The Methuen Drama Guide to Contemporary American Playwrights ed. by Martin Middeke, Peter Paul Schnierer, Christopher Innes, and Matthew C. Roudané (review)

The Methuen Drama Guide to Contemporary American Playwrightsprovides an extensive survey of twenty-five prominent American playwrights whose careers span the last fifty years. Editors Martin Middeke, Peter Paul Schnierer, Christopher Innes, and Matthew Roudané gather a company of established scholars from Europe and North America to contribute authoritative essays on their subjects. Each essay includes a biographical introduction to the playwright, a summary and analysis of four to five of the playwright’s major plays, a summary of the playwright’s overall work, and a selected bibliography of primary and secondary sources. Although the guide does not contain any play texts, it remains useful for undergraduate theatre and English courses, as well as a source for reference material for theatre generalists and practitioners. Readers might employ this guide as an introduction to a playwright’s career and oeuvre, as supplemental reading to one of the playwright’s plays, or as a starting point for further research.

Because each essay exists autonomously, the editors’ introduction provides the only space in the guide that attempts to identify unifying themes across the essays. Among the 140 plays examined, they focus on the themes that they consider exemplify American drama, such as the “rhetoric of nationhood,” “symbology of the self,” and the “myth of the American Dream” (viii, xvi). The editors leave these themes underdeveloped, however, in relation to the wide variety of identity positions that the selected playwrights occupy. Nevertheless, at least they endeavor to establish a context for readers who might use the book to consider American drama as a whole, rather than as a reference for individual playwrights. With a London-based publisher and an international group of scholars, the editors also provide a framework for readers outside of the United States.

The editors’ discussion of the changing relationship between American playwrights and Broadway provides one of the most valuable and practical aspects of the introduction. Whereas Broadway once existed as “an initiating theatre” that regularly premiered relatively unknown plays, today it is a “showcase theatre” that favors commercial success over originality (viii–ix). An especially important point for American theatre students considering where to locate themselves after graduation, the editors observe that contemporary American playwrights develop new work across the United States and London. That so many of the plays described in this guide premiered in London and not the United States, however, belies the editors’ optimistic statement that “American audiences remain eager to receive new theatre” (x). While several essay contributors touch on some of these issues, as in Stephen Bottoms’s essay on Christopher Shinn and Martin Middeke’s essay on Wallace Shawn, not all do. The introduction thus provides a way to read the essays together.

Yet, the introduction also glaringly neglects an explanation of the process for selecting playwrights, which might better balance the individual essays. It is unclear if the editors chose the playwrights first or left the choice to the scholars selected to write essays. The editors note “an emphasis on those whose work first appeared in the 1970s or later” (vii), but the entries vary from playwrights whose careers began in the 1960s (María Irene Fornés, Adrienne Kennedy, Sam Shepard, Luis Valdez) and continued into the 2000s, with playwrights who only began in the late 1990s (Sarah Ruhl and Christopher Shinn). Additionally, the editors include the late works (post-1970) of Edward Albee and Arthur Miller. Because each essay is approximately twenty pages long, the timespan covered creates unevenness among essays. The most prolific playwrights receive the same number of entries, four to five plays, as the least prolific. A notable exception is Sandra Shannon’s essay on August Wilson, which summarizes his ten-play Century Cycle. Shannon gives less space to each individual play, but provides an excellent sense of how the plays work as individual parts of a whole. Alternatively...