Inner Landscapes: The Theater of Sam Shepard by Ron Mottram (review)

Book Reviews 149 toward group solidarity based on altered self-perception). She concludes the chapter with a beautifully articulated discussion of the differences between revolutionary and classical theatre, particularly in what each expects from its audience. The second main chapter of the book concerns Theatre of Experience. "a theatre of truth, ... seek[ing] to integrate all aspects of black life, particularly the most neglected ones" (p. 108). Defining the role of this theatre as that of cultural integration, Fabre discusses a range of plays thematically and then attends to the work ofseveral writers in more detail: J.E. Gaines, Melvin van Peebles, Ed Bullins, Edgar White and Paul Carter Harrison. Although Fabre is clearly more comfortable with the Militant Theatre, her discussion of the Theatre of Experience, and particularly her reading ofindividual texts, is unfailingly insightful and suggestive. In her final chapter, "Theatre and Culture," and in her conclusion, Fabre provides a theoretical overview for her study. Basically, she proposes that the Black Theatre of the period performed several crucial political and cultural functions: restoring and making sense of the black community's mythic and historic past, and contemplating and apprehending its present. She argues that because theatre is, essentially, performance, an event in time, it has particular cultural and political transformative power. As impressive as I find Drumbeats, Masks, and Metaphor, several aspects of the work leave me uncomfortable. In her first major chapter, "The Historical Precedent," Fabre explicitly and implicitly discounts the history of Black Theatre prior to her period, which she takes as beginning in 1945. However, asking similar questions of earlier Black Theatre reveals that black dramatists and critics have long been conscious of the theatre's potential and its impact on black audiences, and in ways as essentially congenial to Fabre's definition of the issues, even if their strategies differed from those of the playwrights of the Militant Theatre. The second reservation arises from my own methOdological predilections. J find that the semiotic approach creates some disturbing anomalies. For example, Fabre's semiotic analysis of street life, by implication, suggests a need to validate its people and culture as dramatic subject. It thus enters into a debate, whieh she in fact mentions, that is as old as Afro-American literature; only the language has changed. The effect is to perpetuate dialogue with a bourgeois world view that Fabre's ideological perspective discounts and that the Black Arts Movement resolutely overcame. My quarrel in this regard is not, of course, with Fabre alone. However, these reservatons ought to deter no one interested in theatre from reading Drumbeats, Masks, and Metaphor. It is a stimulating contribution both to AfroAmerican studies and to studies ofAmerican drama, and Melvin Dixon's translation ofit is exceptionally fine. LESLIE SANDERS, ATKlNSON COLLEGE, YORK UNIVERSITY RON MOTTRAM , Inlier Landscapes: The Theater ojSam Shepard, Columbia: University of Missouri Press 1984. Pp. 172. $7.95 (PB). Sam Shepard is among the pre-eminent playwrights of the contemporary American ISO Book Reviews theatre, At forty-two years of age, he has had more [han forty plays produced in New York City. Some of these have been published in the five collections of his theatrical scripts which are now in print. He has been honoured with numerous awards, including a Pulitzer Prize in 1979 for Buried Child, and has continuously attracted the auention of both scholars and mainstream media. Yet, despite the prolific output, the honours and widespread critical acclaim, Ron Mottram's Inner Landscapes: The Theater of Sam Shepard is the first full-length study devoted solely to Shepard's work. One wonders why. given the number ofscholars who have written about Shepard's art, this is the first sustained·study. It is the rich theatricality. the play of visual image and sound (and, in True West, smell - when a loaf of bread is toasted on stage), which has captivated the attention ofcritics. This attraction, however, raises the problem of how the critic speaks of plays which demand that the audience not simply comprehend but also apprehend the texts. Although in some ways Shepard's plays seem relatively conventional (for example, there are narratives). when the critic constructs an interpretation, the plays seem to...