The American Woman Playwright: A View of Criticism and Characterization by Judith Olauson (review)

324 Book Reviews masks and takes at face value the idea that the streetwise Flossy is impressed with Janie's "hipness," Ultimately, Bernstein crams Bullins into the tired old white-constructed mold of the black spokesman capable only of expressing "rage and prejudices" (p. 142). To aq,yone with even a passing knowledge of Afro-American drama, Bernstein's treatment of Bullins will seem shallowly ethnocentric. A similar list of shortcomings could be compiled for each chapter. Stylistically, The Strands Entwined should embarrass the Northeastern University Press. The prose would be unacceptable in any advanced undergraduate English class. The book should not have been published in anything resembling its current form. CRAIG WERNER, UNIVERSITY OF MISSISSIPPI JUDITH OLAUSON. The American Woman Playwright: A View 0/ Criticism and Characterization. Troy, New York: The Whitston Publishing Co. 1981. Pp. viii, 182. The American Woman Playwright is a useful summary of commercially successful plays by women in the United States between 1930 and 1970, with plot synopses and a survey of critical responses. Unfortunately, this is all that Judith Olauson has accomplished. Her stated aim, "to explore the problem of the apparent lack of both women-centered material and theory" in American drama, is scarcely addressed. Her assumption that women playwrights "evolve as a 'special' group of writers" remains unexamined. The trend she claims to perceive, toward a "freer expression of a variety of themes and characters" over the four decades surveyed, general as it is, is not borne out by the descriptions and discussion she provides. The result is a severely limited survey which neatly avoids all the interesting and controversial issues which the subject might have raised. A study that examines one group of writers exclusively suggests by that choice that the group has something in common that is worth examination. Beyond referring briefly to women as a "special group," however, Olauson never deals with the question of what makes women writers "special." The existence of a female aesthetic, and its nature if it does exist, has been a hotly debated issue among feminist critics of literature and the visual arts in recent years. Olauson seems unaware of the controversy. More specifically, the question of a women's or a feminist theatrical form has engaged a number of writers. Patti Gillespie has discussed the characteristics of feminist theatre in the Quarterly Journal 0/ Speech, a discussion amplified in Dinah Leavitt's recent book-length work on the subject. Honor Moore offers a definition of a "new women's theatre" in the introduction to her anthology. My own work has attempted to define the rhetorical impulse central to feminist drama. Although most of this material would have been available in time for inclusion, none of it is addressed or even mentioned by Olauson. Book Reviews 325 Nor does she use the material she bas amassed as evidence of a shared preference in subject matter, for instance, or a similar treatment of women characters. She quotes Virginia Woolfs view that women have had no "years of common thinking," no literary tradition such as men have had. Yet even when her discussion reaches such consciously feminist playwrights as Megan Terry and Adrienne Kennedy, ber narrow methodology does not permit more than a synopsis of the establishment's critical responses at the time of production . This naturally eliminates the possibility of a feminist interpretation, even though that interpretation would certainly be the most fruitful, and might reveal at least an incipient literary tradition. Olauson defends her focus on women playwrights on the basis that women "have been presumed to be second-rate and undeserving of critical attention." This is certainly a valid concern. In fact, the recovery and reassessment of "lost" women writers constitute a major strain in feminist criticism. Chinoy and Jenkins, for example, have recently completed, in Women in American Theatre, a collection that documents forgotten women in the theatre ranging from American Indian shamans through neglected playwrights Anne Nichols and Sophie Treadwell in the twentieth century. Olauson, however, offers no such reassessment. Her selection of plays is based on their "apparent success with audiences or critics; that is, all the plays have sustained a continuous run of at least thirty performances on...