The Theater Event: Modern Theories of Performance by Timothy J. Wiles (review)

588 Book Reviews (e.g., biography, interviews, scholarly articles and critical studies, reviews, theses and dissertations) and laconic summaries. Then there is the reference guide, a blueprint or template for a biography of the subject, with the material arranged chronologically rather than generically, so that one is constantly aware of the subject's progression and development. Of course, one cannot read a guide like Estrin's as ifi! were a biography; but ifone knows anything about Hellman, even ifit isjust from the memoirs, reading the Guide is like perusing a scrapbook where a life unfolds in successive fragments that await the biographer's assembling art. With a writer like Hellman, the chronological approach is preferable to the generic. Naturally some of the information will be scattered, so that everything about the film version of The Little Foxes will not be listed under 1941, the year of the film's release. In 1941. there were only movie reviews, not auteur studies like Michael Anderegg's book on the film's director, William Wyler (1979), or texts like Louis Giannetti's Understanding Movies (1976). Yet itis far more important to see how a 1941 movie can still command respect a quarter of a century after its release than to read the reviews it garnered at the time. What is impressive about Estrin's Guide is the intelligence that pervades it. This is not merely a compilation; it is a piece of scholarship in its own right, beginning with an Introduction that takes an informed stand on the questions critics have raised about HeUman: the melodramatic structure of the plays, their moral tone, her anti-Fascism, the so-called Chekhovian style of The Autumn Garden (which Estrin dismisses), the adaptations, her ability to write for the screen, her encounter with McCarthyism, and her recent career as memoirist. Reading the Guide, one cannot help but get a composite picture of Hellman as she progressed from playwright and screenwriter to a dominant figure in American cultural life, taking on roles that evoked specific periods in its history: 1930'S left-winger, anti-Fascist, anti-isolationist, blacklistee, campus celebrity, feminist heroine, and finally Mary McCarthy's bete noire. All that is missing is Martha Gellhom's attack on Hellman's reliability as a chronicler (Paris Review, No, 79, 1981), which is understandably absent since Estrin covers only the period from 1934 to 1979, Hellman's future biographers (if indeed there will be an authorized biography) will be in Estrin's debt. BERNARD F. DICK, FAIRLEIGH DICKINSON UNIVERSITY TIMOTHY J. WILES. The Theater Event: Modern Theories ofPeiformance. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press 1980. Pp. vi, 209, $17,50. This bookis part ofa growing body oftheatre theory and history which sees performance, not the dramatic text, as primary, Modern Drama, its title indicates, has not adopted this shift in perspective. It is a shift for which all of us in theatre departments, as distinct from departments of literature, must be grateful, because it allows us a real area of academic study, I say this despite the fact that among the best books adopting this perspective are those, including the one under discussion, written by people in English departments, Wiles's book is about the development of acting theory in the twentieth century, He sees the changes in acting theory as concomitant with changes in the theory of the Book Reviews affectivity of theatre, with changes, that is, in the theory of catharsis. The history of acting theory and of the theory of theatre affectivity is traced through its chief proponents and practitioners, Stanislavski. Brecht, and ArtaudlGrotowski. the latter's seen as a unified theory. Each chapter is followed by one in which Wiles augments the theory through its application to a relevant play or performance: The Three Sisters. The Measures Taken, and Apocalipsis curnfiguris. There is an addendum in which Peter Handke's Offending the Audience is analyzed in terms of Grotowski. The historical development Wiles sees is from a view of theatre artwork as a fixed object whose meaning and even existential makeup remain unchanged, to a view of it as a series of transactions among all its cocreators and corecipients. "The innovation of modern...