Feminist Drama Research Articles

Sightlines: Race, Gender, and Nation in Contemporary Australian Theatre

Reviewed by: Sightlines: Race, Gender, and Nation in Contemporary Australian Theatre Katherine Newey Sightlines: Race, Gender, and Nation in Contemporary Australian Theatre. By Helen Gilbert. Theater: Theory/Text/Performance series. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998; pp. x + 274. $49.50 cloth, $21.95 paper. Sightlines is an important contribution both to theatre studies and post-colonial criticism. Indeed, it is Helen Gilbert’s placing of post-colonial theory in a dynamic relationship with performance studies which offers some of the most productive work of the book. As Gilbert writes in her introduction, her aim is to show how “theories of drama and performance have much to add to debates about how imperial power is articulated and/or contested through discourses centered on the body, space, language, and representation” (6). In a detailed argument Gilbert makes a powerful case for the centrality of performance to post-colonialism, both as a visceral representation of the varieties of lived experience in Australia in the late twentieth century, and as a test of post-colonial theory. This book, together with Gilbert’s other work (she is co-author with Joanne Tompkins of Post-Colonial Drama: Theory, Practice, Politics published by Routledge [1996]) also demonstrates the power and sophistication of critical theory from the so-called margins. It is to the credit of the University of Michigan Press that they have recognised that a study of contemporary Australian theatre practice is of more than local interest. Gilbert’s discussion of identity politics is based on a flexible but rigorously argued concept of identity as relational. Gilbert develops a model of identity under colonization which, she argues, “should be conceptualized less as a fixed state than as a complex process informed by a continually self-constituting hegemony that is always under threat from competing discourses” (146). Working through this paradigm allows Gilbert to extend her analysis across a number of key subject positions which might otherwise be seen as mutually exclusive. She does this by dividing her discussion into five chapters, each dealing with a distinct category of post-colonial identity. The opening case study is of “canonical counterdiscourse,” a demonstration [End Page 228] of how the empire writes back, in this case to Shakespeare. The chapters which follow trace the multiple possibilities of contemporary Australian identity as constructed through performance: indigenous theatre, feminist drama, settler/invader plays, and neo-imperialism in an examination of the theatrical representation of Australian-Asian and Australian-American relationships. This approach has many advantages. By teasing out the strands of Australian experience and possible identities into these broad categories, Gilbert is able to bring together a number of potentially antagonistic subject positions in one coherent study. She does this delicately and carefully, with due acknowledgement and working through of difference. Throughout her text there is explicit and implicit recognition of conflicts and complications which can be productive. Gilbert’s chapter on indigenous drama is a prime example of the positive results of her careful negotiations between a rigorous critical analysis of a body of work and a recognition of the very real circumstances of deprivation and discrimination out of which this work is produced. As she writes, her analysis is not concerned with establishing a poetics of Aboriginal drama (for to do so might well be to speak for rather than about indigenous dramatic practice), but to outline “the strategic possibilities of performance for the production and consumption of this body of work as an expression of indigenous culture” (52). It is a complicated balancing act, though, and some things are blurred in the process. While the concentration on relatively discrete areas of subject formation allows detailed and careful analyses of plays and performances, unacknowledged contradictions emerge. The chapter on indigenous drama focuses almost exclusively on male Aboriginal writers, and while such an approach can be properly justified, Gilbert does not do so. This is also the case in Gilbert’s chapter on “Settler/Invader Plays.” Given the kinds of complex models of identity which Gilbert invokes, I would have liked to see some self-reflection on the theoretical and critical consequences of limiting the discussion of women’s theatre work into one chapter on feminist theatre. Such...

