Strange Duets: Impresarios and Actresses in the American Theatre, 1865-1914 (review)

{ 191 } BOOK REV IEWS yond warning against fads and fashions . . . [to] focus on the nature and limits of representation”(60). In one of the few essays to rely extensively on biography, Barbara Ozieblo argues that Glaspell’s writings, particularly the later novels, reflect the author’s need to understand her “undoubtedly tense relationship with her mother” (156)—a tension likely exacerbated by Glaspell’s own failed attempts to become a biological parent. Drawing on the theories of Michel Foucault, Kecia Driver McBride explores the fragmented language in Glaspell’s drama and fiction as well as her penchant for keeping her female protagonists offstage. McBride finds “throughout her works the continual breaking through of silence when meaning exceeds language” (163). Karen H. Gardiner discovers in Glaspell’s oeuvre “metaphors of enclosure and entrapment, walls and chains” (184)—tropes long favored by women writers for countless reasons— while Kristina Hinz-Bode begins a necessary consideration of Glaspell’s often overlooked male characters. The most potentially controversial essay in either volume is Caroline Violet Fletcher’s “‘The Rules of the Institution’: Susan Glaspell and Sisterhood,” which draws on Glaspell’s life and work to argue that Glaspell was dubious about the possibility—even the value—of feminist sisterhood. Glaspell’s reluctance to join wholeheartedly with any group, including the feminist Heterodoxy , scarcely makes her unique: creative artists are almost by definition individualists wary of total allegiance to causes or organizations. Still, Fletcher’s argument is a useful corrective to those who would see Glaspell as an unambiguously committed feminist, however one defines this tricky term. Like every good writer, Glaspell interrogated her own beliefs as well as the received wisdom of her society. Happily, all of the contributors to Susan Glaspell: New Directions in Critical Inquiry and Disclosing Intertextualities: The Stories, Plays, and Novels of Susan Glaspell are aware of the complexities, ambivalences, and contradictions that inflect this singular and important literary voice. —JUDITH E. BARLOW University at Albany, State University of New York Strange Duets: Impresarios and Actresses in the American Theatre, 1865–1914. By Kim Marra. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2006. 378 pp. $47.95 paper. Kim Marra’s Strange Duets participates in the determined campaign by cultural historians of nineteenth-century U.S. theatre to demonstrate the join- \ { 192 } BOOK REV IEWS ing of history and theory. In Marra’s case, the history is that of three impresarios and three star actresses—Augustin Daly and Ada Rehan, Charles Frohman and Maude Adams, and David Belasco and Mrs. Leslie Carter—and the theory is a historicized analysis of gender that ties the three “strange duets” to patriarchal control and bourgeois respectability, closeted homosexuality and its metaphoric performance,and sexual transgression and its cultural exploitation/ exculpation. In the hands of a competent, theatre-trained historian such as Marra, the reader enjoys carefully researched cultural history and the benefits of Marra’s expertise in gender theory, past and present, and case studies that stand (appropriately) subordinate to the cultural norms and values they exemplify. To be sure, the latter can be pushed to the point where (to use one of the book’s favored expressions) they “vibrate,” like an apparatus run up to the breaking point, but the evidence of the former, the history itself, will allow all but the most uninformed reader to determine when the “two hearts beat as one.” A brief framing introduction establishes the outsider status of the Catholic Daly and Rehan,the queer and Jewish Frohman and queer and Morman Adams, and the Jewish Belasco and fallen WASP Carter.Theatre proved an enabling tool for each to simultaneously suppress and release social disadvantage through the effacing Progressive Era valorization of fame and fortune. Marra devotes two chapters each to the first two pairs and three chapters to Belasco and Carter. Of the six, Daly and Rehan were personally as well as professionally joined (curiously , Marra does not explore the former possibility in the case of Belasco and Carter), though the private aspects of the twenty-year Daly-Rehan relationship were carefully screened from public knowledge, as was the married Daly’s frequent betrayals of Rehan (and his wife) with other women. Faithful to the double standard...