Feminist Theatrical Revisions of Classic Works (review)

{ 288 } Book Reviews The final two chapters explore how these directors deconstruct golden-­ age musicals. This discussion is a particularly timely inclusion as critics and artists continue to debate the ethics and efficacy of this practice. To the directors of musical drama, a musical is not a closed text, and the Broadway canon is not off-­ limits. The revivals that have emerged from this tradition offer radical rereadings of the libretto that correspond to a larger cultural or social reassessment of its content. For example, Nicholas Hytner’s production of Carousel offered a psychoanalytic reading of characters’ loneliness; Trevor Nunn’s interpretation of Oklahoma! was a sociological study of frontier life; and Cabaret as directed by Sam Mendes presented a more accurate and brutal depiction of the Holocaust. As Lundskaer-­ Nielsen argues, nostalgia curtails the artistry of theatre . If the musical canon is to remain viable, it needs to remain timely, relevant , and open to reinterpretation. Directors and the New Musical Drama is a welcome addition to Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History. Edited by Don B. Wilmeth, the series contains books on vaudeville, burlesque, and other popular entertainments, but this volume is the first to address musical theatre. Lundskaer-­ Nielsen’s prose is reader-­ friendly, and her analyses of production histories are thorough. As a treat for Broadway enthusiasts, she includes transcripts of her interviews with several current composers and directors of musical drama. Discussions with Adam Guettel,William Finn, David Leveaux, James Lapine, and others usefully complement her study. Bryan M. Vandevender — University of Missouri \ \ Feminist Theatrical Revisions of Classic Works. Edited by Sharon Friedman. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2009. 290 pp. $45.00 paper. The year 2010 marks the fortieth anniversary of the founding of It’s All Right To Be Woman Theatre (IARTBWT), the first all-­ female performance collective in New York City. The eleven members of this troupe—some political activists , some artists, some both—came together at Alternate U to perform origi­ nal stories rooted in their experiences as women. This new content, developed in consciousness-­ raising sessions, necessitated new theatrical forms and new modes of production—a nonhierarchical division of labor,nontraditional venues, and no separation between audiences and actors. The production of original { 289 } Book Reviews stories by groups such as IARTBWT is one mode of feminist theatre praxis. Revision of extant narratives is another. Feminist revision involves the imaginative reinterpretation of master works, classical texts, and cornerstones of the canon in ways that foreground women’s experience, reclaim and re-­ present negative and demeaning images of the female sex, disrupt fixed and essentialized notions of “woman,” and expose the constructedness of gender categories. In 1972, Adrienne Rich outlined the significance of this aesthetic and political project for women: “Re-­ vision—the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction—is for us more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival. Until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know our selves” (“When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-­Vision,” College English 34, no. 1: 18). This new anthology, Feminist Theatrical Revisions of Classic Works, edited by Sharon Friedman, suggests that over the past four decades the praxis of feminist revision has evolved into its own theatrical genre, one that has exerted such a profound influence on postmodern aesthetics that it shapes even those productions not directly informed by or engaged with feminist theory and practice . The book takes as its premise the notion that feminism, in its multiple incarnations, shares with experimental theatre “a questioning attitude toward traditional means of representation and . . . semiotics,” a healthy suspicion of universal truths, and a belief that texts are inherently unstable, interactive, and open-­ ended (8). To highlight the importance of feminist revision on contemporary drama­ turgical practice and the development of critical theory, this collection examines theatrical reimaginings of urtexts of the Western tradition (many of which are themselves adaptations) created and staged since the 1980s. The book is divided into four sections: classical theatre and myth (with essays on Aeschylus’s Orest­ eia and Ovid’s Metamorphoses); Shakespeare and seventeenth-­ century...