In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

338 BOOK REVIEWS The table of contents of Bernard Shaw, Director points to the book's usefulness as a guide to the technical aspects of play production as well as to the mind of Shaw. University theater departments might adopt it as a directing text. "The Director: Goals and Groundwork" (Aims, Training, Prerehearsal Planning), "General Directing Practices" (Casting, Conducting Rehearsals, Cutting and Changing the Script), "The Actor" (Aims, Training, Degrees of Realism, The Actor and the Character, Motivation, Mechanical Technique), "Stage Effects and Stage Effectiveness" (The Grouping of Actors, Devices, Pace, Timing), "The Technical Elements of Production" (Scenery, Lighting, 'Costume, Make-up, Music), and "The Business of Theatre" (Finances, Promotion and Publicity). The general effect of Dukore's book is to clarify Shaw's method of directing. Shaw viewed the production of a playas the collaboration of fellow artists, each contributing the best of what he was capable in his specialty to the service of the play. Shaw's method contrasts with that of the dictator-director who would impose his own vision on the work. In his Rules for Directors (1949) Shaw indicated that "these rules are founded on experience. They are of no use to a director who regards players not as fellow-artists collaborating with him, but as employees on whom he can impose his own notions of acting and his own interpretation of the author's meaning." Shaw advised that "all playwrights should study these" (Shaw on Theatre, pp. 285 and 279). While Bernard Shaw, Director is filled with the kind of detail one might expect in a handbook, including reproductions of eleven of Shaw's own drawings of sets and costumes, the reader does not lose sight of an implicit thesis: the artistic success of a playwright's work depends upon his own interest in and knowledge of practical theater. After reading Bernard Dukore's study, one can more clearly see why Shaw ranks with the most powerful of playwrights, men who had practical knowledge of their theaters: Sophocles, Shakespeare, Moliere, Ibsen, and Brecht. PHYLLIS B. HETRICK The Defiance College AMERICAN DRAMA IN SOCIAL CONTEXT, by Morris Freedman. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press ("Crosscurrents/Modern Critiques"), 1971. 143 pp. $5.95. This short book consists of four articles originally published as far back as 1952, plus an introduction, a conclusion, and two further new essays. Their general subjects are O'Neill, Miller, T. S. Eliot, Broadway commercialism, violence in drama, and musical theater. While refreshingly unacademic, lively, and freewheeling, the eight essays frequently are glib and the book as a whole is an unintegrated patchwork. It is liberally peppered with accessory judgments stated as self-evident truths - and then forgotten, as are the supposedly "false" situation and characters of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, a play alluded to differently in a later article. Technical terms are BOOK REVIEWS 339 misused: Jones' Dutchman is hardly a notable example of "Happenings," and "literal expressionism" is an impossible jumble. The latter is supposed to characterize the dramas of Wesker, who is as irrelevant to the purported subject of this book as are Betti, Osborne, Strindberg, and others here considered. The reprinted long Eliot article does not even deal with drama, though it does discuss Eliot's essays and poetry; on the other hand, poetic "American drama in social context" is totally ignored: a representative sample of this book's misleading title and lack of focus. MYRON MATLAW Queens College of the City University of New York FROM TENSION TO TONIC: THE PLAYS OF EDWARD ALBEE, by Anne Paolucci. Crosscurrents/Modern Critiques Series. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press; and London and Amsterdam: Feffer & Simons, Inc., 1972. 143 pp. $5.95. Anne Paolucci contributes an important addition to Albee commentary in From Tension to Tonic: The Plays of Edward Albee. A tidy book in the Crosscurrents/Modern Critiques series, From Tension to Tonic reads and informs swiftly (134 pages of actual text), in part because its author modestly disavows any intent to pursue "theses or formal patterns of criticism" (p. xiii). When, however, she does attempt in the opening chapter a far-ranging purview of Albee's position among today's dramatists, Professor Paolucci offers one of...

pdf

Share