PERFORMING ARTS

Theater After Film

by Martin Harries
Univ. of Chicago. May 2025. 304p. ISBN 9780226838717. pap. $30. THEATER
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This book isn’t so much about theater or film in any comprehensive way as it is about how several post-WWII playwrights reacted to the emerging dominance of cinema, using their plays to confront film’s media mastery and resist the threat of globalist mass culture. The argument is as much informed by theorists—Adorno, Brecht, Benjamin, Artaud, Barthes, etc.—as by the works of the playwrights Harries (comparative literature, Univ. of California, Irvine; Forgetting Lot’s Wife: On Destructive Spectatorship) uses as exemplars: 60 percent of the book is devoted to discussions of the plays of Tennessee Williams, Samuel Beckett, and Adrienne Kennedy. His critique focuses on details instead of the plays’ overall narrative structures and does not focus on the nuts and bolts of playmaking.
VERDICT Written for an academic audience interested in this slice of theater history.
Reviewed by David Keymer , Mar 28, 2025
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