Drama

No assessment of American drama this year could fail to note two headline-making events in the field: the death of Wendy Wasserstein and the opening of Suzan-Lori Parks’s year-long play-a-day project, 365 Days/365 Plays. These were the alpha and omega of the year, as Wasserstein died in January and the first of the Parks plays opened in November. Could two playwrights have been more different? Wasserstein succeeded in the mainstream as few American women have done (only Rachel Crothers and Lillian Hellman come to mind). Parks’s Fucking A, despite its insouciant Brechtianism, its wild but moving character construction, its compassion for the poor, and its author’s Pulitzer (for the 2002 Topdog/Underdog), is off-limits even in putatively modern colleges and universities simply because the name inspires marketing fear. Wasserstein exasperated materialist feminists because her plays were invariably set in a world of white privilege and peopled by anxious careerists mysteriously able to deliver Neil Simonesque one-liners while maintaining the sort of only-in-the-theater chic one associates with, say, Philip Barry. Parks still irks African Americans who find her phonetic spelling, nonrealistic worlds, and abstract considerations of history to be irrelevant to “the black experience.” Sometimes it is strategically advisable to underplay the fact that one loves both of them. Good playwriting comes in multiple forms, speaks to multiple audiences, and requires different sets of interpretive muscles for directors, actors, and critics. No news there. Where are great playwrights shaped? Apparently at Mt. Holyoke College, classes of 1971 and 1985.

Prominent themes that recur through the year’s work are reconsiderations of gay and lesbian practitioners and praxis throughout American theater; fresh readings and excavations of work by African Americans; and rethinkings of radicalism in American theater and drama from several eras.

i Playwrights

Susan Glaspell is becoming a prime contender for the title “America’s most written-about female playwright.” She has been the subject of three full-length critical biographies in the current decade alone (most recently Susan Glaspell: Her Life and Times by Linda Ben-Zvi; see AmLS 2005, pp. 431–32) and is obviously the raison d’être of the Susan Glaspell Society. Kristina Hinz-Bode’s contribution to our understanding of the playwright’s work boldly challenges the widely shared notion that the plays are, foremost, efforts at feminist intervention and expression. Rather, in Susan Glaspell and the Anxiety of Expression: Language and Isolation in the Plays (McFarland) Hinz-Bode focuses on two kinds of language that Glaspell used in counterpoint: language that clearly points to something beyond itself (the “representational system” or “symbol model”) and language “as constitutive articulate contact,” which claims that the “world is linguistic,” with talk creating our communities and world via interactions. The latter sets limits on the former, hence the tension in the plays. Hinz-Bode’s project is to show that Glaspell’s oeuvre is preoccupied with the problem of conveying clear meaning from one mind to another while simultaneously insisting that it is only our interrelationships and communities that make us fully (and messily) human and put us in a position to forge social change.

Hinz-Bode’s boldest move is her insistence that neither community formation nor self-actualization is exclusive to women in the plays. Consider Glaspell’s best known play, Trifles (1916). While the female characters figure out in the course of negotiations through language whodunit and why, creating community through talk is not exclusively a female concern in the play. Farmer Hale is disciplined by the other men for being too talkative, too interested in day-to-day work, and for mentioning that he—not any woman in the play—suggested to the taciturn skinflint John Wright that the two men’s families might go in on a party line telephone together. It is the women in fact who have been guilty of Glaspell’s cardinal sins: solitude and silence. In both Bernice (1919) and Alison’s House (1930), Glaspell’s famous absent main character allows for a staging of how people are known and remembered through the construction of others via...