Horton Foote has won many distinguished awards, including two Academy Awards for screenwriting, the Pulitzer Prize for drama, the Lucille Lortel Award, an Emmy, the William Inge Award, lifetime awards from the Academy of Arts and Letters and the Writer's Guild of America, an Outer Critics Circle Award, the Master American Dramatist Award of the PEN American Center, and the National Medal of the Arts. Yet there has been relatively little written about this important American—and southern—writer. Partly that is because he has written in various media, including theatre, film, and television, gaining substantial but limited fame in each, and much of his work is either produced regionally or staged for a small circle of aficionados in New York, where seemingly simple, understated dramas about coastal southeast Texas are never the rage. This tendency is exacerbated by the production history of the nine plays in The Orphans' Home, the subject of Laurin Porter's book. Staged over twenty years, from readings of the first plays in 1977 to the premiere of the final one, The Death of Papa, at Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in February of 1997, the plays have never been staged together.

From its beginning, John W. Frick's Theatre, Culture and Temperance Reform in Nineteenth-Century America does the work of overhauling the received tradition with respect to melodrama, progressivism, the temperance movement, and social and moral reform in nineteenth-century American theatre. Frick's thesis is that “nineteenth-century temperance drama was born of the intersection of temperance motives and ideology with progressive trends in literature and the arts” (13). Though his definition of progressivism is (I think, too) broad, Theatre, Culture and Temperance Reform is neither a survey of temperance plays (readers are referred to two dissertations that have undertaken this work) nor a survey of progressive trends. Rather, it seeks to illustrate “stages or facets of temperance ideology and/or production” (16).

Heather S. Nathans's well-documented study, covering the colonial theatre, the theatre of the revolution, and postrevolutionary theatre to shortly after 1800, focuses on Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. She argues convincingly that the theatre of the time was significantly affected by social, political, and financial matters, therefore located in a social, political, and financial context Nathans calls “crucial” (5).

In Theatre, Society and the Nation, S. E. Wilmer promises two enticing strands of investigation. First, he seeks “to illustrate the role of the theatre and live performance in reformulating concepts of national identity” (3) over some two hundred and fifty years of U.S. history. Second, his introduction asserts that besides examining “theatrical events and the printed texts of plays” the book “considers the audience and critical response” on the part of both “the dominant and oppressed groups in society” (3–4). Wilmer's work is rewarding on roughly half the topics proffered: it provides valuable information about many printed texts and performances of resistant discourse as well as some critical journalism and scholarship that responded to these pieces. On actual audience response, the book is virtually silent, sometimes substituting the comments of artist participants, publicity, or theory for the reactions of people who actually witnessed the events.

William W. Demastes's new book is a rare find. It shows a new direction for interdisciplinary theatre scholarship, combining drama and performance with cognitive science, fuzzy logic, and complexity theory. With this challenging combination, Demastes extends the significance of theatre beyond its conventional place in the humanities and proposes specific ties between an ancient art form and recent scientific discoveries. He demonstrates a post-postmodern or “neostructuralist” approach that dares to discuss “the emergent essence of life itself,” through a materialist, yet “nonpositivist” science of the drama. He thus offers a glimpse “of ’universal' consciousness” in theatre's “spiritual something more” (7–9).

While Irish theatre history and criticism has closely linked performance, nationalism, and identity politics throughout the twentieth century, far less attention has been paid to the Irish theatre's profound role in nation building in previous centuries. Cheryl Herr, John Harrington, and others have reminded us of the nineteenth-century popular theatre's role in subverting British opinions of Irish history and identity. But the eighteenth century, the century of Thomas Sheridan, John O'Keeffe, and Smock Alley, as well as Jonathan Swift, the United Irishmen, and Grattan's Parliament, has received surprisingly little attention from the point of view of theatre history.

“A new language of criticism is essential to describe and inscribe dramatic forms” (145): so writes Imelda Foley at the conclusion of her study of gender in contemporary Ulster theatre, The Girls in the Big Picture. It is not without irony, therefore, that her book is a perfect example of the exuberantly lively business of theatre in performance continually bursting through the limits of an overly schematic theoretical paradigm.

Is it perverse to take an interest in the infamous death of a writer? How many years should pass until we can discuss the details of a tragic death in an objective context? In the case of the promising playwright Sarah Kane, it is still too soon. With Joe Orton, however, it is easy to mistake the man for the literary construction that now personifies him. In different ways, both of these writers suffer the plight of being forever fused with their texts in postmortem criticisms of their writing. In the case of Orton, however, because of the genre of his writing, we seem to be able to laugh about it.

