Drama, p. 399-423

Illusion and reality blur in American popular culture. Motion pictures are redolent with Hollywood products like The Matrix Reloaded and X-2: X-Men United, which take film's technological bravura further than ever before. Television is hardly better, abounding with "reality shows" that require contestants to chew live worms and beetles. Real "reality" grows curiouser and curiouser. It seems appropriate that Frank Rich, once the principal New York Times drama critic, now writes the most prescient political commentary on both the current national administration and the Democratic contenders for the oval office—and his column on politics appears in the Arts section. According to Rich, the political culture of George W. Bush's White House has absorbed the aesthetic of Jerry Bruckheimer, the successful producer of films like Armageddon, Black Hawk Down, and Top Gun. And real "real life" looks more and more as if the art of "wag the dog" precedes, informs, and shapes contemporary political reality. For HBO, co-executive producer Steven Soderbergh offers K Street, which he calls "real-time fiction," its make-believe firm of lobbyists and consultants blending with real politicians and elected law-makers to demonstrate how Washington wheels and deals, backscratches and backstabs.

Against this background, drama criticism paradoxically, not to say schizophrenically, accounts for and explores antitheatricality (the latest buzzword) and "art act"—which does not mean what you think. It will include false reports of terrorism. By comparison, as reality and the popular arts such as film and television grow stranger than fiction, American drama as represented by this year's New York theater seems stable: Arthur Miller's The Crucible with Liam Neeson and Laura Linney and The Man Who Had All the Luck with Chris O'Donnell; Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night with Vanessa Redgrave, Brian Dennehy, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Robert Sean Leonard; Thornton Wilder's Our Town with Paul Newman; Terrence McNally's Frankie and Johnny in the Claire de Lune with Edie Falco and Stanley Tucci; and Lanford Wilson's Burn This and Fifth of July, all in revivals; and new plays like Wilson's Book of Days; David Mamet's Boston Marriage; Edward Albee's The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? and Occupant; Tony Kushner's Homebody/ Kabul; and Suzan-Lori Parks's Pulitzer Prize-winning Topdog/Underdog. Legitimate theater may be the most legitimate thing in America. François Rabelais observed that man is a kind of sewer with a holy spirit hovering over it. American popular "culture" is a kind of sewer that lacks a holy spirit. Spirit is a soft drink that has failed to pay its fee for product placement and has evanesced away. Hope resides in American drama and the scholarship attendant upon it.

i Theater History

Southern Women Playwrights: New Essays in Literary History and Criticism, ed. Robert L. McDonald and Linda Rohrer Paige (Alabama), collects fresh approaches by a dozen knowledgeable and much-published senior scholars and a half-dozen new voices. The editors themselves provide useful opening and closing chapters. McDonald's "The Current State of Scholarship on Southern Women Playwrights" (pp. 1–10) calls for critical awareness of the deep historical prejudices against drama itself and against women artists, especially in the South. Three essays follow on often overlooked topics in the history of Southern women's drama. John Lowe's "'Let the People Sing!': Zora Neale Hurston and the Dream of a Negro Theater" (pp. 11–26) provides an introduction to Hurston's entire playwriting oeuvre, discussing works only recently discovered and being prepared for publication. Theresa R. Mooney's impressive textual research in "These Four: Hellman's Roots Are Showing" (pp. 27–41) shows how the author did draw on her Southern roots as a fundamental resource for her plays in terms of characters and themes. Judith Giblin James's "Carson McCullers, Lillian Smith, and the Politics of Broadway" (pp. 42–60) compares the quite different experiences in adapting best-selling novels—McCullers's The Member of the Wedding and Smith's Strange Fruit—for the stage. Unlike Hellman, McCullers never attempted to ignore her Southernness, but Betty E. McKinnie...