Masks in Modern Drama by Susan Valeria Harris Smith (review)

Book Reviews play could bring solvency to the theatre, but how far could Yeats and Lady Gregory let O'Casey's satiric wit go in a government-subsidized theatre? O'Casey left Ireland for good soon after The Plough and the Stars, and left largely because ofthe Abbey's failure to accept his next play, The Silver Tassie. Ironically, the controversy over Tassie involved neither the government censor nor the Abbey's fiscal health. Yeats merely thought it a bad play, because it went far beyond O'Casey's experience. Yeats always felt that when O'Casey got olltside his urban landscape, his dramatic plausibility declined. ARTHUR E. MCGUINNESS, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, DAVIS. SUSAN VALERIA HARRIS SMITH. Masks in Modern Drama. Berkeley: University of California Press 1984. Pp. 237, illustrated. $27.00. First and foremost, Susan Harris Smith's Masks in Modern Drama is awork of profound scholarship, and it is a useful, ifsomewhat esoteric, contribution to dramatic history and theory. Her subject is the use of face masks in approximately 225 Western plays, from Vbu Roi to the present. Somewhat unnecessarily, she justifies her study on the basis of the extensive use of masking by the major modem playwrights, theoreticians, and directors, and because masks are part of the larger modernist movement and are central to both text and performance. From a primarily psychological and sociological perspective, she divides the use of masks into four categories: "satiric and grotesque; ritual, myth, and spectacle; dream images and psychological projections; and social roles assumed and imposed" (9). Her three stated goals are to document the use of masks, to detennine their use in reinterpreting the traditional and in dramatizing the contemporary, and to examine the problem of transfonning literary metaphor into theatrical image. While she admirably accomplishes her first two aims, she has certain weaknesses with her third, a problem made more apparent because her approach is thematic rather than chronological. Smith evinces a tendency to catalog rather than to synthesize: she reaches various conclusions about the nature of masking in each of the four types, conclusions that tend to be descriptions rather than a unified theory about the nature of masking in modern drama. Similarly, many of her analyses transcend the limitations of the particular type she discusses, a problem she recognizes. But this ambiguity is probably inherent in her scope and in the very nature of her subject; she observes that, paradoxically, the historical and cultural function of masking is individual liberation, but masked on stage, the character is limited and defined by the quality of the mask he or she wears. Nonetheless , her categories are logical and convenient means of dealing with so large a body of material, and they do much to illuminate the myriad uses of an important dramatic device, one which "allows for efficient, visual expression of abstract ideas" (2). While grounded in a solid understanding of the history of modern dramatic theory, Smith's arguments are often based on readings of relatively obscure plays, which could Book Reviews be a problem for the general reader. She also uses many specific productions as examples, and while her emphasis remains on the conceptual and theoretical, her discussions often approach theatrical rather than dramatic history. In this, she points out the problem of translating text into performance, if frequently slighting an explication of the nature of the problem. As with much dramatic criticism, the focus seems dual and unreconciled, both theatrical and literary. Despite generalizations in her discussions of types, her observations about the individual plays are always insightful. In her discussion of EquIls. for example, she argues persuasively that the play may suggest a new mode of ritual theater. The nature of the masks in this work. she argues, translates "an inner conflict into a visual emblem, a ritual," literalizing the anthropomorphic nature of the horses and their representation ofa moralistic and repressive human, not animal, element. The masking projects a psychological state and elevates it to the stature of individual tragedy (85-88). Usefully illustrated, Masks in Modern Drama also provides an appendix of production stills. This, along with a production chronology and an exhaustive bibliography, gives (unher evidence of the admirable scholarship of the...