The Theatrical Gamut: Notes for a Post-Beckettian Stage ed. by Enoch Brater (review)

Book Reviews ENOCH BRATER. ed. The Theatrical Gamut: Notes for a Post-Beckel/ian Stage. THEATER: Theoryffext/Performance. Series. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press 1995. Pp. xi+304. illustrated. $44.50. This volume is the latest in the Theater: Theory/Text/Performance series. Enoch Brater, the series' editor, has compiled this collection, a "disguised" festschrift for Ruby Cohn - disguised, because instead of overt, and repetitious, praise of one of the most innovative and enduring critics and scholars of the past thirty-five years, we have here a more subtle, and hence persuasive, tribute to Cohn's contribution to our understanding of theatre. Every essay acknowledges, either directly or indirectly, indebtedness to her works, thoughts, and presence. Following the sixteen essays, Joseph Chaikin has supplied the Afterword, an affectionate lener to Cohn; and the collection includes Cohn's translation of Bernard Dart's "Training the French Actor: From Exercise to Experiment." The variety of styles and approaches i.n the volume continues Cohn's practice of dialogue and debate. The broad range of critical views is the fITst of three gamuts the title suggests: feminist , historical, semiOlic, sociological, and the "sweet old style" of focussing sharply on text. Second, the collection ranges from looking at Beckett's plays and his sources, to considering other major dramatists of the second half of the twentieth century, and to conjecturing about the direction of theatre as the century wanes. Third, the prose styles run the gamut from serenely eloquent, to pedantic, to mantic (see Jim Eigo's "Sitelines: A Ground for Theater"). The flaw in The Theatrical Gamut derives from the sad irony that many essays are in jarring opposition to Beckett's precision and his loathing of the chum of stale words, and to Cohn's lucid style and impeccable SCholarship. It is a pity that more authors did not heed Northrop Frye's advice: "If you're talking about language [and in this case theatrical art] you ought to lum up with a prose style that doesn't sound like a horse drinking water." As millenium approaches. increasingly few have heard that phenomeModern Drama. 39 (1996) 342 Book Reviews 343 non, but too many have become so enthralled by the ungainly technological siren's offkey song that they log-in without awareness of or attention to compelling rhetoric. A virulent plague of the passive voice has struck, with simultaneous epidemics of vague referents, obvious signposts (the "thus-I-have-shown - next-I-wil1-discuss" sophomoric method of organization). Jargon metastasizes. Buzzwords of choice are: foregrounding , encoded, signifier, valorize, and privileging. In particular, Carla Locatelli's "Delogocentering Silence: Beckett's Ultimate Unwording" descends to the nadir of expression both verbose and flabby, marred further by endnote overkill. If the manuscripts of these articles had been more thoroughly checked for accuracy, many errors could have been corrected. Time permits noting only the worst howler. Antonia Rodrfguez-Gago ("Molly's ' Happy Nights' and Winnie's 'Happy Days''') writes of Winnie's half-remembered lines from "one's classics." Winnie cannot recall "that wonderful line .,. Oh fleeting joys ... Oh something lasting woe," RodrfguezGago then commits the ludicrous and side-splitting mistake of misquoting Milton: "0 fleeting joys of Paradise, dear bought with such lasting woes." She does not give line references for Book Ten of Paradise Lost, but those who, like Winnie, had once memorized the passage will remember that Adam laments: "0 fleeting joys I Of Paradise, dear bought with lasting woes." Exhilarating exceptions to the weak pieces are Yasunari Takahashi's "Memory Inscribed in the Body: Krapp's Last Tape and the Noh Play Izutsu," H, Porter Abbou's "Consorting with Spirits: The Arcane Craft of Beckett's Later Drama," Hersh Zeifman 's "All My Sons After the Fall: Arthur Miller and the Rage for Order," and Elin Diamond's '''The Garden is a Mess': Maternal Space in Bowles, Glaspell, Robins," These share the vinues of acute, sensitive perception, of eloquence, of finely-shaped argument. of wit. They also point towards what may emerge in "Post-Beckettian" theatre . Ruby Cohn, in her first work on Beckett (Samuel Beckett: The Comic Gamut described a world where "all faiths are touering" (see Blau 284 in...