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Book Reviews 125 (p. 56). Bergman bas staged A Dream Play twice (in 1970 and 1977 - be now considers his 1963 TV production of the playa comparative failure) and The Ghost Sonata three times (in 1941, 1954, and 1973). Particularly rewarding are the pages the Markers devote to the latter work. In their illuminating comparative analysis of these three successive deconstructions ofStrindberg'5 text they show how Bergman gradually freed himself from Reinhardt and Molander and arrived at his own, extremely controversial way of reading this elusive play. This engaging and well-written book also contains an extremely useful , annotated chronology of all of Bergman's stage productions between 1944 and 1981 (pp. 235-248). The main text is carefully documenled and indexed, and the book is supplemenled by a selected bibliograpby. The fact that nearly balf of the titles listed in the bibliography are in Swedish or Danish indicates that much of the material is now being made available to a wide audience for the first time. The most important of this book's many virtues is the objectivity with ,which the authors recreate Bergman's "explanations" of the plays he directs. Because it offers such a comprehensive insight into one great director's way of reading three great playwrights, it opens the reader's mind to exciting new possibilities for interpretation and for playability in some of the world's greatest plays. BARRY JACOBS, MONTCLAIR STATE COLLEGE C.W.E. BIGSBY. A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-CemuryAmerican Drama, Volume Two: Williams/Miller/Albee. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1984. Pp. viii, 355· $39·50; $14.95 (PB). This study of Williams, Miller, and Albee is the middle volume in Bigsby's impressive introduction to twentieth-century American dJ1!l11a. Volume One ranges through this century's first forty years of theatre and playwriting, from Provincetown through Thornton Wilder and Lillian Hellman, pausing for 100 pages over Eugene O'Neill. Volume Three moves beyond Broadway into the alternative theatres of the 1960s and after, granting special coverage to America's most prominent postmodern playwrights, Sam Shepard and David Mamel. Like everything else Bigsby has written on the American - or British - theatre, the series is rich in scholarship, sharp in perception, and a pleasure to read. At a time when deconstruction characterizes the literary field, Bigsby synthesizes the social, the psychological, and the artistic iDlO a remarkably coherent analysis of the writing that dominated the American theatre in the post-war years. Drawing upon the dramatic texts and Memoirs, Bigsby fashions a portrait of Tennessee Williams as outsider, continually attempting, both personally and artistically , to accommodate physica1 fragility, homosexuality, and clinical depression. At a time when dispossession and alienation characterized America in general and the South in particular, Williams was reaching not into cultural ideology but into the destructive tensions of his own life, creating from them personal and emblematic characters of 126 Book Reviews loneliness. dislocation, and despair. But Williams's characters display a singularity of courage as well, in their refusal, finally. to yield. As the playwright remarks in Memoirs, "high station in life is earned by the gallantry with which appalling experiences are survived with grace." Bigsby's analysis of Arthur Miller also looks to the connection, both by coincidence and design, of the emotional lives of Miller's characters and the "psyche of a culture." Though more ideologically conurutted than Williams's characters, Miller's defend values that are instinctively felt rather than learned. Despite wide acceptance ofMilleras the intellectual of the American theatre, Bigsby contends that the playwright moves his audiences in part through an insistent liberal impulse but primarily through emotional truths. There is a nostalgia in Miller's plays, as in Williams's, that laments lost values and promotes an idealism frrmly fixed in America's myths. IfWi11iarns's and MiHer's plays long for a pre-lapsarian America - in which Blanche Dubois relied on the kindness ofstrangers and Willy Loman peddled his wares on a smile and a handshake - so also do Edward Albee's. The voice of a generation for whom alienation and solipsism were household words, Albee began his writing career in a rejection of the wealth and materialism of a...

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