Visions of Tragedy in Modern American Drama ed. by David Palmer (review)

Visions of Tragedy in Modern American Drama had its origins in a roundtable discussion at the Comparative Drama Conference in Baltimore in 2015, which included papers from many of the contributors to this new publication from Bloomsbury. Greatly expanded and thoughtfully edited by David Palmer, this collection includes a wide range of essays on canonical American dramatists from Eugene O’Neill to Suzan-Lori Parks that consider the ways these dramatists engage with the long history of tragedy. As Palmer explains in the introduction, the collection addresses the tension between the universality of the human experience of tragedy (that begins with the ancient Greeks and infuses Western drama) and the historicized concerns of modern and contemporary dramatists in the United States. Beneficially, Visions of Tragedy considers this tension inductively; that is, each chapter examines the plays, letters, essays, and public remarks by these playwrights to determine the “distinctive elements of the author’s vision of ” tragedy—an approach that honors the heterogeneity of voices and experiences in the United States (7). Although the essays tend to be rather brief, they collectively paint a rich and compelling portrait of the intersections of classical tragedy and contemporary American concerns. Because of this, Visions of Tragedy in Modern American Drama makes valuable contributions to the study of modern and postmodern American drama, with important implications for the study of O’Neill’s plays.

Organized chronologically, Visions of Tragedy can nonetheless be divided into two broad categories of essays, beginning with those addressing playwrights who purposefully attempt to reckon (to borrow the language of Nakta Bianchini’s essay on Edward Albee) with Aristotle and the ancient Greeks. This category includes chapters about O’Neill (Jeffery Kennedy), Thornton Wilder (Jackson R. Bryer), Tennessee Williams (Susan C. W. Abbotson), Arthur Miller (Stephen Marino), Albee (Natka Bianchini), Lillian Hellman (Anne Fletcher), Adrienne Kennedy (Werner Sollors), Marsha Norman (Palmer), and David Mamet (Brenda Murphy). Marino’s chapter on Arthur Miller provides a fulcrum for the collection by discussing Miller’s 1949 essay, “Tragedy and the Common Man,” which was published shortly after the debut of Death of a Salesman and provides a touchstone for modernizing Aristotelian concepts of tragedy for twentieth-century dramatists. Many of the contributors reference this essay as part of their discussions. Murphy’s chapter on David Mamet exemplifies the chapters that examine the plays from this perspective, with her adept analysis of Mamet’s wrestling with an Aristotelian legacy in American Buffalo, The Woods, Oleanna, and The Cryptogram. Abbotson’s chapter on Tennessee Williams is among the most compelling of the collection, with its consideration of the ways that Williams drew from Greek concepts of tragedy (offstage violence, music, and spectacle) and yet synthesized these concepts with the “tragedy of Puritanism” that Williams argued was distinctly American (84).

The other category of essays in Visions of Tragedy includes chapters about playwrights who were writing tragedy from a distinctly historicized perspective, that is, through depiction of the sociopolitical conditions or injustices surrounding gender, race, ethnicity, and sexuality. Included here are chapters on Susan Glaspell (Sharon Friedman), Langston Hughes (Jonathan Shandell), Lorraine Hansberry (Deirdre Osborne), Amiri Baraka (Harvey Young), August Wilson (Sandra G. Shannon), Sam Shepard (Shannon Blake Skelton), Tony Kushner (Claire Gleitman), and Suzan-Lori Parks (Soyica Diggs Colbert). Although some of the contributors mention Greek tragedy, they often contend that these playwrights do not write in the tradition of Aristotle. A few argue that dramatists reject the genre’s assumptions altogether and instead focus on the tragic suffering of minorities in the United States. Friedman’s chapter on Glaspell initiates this trend by arguing that although Glaspell’s dramas do not resemble Aristotelian form, this does not preclude the consideration of tragedy in Glaspell’s dramas. Drawing from Jennifer Wallace and Felicity Rosslyn, Friedman considers tragic drama as emerging from “periods of social upheaval and changing beliefs,” specifically the “upheaval in gender relations in America during the early twentieth century” (31, 37). Young’s chapter on Amiri...