The Cambridge Companion to August Wilson (review)

{ 282 } Book Reviews Fitzpatrick explains,“the tragic heroine was in ascendance over the free adventurous character who might seek her own destiny” (84). It is important to note that “The Woman” remains unpublished. Equally poignant is Mark Phelan’s essay “Beyond the Pale: Neglected Northern Irish Women Playwrights, Alice Milligan, Helen Waddell and Patricia O’Connor.”While certainly women playwrights from the Republic have largely been ignored, women playwrights from Northern Ireland are erased completely because of Irish studies’ exploitation of “the singularity of ‘nation’ as the dominant conceptual and organization category of historiography and criticism” (109). Phelan calls for an abandonment of this concept to “replace this singularity with a plurality of histories, restore the histories of numerous neglected women playwrights, and in the process rejuvenate the wider field of Irish theatre history” (109). All three Northern Irish playwrights rejected the notion of woman as nation, and all three encountered sexual discrimination that shaped their plays. Sihra also includes several essays about the representation of women in the works of male Irish playwrights Frank McGuinness, Stewart Parker, and Samuel Beckett. In addition to the richly informative essays, Sihra provides a valuable appendix of Irish women playwrights and their plays from 1663 to 2006, including date and place of first production. Playwright Marina Carr, herself the subject of a chapter by Sihra, wonders,“Are their plays any good? This will be the next very important question which follows the retrieval of these women from obscurity ” (xi). W. Douglas Powers — Susquehanna University \ \ The Cambridge Companion to August Wilson. Edited by Christopher Bigsby. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2007. ii + 227 pp. $29.99 paper. Appropriately and respectfully rolled out for publication, Christopher Bigsby’s The Cambridge Companion to August Wilson has the advantages of time and aesthetic distance. Published in 2007—two years after the playwright’s death— this important compilation of fresh insight on Wilson’s work comes at a moment when interest in the playwright is at an all-­ time high. In addition to fifteen original essays written by some of the most respected scholars, critics, and theatre practitioners in the field, The Cambridge Companion to August Wilson has to its credit incisive critical analyses on each of the ten plays that constitute { 283 } Book Reviews Wilson’s now-­ legendary twentieth-­ century chronicle of the African Ameri­ can experience. As one who has written extensively on August Wilson and who is well acquainted with both the milestones and the minutiae of his artistic life, I found Bigsby’s introductory essay,“August Wilson: The Ground on Which He Stood,” especially enlightening. Bigsby cultivates new ground by situating the playwright ’s work within several heretofore unexplored contexts. For example, his in-­ depth look at the experiences of the European immigrant as represented by Wilson’s German father offers a counterbalance to the migration, separation , and reunion experiences that affect Wilson’s African Ameri­ can ­ characters. Bigsby provides additional portals to understanding Wilson by contextualizing his ten-­ play cycle within a host of topics, such as the European Holocaust, Arthur Miller, Franz Fanon, Black Arts and Black Power movements, and the cultural nationalist aesthetics of 1960s poets and playwrights. Bigsby’s familiarity with both specific details and nuances of Wilson’s life provides a helpful framework for the fourteen essays that follow. Many of the essays are heavily biographical in their content, yielding much about the playwright that has never before been divulged in print.While the increasing number of published studies on Wilson—pioneered by scholars Peter Wolfe, Mary Bogumil, Mary Snodgrass, Kim Pereira, Harry Elam, Joan Herrington , and Sandra Shannon—essentially embrace the well-­ known narrative of his life, in some way each contributor to Bigsby’s collection offers new and intriguing details that may counter some of the myths and falsehoods that have already begun to surface and that threaten to obscure the truth about the playwright’s life and his art. For example, “Been Here and Gone,” by journalist and Ameri­ can theatre critic John Lahr, is layered with savory asides about the life and playwriting career of August Wilson. Lahr’s revelations on the extent to which Wilson jump-­ started the careers of well-­ known talents such as...