Captive Audience: Prison and Captivity in Contemporary Theatre (review)

In her chapter on Miguel Piñero's Short Eyes, Fiona Mills quotes New York Times theatre critic Mel Gussow's assessment of the play: "it served a purpose not unlike that of [African-American playwright] John Osborne's Look Back in Anger, challenging theatrical tradition and perception" (60). Brackets draw the gaze of the reviewer. Is it fair for me to focus on this editorial oversight that strips the very white and very British Osborne of his colour and nationality? In a book about "silence and invisibility," it could be relevant – but it also could be slip rather than emblem (5). Yet, "in the context of this volume of essays on prisons in British and American dramas," (122), maybe essays on Samuel Beckett (an Irish writer who lived in France), Peter Weiss (a German who lived in Sweden), and Jean-Paul Sartre (French) might indicate a more persistent problem. Perhaps with the deaths of these three authors, it could also be argued that the subtitle "contemporary theatre" is somewhat generous.

I do, however, welcome this book. In the introduction, Thomas Fahy eloquently articulates the power of the drama discussed in the collection. He states that the "drama of captivity and prison challenges audiences/readers to examine the silence and invisibility surrounding prison"(5). This is then well demonstrated in the opening three chapters, which examine in turn the Medea project in California, Latina drama in the United States, and Piñero's Short Eyes. What I felt was particularly strong about each of these chapters was that they successfully transgress the barriers between performances in prison, about prison, and of prison – both in the practice discussed and in the theoretical tools brought to the analysis. The area of "prison theatre" is perhaps most interesting where there is an acknowledgement that interrogating a performance about punishment cannot be fully realised without taking into account the performative nature of punishment itself. I believe this intersection of prison as performance and performances that tackle prison as theme/metaphor is most acutely foregrounded when inmates themselves are invited to the stage. In these moments, the panopticon can be replayed (with the audience now guards) or the gaze be returned (as prisoners are empowered to look back at their captors). This is touched upon in the analysis of the reviews of Short Eyes but most poignantly explored in Tiffany Ana Lopez's account of visiting her brother in prison. I felt that these moments were exceptionally well realised in this book and were where it most clearly succeeded in its promise.

Individually, each of the chapters in Part Two is well executed and uses the lens of prison or captivity to unfold the problems of different texts. The connection with punishment is sustained, except, perhaps, in the chapter on Sar-tre's No Exit and Beckett's Waiting for Godot. One of the most famous performances of Godot was the 1957 San Francisco Actor's Workshop version in San Quentin penitentiary. The meeting of prison life with the "nothing to be done" line in the script led to an apparently outstanding production. The inmates had no need to read prison as metaphor. I do not doubt the scholarship brought to this essay, only that, in a collection with this title, there seems to be an opportunity missed. The link between prison as a confined place and theatre as a restricted observatory is made early in the book, but the danger of this splice is that all theatre experiences could creep justifiably within the covers. Somehow, a more precisely articulated rationale for inclusion in the book would have supported the very real potential for dialogue among the different chapters.

There are now several books that deal with the area of prison theatre (see Baim et al.; Balfour; Cox; Fraden; Trounstine; and Thompson). This is the first that is more concerned with prison in theatre rather than with theatre in prison, and for that reason alone, it...