Drama

Book publishing in American theater and drama—indeed about theater and drama, period—dropped precipitously in 2008. The groaning boards of the book display at the 2008 MLA were very light on American theater and drama scholarship. Entries for the American Society for Theatre Research's Barnard Hewitt prize and for the Association for Theatre in Higher Education Outstanding Book Award dropped by roughly half from the previous year. There were also two noticeable shifts in the nature of books that publishers seem to want on their lists. First, studies of individual playwrights are no longer dominated by work on Eugene O'Neill, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, and Edward Albee. Second, and less encouraging, an increasing number of new critical and biographical studies are intended as introductions or textbooks and are books we might think of as service projects rather than serious scholarship and as lacking a serious research question. Regardless, many of these books are expertly handled, and we discuss them below. Meanwhile, some of the most exciting drama scholarship appears in the major journals.

i Playwrights

In Stone Tower: The Political Theater of Arthur Miller (Michigan) Jeffrey D. Mason reminds us that the liberal politics Miller articulated outside the theater—most famously his refusal to name names to the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1956 and his 1968 participation in the Democratic National Convention as a Connecticut delegate pledged to Eugene McCarthy—did not totally jibe with the rugged individualism he espoused in his plays. Miller was cynical about government and community while imagining "truth and ideals accessible without reference to viewpoint" and "art and politics as mutually exclusive." When he asserted his individual right to stop the Wooster Group's deconstruction of The Crucible (undertaken for presumably liberal and certainly free speech ends), he ironically seemed to fly in the face of his own assertions about the rights of artists. The paradox, Mason points out, is that trying to translate "Miller's values into practical politics suggests that his views were more consistent with the libertarian position than any other." Mason sidesteps questions of government when necessary and pulls back to a broader idea of politics as involving a "contest over access, participation, and issues. … 'Politics' refers to a way of understanding human interaction as expression and implementation of power relations." On that premise, "political theater deals with issues of social power," and Mason is free to investigate power in domestic as well as governmental and community situations in Miller's plays.

Each chapter is a discrete essay on a strand in Miller's oeuvre. "The Political as Personal" investigates the protagonists in All My Sons and Death of a Salesman, who cannot understand a political world outside their own immediate families. This tunnel vision prevents them from seeing "the social machinery that grinds them down." In "The Personal as Political," the male characters in The Crucible cannot conceive of their communities or families except in political terms, worrying primarily about appearances and threats to social structure. The final chapter, "Violence," concludes with a study of the 2002 play Resurrection Blues, which Mason calls "the playwright's attempt to get at the truth of power structures in the worlds of commerce, force, and politics." For Mason the play marks the distance from the 1950s to the early 21st century via the distance from propaganda as the tool of subversives to propaganda as the shame-free tool of the power elite. Again, Miller challenges readers and audiences with the question of maintaining integrity in the face of corrupt political powers even as he offers no answers to forces that cannot be understood in terms of family, church, or community.

Readers wondering about the absence of women in most of the moral decisions in Miller's plays may or may not be satisfied by the chapter simply titled "The Women." Mason states up front that Miller's plays "are about the men … ; the women are there to serve as foils, so Man is the thesis and Woman is the antithesis." Despite Mason's obvious sympathy for women trapped and hurt by their husbands' limited incomes, infidelities...