American Drama: The Bastard Art by Susan Harris Smith (review)

Book Reviews SUSAN HARRIS SMITH. American Drama: The Bastard Art. New York: Cambridge University Press 1997· Pp. 248. $49.95· This book, quite simply, is must reading for anyone working in the field of American drama as either scholar or practitioner. Furthermore, it is the kind of book drama scholars should pass on to their American literature colleagues, as it forcefully argues what many of us have been suggesting for many years now: American drama deserves an integral place in the leaching of American literary themes and traditions as well as in the teaching of innumerable special topics and approaches which has so long included every genre except the drama. Professor Smith's excellently researched and documented report on the state of American drama since its (debatable) beginnings outlines why and where the dramatic prejudice has occurred, presenting a litany of academic presumption, intellectual snobbery, publishing shortsightedness and popular misconception. The thoroughdocumentation is important given that this study needs to reach out to the unconverted and that mere personal opinion and bombast would fail to convince an entrenched opponent. Rather than bombast, Professor Smith has compiled overwhelming factual data to demonstrate the lamentable reception the American drama has been granted even by those who have worked so hard to blast the traditional canon in defense of other formerly marginalized fields. Smith concisely shows why the drama has been relegated to minor genre status Cin favor of first poetry and then fiction) and adds a summary of the American literary prejudices itself Cas opposed to the more established British literary canon), bringing into focus the myriad "reasons" why American drama (a doubly damned field/discipline) has been left in the margins of the academic canonical debate even as many fonnerly more marginal fields have gained ground in their fights for acceptance and inclusion. What unfolds in this study is an amazing list of opponents and obstacles - oftentimes at odds with each other and rarely operating conspiratorially. One particularly interesting avenue Professor Smith pursues involves the standard assumption that to be "American" entails striving somehow homogeneously to define that term. Much, however, of what is good about the American drama has little to do with this pursuit. The argument is that we rarely force such a restrictive criterion on other national literatures. allowing, for example, British literature (fiction, poetry, as well as drama) to deal with matters other than that of British identity and willingly incorporating such work into the "canon" despite this apparent lack of focus. Such is all too often not the case for American drama (and perhaps for other American literary types as well). She further documents the causes and sources of the literary prejudice against drama, namely the matter of excluding drama because it often lacks "literary merit." Scrutinizing the merits of this "high art" prejudice, however, '70 Book Reviews Smith additionally notes the exclusion of the drama from the burgeoning field of cultural studies. Unfortunately, it appears that American drama is in one case too low and in the other too high. Add to all of this the perennial debate over whether or not a dramatic text is "merely" a script for the theatre, another facet that Smith reveals to be an unfortunate civil war of sorts between potential allies for the recognition of American drama as both text and performance. (The recent emergence of performance studies, Smith suggests, has rather inadvertently dealt a serious blow to efforts at establishing the value of dramatic texts by themselves.) The study, however, goes beyond mere academia and documents numerOllS past attempts to place the American drama on a popular center stage both in the theatre and in print. While many concerted efforts succeeded for brief periods of time at shining a warm light on the American drama, they could not be sustained, resulting in returns to marginalization. The almost overwhelming numbers of causes Smith presents for the marginalization of American drama nevertheless fails to convince her that the Americandrama deserves its bastard status. Herdefenses are reasonable. and I believe they are quite convincing in the other direction. Namely we should, more than ever, fight for the positioning of the American drama in the center of innumerable debates over the...