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Book Reviews 275 W.8. WORTHEN. Modern Drama alld the Rhetoric o/Theater. Berkeley: University of California Press 1992. Pp. 240. $)8.00. When the publisher's blurb remains the most interesting section of a book, there is trouble. Double trouble: trouble generated by the text's unsatisfied promises as well as painful trouble for the faithful reader who sticks with meandering, passionless acadernese that never delivers, illuminates, or delights. In his introduction, Worthen writes, The rhetoric of realism frames dramatic meaning as a function of the integrated stage scene; poetic theater uses the poet's text, the word, to determine the contours of the spectacle and the experience of the audience; and contemporary political theater works to dramatize the theatrical subjection of the spectator as part of its political action. "Strikingly original" bells do not toll for this clearly uninspired thesis. As if Worthen anticipated reader annoyance, he tries to ward off legitimate objections at the start when he suggests, "The taxonomy is not meant to be exhaustive .... I am sympathetic with those who may find the division of modern drama into three rhetorical modes artificial, and the plays used to ramify them idiosyncratic." Ramify? More to the point, Worthen rams left-field examples down our throats without persuading us of his theory'S significance and value in theatrical praxis. Similarly, the aptness of the half- . baked elaborations eludes and exasperates the reader. The first chapter, "Theater and the Scene of Vision," in Worthen's words, "relates visibility to objectification." To this end, Worthen spends a lot of paper on Galsworthy 's The Silver Box and The Skin Game. One starts to worry about forests and trees here, not theatre. "Actors and Objects," the second chapter, opens with a sentence typical of the book's style: "The realistic location of character in a sustaining, possibly determining stage world inextricably entwines character and environment at the moment it dialecticizes them." Are we charmed by the prose yet? This chapter discusses The Great God Browll and Dead End at considerable length. One starts to reminisce about adolescent enthusiasms here, not theatre. Chapter three, "Scripted Bodies: Poetic Theater," mucks around with the plays of Yeats, Eliot, Auden, and Beckett while it reveals little - if any - sensitivity to beauty, daimonic pleasure, and passion. Regarding Beckett, Worthen boldly jumps on Elaine Scarry's Beckett bashing bandwagon. (I detect a virtually profane trend gaining gas.) Worthen slings silly phrases: "slatic images," "poetics of torture," "existential inertia," and "punishing plays that reduce the lively movement of the body to a grim geometry to efface character and abandon action." That Worthen does not understand Beckett's work is the greatest understatement of this litotes-ridden review. One imagines Beckett laughing here. Mirthlessly. The book's last chapter on political theatre alternately drones and zigzags rather Book Reviews incoherently. Its pasted-on postscript about Soyinka adds, as finale, a dollop of presumably de rigueur multiculturalism. Admirable book jacket, though. EILEEN ASCHER, NEW YORK CITY TECHNICAL COLLEGE OF CUNY HENRY J. SCHMIDT. How Dramas End: Essays 011 the German Sturm lind Drang, Biicllller, Hauptmanll, and Fleisser. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press 1992. Pp. t92. $39ยท50. Henry Schmidt had just begun working on the revisions of his manuscript for How Dramas End when he learned of his tenninal illness. Undaunted, he was able to complete the revisions for three of the seven chapters before.his swift and untimely death. Three of his colleagues at Ohio State University, Richard Bjornson, Leslie Adelson, and Michael Jones, completed the task of editing this work and it was published as originally planned. This is fortunate, because the essays it contains represent the broad range of Henry Schmidt's interests in the theater and the best of his scholarly work. I make this distinction because he not only researched and published interpretations of dramas, but he also had translated dramatic works and was an active participant in numerous stage productions throughout this career. In all of his theater-related activities, Schmidt revealed a bias both for "epic theater" and for plays that were controversial or not even staged in their day but which were discovered by later audiences and thought to be too...

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