Feminist Theatre and Theory (review)

Reviewed by: Feminist Theatre and Theory Janet E. Gardner Feminist Theatre and Theory. Edited by Helene Keyssar. New Casebooks. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996; pp. ix + 288. $39.95 cloth, $17.95 paper. What exactly is “feminist theatre”? What is the relationship of such theatre to feminist theory? Are certain types of theatrical composition or dramaturgy more appropriate than others to promote feminist understanding in an audience? And what might any of this mean in the daily lives of women and men? These are some of the central questions addressed by the essays in this new collection of writings on feminism and theatre. From the enormous output of recent feminist theatre and drama criticism, Helene Keyssar has brought together twelve substantial essays, which represent a variety of theoretical stances and critical approaches. One of the central questions in the book is the value of realism as an appropriate vehicle for feminist drama. Janelle Reinelt’s well-known “Beyond Brecht: Britain’s New Feminist Drama” discusses the “[f]eminist transformation of Brechtian techniques” (46) in works by Caryl Churchill and Claire Luckham, among others, and suggests that such appropriation of method is especially useful for socialist-feminist works. Tracy C. Davis reaches a similar conclusion in her comparison of two plays about violence against women and women’s reactions to this violence. Praising Sarah Daniels’s Masterpieces for being “episodic, asequential, multiply cast, [and] employ[ing] direct address, and many localities . . . [which are] all experimental/Brechtian devices that promote objectivity” (145), Davis argues that “unless form and content converge, [End Page 388] conventional dramaturgy can perpetuate and replicate the ideology of domination” (138). However, Reinelt and Davis’s position is not the only one to be found in feminist theatre writing nor in this volume. Increasingly, feminist theatre scholars (Keyssar among them) have come to believe that progressive, even radical, content can, in fact, be presented in traditional, realist theatre (and, likewise, that radical form does not necessarily lead to radical content). Jeanie Forte and Patricia R. Schroeder both take the position that feminist authors do (and should) take advantage of existing theatrical structures and that, in Schroeder’s words, “a modified realism can be an appropriate and powerful vehicle for staging feminist issues” (164). The emphasis here on production and reception demonstrates one of this casebook’s great strengths—its consistent attention to the theatrical as well as the textual aspects of the dramas discussed. As Loren Kruger, citing Michele Barrett, reminds us: “we cannot assume that an avowedly feminist work will necessarily be a feminist event” (54). Another major thread running through the volume is the issue of polyvocality and the interest among some female playwrights and feminist critics in staging the multiple, sometimes conflicting, voices to be heard in feminist debates. In her own essay in this collection, Keyssar applies Bakhtin’s concepts of dialogism and heteroglossia to a range of dramatic texts in order to explicate her assertion that polyphony is central to both feminist theory and feminist theatre. This interest in multiple voices is picked up in Karen Cronacher’s “Unmasking the Minstrel Mask’s Black Magic in Ntozake Shange’s spell #7.” Cronacher shows here how Shange’s choreopoem dramatizes multiple voices—historical and contemporary—and helps to resist the attempts of (white) history to totalize “the African-American experience.” While I am not certain that either of these articles convinces me of the necessity of polyvocality to feminist expression, the centrality of this idea in contemporary debates is beyond question. The book’s focus is on the Anglo-American tradition, but wider inclusion in the discourse is suggested in the final three essays: Yvonne Yarbaro-Bejarano’s “Chicana’s Experience in Collective Theater: Ideology and Form”; Judith Graves Miller’s “Contemporary Women’s Voices in French Theatre”; and Haiping Yan’s “Male Ideology and Female Identity: Images of Women in Four Modern Chinese Historical Plays.” Yarbaro-Bejarano and Miller’s articles essentially report on the state of female and feminist practice in their respective contemporary theatrical communities. Yan’s, on the other hand, discusses representations of women in historical dramas by male authors and traces “an interesting process in which the Chinese...

The feminist possibilities of dramatic realism

The author challenges the rejection of realistic drama that has characterized much recent feminist drama criticism. The book focuses specifically on the Progressive Era, the Harlem Renaissance, and the post-1960s contemporary scene.

Rita Much, ed. New Canadian Drama 6

This volume, subtitled "Feminist Drama," is the latest in the series initiated by Neil Carson. The two plays included here represent the feminist drama specifically as envisioned and made possible by Toronto's Nightwood Theatre. Rita Much's brief historical essay on the founding and development of Nightwood offers a fair and balanced overview of the only explicitly feminist theatre "institution" in Canada. The biographies of the authors and the editor at the end of the volume also provide useful background information. I'm not sure that the institutional memory that these women, Vingoe and Rubess especially, have of both contemporary Canada's feminist theatre and women in Canadian theatre generally is sufficiently appreciated in either the theatre or academic communities.

