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9780929587530

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Reviews

The best single collection of essays I know on modern drama...remarkably fine and sensitive pieces of criticism.--Alvin Kernan Yale Review

Provocative, persuasive, and eminently readable. Saturday Review The best single collection of essays I know on modern drama...remarkably fine and sensitive pieces of criticism. -- Alvin Kernan Yale Review One of the standard and decisive books on the modern theater. The New York Times

When Nietzsche announced the death of God, he lowered the boom on all traditional values, and thus began the modern tradition of revolt. Or so Professor Brustein reads cultural history in his programmatic approach to the modern drama. His choice of exemplary playwrights may seem at first glance an odd mesh, and his omissions may appear scandalous (why not Montherlant, Beckett, Ionesco?). But given the formulae (three fundamental and usually overlapping categories: the messianic, social, existential) and accepting the fashionable canons (the conflict between the real and the ideal, the self and the Other, la bete huamine and man-become-God), the essays are ??liant, and sometimes superlatively successful, attempt so bring to the drama the kind of close reading the New Critics have given to the novel and poetry. Alas, Brustein is, as they say in the theatre, always on, working up so much steam that the discussion of his philosophical, essentially apolitical, and bourgeois-biffing rebels tends to be fogged-out every so often. Still, the Shaw and Strindberg are brilliantly done, especially as psychological portraits, and those on Ibsen, Chekhov and Pirandello bright enough. The O'Neill's a bore, the Brecht respectable, and with Genet, Brustein goes flying blind quite frequently, albeit excitingly. The book, which presupposes a deep acquaintance with the plays, is a landmark of sorts, and its attention-demanding air certainly won't have it collecting dust on the shelf. (Kirkus Reviews)

Author Information

Robert Brustein, theatre critic for the New Republic and is the author of Cultural Calisthenics, Dumbocracy in America, The Siege of the Arts, and Reimagining American Theatre. He is also founder and artistic director of the American Repertory Theatre at Harvard University.

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