New Broadways: Theatre Across America 1950-1980 by Gerald M. Berkowitz (review)

Book Reviews 399 in the expressionist Act II" of the play with "similar discoveries ... in the expressionist Act Ill" of Red Roses/or Me, "where - though the plaster statue has disappeared - Our Lady of Eblana, herself, reappears in many forms," and when she analyzes O'Casey's language, "with its multiple dimensions and ironies ... far beyond realism to become expressionist in a special way, for it is deliberately reaching, at one and the same moment. both towards the absurd and towards the sublime." Sean O'Casey's Bridge D/Vision is not without its vestiges of dissertationitis, despite its originality and maturity. and Kleiman could easily have kicked away some of the unnecessary props which credit critics of the past with commentaries anyone could have made, One cannot help but wonder at the quotations extracJed from Robert Hogan's The Experiments of Sean O'Casey, a study that surely must contain more valuable contributions than the fatuous value judgments included here. One must also hope that the obvious kind of footnote infonning us that in Ulysses Stephen Dedalus "also speaks of God as 'a shout in the street'" (emphasis added) is not intended as a case of post hoc, ergo propter hoc. And one of the most serendipitously enjoyable typos occurs in the labeling, credited to Brooks Atkinson, of Red Roses as "romatic tragedy" - what great possibilities are conjured up in that romalie! (although a subsequent repetition of the same misprint in "like a romatic counterpart of the cynical Diogenes" does not resonate quite as well). Two small areas approached by Kleiman invite further speculation. A footnote mapping out the dimensions ofO'Casey' s transposition of reality in the labor dispute at the center of Red Roses/or Me, suggested by O'Casey himself, nonetheless brings Kleiman inevitably back to the Dublin lockout of 1913, rather than the Railway Strike of 1911 . And her concern regarding the "strong Ulster dialect" of Foster and Dowzard, "so characteristic of the extreme Orange faction - though there is no indication in the text that they come from anywhere else but Dublin," could probably be satisfied by Alan Simpson's description of the East Wall area of Dublin, pertinent for both plays, with its railway links to Belfast. With a renewed interest within Dublin in unearthing the "realities" of O 'Casey's world, which we can only hope survives the untimely death of Alan Simpson, and the revived burst of innovative criticism found in Carol Kleiman's Bridge o/Vision, the dreary present of O'Casey studies may be modifying into a clearer future. BERNARD BENSTOCK, THE UNIVERSITY OF TULSA GERALD M. BERKOWITZ. New Broadways: Theatre Across America 1950- 1980. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield 1982, Pp, ix, 198, illustrated, $19.50, If, compared with its European cousin, the American theatre was slow in the birthing, it has moved in the past three decades through its delayed adolescence into the fullness of maturity. Gerald Berkowitz traces the growth process in this well-presented overview, which includes looks at New York's Broadway, off-Broadway, and off-off-Broadway, and regional theatres across America. The survey stops with 1980, on a note of anxiety occasioned by the new administration's plans to cut budgets in the arts, the only sour chord in an otherwise optimistic rendering of the state of theatre in America. Berkowitz's study steers admirably clear of the kind of provincialism that acknowl- 400 Book Reviews edges only New York theatre. With Joseph Wesley Zeigler (Regional Theatre, Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1973), he sees New York as the only possible site for a national theatre - indeed, its theatres collectively represent the centrality associated with such an institution - but he gives ample credit to the growing role of professional regional theatres in major cities throughout the country. Berkowitz points out that Broadway dominated the American theatre at midcentury, a situation modified by the efforts of such people as Margo Jones in Pasadena, Nina Vance in Houston, Zelda Fichandler in Washington, D.C. , and Herbert Btau and Jules Irving in San Francisco. Berkowitz moves from one regional theatre to the next, remarking on the principals and productions, culminating his discussion in comments about the beginnings...