Most scholars of American drama and theatre acknowledge that women's contributions to the field, especially those prior to the twentieth century, have been underrepresented. Over the past twenty-five years, scholars have begun to address a number of those glaring omissions. Women in American Theatre (New York: Crown, 1981; rev, and exp,, New York: TCG, 1987), edited by Helen Krich Chinoy and Linda Walsh Jenkins, fired the first resounding salvo, addressing an enormous range of material. Faye Dudden's outstanding Women in the American Theatre: Actresses & Audiences, 1790–1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994) provided a more focused study and insight into countless previously unknown figures. Amelia Howe Kritzer's Plays by Early American Women, 1775–1850 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995) brought to the surface many plays and dramatists never before anthologized.

Charlotte Canning's The Most American Thing in America: Circuit Chautauqua as Performance bemoans the confusion that still persists in distinguishing the Chautauqua Institution founded in upstate New York in 1874 from Circuit Chautauqua, which existed from 1904 into the Great Depression and toured rural America each summer under the readily identified brown tent (a deliberate contrast to the white top of the circus, which Chautauqua condemned). Canning states that “one is hard-pressed to find significant numbers of people who have ever heard of Circuit Chautauqua…. It does not seem to have entered into the American mythos” (2).

Theatre historians and practitioners in the academy have been slow to recognize the validity and significance of the community-based theatre movement in the United States. With the exception of a few books and articles, most of the scholarly literature on community-based theatre remains squirreled away in local reports, unpublished dissertations, and Web sites infrequently visited (at least by theatre academics). Perhaps this should not be surprising; compared to Australia, Latin America, and most of Europe, community-based theatre in the United States is scandalously underfunded and unknown. Among its many virtues, Jan Cohen-Cruz's Local Acts will raise the profile of community-based performance in the academy and perhaps spark more books in the field as well as courses and community-related projects in theatre and performance departments.

Penny Farfan's Women, Modernism, & Performance, six intricately woven essays about a handful of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century female artists, is an absorbing study centered on the premise that “the feminist-modernist aesthetics of key figures in the fields of dance and literature developed in part out of their engagement with dramatic literature and theatrical practice, making their lives and work a part of theatre history” (2). Employing broad definitions of both performance and modernism, Farfan casts a wide net, adopting what she describes as a “‘maximalist’ approach” (117) to construct her arguments about these artists' contributions to “the transformation of the representation of gender in both art and life” (119). Her consideration of public performances such as courtroom trials, lectures, and “the performance of gender in the practice of everyday life” (3) informs her analysis of literary, critical, and performance texts to intriguing effect. In the process, Farfan delineates the cultural landscape out of which these women and their work emerged.

Joan FitzPatrick Dean's Riot and Great Anger: Stage Censorship in Twentieth-Century Ireland is a welcome addition to Irish theatre studies. Although there is a plethora of scholarship available on specific theatrical riots in Ireland, and several studies detail the censorship in Ireland of publications, film, and television, no other single work documents in its totality the tradition of theatrical disorder and stage censorship in twentieth-century Ireland.

The Routledge Performance Practitioners series, edited by Franc Chamberlain, is a new set of introductory guides to a range of key figures in the development of twentieth-century performance practice. Each book focuses on a single practitioner, examining his or her life, historical context, key writings, and productions, and a selection of practical exercises. These concise volumes are intended to offer students an initial introduction to the practitioner and to “provide an inspiring spring-board for future study, unpacking and explaining what can initially seem daunting” (Merlin, ii). The list of practitioners in the complete series include Stanislavsky, Brecht, Boal, Lecoq, Grotowski, Anna Halprin, and Ariane Mnouchkine, thus examining a range of performance styles and practices, creating a valuable overview of the development of performer training through the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries. Such interest in the history of specific approaches to training performers has been addressed in other volumes, such as Twentieth-Century Actor Training, edited by Alison Hodge (New York: Routledge, 2000), and Acting (Re)considered: A Theoretical and Practical Guide, edited by Phillip Zarrilli (London: Routledge 2002). Both those collections contain in-depth chapters focusing on aspects of the selected practitioners' theoretical and practical approaches to the principles and concerns in their work. Where the books in the Routledge Performance Practitioners series differ is that they offer a more general overview of the practitioner in one volume, and in addition to the historical context, they provide a set of practical exercises that can be carried out by the student or teacher, as well as by the actor or director. The books are well presented, divided into clear sections, with relevant photographs and diagrams. There are also sidebars providing definitions and further information on key figures and terms mentioned in the main text. This review covers the first four books in the series, examining the work of Konstantin Stanislavsky, Michael Chekhov, Vsevolod Meyerhold, and Jacques Lecoq.

Suzuki Tadashi is arguably Japan's best known and most influential contemporary director, and this long-awaited comprehensive study presents a complete picture of his work to date. An eleven-page detailed production chronology at the beginning of the book lists everything from Suzuki's first production at the Waseda Free Stage (Jiyū Butai) Drama Society in 1959, through his opera Vision of Lear for the Third International Theatre Olympics in Moscow in 2001. This who-what-when-where chronological reference allows one to map quickly the arc of Suzuki's career, from his work as a director in Japan and his rise to international recognition in the 1970s, through his roles as International Festival coordinator and actor trainer, to his artistic directorships at the Acting Company Mito (ACM) and later Shizuoka Performing Arts Center (SPAC) in the 1990s.

Herbert Blau's Sails of the Herring Fleet: Essays on Beckett is, in some sense, an inevitable book. Blau has been rehearsing his valedictory for some time, penning eulogies to the art of disappearance that encapsulates his theatre and his life. Is it any wonder then that in his work Blau repeatedly turns to Beckett, his pained and painfully optimistic (now late) friend of some forty years? Anyone who has read Blau's work or heard Blau speak knows about his strategic use of repetition, almost as if he is transcribing the workings of Godot in his own hand and in his own time. Blau's hand has always been evident in his elegant writing style, his time(s) now even more visibly generational, in the artists he has influenced and in his abiding taste for the Beckett he knew and whom we all have yet to know.