American Drama in the Age of Film (review)

{ 223 } BOOK REV IEWS and arguments that are of such a magnitude that they cannot be satisfactorily covered in the conclusion. Paul Fortunato sets out to examine Oscar Wilde’s relationship to consumer culture, asking questions many critics shy away from: Why and how did Wilde fuse popular culture and modernist aesthetics,and what import could a six-year career in a commercial industry possibly have on the aesthetics of a writer (now) considered one of the great modernists? His study provides a comprehensive vista of the late-Victorian consumer culture: journalism, fashion, advertising pioneers, mass culture critics, and the forgotten female aesthetes. As such, any scholar of modernism or of Oscar Wilde will find much to appreciate in this book. —HEPHZIBAH D. DUTT Bowling Green State University \ American Drama in the Age of Film. By Zander Brietzke. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007. xix + 201 pp. $39.95 cloth. Running throughout Zander Brietzke’s lively consideration of American plays and their subsequent screen adaptations is a provocative counter-Aristotelianism that, unlike Brecht’s, challenges not so much the concepts of empathy or catharsis as the low ranking that “spectacle” gets in the Poetics. Beginning from the common assumption that theatre was upstaged and perhaps fully eclipsed by movies and television during the twentieth century, Brietzke offers a passionate defense of theatre that runs against both the conventional celebration of its “liveness” and the primacy of the playwright, affirming instead its force as an essentially spatial art. Our ways of seeing, he argues, have been decisively changed by the electronic media that now dominate our lives, but for Brietzke that represents a challenge for theatre rather than its death warrant. Generally fudging the qualitative differences between television and cinema, Brietzke’s self-described “breezy” approach to his subject belies a solidly erudite grip of a full range of issues related to performance and media. He sticks to major American playwrights—O’Neill, Albee, Miller, Williams, Hellman, Kushner , and others—and significant film and television versions of their works, yet his analyses reflect the author’s own intersection of interests and values rather than any scholarly imperative to cover the subject systematically. Although fully conversant in film history and technique, Brietzke makes clear that the { 224 } BOOK REV IEWS screen adaptations he discusses are important to him as supplementary works, not as the main focus of his attention. His analyses of individual plays therefore do not pretend to be taut, point-by-point comparisons of stage and screen versions but instead follow a method that is compatible with his overall claim; that is, he takes up as much of a screen adaptation as he needs to dig into the source play’s inherent strengths on a spatially delimited stage. Along the way, Brietzke offers some caustic, often self-referential observations on the perennial death watch over theatre, along with insightful comments on current practices in the teaching of drama, the prevailing rhetoric of introductory drama textbooks, and how students are typically exposed to plays through screen versions because of their convenience for classroom use. He recalls as a fledgling academic hearing Richard Schechner, whom he describes as an avant-garde pioneer turned “highly paid professor at New York University,” pronouncing traditional theatre “an extremely limited genre” lingering on the margins of performance culture, and pondering his own choice of a career as a professor of this obsolete art (6). Brietzke accepts Schechner’s premise that in an age of electronic media theatre can no longer claim the primacy it once did, but he persistently tries to show that this poses a special challenge for stage performance, a new way of seeing its peculiar strengths in a mediated age. Nor does he buy into the mystical virtue of “liveness” claimed by some defenders of theatre against other media. Brietzke declares himself, a bit petulantly ,“sick of the same old saws” about live performance and the special bond between actors and audience (1–2). He questions postmodern theorists such as Philip Auslander who argue that live and mediated performances are not essentially distinct but instead are determined by historical conditions; for his own part, Brietzke relies on some fairly traditional distinctions such as...