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The Political Theatre of David Edgar: Negotiation and Retrieval. By Janelle Reinelt and Gerald Hewitt. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011; 324 pp.; illustrations. $99.00 cloth, e-book available.

Janelle Reinelt and Gerald Hewitt undertake an investigation of the British dramatist David Edgar's work as a playwright and public intellectual. They find him to be a consummate political writer, concerned with how people organize and govern themselves, the tensions between global and local political movements, and the gap between utopian visions of political society and the limits of human ability to implement them. The title, the authors explain, gestures toward the negotiation required in the practice of politics and the retrieval of motivation from the depths of failure that is a hallmark of Edgar's work. Their arguments are supported by Edgar's writing (scripts, speeches, and book reviews), theatrical reviews, and the authors' own experiences at workshops and performances of Edgar's plays. Reinelt and Hewett read these materials through the lenses of political philosophy and theatre studies.

The introduction includes an exploration of what is meant by the terms "political theatre" and "state-of-the-nation plays." Arguing in the second chapter that the body of Edgar's writing, including his plays, journalism, and speeches, must be read intertextually, the authors take up Edgar's extra-dramatic interventions. In the remaining four chapters, Reinelt and Hewett delve into 12 of Edgar's plays, selected based on their depth of political engagement and organized thematically: epic and naturalist theatre; racial conflict and the state; leadership, isolation, and community; and Europe after communism and the negotiation of regime change. This text stands as a useful resource for scholars and practitioners interested in the intersections of politics, society, and performance.

Uncloseting Drama: American Modernism and Queer Performance. By Nick Salvato. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010; 240 pp. $40.00 paper, e-book available.

There's something inherently queer about closet drama, or at least, that's what Nick Salvato sets out to establish in this densely woven, richly articulated text. Closet drama, or texts written for private reading or performance rather than the stage, has surfaced in different eras and regions, but Salvato finds particular distinction in modernist closet drama. Braiding the evolving conception of closet drama, trends in modernism, and queer theory (particularly epistemologies of the closet), he understands closet drama not as a form or category, but rather a conceptual tool. His approach to closet drama as a mode instead of a genre exposes tensions between writing and staging drama while simultaneously eschewing any single resolution.

Salvato takes a similar approach to "queer," deploying it not as an identity marker, but as a descriptor for the act of border-crossing and for both the interstices between categories and the transgressive resistance to categorization all together. In part, this resistance stems from the instability of closet drama as a genre, with its various approaches to privacy, theatrical aesthetics, and the relation between script and performance. Closet drama, he finds, is always half on and half off the stage, and this liminal position challenges the aesthetics and attitudes of traditional theatre. Salvato locates the modernist renewal of closet drama in its queer potential, arguing that these pieces operate outside Wagner's concept of the total work of art, and in so doing, rethink drama's treatment of identity categories in post-Freudian society. Salvato delves into the closet dramas of Ezra Pound, Louis Zukofsky, Gertrude Stein, and Djuna Barnes, illustrating the common queer energies in their work and the ways in which these texts reveal trends in the modernist era. His chapters "Half In and Half Out," "Fronting Pound," "Bottoming Zukofsky," "Topping Stein," and "Backing Barnes," are also concerned with issues such as dominance and submission, sex and violence, and family. His research includes archival findings never before published and interviews with directors and performers of the texts he analyzes. The book provocatively complicates received notions of the closet, modernism, and closet drama.

Spit Temple: The Selected Performances of Cecilia Vicuña. Edited and translated by Rosa Alcalá. Brooklyn: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2012; 264 pp.; illustrations. $18.00 paper ($15...