American Playwrights Since 1945: A Guide to Scholarship, Criticism, and Performance ed. by Philip C. Kolin (review)

Book Reviews 153 their major productions, location, budget, organizational structure, published plays, and secondary literature. Although van Erven suggests that the most energized era of the highly politicized theatre has past, the continued work of many of these groups and the attention being paid to the plays of Fa and others, suggests that artists will continue, in a troubled world, to expend their art in the service of change. JAMES ASHER, WABASH COLLEGE PHILIP C. KOLLN, ed. American Playwrights Since 1945: A Guide to Scholarship, Criticism, alld Performance. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press 1989. Pp. xiii, 595. $85.00. Since the advent of computers. students and scholars have been inundated with many bibliographies seeking to catalogue the daunting amount of publication that appears annually on nearly every aspect of drama and theatre. This collection, however, is in a class by itself. It is much fuller than the usual bibliography, covering more aspects than is usual of the forty dramatists chosen, and - very important1y - it is analytical. It does not merely list titles mechanically but provides overviews, pinpoints the major scholarly approaches and assesses their individual contribution, and, very usefully, also makes suggestions about future research opportunities. Each playwright is commented on by a separate expert (only Don B. Wilmeth covers two writers), with Philip Kolin - the editor of the journal Studies ill American Drama: 1945 - Present - providing a Preface and the section on David Rabe. Each entry follows a standard format. An initial overview on "Achievement and Reputation" in terms of awards, innovations, themes, language, characters, and dramatic technique, is followed by a "Primary Bibliography" of the works of the playwright him- or her-self. arranged chronologically in subdivisions covering plays, screenplays, essays, fiction and poetry, and interviews; a "Production History," tracing how often and how successfully each particular work has been perfonned, with attention to directorial approaches. cast. staging. and sets, and the play's relation to the work of other dramatists; a "Survey of Secondary Sources," subdivided into previous bibliographies, booklength biographies, discussions of dramatic and nondramatic influences, general studies, and critical analyses of particular plays; and, finally , a section suggesting "Future Research Opportunities," with an alphabetical checklist of the secondary sources listed for each writer. For the book as a whole, there are also indices of names and of the titles of plays and screenplays. plus biographical notes on the thirty-nine contributors. No collection is perfect, of course. The most famous names - Albee, Miller, Williams, Shepard - require more selectivity than others; one might question the choice of some of the less well-known dramatists - Albert [nnauf