A Companion to Twentieth-Century American Drama (review)

{ 182 } BOOK REV IEWS A Companion to Twentieth-Century American Drama. Edited by David Krasner. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2005. xx + 576 pp. $167.95 cloth. The dramatic history of the United States is, in many respects, even briefer than the history of the youthful nation itself. With appropriate respect for the few significant plays produced between the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries, American drama can accurately be said to have originated with the emergence of Eugene O’Neill less than ninety years ago. This short life span may well be one explanation for the neglect of American dramatic literature within the academy, a situation that famously led Susan Harris Smith, in 1997, to label it, arrestingly but hardly too hyperbolically, “American literature’s unwanted bastard child, the offspring of the whore that is American theatre” (1). David Krasner, in his introduction to this important new collection, is of the opinion that “perceptions are beginning to change” (1). If that is so, this volume will provide considerable additional impetus. He has assembled an impressive group of contributors (chosen, as he points out,“from various branches of American intellectual traditions, including theatre, drama, and performance studies; literary and American studies departments; and comparative literature” [2]) and has covered, in thirty-three concise, informative essays, an astonishing range of playwrights and texts. The emphasis throughout is on significantly broadening our conception of what constitutes American dramatic literature of the twentieth century, with attention paid, as Krasner makes clear, to “the institutions in which the dramas have been performed (the theatres, venues, and directors who assisted the playwrights), dramaturgical analysis of the plays, background to the playwrights, and the relationship between dramatic literature and broader historical continuities and social transformations” (2). One of the significant aspects of this volume is that it manages, for the most part, to achieve both breadth and depth. One of the ways it does this is by interspersing broad-based essays—on historical periods, on drama from various ethnic groups, or on genres of drama—with more narrowly focused chapters on individual playwrights or on two, three, or four figures grouped together. The most straightforwardly historical essays are those devoted to the successive decades of the century: “American Drama, 1900–1915” (Mark Evans Bryan), “Many-Faceted Mirror: Drama as Reflection of Uneasy Modernity” (Felicia Hardison Londré), “Reading across the 1930s” (Anne Fletcher), “Fissures beneath the Surface: Drama in the 1940s and 1950s” (Thomas P. Adler), “Drama of the 1960s” (Christopher Olsen), “1970–1990: Disillusionment, Iden- \ { 183 } BOOK REV IEWS tity, and Discovery” (Mark Fearnow), and “American Drama of the 1990s On and Off-Broadway” (June Schlueter). Occasionally, these necessarily discursive essays deteriorate into little more than brief plot summaries or lists of primary texts; but a remarkable number of them manage to cover a wide range of plays while at the same time organizing them into patterns that make genuine contributions to critical discourse. This balance is also present in the essays dealing with the drama produced by various ethnic groups. Because these sections often include numerous plays and playwrights unfamiliar even to specialists, the emphasis on broad coverage at the expense of depth of analysis is both understandable and welcome. Rachel Shtier’s “Ethnic Theatre in America” reaches back into the nineteenth century to provide detailed and informed background for subsequent essays on “Playwrights and Plays of the Harlem Renaissance” (Annemarie Bean), “The Drama of the Black Arts Movement” (Mike Sell), “Staging the Binary: Asian American Theatre in the Late Twentieth Century” (Daphne Lei),“Native American Drama” (Ann Haugo), “Writing Beyond Borders: A Survey of U.S. Latina/o Drama” (Tiffany Ana Lopez), and “From Eccentricity to Endurance: Jewish Comedy and the Art of Affirmation” (Julia Listengarten). Bean’s, Sell’s, Haugo’s, and Lopez’s contributions are especially skillful in organizing a large amount of quite obscure material into a coherent and informative essay. The essays one can roughly categorize as concerned with movements or genres are a bit more uneven. Deanna M. Toten Beard’s “American Experimentalism , American Expressionism, and Early O’Neill,” while useful in showing that O’Neill’s experimentalism had its antecedents, surprisingly dates that experimentalism as originating with The Hairy Ape...