The History of Southern Drama by Charles S. Watson (review)

BOOK REVIEWS Peacock includes an Appendix surveying Pinter's work for radio, television and film. He also appends a helpful chronology, placing Pinter's biography against a general index of British Theatre and History. But some major works on Pinter are absent from his bibliography. Austin Quigley's The Pinter Problem (1975) is the most glaring gap, as well as two of the more recent works by Marc Silverstein (1993) and Ronald Knowles (1995). This is a surprising weakness in a work that is otherwise a clear and concise re-presentation of PinIer's life and work. COLETTE STOE BER . UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO CHARLES S. WATSON. The History of Southern Drama. Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky 1997. Pp. 259, illustrated. $29.95. Charles S. Watson has performed a significant service to drama scholars in writing The History of Southern Drama, which takes as its purpose "to make known the subject of southern drama and to establish it as a valuable body of knowledge" (x). Watson is the first, remarkably, to undertake the task of surveying Southern drama from its inception in the eighteenth century to the present. Although he modestly claims that his intention from the outset has been "to lay the groundwork for more intensive studies" (x), the reader will find this volume both thorough and comprehensive. Watson adopts a chronological approach, tracing the changes in Southern drama from its beginnings in Virginia and South Carolina, where early plays tended to be patriotic and moral in tone; through the pre-Civil War period of sectional, anti-abolitionist drama and the post-war hialus; the development of folk and outdoor drama in the 1920S, with Paul Green and DuBose Heyward condemning racism and valorizing folk art; through the Southern Marxism of .... Lillian Hellman, black civil rights and political drama, and the shift in focus with Tennessee Williams's plays; and ending with the work of contemporary dramatists like Horton Foote, Beth Henley, Marsha Norman and Romulus Linney. He limits his study to plays written by Southerners, that is, artists who were either born or lived a substantial portion of their lives in the South, which he defines as the states that comprised the Confederacy plus the border states of Missouri, Kentucky and Maryland. His principle of selection for pre-twentieth -century plays is their historical significance, either in terms of their contribution to the development of drama as an art fonn or their value as cultural histories; in selecting plays written in the twentieth century he inc1udes artistic merit as acriterion, as well. In his dual commitment to tracing the development of Southern drama per se and analyzing its relationship to cultural and historical developments, Wat- Book Reviews son adds to OUT understanding of drama as an expression of cultural attitudes and values. The first plays written in Virginia, in fact, were not by professional dramatists (there were none) but by political and community leaders, who composed plays in order to place their ideas before the public. His chapter on Charleston, where "a vigorous tradition of playwriting for the local theater arose for the first time in the South" (25), explains how the evolution of professional theatre managers created a climate for the writing and producing of plays. These dramas tended to be moralistic in nature, taking stands against such things as drunkenness, dueling and capital punishment, while the drama produced in New Orleans was more satirical in nature, influenced by the Southwestern humor of local colorists. With the political unrest leading up to the Civil War, drama in the South became heavily sectarian and pro-slaveI)', with many stage rebuttals of Uncie Tom's Cabin and later, during the war, celebrations of Confederate victories. While Southern ante-bellum drama tends to reflect regional politics and values, according to Watson, twentieth-century Southern drama is informed by a repudiation of Southern politics, especially racism, while it continues to embrace the customs and culture of the South. Some of Watson 's best chapters analyze this shift, with all its complexities and tensions, in the works of Paul Green, DuBose Heyward and black dramatists of the 1920S through the 1940s. Among the black playwrights he points to Zora Neale Hurston...