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Mary Ann Frese Witt, Metatheater and Modernity: Baroque and Neobaroque Madison and Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013.x + 191 pp.
Witt's helpful introduction provides a concise survey of critical approaches to metatheater from Lionel Abel's coinage of the term in 1963 to the present. The up- shot foregrounds conceptual tangles indexed by the plethora of names scholars employ to identify the phenomenon in question: the term the author prefers, meta- theater itself, but also metatheatricality, the metatheatrical, metadrama, and even, more simply, theatricalism and the theatrical, depending on the claims a given writer makes or the particular emphasis laid on one or another of the textual, social, actorly, directorial, or authorial elements in play. Whatever name scholars use, the theme is the same: the repertoire of practices in which "theater call[s] attention to itself as theater, commenting on itself, reflecting itself, rupturing the conventional pact of illusion with the audience, and blurring the boundaries between the fic- tive and the real and between actor and character" (9). Nevertheless, as Witt notes, there is "no general consensus, either theoretical or historical," as to what to make of them (8). She proposes to remedy the situation by shifting from "the question of what metatheater [...] is" to that of "what it does" as a matter of history and culture as well as theatrical art (9).
This wise change of focus defines the issues joined in the book. Are the the- atrical practices the author highlights "mere exercises in playful sophistry,...