Staging Place: The Geography of Modern Drama by Una Chaudhuri (review)

352 Book Reviews UNA. CHAUDHURI. Staging Place: The Geography ofModern Drama. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995. Pp. xv, 3tO. $34.50 Staging Place is a course in 20th-century Western theatre and drama taking the reader from Strindberg, Ibsen, and O'Neill, to Pinter and Shepard, and on to Ping Chong, Caryl Churchill, Maria Irene Fornes, Spalding Gray, Henry David Hwang, Adrianne Kennedy, Tony Kusher, Eric Overmyer, Stephen Poliakoff, Jose Rivera, Ntozake Shange, and George C. Wolfe, wilh cameo analyses of numerous others included. The glue that binds is what Chaudhuri has labelled "geopathology," the 20th-century theatre 's "characterization of place as problem," and this century being the "American century," her concentration is on geopathology in America. The catalogue of playwrights Chaudhuri discusses should be enough to replay a sense of the epic nature of this work. Add to that sense the equally epic-invoking nature of the thesis - geopathology. The problem of place extends to domestic issues of the nature of home, questions of exile, matters of homewreckings, homecomings and homebuildings, complexities of refugeehood, and the sustaining paradoxes of a multicultural "place." While America is a clear focus, its invasive cultural matrices affect and effect other cultures as well, creating a universal - not just national- problem of place. Hence the inclusion of plays by Pinter, Poliakoff, and others. This summary gives you a good idea of how important this book could be if done well. Not only is it done well, but I would recommend that the University of Michigan Press quickly put this work in paperback because I think it would make an excellent secondary text for theatre and drama courses on any number of modem and contemporary topics. A certain sophisticated "theatre shorthand" may on occasion inhibit undergraduates , but the reward would nonetheless be worth the effort. For the seasoned theatre scholar Chaudhuri's worle will be a refreshing reintegration of and expansion upon numerous themes and approaches evident in scholarship today. Readings of each of the numerous texts are detailed, stagecraft is integral to her discussions, philosophical and cultural underpinnings are clear and insightful, and the overall picture she provides reveals unexpected points of contact throughout a vast range of the modem and contemporary canon (and noncaoon). . Ibsen, Strindberg, and O'Neill are used to outline the modernist struggle with place and ,ts general response to iliat struggle, exile. Discussions of the failed homecomings of Pinter and Shepard ensue, from which the further revisioning of the nature of "home" progresses into a cultural and linguistic matrix that Chaudhuri argues is negotiated by a variety ofdisparate plays and pnlctitioners. Home as concept replaces home as place, a shift her selected playwrights work to make concrete by confronting and articulating the essence of an array of cultural notions of home. Classic realism, naturalism, and ironic realism are among the culturally-inscribing forms Chaudhuri confronts; "ecotheatre" is an approach she endorses, a term she initially applies to the work of Spalding Gray and expands to embrace muIticulturaltheatre efforts in general and Kushner's Angels in America in particular. It is a theatre that challenges "a negative theater ecology that pervades the theater of this century" (8 r). Ch.audhuri outlines Book Reviews 353 many of the virtues of the negative theatre ecologies of Pinter, Marnet, and Beckett, but she chooses to move to a frontier of hope epitomized in the multicultural theatres of African, Latino, and Asian America, not to advocate some expanded version of, say, Afrocentrism, but to reveal that the multicultural experience is the root experience of all Americans, a point to recall and build upon rather than to deny, and struggle to erase. Place is a problem that resists resolution in OUf cultural flow. Chaudhuri shows us how the theatre place has cryst3IJized the problem of geographic - or any other sense of - place, and suggests a positive movement in both landscapes toward resolution. WILLIAM W. DEMASTES, LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY, BATON ROUGE JOHN BULL. Stage Right: Crisis and Recovery in British Contemporary Mainstream Theatre. New York: St. Martin's Press 1994· Pp. 251. $39.95. In Stage Right, John Bull is conscious of the departure he has made from New British Political Dramatists (1983...