New American Dramatists: 1960-1980 by Ruby Cohn (review)

Book Reviews disappointing is the lack of critical analysis of the specific productions cited, and of a conceptual and historical framework that would enable the reader to judge the significance ofReinhardt's contributions to the modern theater. As it is, one must either take the author's assertions on these issues on faith, or be an expert on modern theater oneself. Both specialist and amateur may be troubled, however, by phrases in which "impressionistic features of symbolist design" make a play "flow and work for a modem audience" (p. 53). While such passages are relatively rare, they are not atypical in their casual use of complex terms and concepts that are taken for granted in the text. For an audience of specialists, however, the book is too rudimentary, while general readers may well require some assistance in coping with period and style definitions. It can only be hoped that this attempt to please all possible audiences does not lead to pleasing none. That result would be a pity, since Reinhardt is undoubtedly one of the giants of twentieth-century theater and deserves to be better known than he is in the English-speaking world. There are a few minor errors that should be eliminated in future editions - of fact (the journal Die Aktion was edited by Franz Pfernfert, not Herwarth Walden, who edited Der Sturm and other journals, p. 92), and of spelling and translation (BuhlschaJt, p. 91; infelicitous translations on pp. 28,45,46,93). Despite its shortcomings, however, this mine ofinformation is a welcome and updated English reintroduction to one ofthe great innovators and creators of the modern stage, and it belongs in every good library with theater holdings. HERBERT A. ARNOLD, WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY RUBY COHN. New American Dramatists: 1960-1980. New York: Grove Press 1982. Pp. ix, 186, illustrated. $7.95 (PB). "The theater has survived several periods of debased dialogue. Can it do so again?" Ruby Cohn asked at the end of Dialogue in American Drama (1971). The answer is apparently yes, for in New American Dramatists she takes a look at two decades of American play-writing "whose main driving force seems to me verbal." This is primarily a pedagogical strategy, she says, since one of the criteria for inclusion is that the playwright should have published a number of plays large enough to give a sense of his/her (largely his) work; the existence of texts - even though many of them are out of print - will allow the reader of New American Dramatists to explore more deeply dramatic paths that Cohn can do little more than indicate in a survey. Although antiverbal theater was very strong during the period, she excludes such theater pieces except where the availability oftexts (Richard Foreman's plays, the works Jean-Claude van Hallie and Megan Terry did with Joseph Chaikin's Open Theater) indicates that words are central to the attack on words; besides, Theodore Shank has a companion volume in this Grove Modem Dramatists series: American Alternative Theater. Cohn also excludes musicals, although she recognizes how important music is to the textures of some of the plays under discussion. She rather lightly dismisses film and television, despite the fact that work in those media sometimes reflects what a playwright is doing in the theater; The Goodbye Girl, as much as Chapter Two (both 1977), marks a new softness (sentimentality?) in Neil Simon, a quality that she does not deal with at all. Book Reviews Having turned my hand at surveys often enough, I approach this kind of book with caution. It is an almost impossible genre. The author is expected to be both descriptive and judgmental (this is what there is and this is how good it is) within a very limited space. Whatever one's powers of compression, a survey is always unfair to the authors under discussion. One either falls into the catalog style (as Cohn does in her descriptions of the plays of Joan Holden and Luis Valdez, and most obviously in the one-line summaries of Imamu Amiri Baraka's Spirit House plays) or one delivers verdicts without the space to bring in enough critical evidence. Anyone who has studied a playwright closely...