Tennessee Williams: A Casebook ed. by Robert F. Gross (review)

162 REVIEWS the theater would be more in the style of popular musical drama" (138), she omits his historical drama with music, The Sun Do Move, performed by the Skyloft Players in Chicago in 1942, as well as his series of satirical and primarily non-musical skits, performed at the Harlem Suitcase Theatre in the late 1930s, including Limitations of Life, Colonel Tom's Cabin, The EmFuhrer Jones, and Scarlet Sister Barry, all of which suggest Hughes's serious political commitment beyond his tum toward the musical stage. Though Duffy's text is a worthwhile compilation, it may be somewhat eclipsed by the University of Missouri Press's Collected Works of Langston Hughes volume of Hughes's unpublished and published plays, The Plays to 1942: Mulatto to The Sun Do Move (2002), edited by Leslie Catherine Sanders with Nancy Johnston. Another issue is that Duffy seems to have been unaware of any critical studies of Hughes as dramatist published before 2000. It would have been useful to cite additional critical works beyond biographical sources and primary documents. Overall, though, Duffy's work adds effectively to the recognition of Hughes's importance as a playwright within the context of the American and African-American stage. ROBERT F. GROSS, ed. Tennessee Williams:A Casebook. New York: Routledge, 2002. Pp. xiii + 214. $75.00 (Hb). Reviewed by Philip C. Kolin, University of Southern Mississippi Robert Gross's Casebook joins the ranks of anthologies on Williams's life and work, inseparable in critical discourse. Among the first was Jac Tharpe's magisterial Tennessee Williams: A Tribute ([977), which gathered fifty essays on almost every part of the playwright's canon. Heirs to Tharpe's legacy in providing a broader view of Williams's achievements are Matthew C. Roundano's The Cambridge Companion to Tennessee Williams (1997) and Ralph F. Voss's The Magical Muse: Millennial Essays on Tennessee Williams (2002). Williams scholarship has also witnessed collections of original criticism on a single play - for example, Confroflting Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire: Essays in Critical Pluralism (1993) - and most recently, on a group of plays, in The Undiscovered Country: The Later Plays of Tennessee Williams (2002). Volumes of reprinted articles abound as well, among them Stephen Stanton's Tennessee Williams: A Collection of Critical Essays (1977), Harold Bloom's Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire ([988), and George Crandell's A Critical Response to Tennessee Williams (1996). Gross's Casebook (a misnomer, given its more restricted scope) of twelve new essays explores fifteen plays and seven short stories, with a few pages Reviews going to Cat on a Hot Tin Roofand Streetcar, but liule or nothing to The Night ofthe Iguana, Orpheus Descending, In the Bar ofa Tokyo Hotel, The Red Devil Battery Sign, the poetry, the films, or the essays. (Sadly, except for the cover, there is not a single photo in the book.) Even so, Gross deserves praise for addressing Williams's apprentice plays of the 1930S (Spring Storm and Not About Nightingales) and some later ones (for example, Something Cloudy, Something Clear, and Clothes for a Summer Hotel). Another feature of his Casebook is that several essays group previously unyoked plays to chart the evolution and (dis)continuities of Williams's art, although with varying degrees of persuasiveness. Thomas Gregory Carpenter perfunctorily locates "the beginning of Williams's lifelong essay on American power and masculinity" (28) in Not About Nightingales, arguing that Warden Whalen, whose "inability to maintain any authority in his private sphere" (27), anticipates both Big Daddy, whose manly inheritance is based on "two loving homosexuals" (27), and the impotent Boss Finley, whose political "masculinity [isl trumped [...1 by a woman" (28). 1 disagree that Big Daddy "attempts to spread tolerance" (27): Williams's assault on Big Daddyism began with his own tortured relationship with his father Cornelius and continued with his quarre]s with punitive governments. venal producers, and the repressive technocracy exemplified in The Red Devil Battery Sign. Linda Dorff more persuasively argues that Clothes for a Summer Hotel "reverses Williams's earlier uses of fire and ash metaphors, collapsing [thel earlier modernist resurrection mythologies" (154) of I Rise in Flame, Cried the Phoenix, and...