Modern Drama: Defining the Field (review)

This collection of twelve essays, assembling the work of a prestigious and international group of contributors, is the proceedings of a conference held in Toronto in the spring of 2000 under the auspices of the journal Modern Drama. The goal, both of the original conference and the present volume, is to interrogate the constituent terms 'modern' and 'drama,' thereby giving the field and the journal a sharper, more theoretically rigorous focus. What arises from this project is a cohesive analysis of the shifting histories, blind spots, and culturally constructed categories underlying the study of modern drama. The subject matter is primarily twentieth-century, although an opening essay by Elin Diamond, awarded the essay prize from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, stretches as far back as post-medieval drama and the work of Aphra Behn to examine the characteristics of 'modernity's drama,' in particular its use of time. All of these essays were previously published in two issues of Modern Drama (volumes 43:4 and 44:1), but this useful single-volume format provides the journal increased visibility, and the material added shape.

The first group of three essays explores the generic and academic boundaries within which drama has been circumscribed over the past hundred years. Shannon Jackson offers a fascinating explanation of 'Why Modern Plays Are Not Culture' by considering institutional genealogies and issues of cultural legitimacy in the second half of the twentieth century. Her argument is that drama as a genre has not been fully situated within a disciplinary transition from literature to cultural studies, and that as a result 'drama's decidedly embodied bodies ... continue to occupy a blind spot in critical theory.' Erika Fischer-Lichte pursues questions of interdisciplinarity, asking where and how theatre can be distinguished from culture, media, and art. This thoughtful essay argues that the project is less about limiting or expanding borders, than it is about recreating, in such a way as to avoid the dangers of dilettantism, our conceptions of 'theatre.'

A second group of four essays considers the boundaries between modern drama and postmodern performance. A terrific contribution by Sue-Ellen Case takes as its subject the perhaps surprising juxtaposition of Mme Blavatsky and Brecht as a way to press at the tensions among modernism and spiritualism; masks, avatars, and the Internet; knowledge, authorship, and phenomena. David Savran argues that the ghosts that haunt American drama between 1885 and the 1990s are a symptom of modernity, marking the movement of the United States through distinct stages of imperialism, decolonization, and neocolonialism. The last four essays approach definitions of 'modern' and 'drama' through issues of race, class, and ethnicity. Ann Wilson's excellent reading of Peter Pan, which at first seems at something of a distance from the rest of the volume, considers how Barrie's play interprets modernity, industrialisation, masculinity, and class. Harry J. Elam, Jr closes the volume with a well-written and insightful essay on the trope of madness in the drama of August Wilson.

The volume also includes essays by Michael J. Sidnell, Stanton B. Garner Jr, Loren Kruger, Josephine Lee, and Alan Filewod, with an introduction by Ric Knowles. Modern Drama: Defining the Field reflects on the relations between modern, modernism, and modernity from the critical perspective of the early twenty-first century, and interrogates the cultural, historical, and disciplinary assumptions that have underpinned (and continue to underpin) study of the field. This volume is curiously retrospective in tone, which leaves one with the impression - accurate, I think - that dominant institutional notions of 'modern drama' do not easily open themselves to understandings of drama, theatre, and performance, whether live or electronic, in our own century. The major strength of this collection is the way it suggests to us the means by which 'modern drama' became a historical category.