The End of Humanism: Writings on Performance by Richard Schechner (review)

Book Reviews 455 In Julian Wasserman's essay on "The Pitfalls of Drama," the question of definitions does come up, in fact, as part ofthe Absurd texture ofAlbee's plays. Definitions are not semantics as such. however, and words seem to deflect from insights. I really do not see how we can view the play better by being told that for Julian, "the relationship between the model and the replica, as opposed to the relationship between God and the world, is semantic" (p. 48). Is the model-replica not a paradox and an expanding image, the play's Chinese-box visual aid? Thomas P. Adler's "The Pirandello in Albee" was the essay I read with greatest interest, since the Absurd, I am convinced, must be approached with the Pirandellian dialectic in mind. This piece, I feel, has infinitely more potential than the author was able to realize. But it also produces interesting parallels and displays good reading of both the Pirandellian and Albeeian texts. Other essays in the volume include Virginia Perry's "Disturbing Our Sense of Well-Being: The 'Uninvited' inA Delicate Balance," Matthew C. Roudane's "On Death, Dying, and the Manner of Living: Waste as Theme in Edward Albee's The Ladyfrom Dubuque," LeonardCasper's piece on Tiny Alice, and articles by Mary Castiglie Anderson, Philip C. Kolin, and Liam O. Purdon. Richard E. Amacher's book EdwardAlbeeis a revision ofhis 1969 Twayne edition in which the author includes a new chapter on six of eight new Albee plays. The work is still a good introduction to Albee, since it covers biographical and critical ground, and deals with the plays in an easy way, giving students, especially, a chance to get into the subject. There are excellent summaries of action and plot, and the kind of detailed analysis that is bound to attract students who find Albee's style difficult at first. Still, the book has its drawbacks: the very things that make it useful in teaching and in introducing Albee to readers who do not know his work or are not familiar with the Absurd style make the presentation less than satisfying for others who are looking for something critically viable in this difficult area. The book is an excellent beginning, and within those limits it works well. There is a Selected Bibliography as well as an Index. ANNE PAOLUCCI, ST. JOHN'S UNIVERSITY RICHARD SCHECHNER. The End of Humanism: Writings on Performance. New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications 1982. Pp. 128. $18.95; $6.95 (PB). Even if this collection of essays gathered from PAJ and other sources were reappearing untouched, they would still be worth reading again, because of the energy, immediacy, and sheer informational weight ofRichard Schechner's work. But in fact they have been heavily reedited, both in content and style, to acknowledge and respond to criticism generated from their first appearance. They differ from the originals in the same way one performance differs from another: changing moods, expressions, audience, even the lighting of the season, alter the theatrical/literary event from moment to moment. The analogy of Schechner's writing to theatre is full of possibilities. Like the solo performances he treats so well in these essays, Schechner's essays are one-man shows, as raw, honest, and entertaining as Spalding Gray's solos, and as complex yet personal Book Reviews as Richard Foreman's theatre pieces. Through the dense lists of fading groups, through the untranslatable Indian jargon, through the woven histories of a movement come and gone, the man presents himself in the open. There is something admirable about Schechner's careful walk between frankness and tact as he discusses the transformation Of The Performance Group into The Wooster Group and the gradual usurpation of his directorial power by Elizabeth Le Compte. When the first essay, "The Decline and Fall of the (American) Avant-Garde," appeared in two parts in PAl, many mistook Schechner's dangerous premise for a self-serving whine against his own departure from TPG. Irate "experimental" groups reminded him of their existences; Schechner admits that many groups stay together, some "for fund-raising reasons," but insists, "the parade passed, with reverberations from ever more...