Plays of Impasse: Contemporary Drama Set in Confining Institutions by Carol Rosen (review)

Book Reviews CAROL ROSEN. Plays ofImpasse: Contemporary Drama Set in Confining Institutions. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press I983. Pp. xiv, 325, illustrated. $24. "The dominant image of contemporary drama," writes Carol Rosen, "seems to me to be an impasse, and the dominant way of expressing this core of meaning, at once naturalistically and symbolically, is the total institution." ProfessorRosen's point is well taken. In this lively study of setting and action in fourteen contemporary plays, she focuses on the claustrophobic atmosphere of confining institutions (prisons, barracks, hospitals, asylums) and on the locked-in, hemmed-in characters, seething and impotent, who populate these doleful cages on the contemporary stage. It really is extraordinary that so many of our recent plays have been concerned with characters who are either handicapped, imprisoned, or deranged. The maimed are everywhere: Bernard Pomerance's The Elephant Man, Mark Medoff's Children of a Lesser God, Brian Clark's Whose Life Is It Anyway?, Arthur Kopit's Wings. Hospitals, old-age homes, and lunatic asylums shelter scores of characters in such plays as Peter Weiss's MaratlSade, Peter Nichols's The National Health, John Arden's The Happy Haven, David Storey's Home, D.L. Coburn's The Gin Game, Michael Cristofer's The Shadow Box. Others are confined to prisons or military barracks, as in Brendan Behan's The Quare Fellow and The Hostage, Jean Genet's Deathwatch, Arnold Wesker's Chips With Everything, Kenneth H. Brown's The Brig, David Rabe's Streamers, or John Herbert's Fortune and Men's Eyes. It seems that in the wake of two world wars and in the shadow of a third and possibly final one, the theater today works with symptoms and prison sentences as substitutes for love and fate. But whereas dramatic heroes of an earlier age fell prey to sudden passion or the wrath of gods, the incarcerated suffer by degrees. They get older, sicker, more deeply in trouble with the law. Perhaps it is true that modem audiences no longer will accept the premise of selective blame. If so, violence and illness are potent metaphors for reactive characters and for playgoers who easily understand the nature of collective suffering. 450 Book Reviews What has been the effect of this transposition on the form and vision of contemporary theater? Rosen responds incisively, providing ample illustrations, from Friedrich Diirrenmatt's The Physicists to David Rabe'sStreamers and The Basic Training ofPavlo Hummel. The plays selected for discussion do suggest a variety of responses to confinement, ranging from despair to defiance and mockery. Even so, Rosen demonstrates that in every case these playwrights use the situation ofconfinement not so much to attack specific institutions, but to provide a metaphor for modem experience as a whole. The individual analyses here are penetrating and fresh. We are rewarded additionally by the inclusion of useful production histories and apt descriptions of performances. Particularly striking are the discussions of Weiss's Marat/Sade and Wesker's Chips With Everything. The author's prose style, by the way, is vigorous, even eloquent as the occasion demands. Reading Plays of Impasse therefore is a pleasure. Rosen is especially attentive to staging, for as she indicates, in plays in which the characters are confined to institutions, the set is often the protagonist. She is at her best when discussing scenic design, for instance the Living Theater's production ofThe Brig. the purpose of which was "to demonstrate how the beauty of order is blasphemed by the brutality of the Structure." Rosen undertakes a more thorough investigation of this visceral work than any offered by previous critics. Moreover, her commentary gives us grounds to reanimate Kenneth Burke's conception (in A Grammar ofMotives) of "the Scene/Act Ratio" and to scrutinize anew his far-reaching, brilliant claim that the inevitable outcome of naturalism would be to subordinate the human actor to the backdrop. Inverting the terms ofthe ratio, we are led to recall the Greek and Elizabethan stages with their towering personalities and relatively minimal sets. In her concluding chapter, ProfessorRosen tries to expand the purview ofher study by arguing the proposition that Beckett's Endgame is "a play of impasse abstracted" and as...