Feminist Theater Practice: A Handbook by Elaine Aston (review)

520 REVIEWS in them, even if that place is simply, for the moment, as an on-looker" (IS). This demand for an audience to be "present" is not new: it has been a central objective of avant-garde artists for many generations; but, on the other hand, with every new contribution to this admirable tradition, there are refinements and further invention. Ron Vawter, whose Wooster Group work has been profoundly influential for Etchells, is quoted and interviewed at length here. In the gesture of a mentor, or the voice of experience offering what he can to the "new breed." Vawter observes that there comes a time when all a performer's "bravura" must give way to a performance that lends the audience "gaps" of reception and thereby places more emphasis on their imagination. In this gap, the performers and audience become "true collaborators. And if you can invent the gap well enough the audience just comes right into there" (93). Certain Fragments creates a wonderful blueprint for the refinement of such gaps, and the theatre of Forced Entertainment promises to offer engaging collaboration to all those willing to play witness. ELAINE ASTON. Feminist Theater Practice: A Handbook. London: Routledge, 1999. Pp. 222, illustrated. $20.00 (Pb). Reviewed by Alln M. Fox, Davidson Col/ege While those of us who study feminist theatre are part of a productive and important critical community, within our own departments each of us may very well be the only person specializing in the topic. Elaine Aston's Feminist Theater Practice: A Handbook can stand for us, then, as a repertoire of strategies to build into those acting, directing, and history classes already incorporating the creation and/or performance of feminist theatre. As I read, I thought also of the student who might be at an institution without a faculty member versed in feminist theatre, and how equally important Aston's book might be for such students as a resource and support during their first forays into this kind of political performance. This study, however, is not useful only as a set of exercises for acting, directing, and generating new material; noting that "since the late 19Sos, feminist theater-making in the academy has emerged as a theoretical field of practice that deserves more attention than it has been given" (5), Aston specifically posits our departments as places where feminist theory and professional practice can intersect to invigorate theatre as a whole. Aston's introductory chapter on the stages in which feminist theatre has been theorized and implemented, then, serves as a foundation to which she continually returns throughout the handbook in building the reasons behind the range of administrative, acting, and authorial choices she subsequently offers to the reader/practitioner. Although highly condensed, hers is an acces- Reviews 52! sible treatment of the shifts in American, British, and French critical thought relative to feminist theatre. (It is worth mentioning that a glossary of theoretical terms at the end of the book serves as a useful complement to this introduction .) Aston schools her reader in diverse feminist strategies, but one never gets the sense that she is simply rendering all things equal on the field of playful pluralism. Because the work to follow offers an integrated consideration of feminist methods - including even some held in less estimation by the materialist thought ·that currently predominates in the field - Aston posits feminist performance as a process that is multifaceted, and thus specifically to be engaged through a careful consideration of context, audience, and agenda. Or, as she frankly asserts, "feminist practice 'steals' from wherever and whatever is necessary to create the desired disturbance" (17). For Aston, it appears paramount that this disturbance use feminist theory and practice to denaturalize and reshape the social constructions of gender that define and oppress women's real bodies. In this way, Aston's work advances the discussion of feminist theatre practice by showing the influence of body criticism upon performance practice. An attention to reversing the "exclusion of drama and theatre from critical and theoretical gender study" is addressed, for example, through Aston's emphasis on "devising" work, a strategy that aims to deconstruct gender categories "where the body/voice or' the...