Understanding Contemporary American Drama by William Herman, and: Understanding Edward Albee by Matthew C. Roudané (review)

Book Reviews Sons and Salesman. Furthermore, the authors' position (echoing the dramatist's own) that Miller should not be construed as a realistic playwright needs further bolstering before it can be convincing; although the~comrnent "that, after AllMy SOilS, Miller was not content to create another realistic play" (p. 135) appears downright wrongheaded to this reviewer, it may partly be their failure adequately to define realism by any means other than simply equating it with the Ibsenite well-made play. Even their more defensible judgment that Miller "has been underrated as an innovator of dramatic form" could have been made more tellingly had they performed more than a cursory analysis of the stylistic properties and non-representational devices in the plays. In short, while it is not always, or maybe even not often, true that authors are the best commentators on their own works, in Miller's case his remarks in Conversations - as well as in Timebends are altogether more stimulating, despite the redundancies, than most anything that others have so far written. THOMAS P. ADLER, PURDUE UNIVERSITY WILLIAM HERMAN. Understanding Contemporary American Drama. Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press 1987. Pp. 271. $19.95: $7.95 (PB). MATTHEW c. ROUDANt. Understanding Edward Albee. Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press 1987. Pp. 221. $19.95: $7.95 (PB). William Herman's Understanding Contemporary AmericanDrama is exactly the sort of book that undergraduate students flipping through the card catalog would seize upon for simple access to difficult material. What the student will find there is a reinforcement of values that I hope most university professors are striving to excise. The book's jacket cover speaks to its content: four white male playwrights are blocked into a double-matted frame with one black male playwright superimposed over them - Ed Bullins tidily enclosed within his own frame. Herman' s (or the publisher's) cover image is of course an accurate reflection of the condition of American theatre from the perspective of the dominant discourse. Herman's book has five main chapters, one each on Sarn Shepard, David Rabe, Lanford Wilson, Ed Bullins, and David Marnet. In his final chapter he allots a few pages to Adrienne Kennedy and Marsha Norman - a token black woman, a token white woman - and to other noteworthy decentralized subjectsJack Gelber, Amiri Baraka (who frequently cannot avoid "the tinny sound of propaganda"), MhuJ Kopit (avoided as a main subject because Herman cannot find a unified dramatic vision in his work), and Jean-Claude Van Itallie. Herman is not altogether unconscious of his racist, sexist, and classist depiction of the contemporary American theatre. In his preface he acknowledges that some critics "will quarrel" with his choices and explains some of his omissions, but does so without any awareness of the socio-political context for their absence. Baraka, he says, "has hardly been heard from in the 'So's," and Kennedy "seems to have been discouraged Book Reviews 325 from continuing to work." With characteristic illogic Hennan proceeds to defend his selections on the basis of choosing "those writers whose work depends mainly on language rather than theatrical imagery." This in itself is not only illogical but also an astonishingly naive division of language and visual metaphor that seems to ignore virtually all of modern and post-modem theory of the drama. Thus Hennan justifies his inattention to Malina, Beck, Chaikin, Schechner, Breuer, Ludlum, Foreman, and Wilson because their work is not "precisely amenable to analysis with reference to a text," The reader will hope that Professor Herman implies here that these writers' plays are not readily available in local bookstores rather than that he is making the obtuse assumption that dramatic texts are once and for all to be found on the printed page. Hennan at least admits that his choices confer value, but he rests comfortably with the notion that while other critics and readers will undoubtedly quarrel with his emphases, they "will not be led astray by [his] selections." Who are these readers who will not be led astray? The editor's preface specifies that the audience for this book consists of "students and good nonacademic readers." The book is intended to be an...