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Byrd Hoffman group, which can be seen as more of international than American repute, one can say that in this book alternate theatre in America is roughly fifty percent West Coast and fifty percent East Coast, with not much in between. Shank gives as much space to the San Francisco Mime and El Teatro Campesino ("Theatre of Social Change") as to the Living and Open Theatres ("Primary Explorations"), as much to California's Snake Theatre and Alan Finneran's Soon 3 group as to R. Wilson or R. Foreman. Similarly , there is a detailed account of nearly a dozen S.F. Mime dramas and seven or eight Teatro Campesino pieces but only of four of Foreman's more than two dozen plays. True, agit-prop drama lends itself to discursive commentary , but in a book like this a reader wants to know more about what is behind complex theatre like that of Wilson and Foreman. In sum, useful as the book is, it labors under several difficulties: limited space is foremost, given the abundance and difficulty of some of the work. Next is the restriction to what has been seen (and approved). And finally, related perhaps to the previous difficulty, there is the problem of emphasis, so liable to misinterpretation. Kenneth Bernard Farce: A Historyfrom Aristophanesto Woody Allen. Albert Bermel. Simon & Schuster, 464 pp., $20.75 (cloth). Farce is an expansive, well organized and often amusing examination of the genre. Bermel's study spans the history of farce from its origins in ancient Greek theatre to its modern manifestations in film and television. In Bermel's introduction, "Recognizing Farce," he discusses the unreal nature of the farcical world, the cruelty of its humor, and the distinctions between farce and related genres, among other subjects. He also explains the importance of the figure of Dionysos in the origins of Greek farce and takes a novel look at the farcical elements of The Bacchae. The book's second major section, "Identifying Farce," is the most useful for students and researchers. Here, Bermel analyzes specific historical farces, beginning each chapter with a synopsis of a farce followed by commentary. The first chapter of this section, "A Hurried Tour from Greece to the Twentieth Century," contains so much interesting and useful material that its compression is unfortunate. Among the different subjects treated are farce in Medieval liturgical drama and the theatre of Moliere. According to Bermel, "Farce came into a new prominence in the past seventy years thanks to early Hollywood." Consequently he devotes no less than five chapters to film farce. To read about the antics of screen farceurs is undeniably entertaining, but Bermel's enthusiasm for comic stars such as 116 Mae West and the Marx Brothers leads him to present their careers in too much detail. The number of pages devoted to the relatively short history of film farce seems excessive when compared to the brief treatment of stage farce. Bermel also examines modern stage farce, both "popular" and "intellectual ," featuring Neil Simon and Harold Pinter, among others. There are also chapters on current film and television farceurs such as Mel Brooks and Monty Python. Other playwrights examined include Feydeau, Wilde, Chekhov , Pirandello, Shaw and Wilder. Farce is best when treating its subjects in historical perspective-Molibre or Mel Brooks, the overview of the genre is an amusing and informative one. Kevin Duffy New American Dramatists: 1960-1980. Ruby Cohn. Grove Press, 186 pp., $7.95 (paper). In New American Dramatists: 1960-1980, Ruby Cohn takes an encyclopedic look at the playwrights of the past two decades, categorizing them by type and summarizing the major works of each with attention to content, style, and development of craft. Although the book is informative and carefully researched , one wishes it contained more ideas. Shouldn't a book about a period in art imagine a connection between the work and the world? Sometimes New American Dramatists moves too fast to make a connection , sometimes it reads as if it were transferred directly from index cards. For example, at the beginnng of the chapter "Black on Black: Baraka, Bullins , Kennedy," Cohn states: "When the word 'Black' dislodged 'Negro,' a radical self-examination was forced upon...

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