The Goldilocks Formula

The Playwright’s Guidebook by Stuart Spencer. New York: Faber & Faber, 2002. 374 pp. $16.00.

In an early essay, Susan Sontag expressed admiration—or was it dismay?—at playwright Peter Weiss’s “staggering ambition” to combine dicta from twentieth-century drama’s two major theorists, Bertolt Brecht and Antonin Artaud, in his masterpiece Marat/Sade (173). Both Weiss’s ambition and Sontag’s reaction now seem indicative of the mid-1960s, when an artist could attach himself to defiant aesthetic principles and still wear a pleased, unironic look on his face. In a new volume, The Playwright’s Handbook, Stuart Spencer leaps over the incautious essays of Brecht and Artaud—plus a good many others—and appropriates from Aristotle’s Poetics the bases of an instruction manual for young dramatists. Spencer’s work, too, is suggestive of its moment: we are entering a new century of drama, it tells us, in need of replenishment.