Imagining Aphra: Reinventing a Female Subject

Imagining Aphra: Reinventing a Female Subject Nancy Copeland Aphra Behn (c.1640-1689), the first professional woman playwright in England, has emerged in recent decades from two hundred years of neglect and obscurity to join the canon of Restoration playwrights. A number of her plays have been revived; and The Rover (1677), at least, is frequently taught. Behn's entry into contemporary culture has been taken a further step with two 1991 plays devoted to her life: Aphra, by Nancy Cullen, Alexandria Patience, and Rose Scollard; and A Woman's Comedy, by Beth Herst. These transformations of Behn into a dramatic character offer an opportunity to examine two different approaches to the representation of a seventeenth-century woman within a late twentieth-century context. Indeed, the two plays represent different types of feminist drama. Aphra is a product of a feminist collective, Maenad productions of Calgary, Alberta, whose "mandate" is "vto promote the feminine vision'" (Cullen, et al. "Maenadic Rites" 28). A Woman's Comedy, on the other hand, is, up to a point, an example of what Jill Dolan calls "liberal feminism," which resembles liberal humanism in being ""radically individualistic'" and asserting universal human values, and which seeks equal treatment for women and men (Dolan 3). The presentations of the central character that emerge in these plays are, despite a number of similarities, essentially opposed to one another and raise the important question of whether there is a "right"way to portray Aphra Behn. Although several accounts of Behn have been written, biographers have found her a fairly unsuitable subject for extended treatment. She produced a large number of plays, poems, and innovative prose fictions, but meagre documentary evidence for the details of her life survives. For example, it is not known precisely when or where she was born, what her maiden name was, or to whom she was married, if, indeed, she married at all (see Doody 3). In lieu of extensive evidence of other kinds, important sources of information about her attitudes and personality are her prefaces and dedications, in which she defends herself from her critics and argues for her right to write in the face of misogynist opposition. It is, however, as Margaret Anne Doody observes, "very difficult not to mythologise Aphra while reconstructing her life-story" (3). Her recent biographers, Angeline Goreau and Maureen Duffy, do so, in part, by 135 136 Nancy Copeland relying on Behn's fictional works to fill out their pictures of her. The authors of Aphra and A Woman's Comedy have similarly, and more appropriately, turned to Behn's works in constructing their imaginary Aphras, as well, it would seem, as referring to the biographies. Both plays are primarily fictionalized versions of Behn, rather than histories. "Aphra is an interpretive picture, not a definitive one," note the Maenad authors (S2), while Herst, the author of A Woman's Comedy, emphasizes that she "felt quite free to invent" in retelling Behn's story ("Aphra's World" F3) and, indeed, chose to focus on those aspects of Behn's life "about which least was known" ("Male Plots" 77). Selection is, of course, essential in the dramatization of the life of any historical figure, and the authors of Aphra and A Woman's Comedy have made many similar choices. Both plays stress Behn's profession by creating stage imagery that emphasizes her desk, sheets of manuscript, and the physical act of writing. Both emphasize Behn's poverty and the fact that she wrote out of dire need: Virginia Woolf's observation that the importance of the fact that Behn "made, by working very hard, enough to live on . . . outweighs anything that she actually wrote" (64) seems to have influenced the authors of both plays. Both plays also present their protagonist as an emblem of female victimization by oppressive—indeed, evil—social convention, an approach that reflects Behn's presentation of herself in her prefaces. Both plays also represent Behn as a completed subject through the expedient of dramatizing her life from a posthumous perspective. Both introduce Behn's doggerel epitaph—"Here lies a proof that wit can never be/ Defence enough against mortality"—near the beginning of the play, and in...

Taking center stage: feminism in contemporary U.S. drama

Successor to the author's ground-breaking Feminist Drama (1979; hailed by CHOICE as ...an admirable example of the new feminist scholarship), this new book describes the evolution of contemporary American feminist thought since that volume appeared and traces its themes in a cross-section of contemporary plays. Brown develops new and more encompassing definitions of feminism and feminist drama applicable to the wealth of theory and drama that has appeared since 1979. Giving voice to silenced women, glorifying those defined by the patriarchy as marginal, and propounding a feminist ethic based on respect for the environmental context and for the concrete, everyday world are among the central concerns of the new feminist drama. Plays by Jane Chambers, Caryl Churchill, Darrah Cloud, Kathleen Collins, Holly Hughes, Marsha Norman, David Rabe, Ntozake Shange, and Jane Wagner receive close textual analysis in the book.

