Print and the poetics of modern drama /

This consistently intelligent study explores relations between dramatic text and theatrical performance--stage and page--in English and American work over the past hundred years. Worthen (Univ. of California, Berkeley) would have the reader reject the "zombie-theory of drama," which holds that "performance is only partly and provisionally inhabited by the transcendent work-of-art." Instead, the author promotes playwrights for whom the physical book--what Worthen calls the print form--embodies the playful performative features of linguistic and theatrical experiment. The governing analogy here is with modernist poetry, especially William Carlos Williams and the present-day "Language" poets, and the exemplary modern playwright is Gertrude Stein, who "refuses to distinguish between the registers of the dramatic and the theatrical." Other authors whose teasing dialectic of mise-en-page and mise-en-scene Worthen fruitfully explores include George Bernard Shaw, Harold Pinter, Suzan-Lori Parks, Moises Kaufman (of The Laramie Project), Anna Deavere Smith, and Sarah Kane. Though Worthen's writing is too clever in places, as in his use of the term "animalady" for the performative quality of language, those interested in modern drama and theater will profit from this volume. ^BSumming Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals. E. D. Hill Mount Holyoke College