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Book Reviews 545 Berkowitz's linear text, but the ideas one encounters - despite the errors - make it more rewarding. The errors betray speed of composition and sloppy proofreading, by both Bigsby and Cambridge: of Tennessee Williams's plays, for instance, Bigsby talks of Laura's crippled foot (40)'" Brick in Sweet Bird of Youth (44), and the house built over a cavern in Rose Tattoo (44). Throughout he assumes familiarity with the plays discussed, not stopping for plot summaries before commenting, often alluding to minor plays by title only, and rarely dating plays so that their sequence is not always clear nor their exact social context. Bigsby begins by noticing the general absence of consideration of drama from the remarks of cultural or literary critics. Talking of O'Neill's late plays, he insightfully discusses the characters as actors who self-consciously play roles, using other people's language to "evade the self," and maintains the image of the performing self in many of his discussions. While he says in his preface that he does not aim for comprehensiveness , some of his inclusions and omissions are curious: he discusses Hanay Geiogamah , Theodore Ward, Lee Breuer, Ruth Wolf, and Eve Merriam (the last two on page 266, though they are not in the index), but neglects William Gibson, Robert Anderson, John Guare, Terrence McNally, Lee Blessing, etc. Lanford Wilson, A.R. Gurney and Arthur Kopit get only passing mention; lesbian drama gets a two-paragraph discussion, but William M. Hoffman, Larry Kramer, and Harvey Fierstein are missing. In Cat on a Hot Tin Roof Bigsby assumes the "reestablishment of a relationship" between Brick and Maggie (56), which is tenuous at best in the published versions of .the play; he says that George in Who's Afraid denies history (134), a generalization for which I would want some substantiation; and he calls George a novelist (134, 137), while George insists that he's an autobiographer, with evidence in the play to substantiate that claim. And while Bigsby mentions the literary and American historical allusions (George and Martha as the Washingtons) in the latter play, he does not discuss Nick as Nikita Krushchev nor the geopolitical or mythological allusions - nor what these allusions contribute to the play. While Bigsby speaks of Albee's being "tendentiously oblique" (138) in later plays, he doesn't identify it in Who's Afraid. These are, however irritating, minor points. Berkowitz's American Drama of the Twentieth Century is the better, more complete reference text, with a focused case to make about domestic melodrama, Bigsby's Modern American Drama 1945-I990 the . harder-to-follow but better analytical text for wide-ranging discussions of the playwrights and movements of the past half century. PETER L. HAYS, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, DAVIS ANDRE HELBO, J. DINES JOHANSEN, PATRICE PAVIS, ANNE UBERSFELD. Approaching Theatre . Advances in Semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991. Pp. xiv, 226, illustrated. $39·95· Although a variety of theoretical approaches are represented in this collection, semiot": ics dominates, taking up most of the book and being exemplified through a variety of Book Reviews techniques, both theoretical and practical. Perhaps the most interesting and valuable feature of this book's treatment of the subject is the emphasis on its application to performance analysis, a traditionally vexed project. A lengthy theoretical description of theatre semiotics by Johansen, Svend Erik Larsen, and Ane Grethe 0stergaard is supplemented by Ubersfeld's chapter on "pedagogics," which presents a detailed program for in-class analysis of both text and performance, and by three questionnaires devised by Ubersfeld, Helbo, and Pavis to assist students in performance analysis. One of these questionnaires is then used by Pavis to analyze a 1984 performance of Vitez's production of The Seagull, an approach that yields the more informative of the two production· analyses presented in the section titled "Three Applications." Pavis's chapter on "Theatre and Media," Marvin Carlson's historical survey of theatre spaces, the treatment of dramaturgical analysis in a chapter by Lars Seeburg and an analysis of As You Like It by Seeburg and Johansen are also essentially semiotic in their approaches. The treatment of semiotics is not without its limitations, however, some of which...

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