The Ballad “Kongque dongnan fei” as Freudian Feminist Drama During the May Fourth Period.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsElisabeth EideElisabeth Eide is at the Royal University Library, Oslo, Norway.

Subverting the demon‐angel dichotomy: Innovation and feminist intervention in twentieth‐century drama

In order to explore the significance of new feminist strategies for female representation, this essay traces the persistence of a particular limiting pattern of female characterization, known as the demon‐angel dichotomy, through various forms of twentieth‐century American drama. The discussion examines how the dichotomy was constructed and adapted in dramatic texts representing different genres and historical periods. The plays range from turn‐of‐the‐century, conventional melodrama to recent experimental feminist drama. The final text examined demonstrates how the contemporary feminist intervention disrupts the pattern and challenges further repetition of the dichotomy.

Ingmar Bergman: Four Decades in the Theater by Lise-Lone Marker and Frederick J. Marker (review)

122 Book Reviews does offer many insights into feminist drama's structure and function, NatalIe tends to use her method uncritically. Comments on Aristotle's notion of the "universal laws of nature," for example. need to be rethought by any critic writing from a feminist viewpoint. Still, NatalIe raises important questions both about the persuasive force of feminist theatre and about its specific place within the women's movement. Her study, like Keyssar's, is grounded in actual performances as well as in the written dramatic texts and helps bring to our attention the work of numerous and often little-known contemporary women playwrights and theatre collectives. It is disappointing that neither Keyssar nor NatalIe chose to draw more fully on the already vast resources of the emergent feminist criticism, resources which might have helped them to formulate their questions more precisely and to rethink more radically their critical categories. Both books try to do a great deal and are only partially successful.. Yet they are significant and in many ways complementary additions to the slowly-growing body of book-length studies of women's contributions to the theatre. Each offers the reader an extensive bibliography - ofpublished and unpublished plays in the case of Keyssar's study and of both plays and secondary, critical and theoretical material in the case of Natalie's. Together, these two books present two very different facets of feminist theatre, helping to clarify not only that theatre's characteristics and powers but also its place in theatre history and contemporary society. KAREN LAUGHLIN, FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY LISE-LONE MARKER and FREDERICK J. MARKER. Ingmar Bergman: Four Decades in the Theater, New York: Cambridge University Press 1982. Pp. xvii, 262, illustrated. $39.50; $12.95 (PB). Discussing the projected film version of his stage production of Peer Gynt with 10hn Simon, Ingmar Bergman rejected the suggestion that his film would explain - once and for all- what the play is all about: "I think the only way to explain the play is to play it on the stage, because a film must be an adaptation," he maintained (John Simon, Ingmar Bergman directs [New York, 1972], p. 35). But although Bergman has been "explaining plays" for more than forty years, most of the world - unfortunately - still knows him only as a filmmaker. In order to remedy this situation, Lise-Lone and Frederick1. Marker have undertaken the formidable task of recapturing past performances of plays he has staged, periormances that now live only imperfectly in the memories of the actors who created the roles, and, of course, in the mind of Bergman himself. To facilitate their task, they have interviewed Bergman on various occasions, observed his directorial practices during rehearsals, interviewed his actors, carefully studied his prompt books ""and blocking plans, and sifted through the numerous newspaper reviews of each of his major productions, Supported by a wealth ofphotographs - the book is generously illustrated with 68 very well-chosen production photographs, 7 pictures of Bergman at work, and [8 floor or blocking plans ofthe productions discussed - this truly remarkable feat of reconstruction has resulted in a significant study of Bergman's genius as a theater director. Book Reviews 123 Flexibility of approach has always characterized Bergman's work in the theater, but, ofcourse, his preferences and his style have undergone considerable development since he embarked on his professional theater career in 1944. Though he has always preferred apresentational, anti-naturalistic style of staging - one that reminds the audience that it is watching a perfonnance - as a young man he preached what he calls "s theater of circumstances," that is. theater that relies rather heavily on such external components as setting, costume, and lighting design to stimulate the imagination ofthe audience. Si~ce his famous open-stage production of Buchner's Woyzeck in 1969, however, he has moved on to a radically simplified kind of theater that relies even more heavily than before on direct communication between actors and audience. Similarly, whereas the young Bergman was more closely attuned to a psychologically preoccupied "theater of characters," the mature Bergman seems, at times, almost to favor what J.P. Sartre called an "existential theater of situations and choices." Committed to the...

