American Drama in the Age of Film (review)

In the introduction to American Drama in the Age of Film, Zander Brietzke poses a simple question: “Why bother to see stage drama . . . if the same thing is available to see in a much more accessible format?” (xi)—that is, film adaptations of plays, widely available in DVD and VHS formats. Since storefront nickelodeons opened at the beginning of the twentieth century, the language of film— montage, shifts in perspective, the geographies of on- and off-camera space—has emerged as “the vocabulary for modern experience” (xii). Brietzke situates theatre as an art necessarily informed and determined by film, declaring that “[i]t is impossible to think of theater today without considering the ubiquity of film and television first” (xviii). The idea that theatre should be viewed as an element of a larger cultural universe is nothing new, but there is something striking about his contention that theatre is seen today largely through a filmic lens, both literally and metaphorically. Considering this environment, it seems necessary and appropriate to consider the ways in which theatrical texts have been interpreted in the medium that students (and audiences generally) now encounter them. In American Drama in the Age of Film, Brietzke chooses to analyze exactly those plays that so often make up first-year theatre classes (Angels in America, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, among others) to reveal how filmmakers have interpreted canonical American plays for the screen.

Yet Brietzke sees his project in broader terms: not just to examine various film adaptations of dramatic texts, but to discover “how to make drama more dynamic onstage, how to think of it visually in light of film, and how to stimulate possibilities for future unforeseen developments” (xvii). This book is an attempt to instigate new ways of thinking about theatre by studying how filmmakers have adapted dramatic texts for the film medium. In this way, Brietzke recalls Robert Edmond Jones’s plea in The Dramatic Imagination: that theatre-makers must be conscious of film’s capabilities, particularly with regard to photographic realism, and therefore work toward a theatre freed from the restraints of realism—a theatre of beauty and imagination. American Drama in the Age of Film is thus a part of a larger discourse about how theatre interfaces with the other arts and with the society that sustains it, and the author’s contribution is to suggest that film and television versions of plays may provoke new forms of theatrical production for audiences acclimated to film culture.

In the opening chapters, Brietzke sets out to explain what he sees as theatre’s particular possibilities. Countering Aristotle, the author asserts that spectacle is theatre’s true strength, specifically in the form of what he terms “simultaneity,” or multiple actions occurring at the same time within the audience’s frame of vision. Thus, in Brietzke’s thinking, “theatre is, at heart, spatial, while cinema is primarily a narrative art” (3). Film utilizes cuts to move from one scene to another; theatre allows us to see multiple scenes at once on stage, often working contrapuntally to create a mood (such as the simultaneous scenes in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, a text Brietzke examines at length). “If we have become a visual culture, immersed in the daily rituals of film and television,” he explains, “then an opportunity exists for theater to exploit such heightened visual acuity” (12). For Brietzke, theatre directors should take the new “visual acuity” of contemporary American audiences into consideration, as film directors must.

In his treatments of the film versions of various plays, Brietzke moves chronologically through the twentieth-century American canon, beginning with Eugene O’Neill. Chapter 3, titled “A Vicious Cycle at Sea,” focuses on O’Neill’s sea plays and their condensation into John Ford’s film, The Long Voyage Home (1940). Ford reframed O’Neill’s sea plays to comment on the plight of workers in a brutish capitalist society—a sharp...