Postmodern Theatric(k)s: Monologue in Contemporary American Drama by Deborah R. Geis (review)

Reviews555 men ..." (p. 131). Do we really need the authority of Dent for a plotsummary ? And finally, "The matricidal male infant has a reciprocal relationship to the infanticidal Amazon" (p. 137). Chicago must be relying on leaving this to market forces. RALPH BERRY Stratford-upon-Avon Deborah R. Geis. Postmodern Theatric(k)s: Monologue in Contemporary American Drama. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995. Pp. vi + 205. $34.50 (casebound); $16.95 (paperback). As the first chapter of Deborah Geis' Postmodern Theatric!k)s points out, monologue has not received as much critical attention in dramatic studies as has dialogue. In this study, Geis sets out to rectify this omission, specifically in light of her observation that contemporary playwrights have been increasingly drawn to the monologue as a way to exhibit and to explore a postmodern sensibility on the stage. Geis' study, locating monologue within the postmodern American theater, focuses on the way that contemporary playwrights have used monologue to explode the boundaries of traditional theatrical narrative and to explore the question of subjectivity that is central to postmodernism. The end result is a useful study of language on the stage and provides pertinent readings of several important contemporary playwrights. While the chapter devoted to Sam Shepard is the book's longest and most detailed , subsequent chapters that examine the theatrical voices present in plays by David Mamet, Maria Irene Fornes, Ntozake Shange, Spalding Gray, and Karen Finley offer further examples of postmodern uses of monologue as well as insight into the theaters of each of these playwrights . This selection of playwrights strikes a nice balance of styles and of demographics that serves to represent the many kinds of dramatists writing for today's stage. The first two chapters offer an overview of the monologue in drama and set up theoretical issues that pervade postmodern work. In exploring the traditional uses of the monologue in classical Greek and in Elizabethan drama, Geis notes that playwrights use this device to allow a character an opportunity for introspection and to provide narrative exposition . Chiefly, however, she argues that it affects an audience's perception of time and space. The monologue, by transforming stage space and moving forward or backward in time, allows the speaking subject to manipulate the blankness of the stage and thereby serves as one of the most useful tools for any playwright in creating and manipulating stage reality. In the chapter about postmodernism, Geis gives particular attention to how monologue functions in postmodern texts—the central issue of 556Comparative Drama this study. After indicating the way that postmodernism focuses on the decentered or "ex-centric" subject and that it tends to use the very tools and ideas that it simultaneously questions, she comments, "Perhaps the ultimate manifestation of the decentered subject is the increasing precedence that monologue takes over dialogue in postmodern drama. Moreover, monologue does not necessarily emerge from one coherent 'voice' or 'self; the monologic texts, rather, are similarly fragmented and given multiple voices . . ." (p. 35). This concern with fragmented and multiple voices is traced through the theatrical experiments of the I960's in the works of such groups as the Living Theater and the Open Theater which influenced the contemporary playwrights of her discussion . Issues of character were expanded and fragmented in these experiments: American theatrical tradition moved away from the idea of a character as a figure discreet and separate from the actor and instead explored the conflation of actor and character as well as the fragmentation of character and of narrative. Geis then moves to illustrate the uses that particular playwrights have made of this theatrical tool. The chapters on individual playwrights consider their postmodern "theatric(k)s" as they parody, question, explore , and fragment issues of subjectivity, narrative, and dramatic structure . Thankfully, her study never falls into lengthy line-by-line discussions of specific monologues in specific plays. Geis' focus remains on the overall monologic narrative voice of each playwright and on how it reflects his or her theatrical intentions. For instance, her chapter about Shepard argues that the monologic "arias" performed by his characters beginning with his early plays exhibit the "postmodern emphasis on the self-referential and self-questioning text...