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Book Reviews incoherently. Its pasted-on postscript about Soyinka adds, as finale, a dollop of presumably de rigueur multiculturalism. Admirable book jacket, though. EILEEN ASCHER, NEW YORK CITY TECHNICAL COLLEGE OF CUNY HENRY J. SCHMIDT. How Dramas End: Essays 011 the German Sturm lind Drang, Biicllller, Hauptmanll, and Fleisser. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press 1992. Pp. t92. $39·50. Henry Schmidt had just begun working on the revisions of his manuscript for How Dramas End when he learned of his tenninal illness. Undaunted, he was able to complete the revisions for three of the seven chapters before.his swift and untimely death. Three of his colleagues at Ohio State University, Richard Bjornson, Leslie Adelson, and Michael Jones, completed the task of editing this work and it was published as originally planned. This is fortunate, because the essays it contains represent the broad range of Henry Schmidt's interests in the theater and the best of his scholarly work. I make this distinction because he not only researched and published interpretations of dramas, but he also had translated dramatic works and was an active participant in numerous stage productions throughout this career. In all of his theater-related activities, Schmidt revealed a bias both for "epic theater" and for plays that were controversial or not even staged in their day but which were discovered by later audiences and thought to be too "modern" for their own time. He was drawn for this reason to the "open" dramas of the Sturm lind Drang, to BUchner's plays, to the milieu depictions of Gennan naturalism, to Brecht's epic theater and its aftermath. Common to all of these movements and authors onc finds the element of rebellion against the constraints of middle-class German society or protest against specific social injustice. Many of these texts also graze on the darker side of the human comedy and broach subjects such as sexuality, decadence, nihilism, existential anxiety, economic exploitation, social reform, or prostitution. Because he focuses on "open," epic plays that often treat ongoing social problems, their "endings" seem arbitrarily constructed to him and therefore of special significance in the interpretation of such works. In the general introduction to this study of specific Gennan texts in their historical context, Schmidt offers "a descriptive typology of endings based on a survey of dramas from the Greeks to the present" (4). He argues that the endings of plays are always artificial, if not misleading. since the closure they represent is attained by the contrived resolution, the suppression of the Olher, or the marginalization of rebellious voices. In this typology, he proposes contrasting pairs of endings: celebration (rebirth of the community) or lament (collective grief, individual resignation); irony/parody (multiple levels of simultaneous meaning) or silencing (elimination of alternatives); and utopian/dystopian projections or the reestablishment of a temporarily disturbed social order. Within these categories, he analyzes various modes of endings: deferred, Book Reviews 277 multiple, tableaux-like, call-for-applause, moralizing, and didactic. His theoretical framework concerning the need for endings and the difficulties playwrights often encounter when creating them is written in a lucid and engaging style and it should appeal to a general audience. Schmidt defines the task of the drama critic as sustaining "an ending's multitude of significations, unmasking its power to legitimate dominant interests while delineating its utopian potential to anticipate a resolution of conflict unrealizable under present circumstances" (32). In order to set this principle into practice in his individual studies. he poses the question of why the pLays end when they do and in many cases provides one or more alternative endings. Each play is introduced and set in its historical context for the non~GellTIanist reader, and the discussion is framed in such a way as to be of general interest. The individual pLays treated are relatively unknown 1 0 an English~speaking audience, even if the author may be familiar: Gerstenberg's Ugolillo (1768), Goethe's Stella (1776), H.L. Wagner's The Child-Murderess (1776), J.M.R. Lenz's works, BUchner's Danton's Death (1835), Hauptmann's The Weavers, and Fleisser's Soldiers ;nlngols/adt (1926-28/1968-70). Owing to the untimely death...

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