Staging a Cultural Paradigm: The Political and the Personal in American Drama (review)

Staging a Cultural Paradigm: The Political and the Personal in American Drama explores the many intersections between "personal and private yearnings" and "the need for political and public change" in American theatre (28). Although these impulses have often been dichotomized, Ozieblo and López-Rodríguez convincingly argue that a dynamic interplay between the personal and political characterizes much of American culture, from the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings of the McCarthy era to the consciousness-raising groups of 1970s feminism. That American theatre, from the Provincetown Players to today's playwrights, would reflect this cross-fertilization is almost inevitable; autobiography routinely begets political dissent or expresses a longing for societal regeneration. Yet, as the editors note, "disclosing one's innermost fears and desires in the public world of theater can be dangerous, thus dramatists frequently recur to other texts, past and present, literary or otherwise, to transcend this separation of private and public" (14). This foregrounding of the trend toward postmodern intertextualities is, by far, the strength of this anthology, as the articles explore how American playwrights borrow from or appropriate other texts to express personal/political beliefs and "transcend the barriers erected by the dichotomies of western values and myths" (13).

In "Part I: Unraveling the Intertextualities of Theater," the essays examine those playwrights who "find refuge in intertextualities" (16). Challenging the apolitical reading of Tennessee Williams, Brenda Murphy contends that "complex cultural and symbolic matrices" within his later plays "convey Williams's sense of the deep cultural anxiety and the repressions of many kinds" in Cold-War America (33). Ana Antón-Pacheco argues that theatrical borrowings from Jack Gelber and Eugene O'Neill evidence Williams's professional frustration and personal guilt in his later plays. Gary Harrington reads A Streetcar Named Desire through Shakespeare's plays to reveal Williams's critique of the "socially-determined mandate that every woman conform to a role as wife, whore, or virgin" (67). Stuart Marlow's research into "the broader political forces that were behind the acts of individual betrayal" during the Salem witch trials and McCarthy hearings argues against the efficacy of The Crucible as social critique (98). Russell DiNapoli argues that Maxwell Anderson "lost credibility as a serious playwright" as a result of "his insistence upon writing verse plays in the Elizabethan style on current issues" such as the Sacco-Vanzetti case (101). Johan Callens examines how the Wooster Group's 1998 production of Gertrude Stein's Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights fulfills Stein's "postmodern (non- or composite-) identity politics" through its use of multi-media intertextuality (126).

"Part II: Challenging Inherited Values" focuses predominately on women dramatists' rejection and subversive transformation of imposed patriarchal values. Cheryl Black and Robert K. Sarlós describe the Provincetown Players, who "merged revolutionary lifestyles and revolutionary aesthetics," as a paradigm for societal regeneration (145). Marcia Noe's essay examines the "New Woman" as a "site of debate, struggle, and conflict" in both Susan Glaspell's "theatre practice and personal life" (161). Marta Fernández-Morales investigates Glaspell's dramatic deconstruction of the public/private dichotomy used to disenfranchise women. Karin Ikas examines the strategies of Josefina López to replace "the melting pot ideology" with "a counter model of an American Dream that envisions intercultural and cross-generational understanding" (190). Maria Luisa Ochoa-Fernández's article discusses how Dolores Prida dramatizes a "cultural synthesis" of Cuban and American traditions that "vindicates the duality of the bilingual and bicultural being" (204). Mar Gallego contends that Lorraine Hansberry and Ntozake Shange devote themselves to "the liberating effect of a self-defined, self-validating female space" (207). Araceli González-Crespán argues that Beah Richards's A Black Woman Speaks ingeniously "combines the appropriation of theatrical and literary tradition, which she twists and subverts, and...