Das Amerikanische Drama der Gegenwart ed. by Herbert Grabes (review)

10.4 BOOK REVIEWS contains lengthy passages and that Pinter would have better conceived it as a short drama. At the end, one is left with the impression that, in view of the uncountable number of short plays written in the last eighty or so years, there are comparatively few "symbolic," "epic-didactic," and "grotesque" short pieces which could be approached with Halbritter's categories. No like-minded playwright has succeeded Yeats; the Anglo-American followers of Brecht have mostly chosen to write in the long form (cf., e.g., Arden, Wesker, Mercer); and to judge from Esslin's The Theatre of the Absurd (which, despite its weak theoretical position and the omission of a number of obvious "absurd" candidates, is still acceptable for an impression of the scale of the "grotesque" scene), there have hardly been more than ten playwrights who, from the overall conception of their writing, could have written "grotesque" plays at all, but these have, in fact, produced mainly long pieces. Furthermore, Halbritter's characteristics of the symbolic short drama are so typically Yeatsian and those of the grotesque short play so typically Pinteresque, that most other symbolic or grotesque pieces fall outside the range of the suggested categories. This study, which claims to bring new light into the shadowy province of the nature of the short drama, provides such limited categories that we are still left with unsatisfactory ideas as to the poetics of this dramatic genre. ROOIGER IMHOF University ofWuppertal OAS AMERIKANISCHE DRAMA OER GEGENWART, ed. Herbert Grabes. Kronberg: Athenaum, 1976. pp. 225; DM 14,80. The twelve articles in this collection - all in German and printed here for the first time - attempt to give a representative survey of contemporary American drama. The three major parts into which the book is divided deal with the Broadway theater, off- and off-off-Broadway plays and the Black theater. These sections , each comprising a discussion of four plays, are preceded by descriptive introductions , which, for those acquainted with the American dramatic life of the 1960's and 1970's, offer little new information. The Broadway section contains articles on Miller's After the Fall, Albee's A Delicate Balance, Kopit's Indians, and Hair. Admittedly, we should not forever restrict ourselves to the most widely read and the most successful works ofan author . But there is not sufficient justification for including After the Fall in a volume w:hich. claims to be representative of contemporary American drama; this play is representative of neither Miller's drama nor the Broadway theater at large. Furthermore, it might have been more revealing for an understanding of Miller as a playwright had Rainer Lengeler - despite Miller's "Foreword" - paid more attention to the social implications of the play; the central issues, man's loss of innocence, his responsibility, his imperfection, are social issues; precisely because each man is a "separate person," the fall of man is not an individual matter alone. Mathew Winston faced a similar problem when choosing a play representative of Albee; he probably did not want to add another article to the already impressive bulk of assessments of Who's Afraid of BOOK REVIEWS 105 Virginia Wootp, but he could not ignore the discouraging criticism A Delicate Balance has received. A strong point in his article is its systematic treatment of the characters as infantiles who assume fixed roles in order not to upset the superficial balance of "family life." Hans-Werner Wilz's interpretation of Kopit's second quite successful play compares the London and the New York versions, analyzes the play-within-a-play structure, and treats the opposition of fiction and authenticity as the overall theme. The most penetrating article of this Broadway theater section is Armin Gerath's comprehensive study of Hair. His main points of discussion are the sexual, divine, and diabolic potentialities of the hair symbol, the play's ethnological message, and the interdependence of song structure and social structure. The second part of the book, dealing with off- and off-off-Broadway plays, comprises articles on Gelber's The Connection, Garson's MacBird!, Wilson's The Rimers ofEldritch, and van Itallie's The Serpent. Remarkable in Karl Schubert's study...