Feminist Theatre: An Introduction to Plays of Contemporary British and American Women by Helene Keyssar, and: Feminist Theatre: A Study in Persuasion by Elizabeth J. Natalle (review)

Book Reviews 119 We can now see where Archer belongs in the history ofIbsen criticism: very close to the throne itself! CHARLES LELAND, ST. I \UCHAEL'S COLLEGE, UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO HELENE KEYSSAR. Feminist Theatre: An Introduction to Plays a/Contemporary British and American Women. London: Macmillan 1984. Pp. v, 223, illustrated. £14: £4.95 (PB). ELIZABETH J. NATALLE. Feminist Theatre: A Study in Persuasion. Metuchen, N..J.; Scarecrow Press 1985. Pp. v, 155 . $15.00. With the recent resurgence of the women's movement has come not only a heightened interest in recovering lost or forgotten works by women writers but also a greatly . increased output and availability of works by contemporary female artists. As Helene Keyssar and Elizabeth J. NatalIe demonstrate in their very different looks at Feminist Theatre. this renewed creative activity is nowhere more evident than on the British and American stage. Based on personal interviews with theatre practitioners, first-hand experience of performances, and studies of published and unpublished scripts, both of their books testify to the vitality of feminist theatre. Keyssar's introductory study, published in the Macmillan (and Grove Press) Modem Dramatists Series, draws attention to the growing numbers of women now writing and having their plays produced in the United States and Great Britain. Natalie's work, published by the same house that brought out Janet Brown's pioneering Feminist Drama , highlights the collective and ideological aspects of feminist theatre by considering how theatre groups that began appearing across the U.S. in the late I¢oS have given "a dramatic voice to the new feminist movement." Both authors situate the emergence of feminist theatre in the context of this movement as well as of the general climate of political activism and theatrical innovation characteristic of the I 960s. They both recognize feminist theatre's debt to the strategy of consciousness-raising and to the women's movement's insistence that, "the personal is political"; both authors highlight feminist playwrights' efforts to rethink the hierarchical aspects of play production as well as play construction. But their very different perspectives lead them to paint contrasting pictures of feminist theatre's historical background. While she acknowledges the importance of "new theatre" groups' experiments with transformation teChniques and ensemble work, Kcyssar identifies the female playwrights catalogued in her second chapter as key precursors of feminist theatre. Invoking the names of the tenth-century Hrosvita,_ Aphra Behn, and Anna Cora Mowatt, Keyssar unfortunately goes on to dismiss these women's plays as mere "relics." But the remainder ofher second chapter, in offering an often pointed critique of plays from Susan Glaspell's Trifles to Doris Lessing's Play with a Tiger, convincingly traces the initial stages in the development ofa coherent genre offeminist drama. Natalie disagrees with Keyssar about whether such a coherent genre yet exists and cites 120 Book Reviews reformist or didactic playwrights ranging from Aristophanes and Henrik Ibsen to Bertoh Brecht and the Living Newspaper as precursors for an emergent feminist theatre. In contrast with Keyssar's wideA canging overview, she then focuses her historical discussion on the evolution of American feminist theatre groups over the past twenty years, examining their connections with other feminist organizations. Keyssar's book is thus much broader than Natalle's in scope and quite different in its methodology. The study ofa large numberofwomen's plays has led Keyssar to discover a specifical1y feminist dramatic aesthetic, based on the convention of transformations, or "the theatrical manifestation of metamorphosis of contexts, actions and, most crucially, ofcharacters," rather than on the recognition scene she sees as fundamental to traditional (male) theatre. Her suggestion that all traditional theatre utilizes the recognition structure is in keeping with the other sweeping generalizations that occasionally mar her otherwise sound commentary. But Keyssar's critique of the recognition strategy as essentially reinforcing the status quo and undermining the possibility of real change is a provocative and significant one for feminist theatre studies. Her gradual elaboration of transfonnations and related techniques in the plays she studies also adds up to a helpful catalogue ofbasic characteristics offeminist theatre. Keyssar applies this notion of transfonnation to the plays of some thirty playwrights. Chapters devoted entirely to the...

