Drama

For the second year in a row, significantly fewer books were published about American theater and drama than during the first two-thirds of the decade. No special topics or themes stand out in 2009, but several books and individual articles show that the Progressive era (roughly 1890 to 1925) remains a popular field for American theater and drama research. Not only do the early works of Eugene O'Neill, Susan Glaspell, and Rachel Crothers fit here, but so do studies that assess plays reflecting the legacy of Reconstruction, a culture-wide fascination with eugenics, the effects of jazz as both music and trope, and silent film's debt to the stage. If this is the most often addressed era in the year's work, race is its most frequently visited broad topic and makes an appearance in several of the year's best studies, which address works by August Wilson, Langston Hughes, O'Neill, David Henry Hwang, and Adrienne Kennedy as well as 19th-century anxieties about blacks, Mexicans, and Irish as racial "others."

i. Playwrights

In John Guare's Theatre: The Art of Connecting (Cambridge Scholars) Robert J. Andreach considers a playwright whose surreal, metatheatrical, and unflinching visions of American culture have thrilled and challenged theater audiences since the 1960s. Andreach uses as impetus Guare's 1992 remark that even in recent scripts he is "still dealing with the issues" that shaped the pieces written in the 1960s, namely, "identity, faith, the desperation it takes people to get through their lives, the lunatic order we try to put on the chaos of life, and, technically, how to get the play out of the kitchen sink and hurl it into the Niagara Falls of life." Predominantly, Andreach traces the presence of the art of connecting in the playwright's work in chronological order: Chapter 2 focuses sequentially on Rich and Famous (1974), Landscape of the Body (1977), Bosoms and Neglect (1979), and Six Degrees of Separation (1990), and Chapter 3 considers Four Baboons Adoring the Sun (1992), Moon Under Miami (1995), and Lake Hollywood (1999). On two occasions, Andreach strategically breaks from this sequential approach. In Chapter 1, The House of Blue Leave (1971) and its sequel Chaucer in Rome (1999), along with Marco Polo Sings a Solo (1973), are read for evidence of the ways that the characters' connections to the past are instrumental in identity formation and how these scripts' connections to the past (i.e., Guare's stated interest in the plays of August Strindberg, Georges Feydeau, Anton Chekhov, and Henrik Ibsen) inform their makeup. Thus the choice to consider the memory-saturated House and Chaucer together is apt both because the latter is a sequel to the former and because it helps illustrate Andreach's notion that many of Guare's characters connect to the past as a way of creating their present identities. Also breaking from strict chronological order is Andreach's consideration of the Lydie Breeze tetralogy. Composed in the 1980s but significantly revised in 2000, these plays are set in the 19th century and take as their subject the history of the utopian movement in America. Andreach's decision to place his consideration of Lydie Breeze in his final chapter works well with his overall design. Because the whole of the study has as an undercurrent of a consideration of Guare's endeavors to connect to American history and the American experience, Lydie Breeze as well as A Few Stout Individuals (2002)—which takes as its central figure a thoroughly reimagined Ulysses S. Grant and is also considered in Chapter 4—function as pertinent examples of the playwright's interest in exploring how contemporary American culture is intricately connected to two concomitant histories: the inculcation of a culture of violence and the failure of utopian aspirations.

Christopher Bigsby has built his career on considerations of American theater and culture in general and Arthur Miller in particular. Given his many thoughtful and thorough deliberations, one might reasonably conclude Bigsby has exhausted Miller as a subject of study. However, with the publication of Arthur Miller, 1915-1962 (Harvard), this view is quickly...