Playwrights in Rehearsal: The Seduction of Company by Susan Letzler Cole (review)

Reviews 533 SUSAN LETZLER COLE. Playwrights in Rehearsal: The Seduction of Company. New York: Routledge, 2001. Pp. xv + 262, illustrated. $90.00 (Hb); $26.95 (Pb). Reviewed by James Frieze, Liverpool John Moores University Playwrights ill Reheorsal replicates the distinctive approach adopted by Susan Letzler Cole in her previous work Directors ill Rehearsal (1992). Both books present her observations of. and ruminations on, ten directors at work on productions . What makes Cole's method so striking is her zealous attention to detail, her desire to record meticulously what happens around her while restricting subjective interpretation. Playwrights in Rehearsal consists of eight chapters, each devoted to an American playwright (by which I mean, here, playwrights who have worked mostly in the United States): Arthur Miller, Maria Irene Fornes, Suzan-Lori Parks, Elizabeth Egloff, Jean-Claude van Itallie, Tony Kushner, David Rabe, and Sam Shepard. As Cole puts it, her subjects "vary in age (the youngest and oldest are separated by nearly half a century), name recognition and dramatic technique" (xiii). Individual chapters throw light on not only a specific writer, but a particular context in which playwriting takes place. The rehearsals observed in the Rabe chapter, for instance, are for a restaging of A Question of Mercy. Cole poses the question: "How can the restaging of a play whose author, director, and set designer remain unchanged be a site of exploration. discovery, revision?" (26). In contrast, Suzan-Lori Parks works through advanced drafts of two new plays (In the Blood and TopdoglUllderdog) through close contact with actors. Issues around the adaptation of novels are addressed as Egloff adapts Dostoevsky'S The Devils for the 1997 New York Theatre Workshop production, directed by Garland Wright. The final chapter sees Pilgrim Theatre (a Polish-based company established by American actors) grappling with van Itallie's grappling with an ancient Tibetan text in his Tibetan Book ofthe Dead, a generically unstable work (playnibretto/spiritual repository) that the playwright refers to as "navigational instructions, spoken -as-you-go, for the moments surrounding death, and the days that follow it" (qtd. in Cole 186). Despite the variety of the playwriting contexts presented, each of the chapters is broadly similar in its structure and focus. A chronological, largely diaristic narrative is augmented by Cole's quotation from essays by or interviews with the playwright on theatre and from conversations with the writer, actors, and director on processual, textual issues that arise over the course of the particular production on which she is sitting in. Cole's method is to find a middle ground between verbatim recording and evaluative analysis. She tidies what 534 REVIEWS she sees rather than presenting contradictory, non-fluent speech and action, but she stops short of full analytical interrogation, preferring to pore over practitioners' words almost as if beholding a holy grail. Her gloss of their words makes comparisons to practitioners from other chapters. At the end of a dense and provocative exchange in a Tibetan Book ofthe Dead rehearsal, Cole writes, "Like Sam Shepard at the table reading of Curse ofthe Starving Class, van Itallie declines to answer an actor's question directly, but the reverberations of this exchange will linger all summer" (r9I). Though illuminating to an extent, Cole's mediation tends to defer, rather than pursue, genuine insight. Reading the book as a whole, what intrigued me most was the tension between Cole's desire to trace and record versus the fluidity of group process. The more intricate Cole's transcribing. the more insufficient it seemed. Given the openness of Cole's demeanour, and the quasi-experimental nature of her project, this tension will generally be a satisfying one for the student of process . Cole's writing is generally crisp, often elegant. She is a modest but judicious voice, usually able to communicate through inference, rather than by stating and spelling out. At times, though, her endeavours can be irritatingly pedantic. She is so concerned, for example, with the literal and literary trappings of playwriting - pens, hands, paper, words - that she fetishizes them: "Her right hand nestles in her left hand, its fingers moving slowly as Hester reads a long monologue. As the afternoon wears on, the 'quick time' slows...