Contemporary African American Women Playwrights (review)

{ 246 } BOOK REV IEWS It is in the conclusion that Curtis firmly situates her biography in current scholarship and the life of Quinault in the social world she inhabited. Curtis analyzes how Quinault’s paradoxical championing of the moralistic comédie larmoyant aligns with her love of the more “unregulated and untrammeled entertainments ” of private theatricals—both reflect an attempt to improve her marginalized position as an actress in society through a genre aligned with middle-class values and through salon activities that fostered “proper” social connections (202). Curtis leaves us with the intriguing thought that Quinault herself, straddling the line between actress and salonnière, between disrepute and décence, as well as other women whose “careers are not so well documented,” occupied a unique position “between the lines and in the margins of the texts laid out for them,” at times “stepp[ing] outside the roles assigned” (206). I wish that Curtis had woven this argument throughout her text, providing less of a bald description of Quinault’s life and more of an analysis of how that life was held within and broke outside the “text” laid out for it. “Divine Thalie” is, however, quite explicitly a biography of Jeanne Quinault . It is through her that the reader views the life of an actress and the practice of her art in eighteenth-century France. Curtis only briefly delves into a reading of this life, barely engaging in the contentious, and important, debates on how women and their salons function in the discourse of the Enlightenment . Curtis, at times, is unable to resist providing evidence for even the most arcane detail, tracing the histories and interrelationships of even the slightest Quinault acquaintances. Her primary mission, however, was to provide a documented accounting of the life of Jeanne Quinault, freed from rumor and jaundiced anecdote. She has successfully done this; it is now up to future scholars to more fully situate this life of a woman and an actress in the text of Enlightenment France. —JEANNE WILLCOXON St. Olaf College \ Contemporary African American Women Playwrights. Edited and with an introduction by Philip C. Kolin. London: Routledge, 2007. 207 pp. $120.00 cloth. Contemporary African American Women Playwrights brings together two practiced hands at introducing readers to the drama. Kimball King is general edi- { 247 } BOOK REV IEWS tor of Routledge’s exemplary Casebooks on Modern Dramatists series, and Philip C. Kolin, editor of the present volume, has provided outstanding analysis of the lesser-known plays of Tennessee Williams, among others. Kolin here turns his attention to fourteen African-American women playwrights of remarkable variety and accomplishment, assembling a collection of essays that serves as a valuable introduction for the general reader, for the specialist in drama, and for the playwright. Even a moderately experienced reader may be unfamiliar with some of the writers represented here and struck by the wide range of dramatic styles they represent on a continuum from realistic to experimental. David Krasner demonstrates in his essay on writers of the Harlem Renaissance that both Georgia Douglas Johnson and Zora Neale Hurston write plays on the realistic model, with strong connections to folk theatre, but Krasner links Marita O. Bonner to expressionism, using Strindberg as a comparison. This variety may also be seen in the startlingly different characteristics of three plays that serve as touchstones in these essays: the “social realism” of Lorraine Hansberry’s Raisin in the Sun, the Broadway production that marks a watershed in the production history of African-American plays; Ntozake Shange’s “choreopoem” for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf (presented in a model essay by James Fisher); and the “surrealistic effects and characters” (Kolin) of Adrienne Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro. A casebook presents themes and questions that point the reader toward further investigations. One such theme is possible characteristics of AfricanAmerican playwriting that distinguish it from that of other racial groups. A number of authors and their subjects in this volume suggest that the difference lies in the tradition of spontaneous performance; in Hurston’s words,“No matter how joyful or how sad the case there is sufficient poise for drama. Everything is acted out...