Mirror on the Stage: The Pulitzer Plays as an Approach to American Drama by Thomas P. Adler (review)

84Comparative Drama Relating contemporary South African land laws to the division of the kingdom and other interplay of property and power in Lear, Orkin proposes that the Shakespeare play would have particular impact in the South African apartheid state. Two review articles, on "Shakespeare's Late Plays at Stratford, Ontario ," by Robert Warren, and on "Shakespeare Performances in London, Manchester, and Stratford-upon-Avon 1985-86," by Nicholas Shrimpton, record details of production and assess the work of the several directors involved. These essays, and others, are amply supported by twenty-eight production photos. The volume ends with Shakespeare Survey's annual analysis of that year's contributions to "Critical Studies," by R. S. White; "Shakespeare's Life, Times, and Stage," by Richard Dutton; and "Editions and Textual Studies," by MacDonald P. Jackson—all major efforts of considerable help to those involved in Shakespeare studies. JUNE SCHLUETER Lafayette College Thomas P. Adler. Mirror on the Stage: The Pulitzer Plays as an Approach to American Drama. West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Press, 1987. Pp. xv + 171. $17.50. In his Mirror on the Stage: The Pulitzer Plays as an Approach to American Drama, Thomas P. Adler performs a useful service: he argues that we too easily dismiss the Pulitzer Prize as an index of literary worth and that on the whole, despite some real clunkers, the prizewinners offer a significant overview of the "nature and development" of American drama and thought. He implies, moreover, that our dismissal may be unjustifiably reinforced by the "tendency of critics to consider American drama an ugly stepchild rather than a legitimate heir, divorced from the wider tradition in American literature." Adler's effort to gain more respect for American popular drama, as represented by the Pulitzer plays, involves three principal claims. First, "to an unexpected degree," American dramatists concern themselves with "aesthetic questions," showing an almost Pirandellian tendency to "write plays about plays and the theatrical experience." Second, Pulitzer plays are more stylistically diverse, with more serious themes, than we generally give them credit for. Third, they are less conservative and goodygoody —"more aware of the political and social and moral deficiencies of the American system"—than are the winners of the fiction prize. While I agree, broadly, I find some fault with the arguments for all three of these claims. First, Adler lumps together such diverse instances of "theatricalization" as the incidental use of an imaginary downstage mirror in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, the establishment of an onstage stage in Talley's Folly, and "thematic" role-playing in Idiot's Delight. None of these instances in itself does much to "force the audience" to "theatricalize itself"; certainly, the audience is not provoked "to entertain epistemológica! questions about seeing and knowing the self and reality outside of the self" as they Reviews85 probably are by the plays of Genet, Pirandello, Beckett, Handke, or Pinter. Pirandello may be "the high-priest of Modernism in drama," as Adler says, but he is little more than an altar-boy for the Pulitzer prize winners. I agree with Adler that many of the Pulitzer plays offer a "means of coming to know and define (and possibly even re-create) the self." But rarely if ever is the "aesthetic experience" the primary means to such re-creation. Even the most theatrical of the plays have designs on something other than our aesthetics or epistemologies; mainly, they challenge prevailing "establishment" moral and economic values. The true Modernist présider over American popular drama is not Pirandello but Ibsen; the former only to the extent that he is, as Eric Bentley insists, an Ibsenite playwright. Adler's organization of the Pulitzer plays into ten thematic categories , with each play summarized and analyzed in some detail, amply demonstrates their stylistic and thematic variety. Within categories, there are some interesting juxtapositions; it's useful to consider Beth Henley's 1981 winner, Crimes of the Heart, with Sidney Howard's They Knew What They Wanted, winner in 1925, both under the rubric of "The Ethic of Happiness." But why Talley's Folly has more to do with race than with women ("Nora's American Cousins") or "the American Dream" escapes...