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Playwright Versus Director: Authorial Intentions And Performance Interpretations. Edited by Jeane Luere. Contributions in Drama and Theatre Studies, Number 54. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1994; pp. 179. $55.00 cloth.
Making Plays: The Writer-Director Relationship In The Theatre Today. Richard Nelson and David Jones. Edited by Colin Chambers. London: Faber and Faber, 1995; pp. 165. $11.95 paper.
Richard Nelson calls the playwright-director relationship "a defining feature of twentieth-century theatre" (xiv). If so, the relationship may be best defined by its contentiousness. Who controls the text? Who ultimately is in charge of meaning? The practical working out of such theoretical questions is at the heart of these two books. Luere focuses on the adversarial, Nelson and Jones on the collaborative.
Playwright Versus Director is a rather odd compendium that employs a variety of failed strategies. Luere's various borrowings justify in part her designation as editor, but enough of her own writing exists to make a claim of authorship had she so wished. This author/editor ambiguity is emblematic of the absence of focus in her project. She breaks her subject into four parts: "Theories of Authorship and Interpretation"; "Remarks of Playwrights and Directors"; "Tiers of Director/Playwright Interchange (Five Case Studies)"; and "Theatre Aesthetics and the Law." Part 1-"Theories"- is a nine-page primer recapitulating essays by Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Gerald Rabkin, Alvin Kernan, and several other commentators upon issues of textuality. The section seeks to locate specific...