Theatre Histories: An Introduction (review)

{ 185 } BOOK REV IEWS Murphy on Williams, Elam on Wilson, and Haedicke on Mamet are models of comprehensiveness and insight, while Price on Albee, while a bit more opaque, is nonetheless intelligent and informed. All of these essays are characterized by one further noteworthy aspect of the volume as a whole. In an era when literary criticism is too often characterized by theoretical jargon at the expense of engagement with a primary text, Krasner’s group focuses firmly on extensive quotations from the texts of the plays, on statements by the playwrights about their work, and, much less, but effectively, on criticism. For a book of this size and scope it is probably ungrateful and churlish to point out inconsistencies, errors, and questionable judgments; and Krasner’s volume has an astonishingly small number. Besides the already mentioned occasional absence of cross-references, a handful of essays include birth and death dates for authors mentioned, while none of the others do so. The character played by Sam Shepard in the film The Right Stuff is Chuck Yeager, not “Sam Yeager” (295); Meg is not the “oldest [Magrath] sister” (389) in Henley’s Crimes of the Heart; and it is certainly an oversimplification to say that Eben and Abbie in O’Neill’s Desire Under the Elms end up “mad” (148), that O’Neill’s More Stately Mansions is “fully formed” to the same extent as A Touch of the Poet, and that Long Day’s Journey was not “enthusiastically received when it first appeared ” (149). But these are very minor quibbles about a landmark achievement in the scholarship and criticism on twentieth-century American drama, a book whose many uses one can only venture to predict. We have many reasons to thank Blackwell’s for including a book on American drama in their Companions to Literature and Culture series, to praise Krasner for organizing the project and shepherding it through to such a successful completion, and to applaud his judiciously selected group of contributors for carrying out with such skill his intentions for the volume—“to examine the vitality and broad scope of American dramatic literature” (2). —JACKSON R. BRYER University of Maryland Theatre Histories: An Introduction. By Phillip B. Zarrilli, Bruce McConachie, Gary Jay Williams, and Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei. New York: Routledge, 2006. 544 pp. $44.95 paper. Theatre Histories: An Introduction was conceived and written to counter the Western-centric focus of theatre history texts of the last four decades. It was de- \ { 186 } BOOK REV IEWS veloped over a decade of collaboration by a quartet of scholars who recognized the need to examine multiple histories of theatre, drama, and performance in a more fluid way and to “provide a global perspective that allows the performances of many cultures to be considered, not in the margins of Western theatre but in and of themselves, and as they illuminate each other and our understanding of human expressiveness at large” (xvii). The result is an ambitious, wide-ranging work that is largely successful but exhibits some problems. The book is organized topically as well as chronologically. There are four parts, each with an introduction, three chapters, and a set of case studies. Part 1 covers “Performance and Theatre in Oral and Written Cultures before 1600,” part 2 “Theatre and Print Cultures, 1500–1900,” part 3 “Theatre in Modern Media Cultures, 1850–1970,” and part 4 “Theatre and Performance in the Age of Global Communications,1950–Present.”Threaded throughout the text are three distinct themes (what the authors call “mappings”): an emphasis on “cultural performance” instead of the more common but limited focus on only “theatre and drama”; an investigation of the interpretive processes of historiography ; and a highlighting of the influences of sociological and technological change on “modes of human communication.” The case studies go deeper into and expand each of these areas by discussing a wide range of “interpretive approaches ,”including not only literary-based theory and criticism but also an assortment of other political, cognitive, and cultural analyses. Taken as a whole, the book represents a move toward broader cultural inclusiveness in the subject of “theatre history” and is a praiseworthy attempt to challenge the common approach to teaching...