Notes on technique in feminist drama:apple PieandSigns of Life

<i>Notes on technique in feminist drama:</i>apple Pie<i>and</i>Signs of Life

Feminist Drama: Definition and Critical Analysis by Janet Brown (review)

Book Reviews JANET BROWN. Feminist Drama: Definition and Critical Analysis. Metuchen, New Jersey: Scarecrow Press 1979. Pp. 167. Janet Brown, Director of Theatre in the Communication Arts Department at the University of Hartford, has published the first book-length study of contemporary feminist drama. Although the second wave of the feminist movement in America has been building for almost two decades, feminist plays have not exactly been dominating the American stage. Rather than surveying plays by playwrights who call themselves feminists, Brown offers a definition of feminist drama drawn from the writings of feminist theorists and literary critics. She uses a rather narrow critical method and applies her theory to five feminist theatre groups in order to determine to what extent theatre is, has been, and can be a rhetorical device for feminism. According to Brown, feminist drama takes "woman's suuggle for autonomy against an oppressive, sexist society" as its central rhetorical motive. Brown uses Kenneth Burke's theory which states that "a rhetorical or persuasive motive inspires the symbolic act which is literature" as outlined in The Philosophy oj Literary Form. Following Burke, Brown searches for "associational clusters," both in plays purporting to be feminist and in those which seem feminist to her, which reveal a pattern of symbolic action and consequently the play's rhetorical motive. Brown recognizes the work ofother feministcritics such as Kate Millett, Ellen Moers, and Suzanne Juhasz, as well as that of theorists on the nature of women's oppression such as Simone de Beauvoir and Mary Daly. From the theorists Brown extracts the ideas that women's powerlessness is reflected in "the portrayal of the unjust soc io~sexual hierarchy" and that women are not portrayed as autonomous because they are perceived as objects and only in relation to men. The uniqueness of Brown's approach is its assumption that all dramatic art functions rhetorically and that the rhetorical motive (in this case the feminist impulse) of a play is implicit in its pattern ofsymbolic action regardless of whether the playwright in question professes any particular philosophical or political feminist position. Brown chooses from Burke's pentad (scene, agent, agency, purpose, act) the elements agent and scene to determine whether a play is feminist. The agentscene ratio detennines the quality of Book Reviews 103 feminism. Brown states: "If the agent is a woman, her purpose autonomy. and the scene an unjust socia-sexual hierarchy , the play is a feminist drama," Employing Burke's theory, Brown demonstrates that Tina Howe's Birth and Afterbirth (published in an ostensibly feminist collection, The New Women's Theatre, edited by Honor Moore) does not meet the criteria for feminist drama, because it does not show a female agent slTUggling for autonomy. On the contrary, a rather stifled, low-status housewife and mother oppressed by her obnoxious and overpowering four-year-old son (to be played by an adult actor) strives to convince a happy and professionally successful acquaintance whom she envies and despises to abandon her career for the throes of motherhood. Despite its male authorship, III the Boom Boom Room by David Rabe qualifies as feminist drama, according to the theory , because it portrays go-go dancer Chrissy struggling against oppression by her father, husband, and the male voyeurs for whom she perfonns. Even though Chrissy finds herself becoming more sexually exploited and more objectified toward the play'sconclusion than at the opening, the drama portrays her battle against the menacing socio-sexual hierarchy , whkh succeeds in defeating her only physically and economically but not emotionally. Rosalyn Drexler's The Bed Was Full, the least realistic and most farcical of the plays treated, succeeds as feminist drama, according to Brown, since it effectively portrays woman's oppression as sexual toy and emphasizes scene rather than agent by satirizing the socio-sexual hierarchy through dramatization of nonsensical stereotypes of women in relation to men. Since mistress/victim/artist's model Kali cannot establish her autonomy , the play offers a stunted level of feminism. Of the plays by single well-known authors which portray a lone female agent, Wine in the Wilderness by Alice Childress presents the clearest rhetorical statement of feminism. Agent Tommy asserts her own...

