After all these years I am glad to see that the correspondence (letters, notes and wires) of O'Neill and his second wife Agnes Boulton have finally reached print. I have had occasion to use some of these letters in my research, but many I had not read until this publication. Boulton was married to O'Neill during his most experimental period as a playwright, 1918 – 29, and some of the letters provide material related to productions and his writing of the plays, but most of the letters focus on the marriage and the daily vicissitudes of living in a volatile, love-hate relationship which vacillates between the euphoric and the accusatory, much like the text of O'Neill's 1924 play Welded — a thinly disguised account of their relationship.

This book is a great read for a number of reasons, the most significant of which is the author's demonstration that Alexander Moissi (Alessandro Moissi, 1879–1935) was the German-speaking theatre's first modern actor. That dubious distinction Moissi may have shared with Josef Kainz, Alexander Granach, Peter Lorre, and a few others, but there is little doubt that Moissi was among the twentieth century's first German-speaking superstars. Unlike most of the great German actors before him, Moissi was not a native German speaker. He was born in Albania, grew up speaking Greek and Italian, and had a lucrative career that spanned four decades in thousands of performances all over the world. In none of those performances did Moissi lose the Mediterranean inflections in the language of Goethe and Schiller. But that did not diminish his stature; it enhanced it. Near the end of his career, film director Ernst Lubitsch approached him in Hollywood to plead, “Herr Moissi, please allow me to embrace you, so that people will think I am somebody!”

As women emerged from the constraints of whalebone corsets, trailing skirts, and woolen knickers into skirts that skimmed their ankles or even knees, socioeconomic and political forces were massing against this new physical freedom. The questions Posing a Threat asks are how did women test their newborn freedom through fashionable clothing choices — primarily bathing costumes — and what were the lasting consequences of these experiments? “Flappers” and chorus girls were the principle targets of self-proclaimed moralists and socially prominent spokesmen in the twenties. The emergence of the working-class woman and her fashion decisions created an amalgam of conflicting social, economic, and moral attitudes, and forced negotiations with the hegemonic dictators of acceptable female behavior.

Maurice Kurtz's insightful study of the achievements of visionary actor, director, and teacher Jacques Copeau (1879–1949) is among the most welcome and important theatre books of the past year. Copeau's concepts have had a widespread and profound influence on theatre practice since the first days prior to World War I when Copeau revitalized the French stage. Kurtz offers a thorough and, at times, moving portrait of a singular artist devoted to the greater glory of the theatre. Copeau began his career as a Parisian drama critic before transforming himself into reformer and practitioner who relentlessly attacked the tired conventions of Europe's fin-de-siècle stage. At the same time, Copeau also aimed to offer an alternative to the rise of realism, epitomized in France by André Antoine's Thétre Libre. Seeking a foundation for a new kind of modern theatrical art, Copeau looked to what he regarded as the unchanging truths of the past to create an as yet unknown future theatre.

Following the centennial celebration of Antonin Artaud's 1896 birth, a series of scholarly works on Artaud have appeared. Stephen Barber's The Screaming Body and Jacques Derrida and Paule Thévenin's The Secret Art of Antonin Artaud are concerned with Artaud's non-theatrical works—his drawings and audio recordings—and John Calder Publications has begun reissuing Martin Esslin's Antonin Artaud: The Man and His Work, a book that was first published in 1976, and six volumes of Artaud's Collected Works in translation. These publications come on the heels of several major Artaud exhibitions. Artaud's drawings have appeared at the Centre Georges Pompidou (1987 and 1994), Marseilles' Musée Cantini (1995), and New York's Museum of Modern Art (1996). Retrospectives of Artaud's work in the cinema—Artaud appeared in twenty-three films during the 1920s and early 1930s—were held at Centre Georges Pompidou in 1987, and in London, at the National Film Theatre, in 1993. And finally, Artaud's radio project, To Have Done With The Judgement of God (Pour en finir avec le jugement de Dieu), previously unavailable to scholars, was released in its entirety on compact disc in France, in 1995. The controversial recording, which was recorded six weeks before Artaud's death in 1948, was originally banned by the French director of the Radiodiffusion Française and labeled “blasphemous” and “obscene.” The ubiquity of Artaud's work and the current scholarly interest in Artaud cannot really be called a revival because Artaud has never gone out of fashion. In fact, Artaud's reputation—both in France and in non-Francophone cultures—has never been higher. Since the 1960s, Artaud's poetry, letters, and essays on dramatic theory have inspired theatre practitioners throughout the world.

This exhaustive, but by no means exhausting, book about John Gielgud is well-titled. Jonathan Croall has taken Gielgud's career, rather than his personal life, as his focus and, in so doing, provides a valuable look at English theatre as it grew and evolved through the twentieth century.

While it might not be a stretch to get scholars and critics to agree that the work of people like Robert Wilson and Richard Foreman are postmodern, asking the same folks to agree upon this categorization for Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, and Sam Shepard might be more challenging. Stephen Watt address this issue of classification with regards to drama, which for Watt excludes “performance,” to concentrate on “what writers write” (4). This is not an easy task since, as Watt points out, the very idea of postmodernism dissolves “neatly sutured categories, such as genres themselves” (8). With this understanding, which prompts the dialectical slash in the book's title, Watt searches for a way to “begin to unravel the taut conceptual skein that results from the paradoxical union of the two terms” (13).

