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AMERICAN DRAMA IN THE AGE OF FILM. By Zander Brietzke. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007; pp. xix + 201. $39.95 cloth.
In the introduction to American Drama in the Age of Film, Zander Brietzke poses a simple question: "Why bother to see stage drama . . . if the same thing is available to see in a much more accessible format?" (xi)-that is, film adaptations of plays, widely available in DVD and VHS formats. Since storefront nickelodeons opened at the beginning of the twentieth century, the language of film-montage, shifts in perspective, the geographies of on- and off-camera space-has emerged as "the vocabulary for modern experience" (xii). Brietzke situates theatre as an art necessarily informed and determined by film, declaring that "[i]t is impossible to think of theater today without considering the ubiquity of film and television first" (xviii). The idea that theatre should be viewed as an element of a larger cultural universe is nothing new, but there is something striking about his contention that theatre is seen today largely through a filmic lens, both literally and metaphorically. Considering this environment, it seems necessary and appropriate to consider the ways in which theatrical texts have been interpreted in the medium that students (and audiences generally) now encounter them. In American Drama in the Age of Film, Brietzke chooses to analyze exactly those plays that so often make up first-year theatre classes (Angels in America, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, among others)...