Registres I. Appels by Jacques Copeau (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 107 items he decries most vehemently, Richard Schechner's charge that in Virginia Woolf "Albee gratifies an adolescent culture which likes to think of itself as decadent" and Philip Roth's accusation that Tiny Alice "is a homosexual daydream" that Albee feels compelled to keep closeted by disguising it as something else. But these are so obviously eccentric and off-the-mark that they can hardly serve as representative indictments of much admittedly "bad" Albee criticism . The one long journal article Bigsby does include is Rose Zimbardo's now classic "Symbolism and Naturalism in The Zoo Story," which has set the pattern for much later "good" Albee criticism, though it, too, now seems to go overboard in its insistence that Jerry is Jesus and Peter is St. Peter and both the West Side rooming house and the Village are the Hell that Jerry harrows. The most noticeable deficiency is the lack of any extended analysis and interpretation of what many readers would consider Albee's most significant play to date, for the excerpt from Diana Trilling's "The Riddle of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf!' deals more with the reasons why the play appeals to audiences than with it as dramatic art. Perhaps the cover drawing was intended as sufficient warning that major attention would be given to the most mystifying - some would say muddled - of Albee's plays, Tiny Alice, including the chapter from Bigsby's own book, published in 1969, which he here updates by printing for the first time new essays on Box and All Over. So two of Albee's five full-length original plays (the sixth, the Pulitzer Prize winning Seascape, opened too late to be represented) are seen exclusively, and a third mainly, through Bigsby's eyes, a too limited, albeit intelligent, perspective for a collection of this nature. Despite Bigsby's avowal that "Where I have chosen to print essays of my own this is because I could find no criticism which emphasized those elements which, for the purposes of this book, I wished to stress," he could easily have found adequate substitutions for his discussions of Alice and Box that would stress substantially the same points. But that being said, we can be grateful for his astute generalizations about Albee's career in the essay on Box; and no one would want to see omitted Bigsby's illuminating study, "To the Brink of the Grave: All Over," which is probably the best interpretive essay in this volume, and an excellent summation of Albee's central theme: "the paramount need for compassion and, in the last resort, love, however imperfect that love may be" if one is "to counter the natural absurdity of man's condition." If one disagrees (as I do) with Bigsby's finally negative judgment of All Over on the basis of its language , which he sees as pretentious and "imitation baroque" to the point where "human relevance" is obliterated, this can only help spur needed discussion of one of the few aspects of Albee's dramaturgy which has not been sufficiently touched upon already either within the confines of this collection or without. THOMAS P. ADLER Purdue University REGISTRES I. APPELS, by Jacques Copeau. Paris: Gallimard, 1974. Pp. 360. 85 francs. The name of Jacques Copeau, like that of Edward Gordon Craig, has become legendary in the annals of contemporary theatre. No history book fails to mention , if only in elaborate footnotes, the work and influence of these refractory, solitary and often misunderstood men of the theatre. Never friends, and often 108 BOOK REVIEWS opposed on fundamental points of theatrical reform, Copeau and Craig nevertheless agreed that the state of the theatre at the turn of the century was chaotic, self-serving and superficial. It could only be saved through the person of the director whose unifying vision would restore the artistic and social unity demanded by the collective art of theatre. To this end, each in his own way, these cultured, authoritarian figures devoted a lifetime of energies. Of the two reputations, Craig's has been probably the better served through his own numerous publications and the innumerable studies and biographies by scholars the world...