Violence in American Drama: Essays on Its Staging, Meanings and Effects ed. by Alfonso Ceballos Muñoz, Ramón Espejo Romero, Bernardo Muñoz Martinez (review)

How American drama represents and addresses the role of violence in U.S. society is the topic of this timely volume, drawn primarily from papers given at the third International Conference on American Theatre and Drama. This lively collection, which includes essays by established names, as well as by names new to English-speaking readers, has strengths in several areas: gendered behaviors, chiefly violence against and by women, structural and cultural violence, and wartime aggressions and attitudes.

Single-author studies form an important part of the collection. The editors observe that Dorothy Chansky’s essay, “The Violence at the Top of the Stairs: Domestic Dystopia in Inge’s Heartland,” may be the first to examine domestic violence in the work of Inge by distinguishing between “situational couple violence” and the more devastating “intimate terrorism” (114). Dana Rufolo, in “Psychodrama Strategies That Protect Tennessee Williams’ Late-Play Characters from a Violent World,” argues that Williams moved from recreating memory to creating characters who use “coping strategies” (141) to develop a protective circle of relationships.

Perhaps the most cohesive discussion emerges from essays on women committing violence in response to a threatening environment. In “The Thrust for Freedom from Systems of Oppression: A Century of Suicide, Prolicide and Viricide in Plays by American Women,” Cheryl Black examines acts by which “women meet violence with violence” (45) in plays from 1916 to the present. Noelia Hernando-Real goes so far as to suggest, in “Sane Enough to Kill: On Women, Madness and the Theatricality of Violence in Susan Glaspell’s The Verge,” that Glaspell’s female protagonist breaks free of realist parameters for acceptable women’s behavior and, in that new context, must take life. In “New Critical Approaches to Machinal: Sophie Treadwell’s Response to Structural Violence,” Miriam López Rodríguez sets aside the usual evaluation of Machinal as an innovative expressionist play in order to cast the protagonist as a young woman much like Treadwell herself, who felt victimized by “the American mechanized and sexist society of the 1920s” (81). Jerry Dickey considers in “Working Women and Violence in Jazz Era American Drama” how the public debate over women entering the workplace, particularly the business office, revealed a fracturing of women’s sense of self. Besides the familiar Machinal, Dickey discusses Maureen Watkins’s Chicago, Francis Faragoh’s Pinwheel, and Elmer Rice’s The Subway, lesser-known plays that muted the distinction between the virtuous angel of the house and the worldly, sensual temptress. Moving from modernist to contemporary drama, María Dolores Narbona Carrión, in “‘Arms in Women’s Hands’: The Subversion of the Victim Role of Women in Heather McDonald’s Dream of a Common Language,” recognizes “brave initiatives” (187) that female characters take.

Structural violence (embedded in unequal power relations) and cultural (ideological) violence, whether gendered, racial, or ethnic, receive careful attention. While not excusing male perpetrators, Michael Solomonson focuses on the cultural objectification of women in “Rebecca Gilman’s Exploration of Gender Conditioning as a Factor in Violence Against Women.” Diana Rosenhagen grapples with the question of whether violence against structural and cultural racial oppression can be justified. In “‘Actual Explosions and Actual Brutality’: Baraka, Violence and the Black Arts Stage,” she finds Baraka’s plays of the mid-1960s to be “acts of violence in themselves” (144). Like Rosenhagen, Irma Mayorga, in “Invisibility’s Contusions: Violence in Cherríe Moraga’s Heroes and Saints and The Hungry Woman and Luis Valdez’s Zoot Suit,” considers how stage violence can illuminate oppressive circumstances and outline forms of agency for Latinos/as, enabling a progressive “politics of visibility” (158). N. J. Stanley examines the “urge to [commit] violence” as “an inability to function ethically” (222) in “Neil LaBute, Vigilante of Violence: An Examination of His...