Vanishing Acts: Theater since the Sixties by Gordon Rogoff (review)

Kevlews wrights as almost a necessary part of his critical enterprise. In discussing Gu~e 's Lydie Breeze, for example, Bigsby looks to novelists: "The American novelist has always felt obliged to take America head on, to express the essence of a country born out of myth and astonished at the sheer scale of its ambition" (38). Gu~e's Nantucket plays take a similarly epic approach to nineteenth-century utopian experiments and their ideals and failures. ]n discussing Kushner's construction of America, Bigsby writes of an "American notion of creating your own mythology unconstrained by models from the past" (t (2). He states that "Angels in America presses exuberance in the direction of pretension and portentousness but Kushner insists on its legitimacy" and cites Kushner as saying, "I felt that the outrageousness of the project I was attempting ... [itsJ pretentiousness and grandiosity ... was my birthright as an American" (114; ellipses in Bigsby). For this reviewer, the most impressive element of Bigsby's work is its scope. He is exhaustive in his treatment of each author's oeuvre. He frequently champions lesser-known plays by the authors, prompting me to read plays I'd skipped in the past. Read Guare's Lydie Breeze. Try Norman's Getting Out. Bigsby will tempt you to pick up a Richard Nelson play. I was never disappointed. GORDON ROGOFF. Vanishing Acts: Theater since the Sixties. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. Pp. 306. $37.50 (Hb); $17.95 (Pb). Reviewed by Stephen J. Bottoms, University of Glasgow Gordon Rogoff's niche in American theatre history has long been secure. A key advisor and dramaturg to Joseph Chaikin's Open Theatre in the 1960s, an Obie award-winning director in his own right, a Village Voice theatre critic in the 1980s and 1990s, a professor of dramaturgy and dramatic criticism at Yale (and before that, at Brooklyn College and the City University of New York) his incarnations have been many and various. The temptation, therefore, might to be review this retrospective collection of his writings with the kind of celebratory praise he certainly deserves, especially since, as we finally discover on the last page, the book signals "[aJn exit [...J from dramatic criticism" (29 1), presumably into a well-earned retirement. As an array of pugnacious, witty, and always insightful commentaries on a wide selection of topics, Vanishing Acts merits loud applause. Yet Rogoff is a critic who never shies away from saying exactly what he thinks (in the book's final piece, for example, he reduces both The Icemall Cometh and Death of a Salesman to ridicule with a few carefully targeted sentences). It would thus be a betrayal of his own hardnosed critical principles not to raise a few pointed questions about this book. The first issue is, quite simply, the title, because with Rogoff repeatedly REVIEWS insisting - in his self-reflective pieces on the act of criticism - on verbal precision and the perils of sloppy Ihinking, il is difficult 10 avoid Ihe glaring fact thaI Vanishing Acts: Theater since the Sixties is so inaccurate a title as to constitute false advertising. Anyone turning to it, as I did, expecting some kind of critical overview of key developments in "theater" (in New York? America? the world?) from the 1970S to the 1990S will be sorely disappointed. No less than sixty-four of the seventy-eight pieces included here date from the narrow window between 1985 and 1992 when Rogoff was most active as a Vii/age Voice reviewer. Most of the resl date from later in the 1990s, while the entire decade of the 1970Sis represented here by just one piece - a "how I spent my summer vacation"-style write-up of Rogoff's trip to London in 1977. Even the mosl ardenl admirer would find il difficult 10 view Ihis as a balanced picture of Ihe era purporledly in question. The book would be more convincing if pilched as a colleclion of snapshots from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, and there are some landmark pieces from Ihat period covered here - Angels in America, Serious Money, and Ihe Wooster Group's L.S.D. spring 10 mind (although Rogoff saw...