A Critical Companion to Lynn Nottage ed. by Jocelyn L. Buckner (review)

This much-needed collection, edited by Jocelyn L. Buckner, is a provocative introduction to a variety of Nottage's works, with a special section on Ruined and a dedicated chapter for each of Crumbs from the Table of Joy; Mud, River, Stone; Las Meninas; Intimate Apparel; Fabulation, or the Re-Education of Undine; and By the Way, Meet Vera Stark. This approach gives the collection focus as well as a larger vision shaped by multiple framing pieces: a concise introduction by the editor, a production history, an interview, a foreword, and an afterword. Each chapter is much more than introductory in content, providing important insights into the plays they address as well as conversations in theatre and film history and theory, Black studies, African diaspora studies, cultural studies, and feminist theatre.

Each of the contributors' essays is tightly argued around its particular play and contributes to a broader understanding of the complexity, betweenness, and crossing of borders that structure Nottage's works. Sandra Shannon's foreword emphasizes how Nottage's innovations create freedom for the playwright, her characters, and other African American female playwrights. Buckner's pithy introduction reviews the chapters and highlights three common themes: "history, diaspora, and identity" (5). Also framing the top of the collection is Scott Knowles's chronology of Nottage's works, which interweaves her production history with a few important events in the playwright's life.

Several essays address the complexity of Nottage's use of space. Jaye Austin Williams demonstrates how Nottage crafts fugitivity for black women in Crumbs from the Table of Joy. Williams works from theorists as diverse as Plato, Saidiya Hartman, Hortense Spillers, Frantz Fanon, and Karl Marx to find promise as well as loss and unfulfillment in the "same no-place" (21) of this form of freedom. Jocelyn Buckner's "Diasporic desires in Las Meninas" similarly emphasizes elision and in-betweenness, arguing that through this play Nottage enacts a "revisionist historiography in which identities are constructed in liminal space and time" (53) in response to both Eurocentric and Afrocentric notions of belonging and desire. Adrienne Macki Braconi also attends to the slipperiness and porosity of spatial boundaries in Intimate Apparel, analyzing in particular Maureen Freedman's stage design for the 2012 Connecticut Repertory Theatre production.

Other chapters focus on Nottage's multifaceted representational strategies. Jennifer L. Hayes examines the characters in Mud, River, Stone as a diverse, global chorus and argues these multiple voices inspire the audience to see many sides, and their own role, in global conflicts. By focusing on character duality, Faedra Chatard Carpenter argues that Fabulation, or the Re-Education of Undine recuperates the rich, complex history of Brer Rabbit, in the process challenging stereotypes, spanning geographic and temporal fissures, and creating a blackness that is a "proliferating 'work in progress'" (107). Harvey Young also highlights the multiple means of "racial role play" (115) that are critically and intentionally deployed by the black female characters in By the Way, Meet Vera Stark.

A special section on Nottage's 2009 Pulitzer Prize–winning Ruined is this collection's special strength, drawing out the relationship between the play and its relationship to activism and social transformation. Jennifer-Scott Mobley's "Melodrama, Sensation, and Activism in Ruined," Jeff Paden's "Renegotiating Realism: Hybridity of Form and Political Potentiality in Ruined," and Esther J. Terry's "Land Rights and Womb Rights: Forging Difficult Diasporic Kinships in Ruined" take up themes from throughout the volume as well as work together to illuminate the structure and impact of Nottage's most acclaimed play. Examining Ruined's plot structure and realistic style, characters marked as clearly "good" and "bad," female heroines, music and song, and spectacular climax scene, Mobley argues that Ruined uses melodramatic rather than Brechtian dramaturgy to generate a more potent political response in audience members. Continuing the discussion of theatre and activism, Paden reads Ruined's songs and scenes of violence through theories of performing pain to frame its oft...