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REVIEWS well as numerous other article-length studies. Extensive bibliographic material and production records conclude Fisher's text, all of which will be greatly appreciated by those researching and performing Kushner's work. ROBERT BAKER-WHITE. The Text in Play: Representations of Rehearsal in Modem Drama. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1999. Pp. 212. $37.50 (Hb). Reviewed by Neil Blackadder, Knox College The cover photograph of The Text in Play shows three (mysteriously unidentified ) people in the immediately recognizable configuration of a theatrical rehearsal: two actors, scripts in hand, watched by a director seated at a table strewn with papers. The image suggests that the "representations of rehearsal in modern drama" studied in Baker-White's book reflect that familiar situation, as if the author had restricted himself to examining plays in which directorcharacters rehearse actor-characters. In fact, the scene on the cover does not look much like a scene from any of the dozen or so plays the book deals with, since the author's range is much broader than the picture implies and his study, consequently, much richer. By discussing a variety of plays that feature rehearsal in some form, Baker-White wants to accomplish a great deal: U ta suggest that in rehearsal lies theater's greatest chance to inhabit the space of polysemous potential that much contemporary (and not so contemporary) theory prizes, and that this potential has always been the theater's special richness, and that this is a great irony, because rehearsal is the unseen, hidden core of the art" (14). In the introduction Baker-White makes a case for dramatized rehearsal as a rewarding object of study by considering it in relation to the notions of authority and performance. He points out, for instance, that "The presence of rehearsal within the codified dramatic text itself signals adispute over the locus of authority in the making of theater" (17), and that "paradoxically, in always preceding the closure of performance, rehearsal both denies and moves toward closure" (17). Here and throughout the book Baker-White contends with particular effectiveness that certain properties often attributed to performance actually apply more to rehearsal, arguing "for the especially open and flexible medium of theatrical rehearsal over the relatively closed and predictable medium of dramatic performance" (19). Rather than overlooking the significant and awkward fact that a play featuring dramatized rehearsal nevertheless remains a play, he endeavors to address the questions thus raised: "Are the freedoms of the rehearsal moment cancelled by virtue of their placement within the finished dramatic text? Or, conversely, is the ostensible stability and Reviews [77 traditionality of the text itself upset by the presence within it of rehearsal's potentially disruptive energy?" ([6). One of the appealing features of The Text in Play is that it comes at rehearsal from various angles. In a short chapter entitled "What is Rehearsal?" BakerWhite finds support for his own ideas in several recent studies - most notably, Susan Letzler Cole's Directors in Rehearsal: A Hidden World ([992) - of the activity of rehearsal: for example, that "the rehearsal situation revolves around - in a sense is defined by - a continuum of flexibility and control" (24) and that rehearsal serves to highlight "the unfinalizability of human experience" (27). He then explores such notions in greater depth in "Toward a Theory of Rehearsal," drawing on the critical positions of Bakhtin, Brecht, and Barthes. Baker-White explicates certain "theoretical levers" (17) offered by the work of each of those writers as they relate to rehearsal: in particular, dialogism, unfinalizability, and "eventness" in Bakhtin; interruption and anti-totalism in Brecht; and suspension and the writerly in Barthes. 1t appears that Baker-White is attracted to the idea of a general theory of rehearsal, yet he declines to propose one, acknowledging that to do so would contradict the thrust of the "anti-theoretical theories" (69) he has just presented as the "building blocks" (34) of such a theory. Instead, his analyses will demonstrate that the "metatheatrical explorations" of the playwrights he discusses "can be seen to derive from the same impulses that motivate Bakhtin, Brecht, and Barthes" (69)ยท The final four chapters of The Text in Play consist of examinations of specific works...

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