he names of Arthur and Barbara Gelb have been connected with Eugene O'Neill ever since their 1962 biography of the playwright became a surprise bestseller. Since that time, they have written numerous articles and reviews, and their biography has become an unavoidable landmark in O'Neill scholarship. In the introduction to their new book, the Gelbs write that, following the publication of the earlier biography, “countless studies of O'Neill's plays [were] published, along with chronicles of his life and times.” Many of these texts used the Gelb book as a guide, some of which “surpassed segments of our own research, elaborated on our early discoveries and caught us in errors” (xiv).

If there is one constant to be noted throughout the lives of the three Komissarzhevskysthe nineteenth-century operatic tenor, his turn-of-the-century actress daughter, and her half-brother, who made a career outside the USSR as a directorit is their unwavering devotion to an ideal of theatre art that permeated every aspect of their existence. Whether this is literally true or not, it is how Victor Borovsky sees them and presents them in his magisterial tripartite biography.

According to Thomas F. Connolly, George Jean Nathan (1882–1958) stands as “the first modern American drama critic” (13). Nathan's career spanned the early half of the twentieth century, beginning in 1905 as reviewer for the NewYork Herald, followed by a position as coeditor with H. L. Mencken of The Smart Set (1914–1924) and, later, as cofounder with Mencken of the American Mercury (1923–1932), and concluding as a contributor to The American Spectator, Newsweek, and Esquire. In addition to his magazine and newspaper work, Nathan authored thirty-four books of theatre criticism and dramatic theory, becoming the most widely read theatre critic in the nation.

Michael Balfour's Theatre and War, 1933–1945: Performance in Extremis offers eleven essays, all previously published and in several cases abridged for this volume. They cover four aspects: theatre in service of Fascism, theatre of resistance, theatre behind barbed wire, and theatre at the front. With the exception of two contributions, the essays represent recent scholarship and cover developments in Italy, Germany, France, Britain, and the Soviet Union. The level of analysis varies from essay to essay, ranging from in-depth academic research to personal recollections of survivors and eyewitness accounts. The volume addresses theatrical formats ranging from simple, cabaretlike performances to large-scale public spectacles, including both state-organized events supportive of Fascist ideology and the theatre of resistance.

In Reading Stephen Sondheim: A Collection of Critical Essays, editor Sandor Goodhart interrogates an incongruity between Stephen Sondheim's reputation as one of the most important artists of the musical stage and the simultaneous paucity of serious academic attention to his work. Two recent collections from Garland Publishing, Joanne Gordon's Stephen Sondheim: A Casebook and Goodhart's own Reading Stephen Sondheim, attempt to illuminate Sondheim's works by examining them through a wide array of critical lenses. Gordon, an acclaimed Los Angeles stage director and accomplished scholar, includes fourteen essays by directors, acting coaches, designers, and scholars in her book (an eclectic collection oriented toward theatrical practice). Goodhart's volume presents an assortment of literary studies representing current trends in critical theory.

The grandiose title and a three-person editorial team promise a magnum opus on some impressive topics. In fact, this volume is a collection of occasional papers originating in a summer school convened by Pirkko Koski in Suitia, Finland, in 1995, and two of the essays have been published elsewhere previously. The “international cast of scholars” touted in the publisher's blurb comprises five North Americans (one an expatriate), four Finns, and one Israeli. As in all such Festschriften, there is a certain imbalance and immiscibility, and some of the essays are only tenuously connected to the nexus announced in the title.

This vivid, inspiring collection of essays explores the general outlines, the retrospective guidelines, the facts, the falsehoods, and the possible future of experimental performance from the fin de siècle onward. It asks less what the “avant-garde” is than how it has been considered, and in so doing, suggests a preliminary structure for a long-needed genealogy of ideas of the groundbreaking, anarchic, and simply the “new,” in performance history.

