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528 Book Reviews graph, where theater is related to gay culture "as its mirror," to the very last paragraph, where "Theater is the mirror of the role-playing and stereotyping gay men experience every day" (276), "mirror" stands as an image of how perfonnancc in the theater is related to performance in life. "Life" is real, life is there; the play, by implication, is not. Yet CIum flirts with more complex understandings of that relationship whel! he talks about coming out as a kind of performance. "a public joining of private and public iife" (87), or about "gay sensibility" as "an awareness of performance becau~e of the need to perform, and a mockery of the roles one is expected to perform" (88). In all sorts of ways - the fiction-disrupting display of the gay body onstage, the interventions of ACT UP, AIDS memorial services as a form of theater - Clum keeps demonstrating the disruptive power of"gay" to break down distinctions ~tween performance as play~acting and performance as self and community. "What unites many gay plays," Clum observes, "is the dialogue with, defiance of, or elimination of the conventions of realistic drama that would otherwise entrap gay characters. Moreover, the plays are unabashedly metatheatrical , revelling in their own theatricality, underlining the essential fact that acting has been, to some extent, an essential part of the gay man's life" (199-200). For queer readers (as opposed to gay readers), this metatheatricality wiU sort oddly with the other strand of Cluffi's plot. the romantic telos of love, coupledom, the happy gay family. Carried to its logical extreme, queer critics might argue, the metatheatricality of "acting gay" deconstructs the possibility of "acting gay." Be rnat as it may, readers of all kinds will find in Cluffi's book a user-friendly guide to representations of male homosexuality before and after the performers at the Stonewall Inn made "gay" a word to reckon with. BRUCE R. SMrrH. GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY PENELOPE PRENTICE. The Pinter Ethic: The Erotic Aesthetic. Studies in Modem Drama, vol. J. Series Ed., Kimball King. New York and London: Garland Publishing 1994. Pp. lxxix, 396. $65.00. This work modifies and expands Prentice's 1972 Ph.D. dissertation on "dominance and subservience as technique and theme" in Pinter's plays. where she was "not concerned with an aesthetic theory so much as the social, psychological, ethical and basically human truths in Pinter's work" (DAI 32.I 2 (June 1972): 7ooo-A). The Pinter Ethic promotes aesthetic to the subtitle - "The Erotic Aesthetic." Still evincing no particular concern with aesthetic theory but equating "the aesthetic" with "the beauty in Pinter's plays," Prentice intends to imply that "the ethic and the aesthetic are wedded through the erotic" (xxiv). Pinter's "ethic," as "expressed through the dramatization of the dominant/subservient conflict, promotes life-enhancing values of love and justice" (41). Prentice plots how Pinter's "vision" linking power, love. and justice expands from the private to the communal and to the global level. The lengthy front matter (79 page~) includes a relatively concise "Overview" (xviixxix ) and a mostly familiar, yet useful (though not entirely accwate) "Biography" (49 Book Reviews 529 pages, nine of which discuss the novel The DWQlfs). The body's three parts correspond lO the "three phases" of Pinter's expanding focus, All three part~ - beginning with an introduction on Pinter's "Achievement" (3-10), which Prentice considers "indispensable " (xxviii) - incorporate pre~iously published material. The result is a provoking am.aigam of speculative insights, questionable interpretations, and unsupported generalizations . Prentice's mostly chronological account of Pinter's "mastemarrative" (ix, 228, 258, 360) significantly presents The Room, The Birthday Party, The Dumb Waiter and the novel The Dwarfs out of compositional order. Her.comments on Pinter's "writing process " concerning other works (lvi- lix, 97-98) can be refined and expanded by examinM ing his archive in the British Library (sec the 1994 Pinter Review). The often disproportionately brief portions "touching" (xviii) on the screenplays, which "suppleM ment and often heighten a current concern, pushing it in a provocative and innovative direction" (293), are rather uneven, sometimes attributing to Pinter features of a novel or a...

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