Avant-Garde Drama: A Casebook, 1918–1939 ed. by Bernard F. Dukore, Daniel C. Gerould (review)

Avant-Garde Drama: A Casebook, 1918-1939. Edited by Bernard F. Dukore and Daniel C. Gerould. Thomas Y.Crowell, 592 pp., no quoted price (paperback). Albert Bermel CONTENTS: 1. Plays: Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, The Water Hen; Ernst Toller, Man and the Masses; Bertolt Brecht, Saint Joan of the Stockyards; Yurii Olyesha, The Conspiracy of Feelings; Luigi Pirandello, Each in His Own Way; e.e.cummings, him; Michel de Ghelderode, Chronicles of Hell. 2. Documents: Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, "Theoretical Introduction to Tumor Brainard" and "The Analogy with Painting"; Kenneth Macgowan and Robert Edmond Jones, 'Masse-Mensch-Mob Man"; Bertolt Brecht, "A Short Organum for the Theatre"; Yurii Olyesha, "The Author About His Play" and"Notes of a Dramatist" and "Alternate Ending to The Conspiracy of Feelings"- Luigi Squarzina interviewed by Gino Rizzo, "Directing Pirandello Today "; Luigi Squarzina, "Notes for Each in His Own Way "; Andre Breton, "First Surrealist Manifesto"; J. A. Boiffard, P. Eluard, and R. Vitrac, "The Surrealist Revolution"; Antonin Artaud, "No More Masterpieces." Readers will kindly pardon the dissecting act as I split myself three ways - into reviewer, teacher, and shameless influence-peddler - for the purpose of paying tribute to this anthology. Having spilled out the contents above, the reviewer portion of me can now lazily point out that they add up to a daring and varied sample of interwar drama fortified by the batch of documents, by the editors' preface, introduction, analytical notes for each play, and five pages of well-chosen bibliography. The book came out originally in 1969 under the Bantam imprint. Like most mass-market paperbacks it was liable to fall to bits with conscientious use, or fly to bits if you opened it outdoors, or, if you tried to take it off a shelf after a year of rest, to part from its cover. In this Crowell edition it is fatter, the paper looks whiter and not guilty of "show-through," and , praise God, there are real margins so that the text can be appreciated in its entirety. In this "quality" format it will no longer have to compete for survival in toy and stationery stores with westerns, Gothic novels, crash diets, recipes, kitten calendars, and Snoopy compendia adnauseum. 68 When examining an anthology, even one that is close to being a model of its kind, a reviewer is expected to raise doubts and gripes, that is, to push his own preferences; and so I dutifully complain that we have represented in this exhilarating array of comedy, farce, tragedy, blasphemy, and lunacy one Polish drama, one Russian, two Germans, one Belgian, one Italian, and one American (our most ambitious native work), but none French-when it was France that thoughtfully gave us the term avant-garde. As compensation of sorts, Artaud, Paul Eluard, Roger Vitrac, and Boiffard are recruited for the documents. But Aragon or Cocteau or Salacrou could have contributed a play at least as "avantgarde " as Olyesha's. Still, if the book could not be enlarged to house a Frenchman, I would not like to see any of its present occupants evicted. Compiling an anthology, anyway, is not always a question of what you want but what you can afford to borrow, steal, or have translated. (The permissions departments of certain publishers are notoriously refractory. Which is to say, greedy: if you consent to an outrageous fee you can hook any play you fish for.) The teacher portion of me declares that this is a first-class selection for the undergraduate classroom and, probably, for high-school juniors and seniors. I have gone on using my Bantam edition until it consists of fragments perilously united by Contact and masking tape. Students can be reassured, if they care about such matters, that the editors' commentary keeps effortless pace with recent scholarship and criticism; while the general introduction, entitled "Explosions and Implosions: Avant-Garde Drama Between World Wars," provides a conspectus of political and artistic changes that helped to provoke and nourish the dramatic experiments of the period, which Dukore and Gerould call "the second waveout of three in the 20th century that washed over the international theatre and reshaped it. Although the editorial essays deal expertly with the plays' innovations and are nothing...