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

In Visions of Tragedy in Modern American Drama, editor David Palmer brings together a convocation of scholars who explore the ongoing debate about modern tragedy and its relationship to the classic definition and examples of the form. In eighteen short essays, each by a different author, the works of signifi-cant American playwrights, beginning with Eugene O'Neill and Susan Glaspell, are discussed in terms of their tragic vision, influences, and thematic concerns. In his introduction, Palmer explains the task given to the essayists: "Rather than starting with preconceived notions of what tragedy is and then forcing them down upon the works to see if they fit the mold, contributors here were asked to look directly at the plays themselves and to explore what they showed about their author's vision of the nature and sources of human suffering, the ways the self is assaulted, and the ways characters respond. From that, it was hoped, distinctive elements of the author's vision of tragedy would emerge" (7). What is so appealing about this approach is that each playwright is considered as a unique artist, engaged with the idea of tragedy in a specific way. The tragedy of Sam Shepard's alcohol- and violence-saturated families is different from the tragedy of Amiri Baraka's doomed subway rider, which is different from the tragedy of Marsha Norman's lost working-class mother and daughter and Adrienne Kennedy's chorus of fragmented selves—though all stem from distorted visions of the American dream, along with the cognitive dissonance that comes from the unrealistic expectation that it should be easily achievable.

As a reader progresses through the essays, an argument for an understanding of tragedy that is broader than a more traditional classical definition emerges, even as the expected indebtedness to classics of Greek tragedy and the work of Shakespeare is acknowledged. Can a play be a tragedy when it contains a great deal of humor? Can a play be a tragedy when the classical conception of fate does not apply but instead issues such as racism and sexism prevent characters from having true control over their lives and futures? Is there a difference between a play that contains content that would be labeled "tragic" and a play that functions in the tragic mode? Christopher Bigsby, in the foreword, attempts to define what makes a modern tragedy: "What is common is the attempt by the protagonists of these dramas to invest their lives with meaning in a context in which such meaning is neither gifted nor apparent, indeed in which they feel the pressure of unmeaning. What is common is the sense that the past pressed unbearably on the present" (xix). That past may be the disturbing history of a family or a community or even a country. The tragic mode allows dramatists to go beyond the exploration of personal psychology and to take on more universal and political themes, as essayist Jonathan Shandell argues Langston Hughes did in Mulatto (50).

In the final chapter, "American Theatre since 1990," Toby Zinman considers plays that are primarily about American history, rather than family dramas, and "history, as it turns out, is often about war" (213). She examines musical theatre's engagement with history and tragedy through pieces such as Stephen Sondheim's Assassins and Lin-Manuel Miranda's Hamilton, in which, as she argues, "it is America, flawed but great, that becomes the tragic hero" (215). The final section of the chapter considers recent plays that contend with the legacy of war, past and present, such as Rajiv Joseph's Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo and Christopher Shinn's Dying City. Plays like these serve a necessary purpose, "revealing the emotional truth of war" in a way that journalism can't (227), and, unfortunately, the subject continues to be as relevant as it was during the era of classical tragedy. Although Zinman, by necessity, has to limit the scope of the final...