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Reviews 339 (1938), arguing in favour of the play's theatricality and for the concerns it shares with the Dadaists and surrealists: loss of faith, nihilism, and a preoccupation with the technologies of war. Chapter five discusses Stein's final dramatic works: Yes, Is for a Very Young Man (1944-45) and The Mother of Us All (1945-46). These are Stein's most conventional works. Bay-Cheng's theory is that the two plays split Stein's career in two directions: "[Olne play expands upon Stein's previous experiments in language and dramatic structure , while the other reaches into the previously unexplored world (for Slein) of representational drama" (93). The final chapter traces the afterlife of Stein's drama, exploring its production history after her death (the volume features a useful chronological list of professional productions of Stein). Mama Dada does not claim to be comprehensive, and given Stein's vast dramatic corpus of over one hundred operas and plays, individual readers will register omissions and oversights. There is very little discussion of Stein's early plays, and Bay-Cheng argues that Stein's "best dramatic writing emerges only after her second more adventurous film experiment in 1929" (35). Mama Dada is a homage to Stein that carefully avoids the more controversial and troubling aspects of her personality and politics, and it ends by declaring that "ever in the vanguard," Stein "is truly 'the mother of us all'" (t40). Not all readers would want to share that parentage. LYNN C. MILLER, JACQUELINE TAYLOR, and HEATHER CARVER, eds. Voices Made Flesh: Performing Women's Autobiography. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003. Pp. vii + 322, illustrated. $55.00 (Hb); $26.95 (Pb). Reviewed by Lesley Ferris, The Ohio State University The ambiguous title of this intriguing collection of essays heralds equally ambiguous content. My first thought on reading the title was that the collection focused on women who perform some aspect of their own life narrative. And while there are examples of this in the second half of the book (subtitled "Staging the Seif'), a primary interest - and indeed the practice of two of the editors themselves - is the performance of other women's lives. This first section , entitled "Women's Historical Auto/Biography," offers a series of essays, several of which include actual scripts, about the performance of women from history. Sometimesperformance material is taken from memoirs, diaries, letters , and autobiographical sources, while other times it is taken from what others have said about the woman and melded with the performer's own life material. As a result, there is a good deal of doubling and mirroring that takes place in this collection. The book begins with two introductory essays. In the first, Miller and Taylor provide an overview of the collection and in so doing coin 340 REVIEWS the term auto/biography. This term designates portrayals of "first-person performances of significant historical or literary figures" (5). For the authors, "this kind of historical presentation represents a negotiation between the autobiographical self of the writer-performer and the biographical record of the historical personage" (7). The second essay, by Carver, is what the editors call "a framing essay that addresses critical concerns of autobiographical practice" (5). Carver's piece, "Risky Business: Exploring Women's Autobiography and Performance," provides some of the high spots of autobiographical theory and performance, but her overview reveals the difficulty of compressing such wide-ranging approaches and nuanced considerations in a few pages. One key concern that is absent from such an overview is the historical concept of the actress/self. Female performers had to contend with the long-held belief that male actors were superior. Furthermore they had to negotiate the assertion made by many male writers that far from being creative artists in their own right, they were "natural" actresses. Nietzsche, for example, asked readers of The Gay Science (1881) 10 "[rletlect on the whole hislory of women: do they not have to be first of all and above all else actresses?" (qtd. in Ferris vi). There is a double vision behind such a prejudicial, objectifying view: to work in the theatre profession, actors must be experts at disguise; but because they are...

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