Theatre, Society and the Nation: Staging American Identities by S. E. Wilmer (review)

520 REVIEWS Catholic, nationhood/dependency, religion/class, etc.) on a purely personal level as violent assaults on individuality with little political analysis, or present them in O'Caseyan terms as signs of an insoluble socio-political pathology. In a brilliant critique of Friel's much acclaimed Translations (1980), the author lays bare the inherent anti-republicanism of the play. The problem with Friel's play is its insistence on defining linguistic identity as an ontological phenomenon, rather than a political or semantic one. The book ends abruptly with a short analysis of Frank McGuinness's Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching towards the Somme (1985), another demonstration, the author points out, of "ideological conformity to the political interests of the state" (223). Here too, however, a subversive potential emerges, this time in the play's strategic use of sexual nonconformity as a way to deflect the pressures of state-imposed social and political conformity. Readers who have little knowledge of Ireland's political or theatrical history will find this study difficult to digest; those who have a standing interest in the field - whether in Irish politics, theatre, or the arts in general - will find in it an absorbing argument that triggers numerous new questions. The book is a treasure for its discussion of scores of plays. Pilkington's criticism often adds an important alternative reading to the critical canon of key moments in Irish cultural history. The author also unearths pearls of plays that deserve renewed attention, like Teresa Deevy's King ofSpain's Daughter (t935) and Katie Roche (t936). Pilkington's predominant focus is a view on" the centre, however. and while the centripetal power of Ireland's Abbey Theatre is legendary, the periphery might yield equally important material for the charting of power and dissension . Provincial theatre, amateur theatre - a formidable force in Catholic Ireland - and modernist groups like the Gaiety Theatre hardly enter into the author's horizon. This opening up might have made the scope of the book unmanageable. It could. however, have been introduced in a concluding chapter , now missing altogether. Still, Theatre and the State in Twelltieth-Century Ireland: Cultivating the People makes for enthralling and, for many readers undoubtedly, controversial reading. It is a book that cannot be ignored in future scholarship on Irish theatre. s. E. WILMER. Theatre, Society and the Nation: Staging American Identities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. vii + 281. $60.00 (Hb). Reviewed by Kurt Eisen, Tennessee Technological University In this study of the politics of American theatre, S. E. Wilmer outlines various periods from the colonial era to the present day while describing how some Reviews 52 1 key dramatic texts or theatrical events either renected or sought to undennine prevailing notions of being "American." His method could not be confused with New Historicism. Rather than deriving a sense of an era primarily from its cultural texts, each of the book 's seven essays begins with a conventional summary of major events and connicts of the period, informed by cultural theorists such as Homi Bhabha and Benedict Anderson, and then proceeds to discuss selected plays or a particular cultural performance within that context. In spite of some shrewdly chosen and well-researched texts and contexts, Wilmer's historiographic approach does not sufficiently exploit theatre's own potential as a mode of historical understanding. Wilmer has made some useful choices in beginning his survey with such trenchant colonial dramas as The Paxton Boys, POllleach, and The Candidates , with an especiaJly revealing look in the second chapter at William Dunlap 's political motives in revising the pro-Federalist Andre to the more Jeffersonian The Glory ofColumbia in the early 1800s. Yet he also makes an abrupt transition in chapter three from this period to the Ghost Dance controversy that led to the Wounded Knee massacre of 1890. To be sure, Wilmer does provide the necessary background for his discussion of the Ghost Dance as a para-theatrical political movement of great historical and ethnographic importance, but without attempting to find any sense of connection to his concerns in the previous two chapters. He seems unaware, for example, that the view of Native American ritual as "American theatre" has been...