Speaking on Stage: Interviews with Contemporary American Playwrights ed. by Philip C. Kolin and Colby H. Kullman, and: The Critical Response to Tennessee Williams ed. by George W. Crandell (review)

Book Reviews 299 Drawing on Shaw's recently published diaries, his collected leuers, and the works themselves, the biography presents many interesting insights into Shaw's inner life. Shaw's deep suspicion of doctors, for instance, is traced convincingly to his revulsion at the decay of the body; his flight from that fear made him seek the ethereal realm of purity and sunshine (67) - and the porous wool of a Jaeger suit of clothes (105). Less convincing is the speculation around Vandeleur Lee, third member of the Shaw family menage atrois. An incident where Lee drew a moustache on the six-year-old Shaw's face is suggested as only the first of other, more shameful, attacks (20), but no evidence is offered for this supposition. Peters finds numerous incidents which reveal Shaw's feminine side and suggests that he was deeply troubled by doubts about his sexual identity. Dismissing his philandering as "misogyny masquerading as sex" (123) and his pain over Stella Campbell as "wounded vanity" (248), Peters reduces Shaw's pursuit of women to mere posing. His relationships with men are scrutinised much more closely, from his childhood friendship with McNulty to Graham WalJas, who is associated with an ecstatic experience which changed Shaw's vision of himself. The most important relationship, however, is with Harley Granville Barker, whose friendship with Shaw stretched over the first decades of the century, and who brought to life many of the major Shavian heroes. Peters finds in Shaw's Heartbreak House and Barker's The Secret LIfe coded messages that the two playwrights sent from their inner lives to each other. Such biographical commentary reduces the larger impact of the plays to personal writing and diminishes the breadth of both works. Was Shaw homosexual? Probably not. Peters produces so much questionable evidence that a wary reader rejects her thesis in the end. Was he sexually ambivalent? Quite possibly. Peters's most important discovery reveals a consistent presence in Shaw's personality of a hitherto hidden and feminine side, which may lead to a fresh understanding of Shaw's works. L1SBIE RAE. BROCK UNIVERSITY. ST CATHARINES PHILIP C. KOLIN AND COLBY H. KULLMAN, eds. Speaking on Stage: Interviews with Contemporary American Playwrights. Tuscaloosa and London: University of Alabama Press 1996. Pp. x, 425· $44·95· GEORGE W. CRANDELL, cd. The Critical Response to Tennessee Williams. Westport. Connecticut and London: Greenwood Press 1996. Pp. xxxix. 307. $59.95. By their very nature collections of interviews are uneven, especially when conducted by interviewers of variable experience without a common mandate. Of the twenty-six items in Speaking 0 11 Stage eighteen were published between 1986 and 1993 as discrete contributions to the journal Studies in American Drama, 1945- Present. To these have been added eight more: an independent radio interview with David Henry Hwang. now 300 Book Reviews published for the first time, and seven others especially commissioned for the present volume. The latter are not identified, but from their dates would seem to be the interviews with Jack Gelber, Emily Mann, Beth Henley, Tony Kushner, Joan Shenkar, Wendy Wasserstein, and either Terrence McNally or Maria Irene Fornes. The original eighteen, in order of appearance, are: Robert Anderson, Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee (as a duo), Arthur Miller, Neil Simon, Edward Albee, (Maria Irene Fornes?), Adrienne Kennedy, Megan Terry, Jean-Claude Van hallie, Charles Gordone, David Marnet, Albert Innaurate, Romulus Linney, Ntozake Shange, Kenneth Bernard, Tina Howe, Karen Malpede, (Terrence McNally?), and Mark Medoff. A few of the early inlclViews have been brought up to date by supplementary discussions (e.g., Terry. Linney, Howe), but most have merely had more recent data worked into the interviewer 's brief foreword to each item, with Albert Innaurato left unembellished at 1986. Despite many fine interviews, the collection is more uneven than most, so I shall note its weaknesses before appreciating its strengths. At the behest probably of their publisher, the two editors attempt to present Speaking on Stage as "representative of American playwrights since 1945," but the collection has too many major omissions to make such a claim persuasive. There is no Sam Shepard , none of the three important Wilsons (Lanford, Robert, or August), no...