The Other American Drama (review)

In an early chapter of The Other American Drama, Marc Robinson allows himself, in a moment of self-indulgent fancy, inside the mind of Gertrude Stein: “if I only say what I see,” Robinson’s imagined Stein ponders, “what I see will live before you” (17). Robinson intends for the passage to illustrate Stein’s “enormous faith in the ability of sheer description” (17), but it just as aptly describes a similar faith on Robinson’s part; for Robinson, whose descriptive powers are substantial, has written not so much a work of dramatic criticism (at least not in conventional terms), as a personal attempt to “say what he sees” when he looks at some of the most neglected, misread, and important American dramatists of this century, and to hope that what he sees will take life before his readers.

As the title suggests, Robinson’s The Other American Drama encourages a departure from the “sluggish, bloated, mechanical” (1) mainstream of canonized American drama: the well-made, melodramatic tradition of the nineteenth century, metamorphosed into the sentiment-laden psychological realism of the twentieth century, and carried out with “overwhelming predictability” (1) by such dramatists as O’Neill, Miller, Hellman, and August Wilson. The title might also suggest the formation of an alternative canon of sorts: the other American Drama. But Robinson rejects all canons, even an alternative one; other than placing Gertrude Stein alongside Eugene O’Neill as the fountainhead of a parallel stream of American drama, he makes no attempt to chart an alternative tradition. His selection of dramatists is, as he openly admits, one man’s personal pantheon, held together not so much by an ongoing or shared tradition, as by a shared temperament, a spirit of profound and perpetual dissatisfaction and self-inquiry into the act of writing for the theatre which leads away from plot-based, narrative drama and toward an attempt to transcribe moments of the acute perception of phenomena and consciousness.

Robinson devotes individual chapters to Gertrude Stein, Tennessee Williams, Sam Shepard, Maria Irene Fornes, Adrienne Kennedy, and Richard Foreman. With the exception of Williams (and possibly Shepard), Robinson could not have chosen a more aesthetically inaccessible, intellectually challenging collection of American dramatists. As Robinson says of Kennedy’s work, “a single ten-page play is enough for a sitting” (120). What is perhaps most remarkable about Robinson’s choices is that these are not only extremely difficult writers, but writers of such idiosyncratic aesthetics, that to appreciate any one of them is a challenge to the best dramatic scholar, but to appreciate all of them as Robinson does is an accomplishment at which to marvel. He deftly moves from Stein’s “deceptively simple task of defining phenomena” (14) to the “heliotrope temperament” of Williams’s heroines (32) and then again to the “smallest grace notes” of Fornes’s language (179) and the “measured frenzy” of Foreman’s staging (150). His range is impressive and his insights penetrating (although his obvious affection for Williams’s work leads him to include Williams—and to strain to justify that inclusion—in company where he does not belong).

Perhaps most refreshing in Robinson’s approach to these authors is his attempt to breathe a certain humanity into figures like Stein and Foreman, redeeming them from their conventional categorization as cold and abstract formalists. He insists emphatically on the “psychological” and “emotional” content of their works, forcing his reader to redefine such terms, applying them no longer through the worn-out cliches of emotional conflict between psychologically-determined characters, but through the psychology of ever-shifting human consciousness and the emotional content of a heightened moment of perception.

Robinson can be an evocative writer, at his best when painting in the broadest possible strokes and indulging in rich metaphoric language. Of Richard Foreman, he notes:

[O]ne might see his plays as mere accidents, collections of detritus that slipped out inadvertently while Foreman was working to resist the gravitational plunge of his ideas. His...