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Book Reviews America and elsewhere will find these chapters valuable for their descriptive plot summaries . Other readers will feel reminded and refreshed, not overwhelmed, by Fenn's earnest, appreciative, and not very critical approach. In these war chapters Fenn deals with David Rabe's initiation plays The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel and Streamers , H. Wesley Balk's experience adaptation The Dramatization of 365 Days, along with Amlin Gray's How I Got That Story, and John DiFusco's Tracers. As for homecoming dramas, Fenn includes Rabe's Sticks and Bones, Adrienne Kennedy's An Evening with Dead Essex and Tom Cole's Medal ofHonor Rag, as well as Ronald Ribman 's The Burial of Esposito, Terence McNally's Bringing It All Back Home, and Emily Mann's Still Life. The book's epilogue asks, "Did the theatre merely preach to the converted? Or did it rally disciples to the cause?" Fern waffles and concludes, "The theatre has neither the mandate nor the capability to change the world, nor should it try." Dear, departed Abbie Hoffman.would disagree. In moments of hope - rare in these gloomy nineties so do I. Long live the sixties and seventies in dramatic words and theatrical deeds. EILEEN FISCHER, NEW YORK CITY TECHNICAL COLLEGE OF CUNY DORIS ALEXANDER. Eugene O'Neill's Creative Struggle: The Decisive Decade, 19241933 . University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992. pp. 339· $29.95· Do~is Alexander's introduction to Eugene O'Neill's Creative Struggle is a succinct statement of the complexities inherent in the autobiographical interpretation of any writer's work, especially during formative creative years when the writer is sometimes quite conscious, and sometimes not at all conscious, of the personal nature of the work being created. And, she says, in the case of so philosophical a writer as O'Neill, the problem is further complicated by his "active intellectual life." The motive forces in O'Neill's plays are always powerful, but whether they are primarily intellectual or autobiographical is often difficult to determine; and whereas earlier O'Neill critics (who wrote before the overtly autobiographical Long Day's Journey Into Night) usually settled for the intellectual, many later critics, of whom Alexander is the most recent, have emphasized the autobiographical, though she strives to give the intellectual its due. For Alexander, memory and intellect in the years in question (1924-1933) lead O'Neill through a period of affirmation, followed by one of negation, then to one of renewed affirmation. In all the plays considered, she finds the desire to affirm life, based in part on O'Neill's search for God and in part on Nietzsche's Zarathustra, conflicting sharply with the suicidal despair engendered by the gUilt as'sociated with his adolescent rejection of his drug-addicted mother. In Desire Under the Elms, Alexander finds the tough Puritanism of old Ephraim Cabot in mortal conflict with the life-denying hatred of his guilt-ridden son Eben, who is locked into an essentially incestuous relationship with the. whore-mother figure of Book Reviews 539 Ephraim's new wife Abbie. Eben's suicidal support for Abbie's murder of the baby she has borne with him stands at the end, says Alexander, for O'Neill's mother's souldamning addiction now abetted by O'Neill out of his guilt. Alexander sees a sort of affirmation in the fact that old Ephraim (in whom O'Neill places the essential characteristics of his own late father) and his "hard God" survive, whereas the guilt-ridden lovers will die for their crime. In the plays to follow, Alexander sees a pattern of more certain affirmation. She finds in the complexities of The Great God Brown less the importance of the masks, which she ultimately sees as confusing, than of O'Neill's relationship with his drunken but more genuinely (he felt) creative brother Jamie, figured in the character of Dion Anthony. That Dion dies as the result of having been struck by Billy Brown signifies for Alexander (as for others before her) the playwright's sense of a betrayal of his brother that may have been partly responsible for Jamie's death. As Alexander interprets the...

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