American Drama of the Twentieth Century by Gerald M. Berkowitz, and: Modern American Drama 1945-1990 by C.W.E. Bigsby (review)

Book Reviews 543 ing that has been realistically introduced through the action." Fool for Love most successfully combines the real and suprareal with its ambiguous dreamlike setting and fierce expressionist staging, and its suspension between fantasy and reality. However in the earlier Curse ofthe Starving Class, according to DeRose, suprarealism clumsily cohabits with realism, coming off as "vestiges of an older aesthetic" without context in the action of the play, while in the more recent A Lie ofthe Mind Shepard almost completely loses touch with his avant-garde roots, producing a play in which suprarealism has been replaced by cliched symbolism. DeRose sees hope for a resurgence of Shepard 's dramatic inventiveness in States ofShock, "a fluid, dreamlike event of hypnotic, archetypal images, as full of visual poetry as it is of current politics." While DeRose's overall argument is well sustained, I suspect it doesn't fit so well in the case of Curse of the Starving Class. Here I'd argue that the "strain" between the heightened theatrical reality and the developing realism produces a "conflict" (if it is such) which is "creative." The disjunctive moments of suprarealism, rather than being "discontinuous images without context" (as DeRose contends) seem to me to constitute a productive convergence of naturalistic form and fragmented image (the latter often conceptually at odds with the naturalistic form) which is utterly gripping. Surely these moments are stunning examples of the heightened, shattered reality that Shepard is so superb at depicting. . Overall, however, DeRose's book provides incisive appraisals and deft analyses of Shepard's plays. The book is elegantly written and is a pleasure to read. His discussion ofthe early "lost" plays - such as Cowboys, Dog, The Rocking Chair, and Blue Bitch adds to our knowledge of the Shepard oeuvre, as does his examination of Shepard's lesser-known musical and performance pieces such as Drum Wars. DeRose's examination of Shepard's dramatic strategies contributes much to our understanding of how the plays communicate so powerfully and why Shepard's plays have so profoundly influenced the course of American drama. LEONARD WILCOX, UNIVERSITY OF CANTERBURY, CHRISTCHURCH, NEW ZEALAND GERALD M. BERKOWITZ. American Drama of the Twentieth Century. London and New York: Longman, 1992. 300 pp. $24.95. C.W.E. BIGSBY. Modern American Drama 1945-1990. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992.362 pp. $17.95 (PB). Berkowitz's book is a handy, fairly complete history of American drama during this century, complete with appendices of parallel chronologies of American drama, world drama, other literature and art, and historical events, as well as brief biographies of many playwrights, and several bibliographies, general and particular. Berkowitz's thesis is that "realistic contemporary middle class domestic melodrama" (no commas in the original) is the dominant and essential mode of 20th-century American drama, and he defends his thesis well, although I would prefer to call the plays serious dramas and 544 Book Reviews so avoid the pejorative connotations of melodrama. The book's .strength is also its weakness, in that its survey nature means that few pages and little deep analysis can be devoted to any playwright or any play: post-Depression O'Neill gets nine pages; Wilder gets five and one half. For the most part, Berkowitz's assessments of a play or a playwright are judicious, although he overdoes Odets's contribution to domestic drama. Since he is examining, ashe says, dramatic literature and not theatre, he does not discuss the contribution· made either to the reception or interpretation of a play by its director or actors (except for acknowledging the two endings of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, but not identifying Kazan as the director who demanded the revisions). Berkowitz does, however, repeat the oft-cited distinction between Miller and Williams , that Miller deals with social problems and Williams examines character: "Miller ... us[ed] domestic stories to reflect larger or political issues," while "Williams ... helped to move domestic realism ... toward its new function of illuminating psychological and emotional forces within his characters" (77). (Isn't that what O'Neill was doing in Strange Interlude? nearly twenty years before?) While Miller obviously engages social problems, to credit only Williams with the examination of psychological...