Reviewed by: Staging Place: The Geography Of Modern Drama Jeanne Colleran Staging Place: The Geography Of Modern Drama. By Una Chaudhuri. Theater: Theory/Text/Performance Series. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995. pp. xv + 300. $30.00 cloth. Fredric Jameson has suggested that a “detour through the modern” is needed to “grasp what is historically original in the postmodern and its spatialisms” (Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism [Durham: Duke University Press, 1991], 156). Una Chaudhuri, in the erudite, elegant, and subtle analyses of both canonical and contemporary dramatic works offered in Staging Place: The Geography of Modern Drama, provides one such detour. Like Jameson, Edward Soja, Michel Foucault, Henri Lefebvre, and others, Chaudhuri argues the necessity of a spatialized discourse to offset or to supplement now-familiar historicized ones. To this end, she theorizes a geography of theatre, foregrounding the notion of “platiality” as a more strenuous recognition of “the signifying power and political potential of specific places” (5). Staging Place vigorously refuses sterile conceptions of space as fixed or undialectical, offering instead an effective framework for thinking through issues of space in more vital and productive terms. Staging Place begins with a discussion of the family home as the privileged setting of modern drama. To examine the trope of home in its various manifestations is to interrogate issues of affiliation and rejection, claim and dispossession, and to recognize that the representation of these issues is always negotiated within the parameters of place. Chaudhuri’s ambitious project complicates notions of place as deterministic and exile as emancipatory—ideas derived from the naturalistic and realistic drama of earlier modern playwrights—in order to encourage a semiotics of space that can accommodate heterotopic accounts of the constructive interrelationship of place, identity, and subjectivity. Staging Place moves from the release sounded by Nora’s slamming door as a liberatory act dependent upon a faith in the individualism of liberal humanism to considerations of the postmodern diasporic condition, in which the abrasive force of history strips the concept of exile of its literary status, to an investigation of the refiguration of the concept of home within the discourse of multiculturalism. Chaudhuri recognizes that the century-long struggle over the problem of place she is tracing is a continual attempt by theatre as a mode of cultural criticism to reveal something about the impact of environment—social, cultural, geopolitical place—on the formation of identity. She also recognizes that the persistent tendency to elide the recurrent motifs of home, home-leaving, and homecoming indicates a desire to obviate any assessment of the historical and cultural determinants that constitute place—that the elision, in short, represents a resistance to ideological readings of space. One of the book’s most engrossing discussions considers, as a demonstration of this resistance, the relationship of the naturalistic stage, which operates by enacting a connection between performance and spectator through a contract of total visibility, to the environmental stage, which assaults traditional boundaries and enacts an undifferentiated space based on a contract of shared participation. Chaudhuri argues that naturalism and realism, often discussed as opposites, in fact form “a continuum that has been disguised as a rupture, and the motivations behind the disguise [. . .] derive from its occlusive ideology” (27). Against either logic—that of the naturalism of Miss Julie or of the various stagings of environmentalism—Chaudhuri sets the critique offered by Jim Cartwright’s Road (1986). Road gestures toward environmental stagings through performances outside the theatre building and within the lobby; and it invokes naturalistic practices such as reading the contents of the house as emblems of identity. But the play ultimately demystifies the erasure of otherness that is practiced in both the naturalistic theatre of visibility and the environmental theatre of participation. “The theatre’s investment in presence, visibility and display is revealed in Road to be [End Page 237] an illusion,” Chaudhuri writes, a “fantasy of anthropological dimensions that seeks to vanquish otherness without the pain of being othered oneself” (53). The discussion I have just described is one of many compelling readings Chaudhuri offers, including a particularly perspicacious discussion of Caryl Churchill’s Mad Forest. But her singular accomplishment in Staging Place is...