Playwright Tony Kushner has called the remarkable generation of gay and lesbian playwrights examined in these two books a “weird little golden age” of dramatists, filmmakers, and theorists. Each book deals with aspects of this twentieth-century gay – lesbian renaissance and, for scholars, opens the field of sexuality and gender to an emphasis on theatre history, culture, and literary theory. Of these two works, Alan Sinfield's Out on Stage stands out as an essential critical history of homosexuality in modern drama, while Straight with a Twist, edited by Calvin Thomas, is an interesting collection of a dozen essays on aspects of Queer Theory (embracing variant definitions of the term from Rimbaud to Foucault) viewed through the prism of the heterosexual gaze and its complex relation to the gay – lesbian “other.”

Trevor Griffiths first made his presence felt in British theatre with the 1970 production of Occupations, his account of the 1920 factory occupations in Turin, Italy. For the past three decades, he has produced a considerable body of work for stage, television, and film. Griffiths's journey as a writer reflects his lifelong commitment to the socialist cause in England, his exploration of the contradictions inherent in revolutionary politics, and his own struggles as a radical writer working within a capitalist system.

The year of publication of African Theatre in Development is significant. In the immediate years preceding its 1999 release, important works that mark the march of progress in African theatre had been published: Martin Banham, Errol Hill, and George Woodyard's The Cambridge Guide to African and Caribbean Theatre (1994), Eckhard Breitinger's Theatre and Performance in Africa (1994), Marion Frank's AIDS-Education Through Theatre (1995), Jane Plastow's African Theatre and Politics (1996), David Kerr's African Popular Theatre (1996), Karin Barber, John Collins, and Alain Ricard's West African Popular Theatre (1997), Don Rubin's The World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre, Volume 3, Africa (1997), Oga Steve Abah's Performing Life: Case Studies in the Practice of Theatre for Development (1997), Robert Mshengu Kavanagh's Making People's Theatre (1997), Kamal Salhi's African Theatre for Development: Art for Self-Determination (1998), and Jane Taylor's Ubu and the Truth Commission (1998). Published as if with one eye on a fin de siècle assessment of past theatrical achievements and the other on millennial aspirations, African Theatre in Development is mostly a case-by-case study of how theatre has been developed in Africa, and how it has been used in and for development. It is the first in Indiana University Press's nascent African Theatre series edited by Martin Banham, James Gibbs, and Femi Osofisan, all eminent scholars of African theatre.

One of the most celebrated African writers of a generation, Athol Fugard has come to be regarded as a great playwright throughout the world. This white South African playwright witnessed firsthand the tyranny and eventual transformation of his racially polarized country into a multicultural society. Beginning with his play No-Good Friday (1958) about black African township life, Fugard has created a large body of work which includes plays about the destructiveness of racial apartheid, the alienation within families, and the role of artists in society. Although Fugard often writes autobiographically, dramatizing scenes and characters from his past, he has refrained from documenting political events in a sweeping social allegory of South African repression. On the contrary, as Wertheim points out, Fugard emulates the minimalist staging and style of Samuel Beckett by letting his disenfranchised and alienated characters speak for themselves about their condition in an inhumane society.

Stephen A. Black has brought to an impressive conclusion the important project on which he has been working for a couple of decades, the writing of a psychoanalytic biography of Eugene O'Neill. Black, who is a literature professor, underwent non-medical psychoanalytic training to carry out this work, and the result is a book that conveys both artistic and scientific insight into the self-analytical dramas of O'Neill.

At the First International Conference on the American Theatre at the University of Málaga, Spain in May 2000, one of the most worthwhile of the many fine papers was the plenary paper by Brenda Murphy, “Tennessee Williams's Metaphors of McCarthyism.” An outtake, as it were, from her book on the plays and films written during the McCarthy era in response to the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings, the paper was a close analysis of Tennessee Williams's Camino Real (a notable failure in the American theatre), the critical response to it, William's own feelings and political views, and the political situation in America at the time. She also drew many fascinating parallels between the play and the well-known anti-fascist film, Casablanca. Like many others, I was eager to read the book.

How has “America” been performed, reimagined, and contested for the past 250 years? Or as J. Ellen Gainor puts it, what “role” has theatre played in the “construction of American identity”? One need not concur with Jeffrey D. Mason's foreword that there is a “void” of theatre scholarship on this topic (remember the pioneering histories of Richard Moody and Walter Meserve) to agree with him and his co-editor, J. Ellen Gainor, that questions of nationalism and cultural representation in the United States remain far from exhausted (4). As evidence for this claim, Mason and Gainor invoke a bibliography of recent (and not-so recent) scholarship by “New Americanists” like Sacvan Bercovitch, Annette Kolodny, Donald Pease, Myra Jehlen, and Lauren Berlant that should rightly spur theatre scholars to engage the problem of “performing America” with fresh vigor.