New Plays USA ed. by James Leverett (review)

ace than will be found elsewhere in the book: ". . . Ido not believe that metaphysics is absorbed through the skin, but that wisdom can be nurtured through every perceiving sense, including 'the conventional sense.' " Unfortunately , this comes at the end of the preface, and the chapters that follow do nothing to illuminate Cohn's intriguing premise, unless she is saying that her work will not be fanciful. A book about theatre from 1960-1980 should stretch the imaginations of its readers as much as that period in theatre history stretched the perimeters of the form. Mignon Smith Benzene. P.O. Box 383, Village Station, N.Y., N.Y. 10014; $3.50. Zone. P.O. Box 733, N.Y., N.Y. 10009; $2.50 Recent issues of Benzene and Zone, New York avant-garde tabloids, have featured texts of work by the Wooster Group and Mabou Mines. Zone No. 7 (1981) includes the group's Point Judith, accompanied by sections from Elizabeth Le Compte's 1978-80 notebooks, remarks by the performers, designer and filmmaker on making the piece. The most interesting comments are Le Compte's on the male and female roles, and use of the space. Another Wooster Group text, the controversial and remarkable Route 1 & 9 of last season, appears in Benzene 5/6. Though it is important to have these scripts published, documentation is somewhat incomplete without the play-within-the-play section (Long Day's Journey Into Night and Our Town, respectively) to juxtapose with the group's own new work. Zone also published Wrong Guys, a detective novel by Jim Strahs who also wrote the "Oil Rig" section in Point Judith. Strahs has a wonderful talent for stage language and hopefully he'll write his own evening of theatre sometime soon. Ruth Maleczech, who directed and adapted Strahs' writing for the Mabou Mines production, did a superb job editing the novel for the stage. These publications are worth having for their record of how some theatre groups are creating stage material. Bonnie Marranca New Plays USA. Edited by James Leverett. Theatre Communications Group, 375 pp., $17.95 (cloth); $9.95 (paper). TCG's New Plays USA is a handsomely made book which contains six of the best known plays of the past several seasons from Off Broadway and nationwide non-profit professional theatres. Included are: A Prelude to Death in Venice, by Lee Breuer; an adaptation-translation of Gogol's Dead Souls, by Tom Cole; FOB, by David Henry Hwang; Still Life, by Emily Mann; The Resurrection of Lady Lester, by Oyamo; and Winterplay, by Adele Edling Shank. There is an introduction by Michael Feingold, about the character and development of resident and off-off Broadway theatres, and a preface by the book's editor James Leverett, who writes: "It was accidental that 118 we picked a play by an Asian-American, one by a black, two by women, a major new translation, a daringly experimental performance piece, a documentary about the aftermath of Viet Nam and a hyperreal family drama." No need to apologize; the diversity is a strong point. The only thing missing here is a wild card. Most of the plays come from well established theatres and theatre institutions such as the New York Shakespeare Festival, Yale Repertory Theatre, and the American Place Theatre. A play and a place we haven't heard of, or a play excoriated or ignored by critics would have given New Plays USA more vitality, sort of like adding an ornery chromosome to an inbred gene pool. MS The AntitheatricalPrejudice. Jonas Barish. Univ. of California Press, 510 pp., $24.50 (cloth). This hefty volume of over 500 densely-packed pages covers the vast and prolific attacks on the art of the theatre from Plato to our present day. Barish does not so much set out to understand why theatre art (preeminently the art of dissimulation, a sheer artifice carried out by practitioners licensed to fulfill fictive destinies) suffers from the low standing it has among divers arts. He leaves such comprehension to sociologists, psychologists, and culture-watchers. But what he does do is to stake out brilliantly the territory shrewn with acerbic comments by fanatical minds out to rid society...