In this clear, concise, and accessible volume, Michael Patterson sets himself the task of examining “the work of nine talented and innovative British playwrights who shared a laudable but strange conviction: that by writing plays and having them performed they might help to change the way society is structured” (1). As if conscious of the inevitable charge that by focusing on Wesker, Arden, Griffiths, Barker, Brenton, McGrath, Hare, Bond, and Churchill he is perpetuating the damaging myth that political theatre in postwar Britain centers on these usual suspects, Patterson takes pains to define his terms. Political theatre for the purposes of his volume “implies the possibility of radical change on socialist lines: the removal of injustice and autocracy and their replacement by the fairer distribution of wealth and more democratic systems” (4). But as the Lord Chamberlain found in his increasingly desperate attempts in the 1960s to hold on to his power to censor British drama, the more you attempt to define, the more problematic the issues that arise. Theatre historians are now becoming increasingly aware of the power of “hidden theatre” in the evolution of postwar British theatre—that is, the large number of community-based and politically active groups that have been marginalized by a disproportionate focus on “representative” political playwrights and a few well-scrutinized collective organizations, such as 7:84, Monstrous Regiment, and Belt and Braces, who are all alluded to in this volume. In light of this fact, Patterson's interest in the phenomenon that saw a generation of playwrights flourish between the mid-fifties and the early eighties, who shared a desire to change society, now seems rather quaint. It is all the more to his credit, therefore, that he has produced a highly thought-provoking work.

Gender, Theatre, and the Origins of Criticism: From Dryden to Manley explores the role theatrical artists played in the emergence of literary criticism. Marcie Frank suggests that a study of this emergence should begin with John Dryden, and that it must also include the contributions made by female playwrights (such as Aphra Behn, Catharine Trotter, and Delarivier Manley)—not merely as side notes worthy of attention in a feminist attempt to include women writers in the history of criticism but, more important, as writings that actively carried on the genealogical literary tradition that Dryden established. Frank makes the case that by figuring the transmission of a national vernacular canon “as a patrimony, [Dryden] drew the lines of access to a native literary tradition for subsequent writers and critics” (2). The essays in the book work to establish the presence of a critical legacy left to us by Dryden, Behn, Trotter, and Manley. In doing so, Frank hopes to restore the theatre's rightful place in the story of criticism's emergence, thereby allowing an acknowledgment of the “performativity of criticism, both in the sense of what it accomplishes—the establishment of a native tradition coded as filiation—and in the appreciation of the means by which it does so” (2).

W. B. Worthen, I suggested in a review of his Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance (1997), swims with the sharks. So thorough is his argumentation, so sophisticated is his mapping of contemporary theory and scholarship, so tenacious is he to prove irrefutably his wisest and most commonsensical points, so determined is he to use the masters' theoretical tools to tear down the theory masters' houses, that he sometimes, almost inadvertently, appears to be making the very points he is in fact refuting.

Benjamin Griffin takes an innovative approach to studying the history-play genre in early modern England. Rather than comparing history plays to their chronicle sources or interrogating their political implications, Griffin studies their relationships with other early modern English dramas, contextualizing them for “those who wish . . . to understand the history play by way of the history of plays” (xiii). He seeks to identify the genre's distinct characteristics by selecting a relatively broad spectrum of plays and examining their dramatic structure, their historical content, and their audiences' relationship to the subject matter.

I was introduced to sourcebooks as an undergraduate in the 1960s. At that time, the most frequently used were A. M. Nagler's A Sourcebook in Theatrical History (1952), Toby Cole's Directors on Directing (1963), and Toby Cole and Helen Chinoy's Actors on Acting (1948). These books first introduced me to the process of theatre history, and as I believe it is important to introduce this process to students, I continued to use both Nagler and the Cole and Chinoy volume, which was expanded in 1970, in teaching theatre history.

Readers excited by the recent and growing body of work on audience studies, such as Richard Butsch's The Making of American Drama, will be pleased to discover in Neil Blackadder's Performing Opposition a lucid historical examination of a very specific kind of theatre audience: the protesting one. Covering the scandals that greeted performances of plays by Hauptmann, Jarry, Synge, O'Casey, and Brecht, Blackadder provides us with a thorough reading of the events themselves, based on extensive use of firsthand accounts, reviews, court decisions, and more, as well as with a useful contextualization of the protests within the increasingly detailed—and important—history of theatre audiences.

