Audience and Authority in the Modernist Theater of Federico Garcia Lorca. By C. Christopher Soufas. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 1996. 190 pages. central premise of C. Christopher Soufas' important book on Lorca's is that all the plays-the early theater, the experimental plays, the rural dramas-are unified by cohesive renovative aesthetic agenda. Soufas argues convincingly that every play in Lorca's oeuvre, beginning with Butterfly's Spell (1920) and ending with Play Without Title (1936), is informed by the dramatist's specifically Modernist sensibilities, creative vision defined as the impetus subvert, disrupt, or even to sever the connection with more publicly available mode no longer considered an adequate medium for art (1). For Soufas, the whole of Lorca's dramatic production emerges as response to fundamental tension between the long-standing mimetic representational theatrical imperative-- with its attendant audience demands for conventional stage performanceand the Modernist playwright's desire to subvert that empirico-mimetic model, expressing the creative of private, alternative reality. struggle for stage alluded to in Soufas' title refers to the confrontation between the spectators' traditional expectations of physical staging for the commercial theater, and the dramatist's imposition of his private world through the innovative, poetic function of the script. Soufas traces the evolution of Lorca's in terms of his increasingly effective realignment of key dramatic functions, the visual (physical spectacle, the scene) and the verbal (the script) dimensions of theater. This reorientation of theatrical functions-a shift which reflects the Modernist rejection of oneto-one correspondence between word and image-is Lorca's primary strategy for implementing the authoritative theatrical agenda that motivates his work as playwright. Key to this theoretical position that Soufas outlines in Chapter 1: Introduction is recurring concept that he borrows from Lorca's 1931 play Public, the notion of a force (12). Citing the fictional Director's idea of an alternative, non-realist stage theatrical structure, Lorca alludes to an ideal theater beneath the sand, the offstage, unseen locus of a force, capable of exerting the desired control over the public, when the audience has no further recourse except to pay full attention, filled with spirit and overpowered by the action (The Public: qtd. 12; 18; 78; 85; 88; 137; 155). Soufas appropriates Lorca's term hidden force as heuristic device throughout his study, referring to it repeatedly (often to fault: 12-13; 82-85; 121-23; 136-38; 151-53) as an empowering creative dimension of new theater. The intuition of the existence of an 'outside' authority that progressively dominates and directs the activity of the stage-an authority Lorca refers to as the `hidden force'-is simply the conceptual/intellectual manifestation of the foundational tenet of Modernist aesthetics (151). Traces of the offstage hidden force ultimately become manifest onstage, argues Soufas, through an important feature of Lorca's theater, the principal of indexicality: As visual-verbal complementarity diminishes, the stage ceases being self-contained space, providing instead indications of more authoritative offstage referent. Meaning is thus manifested `indexically,' along directional axis (20). Soufas provides an intelligent, close textual analysis of the entire corpus of Lorca's theater, dividing his study into the following chapters: The Early Theater; The Farces; Experimental Theater; Blood Wedding; Yerma and Doha Rosita, the Spinster; The House of Bernarda Alba and Play Without Title. …