Codifying the National Self: Spectators, Actors and the American Dramatic Text (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Codifying the National Self: Spectators, Actors and the American Dramatic Text Yuko Kurahashi Codifying the National Self: Spectators, Actors and the American Dramatic Text. Edited by Barbara Ozieblo and María Dolores Narbona-Carrión . New York: Peter Lang, 2006; pp. 299. $38.95. Barbara Ozieblo and María Dolores Narborna-Carrión's Codifying the National Self: Spectators, Actors and the American Dramatic Text consists of essays developed from papers given at the Second International Conference on American Theatre at the University of Malaga in May 2004. The editors state that the essays in this collection are meant to address the "notion of Americanness" and the "concept of the alien" demonstrated in the history of American theatre from the late nineteenth century to the present (12). Seventeen essays in this volume investigate American national identity and alterity through examination of diverse theatrical work created in the US from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first centuries. The best essays in the collection explore, on the one hand, the idea of homogenous American identity, and on the other, plays that have challenged and, at times, succeeded in broadening what being an American means. Sharon Friedman's "Feminist Revisions of Classic Texts on the American Stage" examines three contemporary adaptations of classics—Ellen McLaughlin's Iphigenia and Other Daughters, Paula Vogel's Desdemona, and Suzan-Lori Parks's In the Blood—and discusses how each challenges the patriarchal structure. Another informative [End Page 160] article on the female challenge to homogenous national identity is Wendy Ripley's "Anna Cora Mowatt: Player and Playwright." This essay examines the playwright in the social and historical context—a nineteenth-century male-dominated society in which theatre was considered the "abode of the devil" and "unladylike" (56). Ripley juxtaposes some of Mowatt's characters and Mowatt herself in order to investigate how this playwright forged a career as both a professional writer and actor, and in the end how she could reconstruct a "national culture" and reclaim her own version of the American landscape to "recreate herself" as a professional writer (65–67). Noelia Hernando-Real's concise essay about Susan Glaspell's Inheritors discusses how Glaspell explored and redefined "the American self" through her challenge to the confirmation of "American identity as a unifying community of men and women" (192). And Susan Harris Smith's essay on American periodicals during the period 1890–1918 is also an excellent contribution that closely examines how American dramatic periodical literature helped to build the "larger Americanist narratives about immigration, progressivism, and nation formation" (41). However, some essays fail to discuss "what America is and how it acts itself and how Americans perform themselves through history and tradition," as stated in Ozieblo's introduction (14). Instead, some essays force critical theories on a theatrical work rather than clarifying the works' roles as an example of the construct and demonstration of American national identity. It is also unfortunate that none of the essays in this volume are based on an author attending a live performance; all of them are (expect for a few such as Susan Harris Smith's cultural investigation of popular periodicals and David Savran's examination of "middlebrow theatre" in America) either based on script analyses by the authors or are performance analyses based on information provided by other reviewers. As a result, many of the essays in the book are lifeless and pedantic, especially those by William Haney and Claus-Peter Neumann. In Haney's "Artist Expression, Intimacy and Primal Holon in Sam Shepard," we are presented with an enigmatic discussion of the term "holon," coined by Arthur Koestler to describe an "entity that is itself a whole but simultaneously part of a larger whole" (139). In applying this term to Shepard's Suicide in B-Flat, Haney uses Ken Wilber's "primal artistic holon" (139) without providing a clear definition of what is meant by this except for a vague explanation that it is the "whole/part [that] bubbles up from the source of thought or the inner self" (139). His failure to clarify or define his use of these terms is compounded by his failure to explain how the whole...