A Guide to Critical Reviews Part I American from O'Neill to Albee by James M. Salem (review)

1967 BOOK REVIEWS 319 the individual" for the way each has sacrificed others for its own survival, is his strongest statement to date about man's failure to love; his one last hope is his ability to perceive this awful truth about himself and others and to continue to live. In his perception of the human condition Miller is more akin to Anderson than to Williams whose plays are an "extension of one man's individual psychology." SIGNI FALK Coe College A GUIDE TO CRITICAL REVIEWS PART I AMERICAN FROM O'NEILL TO ALBEE, by James M. Salem, New York, The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1966, 181 pp. Price $4.50. Professor Salem's Guide is the first of a projected four-part book which will include reviews of musicals, British and Continental drama, and screen-plays. The present volume lists the reviews of plays by fifty-two dramatists and is com~ plete with the exception of plays by playwrights whose work appeared before 1920, the beginning date of the bibliography. Professor Salem's sources are American and Canadian periodicals and the New York Times. The limits are thus established and the productions reviewed, therefore, primarily New York productions . There is no reference to scholarly journals for which such bibliographies are more readily available. For the student and the teacher interested in the immediate reception of a particular stage presentation Professor Salem has provided a distinct service. The volume is, within its defined limitations, very usable and may also help clarify those qualities which distinguish the more immediate reviews from a currently emerging body of dramatic criticism in America. WALTER J. MESERVE University of California, Santa Barbara A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ACTING, by Garff B. Wilson, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1966, 310 pp., illus. Price $6.95' On the first page of his General Introduction, GadI B. Wilson admits that he has undertaken a "hazardous project," that the evidence on which he bases his remarks is "sometimes sketchy, usually subjective, and always second-hand." Having pointed out the dangers, he plunges into his subject and comes up with a book which is a clear indication that he should have listened to his own warning . Since the twentieth century is huddled into the last fifty pages, most of which deal with film stars, Wilson's book is primarily about nineteenth-century actors and what he has to say about them is neither very informative nor very interesting . The book is divided, first, into periods, which Wilson introduces with summary material that sets the theatrical scene. These notes are necessarily brief but they do not need to be quite as bromidic as Wilson makes them ("The introduction of talkies in 1927 caused a major revolution in the film industry "). Within periods, he attempts to sort actors into schools: heroic, classic, emotionalistic, personality, comic. The terms are never very clear. He defines classic "to indicate a manner of performance 'of the first rank, perfect in its way, a model of its kind'." Van Heflin's pseudo-Method Eddie Carbone in A View from the Bridge would suit that definition, but such a performance is plainly not what Wilson has in mind. In so far as the vague schools take on definition, the actors never seem very comfortable where he has placed them. Fanny 320 MODERN DRAMA December Janauschek, one of the classic ladies, is described as "intense, powerful, heroic," which makes· her sound as though she ought to belong with Edwin Forrest and the rest of the heroic boys. Matilda Heron, one of the emotionalistic ladies, is described in such naturalistic terms that she sounds as though she ought to be with Minnie Maddem Fiske as a pioneer of contemporary acting. If he could convey some genuine sense of an actor's style and technique, however, it would make little difference in what school he placed him. For the most part he fails. Wilson's sketches of the various actors, which range hom sixteen pages (for Mrs. Fiske) to a few lines, are uncomfortable mixes of biographical fact and critical quotes. Occasionally a quotation actually conveys something, as when John R. Towse explains Richard Mansfield's use of falling inflection, but most of the...