Conversations with Edward Albee ed. by Philip C. Kolin, and: Conversations with Arthur Miller ed. by Matthew C. Roudané, and: Arthur Miller by June Schlueter and James K. Flanagan (review)

Book Reviews 321 contrived and facilely achieved. That they have largely lost their mythic significance is taken as evidence that Williams's traditional pattern has "reached exhaustion," leaving only such self-parodies as Kingdom of Earth in its wake. In its truncated form, Thompson's final chapter is likely to elicit more contention than consent, yet this does not diminish the worth of her overall critical approach as applied to the major plays or of her many suggestive observations along the way. THOMAS P. ADLER, PURDUE UNIVERSITY PHILIP C. KOLIN, ed. Conversations with Edward Albee. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi 1988. Pp. xxx, 223· $26·95; $15.95 (PB). MATTHEW c . ROUDANE, ed. Conversations with Arthur Miller. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi 1987. Pp. xiii, 394. $24.95; $14.95 (PB). JUNE SCHLUETER AND JAMES K. FLANAGAN. Arthur Miller. New York: Ungar 1987. Pp. xx, I7I. $16·95· Two earlier volumes in the Literary Conversations Series. under the general editorship of Peggy Prenshaw. have already devoted themselves to dramatists, both of them Southern: Lillian Hellman and Tennessee Williams. Now, the University Press of Mississippi has added two others to that list: Philip Kolin's Conversations with Edward Albee collects twenty-seven of the approximately 125 interviews the playwright has given, spanning the quarter century from 1961-'1986, while Matthew Roudane's Conversations with Arthur Miller reprints thirty-nine interviews covering the four decades from 1947- 1986. Kolin begins his "Introduction" by quoting Albee's skepticism about the practice of interviewing writers: "I think it's really a waste oftime. . . . I get a little disturbed by the concentration upon the writer rather than what he writes. . . . what a writer thinks about his own craft - [is] very private, and it's best that most writers don't think about [it) consciously.... Interviews are a mess" (p. vii). And one of Miller's interviewers (Rust Hills) in Roudane's volume extends this uneasiness to the audience of these mostly occasional pieces: "Well, you know, interviews have kind of run their course. I mean, everybody's sick of interviews: the people who get interviewed, the readers, maybe even the interviewers" (p. 207). By the time that each editor has added his own apology for the repetitions that "inevitably" appear in such collections - authors, after all, especially when addressing different forums, can be forgiven for plagiarizing from themselves - readers have perhaps been sufficiently forewarned about over-dosing. (But what's a conscientious reviewer to do?!) Kolin follows up his "Introduction," which succeeds admirably in suggesting the flavor ofboth Albee's personality and ofthe selected "conversations," with an unusually complete chronology of the dramatist's career. The sources of Kolin's material are wide-ranging, with a tilt in the direction of the hard-to-come-by, including transcrip- 322 Book Reviews lions of several broadcasts. A solid handful of the interviews - the ones by William Ranagan (from Paris Review), Guy Flatley, Mark Anderson and Earl Ingersoll, Kathy Sullivan, and fellow-playwright Terrence McNally - warrant the permanence that republication confers. Sections ofa few others - those by Tom Donnelly. Jeanne Wolf, Alan Rich, and Allan Wallach - deserve easy accessibility; unfortunately, the editorial policy governing this series precludes presenting ex.tracts, so one has to take the proverbial dross with the gold. (Nor has the press provided very careful copyediting for either of these two volumes; distracting errors, including the inability to spell "playwriting" correctly, occur at the rate of once every twenty or twenty-five pages.) Unfortunately. too, for all his stylistic variety and technical virtuosity as a dramatist, Albee is something of a Johnnie-one-note - or at best two-or-three-note - throughout these interviews, though two of these recurrent refrains are, assuredly. vital to a proper awareness of his intention. The one that isn't is his constant railing against the theatre critics, admittedly grossly unsympathetic to and even ignorant of Albee's intentions in his more recent plays, who, with some kind of personal ax to grind, build up a reputation, perhaps prematurely, only to destroy it later on. They are indicative of a commercial enterprise that tries to level the theatregoers' experience down to safe entertainment. Instead of giving the public just...