Urban Drama: The Metropolis in Contemporary North American Plays by J. Chris Westgate (review)

Linkages among literary works, authors, and urban settings are in numerous ways familiar. One might easily be reminded, for instance, of the Paris of Henry Miller, the Los Angeles of Joan Didion or Raymond Chandler, the Venice of Henry James—or, in the movies, the New York of Woody Allen. In drama, compared with the novel or film, such connections are rarer, perhaps, although they have existed for centuries. What would Restoration comedy be, after all, without its ties to the truewit culture of seventeenth-century London, including the particular locales where figures such as Mr. Dorimant or Mr. Horner live, dine, and go to the theater? More recently, playwrights such as Luis Valdez, David Mamet, and David Lindsay-Abaire, in dramatizing the environs of Los Angeles, Chicago, and Boston, have offered dramatic angles of vision that, along with those in cinema and narrative fiction, assist in providing readers and audiences with the cultural, architectural, tonal, and political perspectives that to some degree compose our imaginative conceptions of such cities.

In Urban Drama, J. Chris Westgate adopts a perspective on the relations of theater to cityscape that is not as familiar or culturally ingrained as the examples above. Westgate sets out to characterize what he calls the "sociospatial ambitions" of a selection of fairly recent plays that for the most part are set in the embattled, fractured, or ghettoized urban situations of Los Angeles and New York City. Thus the book has a set of potentially important premises, and it does offer some keen perceptions. Westgate's methodology, in brief, is to read his case-study plays against a range of theory (cultural, sociological, and architectural, for the most part) while considering background on the plays themselves—initial and subsequent productions, authorial conversations, and a selection of reviews. His aim is to look closely at the drama of the urban setting in connection with the sorts of disruptions that have characterized American (for the most part) cities in recent decades, upheavals that often have to do with race or, in direct relation, the fragmenting of cities into nationalized neighborhoods demarcated by privilege (or lack of same) as well as by racial identity or status. The result is a mix of perspicacity and laboriousness, as the writing provides enlightened perspectives but is at the same time mired in its own processes, especially in the sort of background (and for these purposes, unnecessary) research that one associates with a dissertation's regulated thoroughness. Urban Drama could, in short, be lighter on its feet and smarter in the bargain.

Jose Rivera's Marisol and Tony Kushner's Angels in America are assessed vis-à-vis the implications of their respective urban contexts in the first chapter, with particular attention to homelessness and resonances around the early AIDS crisis, reflected in New York City as well as nationally in the 1980s. Here and elsewhere in the book, Westgate is skillful in depicting how schisms in urban space are reflected dramaturgically in the structures of plays. He does well, too, to emphasize how contestation of urban geography plays out in the lives of characters as well as in the organization of a particular play's action. With respect to Marisol, and with the political (mayoral) campaign against the homeless as background, the author supplies a particularly pointed inquiry into how "[i]deology, geography, and epistemology converge in and about the urban landscape of New York City" (31-32) and of how control of public spaces often reflects violent oppositions. While New York, with its economic strata and heterogeneity, is unlikely ever to become a "tidy" city in the sense of conformity to any shared sense of what is in or out of place, there is pointed commentary here on how drama can reflect powerfully the situations of individual lives in the face of a city that is monolithic in both size and agency.

In the case of Angels in America...