such as Candida, to my mind Shaw's major play least likely to succeed in the classroom. At first sight, in fact, one may regret the inclusion of Death of a Salesman or The Glass Menagerie, readily available elsewhere, until one realizes that Miller and Williams have to be represented in this context and that no other plays will represent them nearly as well. I hope that one day an editor (and, of course, a publisher) will have the courage to print all the materials with which he wishes to surround a play and then, with an appropriate reference, leave Candida to the Penguins. The material with which Mr. Steinberg surrounds the plays is unexceptionable in its clarity and basic usefulness. He has no critical introductions or study questions which, as he says, "tend to slant interpretation of the text." Instead, each play is preceded by a short statement which places it in the body of the author's work with care and objectivity. Then comes a short bibliography of critical essays or other studies ranging from PMLA via Modern Drama to Encounter. The emphasis seems to be on pieces that present issues or points of view. After each play Mr. Steinherg has one or two usually rather full critical statements hy the playwright, most of them bearing directly on the play. Some of these are excellent, like the excerpts from the correspondence between Shaw and Ellen Terry ("... Candida, between you and me, is the Virgin Mother and nobody else"). A few are debatable, such as' the one paragraph of Saroyan's which preempts the basic idea of The Time of Your Life without adding much of another dimension to it. Most are good, relevant, substantial essays by Miller, Yeats, Shaw of course, and Anderson. These selections have two main advantages: in general they reinforce the manifold contrasts and juxtapositions of the plays; and in particular they can give rise to much more precise, meaningful, and intellectually valid student essays and term papers. Mr. Steinberg's anthology, augmented with a few single volumes, can be a very good basic text in a course in modem drama. HENRY W. KNEPLER THE ART OF RUTH DRAPER, Martin Dauwen Zabel, Doubleday and Company, 1960, 373 pp. Price $4.95. In 1923, when I met Dorothy Sands at the Breadloaf School of English in Vermont, she told me, "I am making a break with my conservative Massachusetts family and am going to New York. I hope to do something in the theatre such as Ruth Draper is doing, though I know I can never touch her genius and popularity." (Miss Sands became a well-known Broadway actress.) In 1953 for the last time I saw Ruth Draper in her one-woman show in Claremont, California . In 1923 she was a fabulous performer; in 1953 she had lost none of her old magic: when she came on the stage and began her impersonations, the miracle happened once more as it had been happening for over forty years. 1961 BOOK R.Evmws 407 Miss Draper died in 1956 and now a book about her, The Art of Ruth Draper by Martin Dauwen Zabel has appeared. On the dust wrapper the publishers declare, "The Art of Ruth Draper re-creates in a brilliant cameo biography and in thirty-five monologues . . . the genius of a great actress and a fabulous...