The War against Naturalism in the Contemporary American Theatre (review)

Reviewed by: The War against Naturalism in the Contemporary American Theatre Annette J. Saddik Robert J. Andreach. The War against Naturalism in the Contemporary American Theatre. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2008. Pp. 174. $27.00 (Pb). Robert J. Andreach begins his study of anti-mimetic drama, The War Against Naturalism in the Contemporary American Theatre, by quoting John Guare’s well-known preface to The War Against the Kitchen Sink, which sets up the kitchen sink as the “icon of naturalism” in the twentieth-century theatre. Guare describes a “dangerous terrain” that results from “dismantling” the kitchen sink; Andreach calls this terrain “the imagination, dreams, the unconscious” that lie “beneath the surface in conflict with the surface” (1). Taking Guare’s comments a step further, Andreach formulates his own argument: “to generate ‘the tension between surface reality and inner reality’ that creates the war, the surface reality that must be in the play is some element of the naturalistic play” (1). Andreach then relies on the work of Marvin Carlson and William W. Demastes to compose a clear and useful definition of naturalistic theatre as one in which existence is “presented with such scientific objectivity that the audience is an observer of the life depicted rather than an imaginative participant in it” (1), with characters whose behaviour is determined by the uncontrollable scientific forces of heredity and environment. [End Page 607] Andreach’s study is broken up into four chapters: “The War in the Total Play and in Setting: Ludlum and Eno; Johnson, Lindsay-Abaire, Lucas, and Groff”; “The War in Language and in Character: Wellman, Maxwell, and Gibson; Foreman and Groff”; “The War in Character Behavior: Albee, Greenberg, and Donaghy”; and “Naturalism Defended and Three Extraordinary Plays: The Working Theatre, Corthron, Glover, and Foote; Overmeyer, Jenkin, and Long.” The book also contains an introduction and a conclusion, which discuss the war against naturalism at the close of the twentieth century and at the opening of the twenty-first century. Andreach sets up his argument in the introduction, using Tracy Letts’s Bug (1996) as an example of a play that could be performed as either a naturalistic play or a parody of one. Showing how the play introduces contagion (through bugs) as an overwhelming force controlling the characters, Andreach carefully catalogues how the naturalistic elements in Bug both establish and challenge definitions of naturalism. Another very useful distinction the book explores concerns the difference between the production aspects of naturalistic theatre and naturalism as a philosophy. Andreach provides specific and precise examples to support his argument in chapter one, in which he explores the work of Charles Ludlum and the Ridiculous Theatrical Company’s production of The Artificial Jungle, along with Will Eno’s The Flu Season. He points out that both authors have criticized naturalism as passive and voyeuristic – a “peephole on life” (13) in Ludlum’s words – and goes on to complicate his ideas through such plays as Cindy Lou Johnson’s Brilliant Traces, David Lindsay-Abaire’s Fuddy Meers, Craig Lucas’s Reckless, and Rinne Groff’s What Then. Chapter two opens with an analysis of Mac Wellman’s Fnu Lnu as a play that wages war against naturalism through its language. Andreach then discusses the work of Melissa James Gibson and Richard Maxwell, who has “made a name for himself by turning naturalism’s strength against itself” (49), closing with the decidedly anti-naturalistic theatre of Richard Foreman and Groff’s Inky. Chapter three begins with a discussion of Edward Albee’s The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? in terms of Greek tragedy and then moves on to Richard Greenberg’s The Violet Hour, which premiered the same year (2002). Andreach sees Greenberg’s theatre as developing “the relationship between the conscious ego, which is better called the disengaged ego, and the unacknowledged self” (96). He explores Greenberg’s plays in terms of his own study’s concern with “the relationship between the outer and inner realities of ruled surface and unruly subsurface” (96). Andreach concludes this chapter with Tom Donaghy’s The Beginning of August, identifying a pattern in both this play and in Donaghy’s From Above, that a “protagonist so...

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