American Drama 1945-2000

Reviewed by: American Drama 1945–2000: An Introduction Jill Dolan American Drama 1945–2000: An Introduction. By David Krasner . Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2006; pp. viii + 216. $74.95 cloth, $29.95 paper. Startled by the image of the undressed woman on its cover, I asked to review this book before I'd even looked at its table of contents. The color photo—from the fiftieth-anniversary production of Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof at Hartford Stage in 2005—shows the actors playing Maggie and Brick sitting on an unmade bed. The disheveled Maggie wears a revealing, white, silky slip that bunches up her thighs and exposes her cleavage. Behind her sits Brick, his hair tousled, his white cotton shirt untucked and rolled at the sleeves, holding his crutch against his chest. They both look disappointed. [End Page 694] Although those of us who know the play understand that it represents a scene of unfulfilled sex and thwarted (ultimately queer) desire, the photo clearly arranges Maggie to be looked at. As John Berger instructed us decades ago in Ways of Seeing, such images perpetuate women's passivity and objectification. The rather lurid picture conveys an inauspicious message about the status of women in American theatre. Cover images aside, American Drama raises other ideologically, politically, and pedagogically vexed questions: how should a scholar tell the story of American drama over a fifty-five-year period in 200-plus short pages? David Krasner isn't very self-reflective about his choices. Although he tries to be progressive and inclusive, he inculcates conventional critical perspectives about a fairly standard collection of plays. He naturalizes his point of view, never adopting an explicit methodology or approach, and frames his analysis only nominally through history and culture. Krasner produces a synthesis of themes and tropes aligned under an unexamined notion of nationalism that leaves little room for pungent analysis. American Drama follows a strict chronological structure, clumping time into convenient ten- or fifteen-year segments and emphasizing history as a progress narrative. For example, at the end of his 1945–59 chapter, he notes: "We now take up a new paradigm, making way for the rebellion that marked the 1960s and first half of the 1970s. Christopher Bigsby put it well when he said that in '1959 something was coming to an end.' That 'something' was playwrights with a social conscience giving way to new sensibilities of drama" (61). One could argue, however, that the very themes Krasner traces here—anxiety about finances, family instabilities, strivings outside of geographical or racial segregation, and criticism of US social inequities—circulate throughout the history he addresses. Within each chapter, Krasner offers an organizing theme or metaphor—politics and existentialism, money, "the body in pain"—but they seem forced and reductive and do little to advance his arguments. I can't help but wonder if other metaphors might have allowed Krasner to include other plays with new insights in his discussion. For instance, if we keep reading American drama through the shopworn theme of the "American Dream," of course we'll continue to focus on Death of a Salesman and the opuses of Miller and Williams. Krasner also reminds us that "[t]he Western frontier is one of America's most enduring myths" (112), but aren't there other myths, tropes, and perspectives that might tell the story of American drama differently? If we continue to trace binary constructions of insiders and outsiders, mainstream and margins through the American historical landscape, plays by women, people of color, lesbians, and gays will remain, as they mostly are here, icing on the stale cake of the heterosexual white-male canon. Inevitably, in a book that surveys such wide territory, dropping names substitutes depth for breadth. Dramas "attacking the 'establishment'" (84) are listed in one long paragraph and include some of the more innovative artists of the period from 1960 to 1975 such as Megan Terry, Rochelle Owens, Tom Eyen, and Arthur Kopit. Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? on the other hand, commands seven dense pages of standard analysis. Identity politics get short shrift; for example, although he discusses work by Maria Irene Fornes, he

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