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AMERICAN THEATER IN THE CULTURE OF THE COLD WAR: PRODUCING AND CONTESTING CONTAINMENT, 1947-1962. By Bruce McConachie. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2003; pp. xiv + 347. $49.95 cloth.
What made Broadway Broadway at the height of the Cold War? Bruce McConachie's provocative new book uses cognitive science to parse the workings of popular productions from the era. Workings here means the dramaturgical and thematic mechanics attributable to playwrights, but also includes the contributions of directors, choreographers, and actors to character construction, and designers' roles in defining reality. Most ambitiously, the book is an effort to construct a historically and psychologically responsible way to answer the entwined questions of what audiences wanted and what they perceived in the dozens of plays and handful of movies, musicals, and modern dances McConachie analyzes.
The cognitive psychology and linguistics of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson are McConachie's primary theoretical lens. According to Lakoff and Johnson, "mental concepts arise, fundamentally, from the experience of the body in the world"; humans arrive, via this "embodied realism," at metaphors, without which "most conceptual thinking cannot occur" (13). McConachie is quick to point out that "cognitive" in this science goes beyond its usual definition and includes-since "[c]ognitive processes are presemiotic" (25)-unconscious as well as conscious meaning-making. "The minds of audience members," he observes, "shaped by evolution, the experience of living on earth, and historical culture, will tend to take welltraveled routes of cognition to gain comprehension" (25).
The metaphor on which McConachie stakes his claim is containment. This works on both a national/political and an individual/psychological level, as the business-class audience on which...