Modern Dramatists: A Casebook of Major British, Irish and American Playwrights (review)

Modern Dramatists: A Casebook of Major British, Irish and American Playwrights. Edited by Kimball King. Casebooks on Modern Dramatists, vol. 28.New York: Routledge, 2001; pp. vii + 396. $80.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.

The casebook, or collection of essays by diverse authors on a single playwright, reflects two major issues facing theatre studies today: a drive to develop interdisciplinary research approaches and a need on the part of academic publishers and libraries to get as much variety in their offerings as they can despite steadily shrinking budgets. A well-constructed casebook gives insight into a single topic specifically while indirectly pointing to new directions in theatre research. But the nature of the casebook makes its comprehensiveness broad rather than deep, and too often beleaguered libraries or cramming undergraduates assume a casebook to be the twenty-first-century equivalent of Diderot's Encyclopedia: everything you need to know about Sam Shepard, in one handy volume.

Kimball King's Modern Dramatists: A Casebook of Major British, Irish and American Playwrights does not claim to be a comprehensive look at dramatic writing over the last half century, but it does claim to be "a useful compendium of criticism on an important literary genre" (ix). It is indeed an impressive compendium, but its organization makes it hard to use. King has taken one article from each of the twenty-six casebooks published by Routledge over the last thirteen years and included them in this collection, arranging the essays in alphabetical order by subject. While almost every article in the collection is strong and reflects well the strength of King's casebook series generally, it is unclear how any article was chosen for the collection, or how it or the playwright's work it describes relates, besides alphabetically, to those subjects around it. Also distracting are the typographical errors, from simple misspellings within the essays to the book being called Classic Casebook Articles (instead of its actual title) in the introduction.

The book claims to be for the general reader as well as the expert, but it provides no substantive background information on the playwrights and includes no index, limiting its usefulness as a research tool. Instead of creating a historical or critical context for the essays, the introduction does the work of a list of contributors by detailing brief biographies of the articles' authors and the editors of the earlier casebooks in which the articles originally appeared. The three-paragraph overview of contemporary drama the introduction does provide is sketchy. For example, King claims, as one certainly can, that the performance of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger (1956) helped start a revolution on Anglophone stages, but to assert the Royal Court and the BBC's influence on the success of Irish playwrights Brian Friel, Thomas Kilroy, and Hugh Leonard without mentioning the Abbey Theatre, Radío Telefís Éireann or the Field Day Theatre Company is to tell less than half the story. At least a nod at American influences on contemporary playwriting like the Black Theatre Movement, the Actors Studio, or performance art in the book's introduction would also create a fuller perspective on contemporary drama's origins and influences.

Reading the essays, critical preoccupations in contemporary drama criticism do begin to emerge. For example, several explore the influence and experience of pop culture, especially film, on modern playwriting. Toby Silverman Zinman's essay, "What's Wrong with this Picture? David Rabe's Comic-Strip Plays" points out how Rabe's dramas, like the pop art paintings of Roy Lichtenstein, create a two-dimensional simulacrum for the spectator and thus open a space for cultural critique of contemporary America and its race, class, and gender biases. In "Playing with Place: Some Filmic Techniques in the Plays of David Hare" John Russell Brown looks at how David Hare's work in film influences his writing for the stage, claiming that Hare directs an audience's...