MARC MAUFORT and FRANCA BELLARSI, eds. Crucible of Cultures: Drama at the Dawn of a New Millennium. Brussels: P.I.E.--Peter Lang, 2002. 343 pp. Marc Maufort, Professor of English literature and at the Universite Libre de Bruxelles, is the Series Editor of Dramaturgies: Texts, Cultures and Performances, and Crucible of Cultures appears as number four in the series. Those of us with an interest in Canadian will also be familiar with the first title in that series, Siting the Other: Revisions of Marginality in Australian and English-Canadian Drama, also co-edited with Franca Bellarsi, which appeared in 2001. It is worth noting that the aim of the series is re-assess the complex relationship between textual studies, cultural and/or performance aspects at the of this new multicultural millennium, with a particular emphasis on innovative research work in the field of twentieth-century dramaturgy, primarily in the anglophone and francophone worlds: Crucible of Cultures came out of a conference of the same name, held in Brussels in May of 2001. The contributors to Crucible of Cultures, the book, are from Canada, the UK, the USA, Australia and New Zealand, and Europe (Spain, Germany, Belgium), with a lone entry from Japan by Eriko Hara, writing on Asian-American women's theatre. While a selection of essays deals with African theatre, none is by a scholar coming from an African university. Of the twenty-eight contributors, eleven are women. In addition to the African entries, the book is organized by a loose grouping of essays that focus on British, American, Canadian, and Australian/New Zealand theatre--so despite the insistence on cultural exchange articulated in Maufort's Introduction, national boundaries remain an organizing principle. This choice may be a simple convenience, but also implies an attachment, by both theatre artists and academics, to nationalist perspectives as a way to withstand ongoing cultural imperialism. Maufort does not say as much, but the adherence to nationalist groupings seems to acknowledge that theatre remains a local project even when engaging with global forces. I offer all of this background positioning to help the reader make sense of what the conference proceedings are intended to represent and how best to make use of the book. The broad category of Anglophone drama and, what seems increasingly, in retrospect, the arbitrary temporal designation of the dawn of the millennium do not, at first, paint a particular landscape--that is, they do not in themselves tell us what to expect from the collection. We get a much clearer picture in the Introduction, when Maufort specifies that his organizing and unifying principles are multiculturalism and postcolonialism. …