The Theatre of Fernando Arrabal: A Garden of Earthly Delights by Thomas John Donahue (review)

104 Book Reviews finds the collective creations more simplistic in their rhetorical strategies than those by individual authors. Feminist Drama deserves its place on library shelves as the first of many books forthcoming on the politically and aesthetically stimulating topic of fem,inist drama. However, Brown's use of Burke's literary form seems more a limitation than an illuminating tool of critical analysis. Choosing a formalistic approach rather than a feminist one, Brown treats her material with the same chilly academic patriarchal objectivity as medical students witnessing the dissection of a corpse. Furthermore, the choice of plays studied seems odd. With the rich blossoming of admittedly feminist playwrights in the 'seventies, why choose to devote a chapler to a play by a man whose best known plays feature male combat rituals, and another to a woman whose absurdist dramas glamorize demeaning stereotypes of women by making them seem vaguely ridiculous but always campy and kinky rather than truly oppressive, and another to a play which Brown concludes is not feminist? Only Childress and Shange could fit most feminist critics' definitions of feminist drama. Brown never mentions why she chose not to study works by more obviously feminist playwrights such as Megan Terry, Maria Irene Fornes, Martha Boesing, Adrienne Kennedy, Myrna Lamb, Susan Griffin, J.E. Franklin, Honor Moore, Ruth Wolff, Sonia Sanchez, Martie Charles, Elaine Jackson, Cam Hubert, Judith Katz - to name a few. The first seedling to poke its tender green shoot up to the blaze of the desert sun deserves congratulations. Perhaps one should not be too hasty to ask why all the brilliantly plumed tropical birds are not preparing to nest in its branches. ROSEMARY CURB, ROLLINS COLLEGE THOMAS JOHN DONAHUE. The Theatre of Fernando Arrabal: A Garden of Earthly Delights. New York: New York University Press 1980. Pp. 153. Donahue's The Theatre ofFernando Arrabal is cogent, well-written, and infonnative. The Spanish dramatist's innovative as well as conventional theatrical techniques are probed with objectivity; evaluations concerning the import of images used to heighten suspense and point up satire are broached with felicity. Donahue underscores the pitfalls which such a prolific writer encounters when he attempts to produce too many plays in such a short time. Repetition of visualizations, for example, which range from sublimity to mephitism, from spirituality to the basest sado-masochistic rituals, are subsumed for their shock value and are powerfully inscribed in the mind's eye. When introduced into nearly all of Arrabal's theatrical spectacles, however, they become monotonous, devoid of interest. Unlike Genet, who stopped writing when his creative elan thinned, Arrabal produces constantly; as a result, his later plays are arid. The early dramas (Fando and Lis. Orison, Automobile Graveyard. The Grand Ceremonial. And They Put Handcuffs on the Flowers ) are by contrast powerful commentaries on his own excoriating childhood as well as on the cultural situation in Spain when he was growing up. The watered-down plays of later manufacture are devoid of the searing emotions, the nightmarish quality. the scars ofstill unhealed wounds, present in his early works - those qualities which give life and essence to theatrical ventures and adventures. Arrabal himself told me in an interview that his plays emerge full-blown from his unconscious, fed and nurtured by his years of Book Reviews 105 pain and anger at the atrocities he saw committed in his land during the Spanish Civil War; also by his mother's hideous comportment vis-h-vis his father. The anger which the playwright felt during his early years was the catalyst which brought to life those creatures of his fancy and fantasy . His works then were authentic, real, acerbic outpourings , unforgettable incantations revealing his own agony/passion. Now that he has become popular, and the pain has been mitigated by adulation, the cry has dulled, the sobs have silenced, and the artificer, the contriver has taken over. It is the time for a period of indwelling so that a renovatio may come into being. It was at the age of five (1937) that Fernando Arrabal was drawn to the theatre. He created little buildings and stages out ofcardboard boxes, characters, plots, and suspense from his own active mind...

Kenneth Burke andthe Mod DonnaThe dramatistic method applied to feminist criticism

This essay employ's Burke's pentad and pattern of symbolic action and a definition of feminism proposed by Aileen S. Kraditor to posit a definition of feminist drama. An analysis of the Mod Donna by Myrna Lamb illustrates the critical use of this definition.