Kitchen Sink Realisms: Domestic Labor, Dining, and Drama in American Theatre by Dorothy Chansky (review)

Kitchen sink realism is a designation that originated with the post-World War II British playwrights who were known at the time as the "angry young men" (although there were several women in the group), who eschewed the middle-class drama of the drawing room in favor of working-class plays that were often set in the kitchen. In Britain, the term was associated with meaningless drudgery and the dreary, hopeless outlook of the lower classes after the war. In the American theatre, as Dorothy Chansky explains, the term has come to mean "plays trafficking in the domestic everyday, reveling in the use of household objects, often depicting people of limited financial means, and frequently featuring intense showdowns that favor psychologically credible acting, rather than, say, abstract, consciously poetic, or athletically physical styles." It is associated with "grittiness, literal-minded representation practices, and emotional intensity."

While Chansky's study discusses numerous plays that fit the description, the book's title does not begin to describe the ambition of her project. As she notes several times, hers is a diachronic study and it places the history of the theatre and its realisms in a rich context of cultural, economic, and political history. Throughout the book, the treatment of particular plays is imbricated with a wide-ranging discussion of the domestic culture with which they interact, including domestic architecture, the history of consumerism, patterns of food preparation and consumption, the history of domestic labor, and the feminist movements of the last one hundred years.

After a brief Introduction, the book is laid out chronologically, with seven chapters covering the period of the study. Each chapter focuses on four or five plays, while referring to many more, treating them in the context of a particular aspect of cultural or economic history. Each chapter also has a specific section on African American plays which went largely unproduced in the commercial theatre, but can now be understood as significant in the representation of domestic realism. In choosing the plays to discuss, Chansky made use of the "Best Plays" series, originally edited by Burns Mantle, which chronicles most of the plays produced in New York, season by season. Her approach creates a revealing juxtaposition of canonical plays like A Streetcar Named Desire, Death of a Salesman, and 'Night Mother with plays that have received little or no analysis, like George Kelly's The Show-Off, Sidney Kingsley's The World We Make, Langston Hughes' Limitations of Life, John Van Druten's I Remember Mama, and Maxine Wood's On Whitman Avenue.

In her treatment of realism, Chansky notes that she makes use of "multiple axes and indices of reality and the real, relating to script, environment, prices, products, affective credibility in casting, or 'persuasive' performance." In doing so, she tends to avoid aesthetic definitions of realism. While it may be surprising to find Edward Albee's The American Dream, usually described as Absurdist, and a postmodern performance piece like Martha Rosler's Semiotics of the Kitchen in a book about kitchen sink realism, Chansky makes it clear that her conception of realism is inclusive, considering any dramatic or theatrical elements that reflect the real to be fair game. Nevertheless, it would be useful to have her articulation of what constitutes a realistic play. A conclusion that clarified this and pulled together the many threads that are dexterously woven in this study, and a bibliography listing the sources in Chansky's richly detailed footnotes, would make this book even more useful. Just as it is, however, it makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of American history as well as the American theatre and its many realisms.