When eighteenth-century deists dubbed John Wesley's galvanizing of Christian fervor “methodism,” they generally meant it as an insult. Wesley was earnest and pugnacious, a tireless crusader with little sense of humor. Much the same could be (was, and is) said of Lee Strasberg. The volume of essays assembled by David Krasner in Method Acting Reconsidered is a conscientious attempt to rehabilitate a maligned acting model. Sanford Meisner emerges from this attempt more strongly than does Strasberg himself, while Stella Adler's contribution has still to be validated, despite (and sometimes because of) what is said about her here. The Method itself survives because, as Dennis Beck says in an essay that thoughtfully incorporates Stanislavsky, Strasberg, and Diderot, the actor's pursuit of truth (or authenticity) is “most fundamentally . . . the reactivation of acting's inherent paradox” (265).

Joel Schechter's new book of oral-history interviews with members of the Pickle Family Circus offers an unparalleled journey into the mind of the clown. Audiences are accustomed to seeing clowns, but they rarely hear them think. The Pickle Clowns places a slapstick stethoscope under the fright wig of comic performers like Bill Irwin and captures the pulse of their thought processes, as they invent gags and re-create the trajectory of their most memorable comic inventions.

One of Stanislavsky's most frequently quoted directives to actors is to play the specifics of life and to avoid the enemy of generalities. If this guideline can be applied to the composition of texts, then authors Jane Milling and Graham Ley of the University of Exeter have succeeded in disarming that enemy in print. Their detailed analyses of the writings of an illustrious group of twentieth-century theatrical figures is solidly grounded in sociocultural and artistic specifics and illuminates the theoretical trails blazed by these practitioners.

Since theatre emerged as an academic discipline, scholars and artists have argued over how to define it. These debates have had various motivations: the desire to capture the full dimensions of their object of study, the search for appropriate methods of analysis, and the fight for intellectual ground in academic power struggles. The increasingly popular term “performance,” which arose out of dissatisfaction with the narrow aesthetic and cultural limits that the concept of “theatre” seems to impose, has been likewise much debated (as demonstrated in Marvin Carlson's 1996 survey).

For readers of this journal and certainly for students of the American circus, the subtitle of this book (“The Most Famous Man You've Never Heard Of”) is an exaggeration that serves (as does the dust jacket) as a kind of circus bally to get the attention of the reader. Dan Rice's position is surely secure in the history of the American circus, both as a pioneer circus entrepreneur and as the greatest American clown of the nineteenth century, a presence as well known in his own time as the great P. T. Barnum.

Using both published and unpublished sources, Brenda Murphy's carefully researched account of important productions of Eugene O'Neill's realistic, autobiographical masterpiece devotes the first twenty percent of the text to the famous New York premiere and continues with briefer accounts of major productions in English, foreign-language productions, and film and television adaptations. As appendixes, Murphy also includes a production chronology from 1956 to 2000, a discography and videography. The fifteen black and white photographs are portraits and close-ups, notably excepting one image from the first José Quintero New York production (displaying the much-discussed stained glass window treatment behind the four principals) and one nearly full stage shot of the famous interior from the first Stockholm production.

Since its inception in 1967, the Prague Quadrennial, an international exhibition of stage design and theatre architecture, has been a focal event for the world's best theatre practitioners, historians, and critics. Held every four years, the Quadrennial features exhibits from around the world that exemplify the breadth, depth, and variety of approaches to theatrical practice. The 1999 Quadrennial provided a forum for discussing the topic “Theatrical Space in Postmodern Times: Contemporary Concepts and Methodologies,” and was hosted by the Theatre Institute in Prague and the Scenography Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research. In Space and the Postmodern Stage, select essays from this Quadrennial's presentations suggest, as coeditor Irene Eynat-Confino remarks, “the many facets of postmodernism on the stage and in theatre sites” (9).

Scholars attempting to define the myriad meanings and purposes of the theatre across the centuries have tended to avoid issues of sexuality, particularly those aspects of it that seem to veer from the generally accepted norm. In The Changing Room: Sex, Drag, and Theatre, Laurence Senelick makes a compelling and persuasive case for understanding the centrality of sexuality in all aspects of performance, in all its confusing complexity and glory. In this, the first major cross-cultural study of theatrical transvestism, the theatre is “the changing room,” in its acknowledgment of “the essential queerness of its nature” (509). In over five hundred pages of copiously researched, cogently argued analysis, Senelick charts the role of drag in theatre from its origins to the present, shifting effortlessly through a broad range of cultures and eras. Along with the opportunity of viewing theatre history through a unique lens, drag provides an opportunity for the exploding of familiar stereotypes of gender—and Senelick comes armed with dynamite.

