Public Issues, Private Tensions ed. by Matthew Roudané (review)

230 Book Reviews MATIHEW ROUDANE, ed. Public Issues, Private Tensions. New York: AMS Press 1993. Pg. 332. $45.00. Public Issues, Private Tensions contains seventeen illuminating essays by the most respected scholars of modem drama, who grapple with the civic function of theater and its relationship to the spirit of the individual in American drama from 1945 to the present. Although the critics use a variety of contemporary critical approaches, from performance theory to feminist theory, they treat theater in the way the Greeks would have applauded, emphasizing the inextricable connection between the political and the personal. The volume developed from the Fall 1988 issue of Studies in the Literary Imagination, which contained essays by Professors Adler, Blau, Esslin, Hart, Jacobi, Martin, Miller, and Weales. Among the newly commissioned essays are those by Ruby Cohn, William Gruber, Leslie Kane, Karen Laughlin, Philip Koli~, Anne Paolucci, June Schlueter, Patricia Schroeder, and Susan Harris Smith. This review will focus on the later group. Ruby Cohn has done careful research on Arthur Miller and Lillian Hellman in the fifties . While their plays The Crucible and The Children's Hour reflected McCarthy's repressive political climate, while both refused to name names before HUAC, and while both were assimilated Jews, sympathetic to left-wing causes, they had uneasy public and private relationships with each other. Cohn's essay derives its strength from the compelling facts that she has uncovered: "During the run of The Crucible, the Rosenbergs were executed for passing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union, and on that day, Miller's audience refrained from applause for his play, which closed on an execution" (79); Kazan's decision to name names cost him the job as director of The Crucible. Furthermore , she discusses The Wooster Group's deconstruction ofThe Crucible, which appropriated Timothy Leary's record "L.S,D," about the counter-culture of the 1960s and "dedramatized " The Crucible by "treating it as a lecture demonstration about a cultural icon" (82). Miller protested, and Cohn takes issue with Miller's insistence on protecting the integrity of his play. In doing so, she raises a provocative, ethical question about "the bold, often confusing" work of an avant-garde theater group (84). Karen Laughlin moves the collection in a feminist direction with her essay about Megan Terry's Simone and Denise Hamilton's Parallax. In both plays, she observes, women resist gender limitations, dedicating themselves to knowledge, justice and equality (155). At moments Laughlin's argument contains too much jargon, but her essay is valuable because it illuminates two significant plays that have not received much attention. Susan Harris Smith pulls the feminist thread further in her essay about misogyny in the plays of Shepard, Mamel, and Rabe. She makes an important connection between the sexism in these plays and their dramaturgy. Furthennore, Harris attributes the commercial success of these playwrights to the domination of a patriarchal theater system (127). Yet she fails to note that both Shepard and Rabe have stepped out of the limelight in recent years. More important, however, she points to the racist and imperialist attitudes that these plays foster and reflect. Similarly, Leslie Kane's examination of Book Reviews 231 Horovitz's The Widow's Blind Date convincingly concludes that this play is Horovilz's "most powerful treatment of guilt and degeneration in America" (140), intelligently reading rape as a metaphor for "humiliation, hostility, and degradation." Gruber's essay on Fornes, too, discusses Fornes's sense of impending cultural crisis while asserting that she redefines her characters' identities as public rather than private. Despite Harris Smith's conviction about the marginalization of women, both Philip Kolin and Patricia Schroeder celebrate the political plays of Emily Mann. Kolin, however , is not really accurate when he asserts that Mann has earned a respected place in the American theater for her documentary dramas. In fact, her plays are rarely taught or produced. Nevertheless, both critics make a compelling case that we ought to know her documentary dramas because they deal with such cataclysmic events as the Holocaust, the Vietnam War, and the Dan White Trial in a domestic context. Schroeder astutely points to Mann's Brechlian, filmic, and musical techniques, links Mann...