Messiah of the New Technique: John Howard Lawson, Communism, and American Theatre, 1923-1937 (review)

Abstract

{ 149 } BOOK REV IEWS author herself is an important figure in the Kansas City theatre, and as such is as much a part of its history as the history she presents here.And so, even as one chuckles at the vanity of theatregoers who go to the theatre to be seen rather than to see theatre—the appendix on the campaign to have women remove their “merry widow” hats is particularly amusing—one cannot help but be moved by the connections made here. By the end of the book, the past melds with the present, with the major American theatre performances given by road-show stalwarts like Joseph Jefferson, Bert Williams, George Walker, and the important local repertory companies like the Woodward Stock Company reverberating with the revival in 1964 of professional repertory theatre in Kansas City. It was at this point that Dr. Patricia A. McIlrath of the University of Kansas City founded the Missouri Repertory Theatre, bringing back professional repertory theatre in Kansas after its slow demise in the 1930s. This connection the author makes herself, and in doing so she opens the possibility for other scholars to continue to deepen our understanding of the impact and importance of these early regional theatres on the regional theatre that exists today. —DAVID A. CRESPY University of Missouri, Columbia Messiah of the New Technique: John Howard Lawson, Communism, and American Theatre, 1923–1937. By Jonathan L. Chambers. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2006. xv + 268 pp. $55.00 cloth. Arguably the most notable American playwright of the literary left of the 1920s and 1930s, John Howard Lawson has been omitted from almost all full-length (and period-specific) studies of American theatre. Known merely as a member of the notorious “Hollywood Ten,” as a second-rate playwright, or perhaps for his text Theory and Technique of Playwriting, Lawson has remained ostracized by mainstream critics and historians for decades. When I read Rosemarie K. Bank’s essay“The Doubled Subject and the New Playwrights Theatre, 1927–1929” (1992), I hoped the work of the New Playwrights (Lawson in particular) would be recuperated into American theatre history studies and vigorously reexamined. More than a decade later, Jonathan L. Chambers’s study of Lawson reviews the playwright’s “hybrid,” “mixed form,” or what I call “production-dependent” texts, within an appropriate theoretical framework and from a cultural perspective. Placing Lawson at the center of \ { 150 } BOOK REV IEWS his study, Chambers addresses ways in which dramatic form and style were debated, how theatre in the United States comprised a more intricate maze of theory, practice, and politics than previous studies indicate. More important than his deliberate act of recovery scholarship in Messiah of the New Technique, Chambers employs critical tools that allow the reflexivity and intertextuality of Lawson’s work (and life) to reverberate against and through the sociopolitical energy of the 1920s and 1930s—and beyond. His choice to scrutinize Lawson’s corpus and criticism of the playwright’s work through the lenses of New Historicism, poststructural Marxism, and cultural materialism, under the umbrella of a clearly defined organizing principle that utilizes Tony Bennett’s notion of “reading formations,” frees Chambers from the bonds of biographical study. This narrative pliability allows him to achieve his goal of simultaneously offering “a critical and political biography” and a “cultural and social history” (8). Beyond considering the “originating conditions” (10) under which Lawson matured, Chambers reexamines the ways in which plays and productions were initially misread in print and onstage. He addresses Lawson’s culpability in this interpretative dilemma, suggesting, also, that subsequent readers, critics, and historians are, in turn, inculcated by the dominant reading formations of their lived experiences. By embracing the “variable nature of reading/consumption,” acknowledging the“maneuverability”of texts, and recognizing a“cyclical theory of exchange” (12), Chambers advocates a more open reading of Lawson’s plays (and career). He resists the reductive readings of earlier Lawson scholars, who viewed “text” as fixed and pronounced Lawson a failure for not conforming to traditional content and dramatic form. At crucial junctures in the text his methodologies are systematically interjected into the narrative structure, where Chambers acknowledges indebtedness to Stephen Greenblatt, Frederic Jameson...