Gaspare Vigarani, the Italian architect and set designer, was hired in 1659 to build a new theatre in the Tuileries Palace for the festivities celebrating Louis XIV's marriage in 1660. This theatre, the ill-fated albeit magnificent Salle des Machines, was not completed in time for the wedding celebration. It opened in February 1662 with a production of Cavalli's opera Ercole amante. His sons Carlo and Ludovico had assisted Vigarani in creating the scenery and machinery for this production. In 1663, Carlo was invited back to France to supervise royal entertainments, a function he exercised until 1680. In 1673, he joined the composer Lully at the newly created Académie royale de musique, where he designed scenery until 1680. Jean Berain, who was named to the post of “dessinateur de la chambre et du cabinet du Roi” in 1674, had assisted Vigarani early in his career and designed costumes for Lully's operas. He succeeded Vigarani as set designer at the Opera in 1680, a post he would hold until 1710.

The century that featured two world wars, mass murder, and nuclear terror was also a century in which clowns ceased to be comic. So Donald McManus suggests in his book about clowns who face their own deaths: suicides, mock executions, and hangings. No wonder the book is titled No Kidding! That phrase is a translation of the Swiss clown Grock's “Sans blââgue!”—words through which the popular circus artist indicated “to his audience the potentially serious nature of his comic turns,” according to McManus (11).

The title of Robert Henke's latest book accurately reflects its innovative contents. The close study of manuscript and printed texts of various kinds—contracts, letters, poems, memorializations, scenarios, treatises, and diaries—sits alongside examination of actors, actresses, the character system, and individual roles to provide the first study devoted to the interaction, indeed cross-fertilization, between the oral and the literary aspects of commedia dell'arte, contrasting yet complementing each other as did binary pairs of arte figures.

New historicism has come under fire in certain quarters for its perceived tendency to merely replace older totalizing histories with new ones that reify the very univocity they ostensibly strive to complicate. To respond to Deleuze and Guattari's call for “rhizomatic” histories in preference to “arboreal” ones has proven quite difficult to achieve in practice, even for the most dedicated adherents. Andrew Sofer's The Stage Life of Props comes as close as any history to realizing a comprehensive and comprehensible study of physical objects in the theatre that eschews master narratives in favor of a more fungoid methodology. In so doing, Sofer has created a convincing text that does for the history of stage properties what Joseph Roach's The Player's Passion (1985) did for the history of acting: set the stage, as it were, for a revitalized look at one of the murkier zones of theatre history as useful for students of props in general as it is to period specialists looking for new approaches to old mysteries.

This lavishly illustrated collection covers a period of time that has seen tremendous growth in English-language kabuki scholarship. In 1966, there were in print but three introductory books on kabuki in English—Faubian Bowers's Japanese Theatre (1952), Earle Ernst's The Kabuki Theatre (1956), and A. C. Scott's The Kabuki Theatre of Japan (1966)—along with a handful of plays in translation and a few journal articles. Today, thanks to the work of such researchers as Samuel L. Leiter, James R. Brandon, Leonard Pronko, Donald Shively, Lawrence R. Kominz, Andrew C. Gerstle, and others, kabuki scholarship can boast of dozens of books and book chapters, as well as scores of articles covering a range of topics from music, theatre architecture, and dramatic text to actors, acting, and audience. Furthermore, with the recent publication of the four-volume series Kabuki Plays on Stage (edited by Brandon and Leiter, 2002–3), fifty-one previously untranslated plays are now available in English. No longer is it necessary to spend years learning the Japanese language in order to carry out research into kabuki theatre.

Originally published in 1999, this book is the first and still the only major collection of primary sources in English translation for the study of Chinese theories of theatre and performance. In an earlier Theatre Survey review of this anthology (42:1 [May 2001]: 96–8), Sara Davis focused on the historical development of Chinese theatre and devoted a substantial portion of her comments to the earlier periods, noting with regret that these eras and the professional folk performance that flourished during them are underrepresented in this volume. This is undoubtedly true, but the unequal coverage does not originate with editor Fei. Very few literati-scholars wrote for or about the performing arts prior to the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368). Written theatre theory in China being primarily in the hands of these gentlemen until the modern era, the relative paucity of early primary sources is therefore an unavoidable reality. With the 2002 republication of Fei's anthology in paperback form, it therefore seems appropriate to reassess her work, describing and evaluating the materials that are included for the larger readership now provided access.