A Student Guide to Play Analysis (review)

declaration of “an interim.”To make a long story short, it was the younger folks (granted there were such veterans as Ida Rauh among them) who demanded a more professional, as opposed to what they regarded as dilettantish, manner of operation—which is why O’Neill found natural allies among them, particularly in Jimmy Light and Jasper Deeter. An especially disappointing feature of the book—and the apology printed at the bottom of “Illustrations”(xi) cannot quite absolve Cambridge University Press—are the pictures. Are we to believe that Cambridge cannot match printing technology available to the University of Massachusetts and University of Alabama presses? Despite my reservations, I conclude that The Provincetown Players and the Culture of Modernity is a signi¤cant further step in our understanding of this “most signi¤cant and . . . most in®uential American theatre group of the early twentieth century” (xiii), which brought a “new conception of the theatre” (1) to these shores. And it de¤nitely provides a broader ideological context for their appreciation. —ROBERT K. SARLÓS Emeritus, University of California–Davis \ A Student Guide to Play Analysis. By David Rush. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2006. 299 pp. $28.50 paper. As its title implies, David Rush’s A Student Guide to Play Analysis is intended as a textbook for undergraduate courses in script analysis or modern drama. Such courses are common to most theatre programs, often serving as a prerequisite for required classes for majors. However, despite the prevalence of this class as a building block for a program, there seems to be a fundamental disagreement about its purpose. Is the central goal to teach students to analyze plays as literature , looking for meanings, themes, structure, and so forth? Or is the course intended to be more practically connected to other classes in the theatrical curriculum , such as acting, directing, and design? These approaches are not mutually exclusive, but frequently one approach dominates, emphasizing one area of study over another. Because Rush provides an exclusively literary approach to play analysis, the usefulness of this text will depend on how the instructor balances teaching literary analysis and production-based conceptualization. Instructors considering this text should also be aware of its strict allegiance BOOK REVIEWS { 170 } to Aristotelian theory. Rush presents Aristotle as the de¤nitive authority on plays and drama, omitting important context about the conditions under which Aristotle wrote and the unresolved questions about whether his analytic system was descriptive or prescriptive. He also fails to address concerns some scholars may have about the political implications of relying so heavily on such a traditional theorist’s analytic tools. Rush treats critical theory only in the ¤nal chapter , which includes a discussion of postmodernism as a style and a concise summary of the differences between “liberal humanism” and the postmodern worldview. This chapter also includes a discussion of contemporary playwrights who are writing nonlinear works.Rush’s designation of postmodernism as a style and his omission of how postmodern theories may be used as analytic tools only reinforce instructor and student reliance on Aristotle. Rush devotes four chapters to three of Aristotle’s six dramatic components— plot, character, and language—allocating two chapters to plot (structure). He brie®y discusses thought,music,and spectacle in the introduction.The chapters on plot deal primarily with a detailed explanation of the Freytag pyramid of inciting incident, climax, and resolution. The chapter on language examines language in a fairly microscopic way without clearly explaining how this microcosmic approach might contribute to a greater understanding of the play as a whole. One of the great strengths of the work is that Rush provides comprehensive and useful information on many genres and styles, including chapters on tragedy, comedy, melodrama, farce, and hybrid genres, such as tragicomedy. In the chapters on styles, Rush includes descriptions of realism, symbolism, expressionism , theatre of the absurd, epic theatre, and postmodernism. He provides some historical context about each one and surveys common features of plays written in particular styles or genres. Discussion questions are provided at the end of each chapter. Another positive feature is Rush’s approach to questioning a play. Rush uses a set of standard questions to organize his...