In his introduction to this very interesting collection of reviews from the New York Times, Ben Brantley says that he and theatre critic Peter Marks faced great difficulty selecting 125 productions to constitute the 125 “unforgettable plays” of the twentieth century. They “focused not only on the intrinsic merits of the work reviewed, but also on its historical context and the degree to which it engages the critic” (xviii). They also limited themselves (by choice, one assumes) to daily reviews, “passing over the longer and more contemplative pieces that appeared in the Sunday paper” (xix), a decision that surely eliminated at least some reviews that have had the most impact and revealed the most mature appreciations of O'Neill, Odets, Albee, August Wilson, and others.

Jarka Burian's Modern Czech Theatre: Reflector and Conscience of a Nation accomplishes something important: namely, it helps theatre scholars understand why Czech theatre in the twentieth century was interesting, important, and worthy of study, in spite of the fact that Czech theatre artists were only occasionally leaders in theatrical innovation, and Czech playwrights sometimes “did not measure up to their fellow theatre artists.” In his book, Burian focuses primarily on theatre productions, the history of selected theatre companies, and the accomplishments of important Czech directors. Throughout it, Burian points out the periods when Czech theatre belonged to “the first ranks of European theatre” as well as when it sank into stagnation. Burian presents these different periods within the context of Czech history and situates them within the history of Western theatrical practice as well. As his title suggests, Burian stresses the unusually close bond the Czech people had with their theatre, and the high degree of political and social relevance that theatre had within Czech society.

In order “to introduce readers to the theorized analysis of performance,” Colin Counsell and Laurie Wolf have organized Performance Analysis, a collection of thirty excerpts (each up to nine pages in length), into eight parts. The crossover nature of many of the selections suggests an implicit bridge between performance studies and more traditional investigations of theatre.

At the beginning of No Surrender! No Retreat! African American Pioneer Performers of Twentieth-Century American Theater, Glenda E. Gill asks, “What shall the Negro dance about?” She poses the question as a “metaphor for all African American performing artists who faced . . . overwhelming discrimination” and lets it drive her passion and admiration for her chosen subjects. Her admiration for these theatrical heroes began through her early childhood contact with prominent African Americans on the campus of Alabama A. & M. College. Gill's palpable enthusiasm, germinated from the life-altering performances she saw as a youth, is the clear source of the power behind her scholarship and writing style. The chief value of the book lies in the balance Gill achieves between her quests to document and to celebrate these “pioneer performers,” people who have made her “dance” intellectually and inspirationally. She features the stories of Rose McClendon, Paul Robeson, Ethel Waters, Marian Anderson, Canada Lee, Pearl Bailey, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, James Earl Jones, and Morgan Freeman.

African theatre and theatre artists have a long history of playing interventionist roles in the sociopolitical climate of the continent. Al-Zalum (The Tyrant) brought about the expulsion of Yussuf Khayyat from Egypt in 1878. Wole Soyinka was incarcerated during the Nigerian Civil War of the 1960s and helped end military dictatorship in that country in the 1990s. Ngugi wa Thiong'o's Kamiriithu Theatre was razed in the 1970s and the playwright incarcerated by Kenya's political leadership for allegedly using the theatre to “teach” politics. South Africa, because of its long years of apartheid, produced an impressive list of interventionist theatre practitioners—Athol Fugard, Mbongeni Ngema, Barney Simon, John Kani, and many more. The latter half of the 1990s ushered in a new way of life in South Africa, and theatre that had vehemently protested the evils of apartheid sought new ways to be relevant. South African Theatre as/and Intervention continues the trend of interventionary theatre, gathering intellectuals and practitioners to discuss how theatre should engage itself in future interventions. Blumberg and Walder's is the first book entirely devoted to the subject of theatrical intervention in an African country, and, whereas past interventions have often been reactive, their approach is proactive. By looking at the present, they boldly predict the future and set the pace for a productive, meaningful intervention, not only in South African theatre, but in theatre through out Africa and the world. Though focused on South Africa, the ripples extend to African and world theatres.