Popular Culture Review Vol. 2, No. 2, July 1991 | Page 38

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The Popular Culture Review

within the "commercial mainstream" have profit as their primary
motivation, rather than reaching as wide an audience as possible,
which is equally likely. Given the huge sums of money to be made in
the mass media, there would seem to be few playwrights in the
commercial theatre for financial gain.
Jill Dolan's consideration of The Feminist Spectator as Critic
does include an analysis of mainstream theatre—Dolan devotes a
chapter of her book to the 1983 Broadway production of Marsha
Norman's 'Night M other-but her analysis is enormously
problematic, not least because it completely ignores the play's impact
on its audience.
Dolan approaches her study of the production from a
theoretical position that is inherently unsympathetic to the
commercial theatre, and she essentially selects tenuous examples
that back up her commitment to an alternative theatre. I do not want
to imply that Dolan's findings are not in many ways useful, because
she arrives at many interesting and accurate conclusions. Her major
emphasis is on what she terms the "gender-biased politics of
reception," and she finds that the critical response to the production
was polarized around gender politics, with the (predominantly male)
mainstream critics marginalizing the play by responding to such
things as the performers' physical appearance or the play's focus on
domestic issues, and by refusing to accept its universality. In short,
Dolan found that sexist male critics were desperately trying to find
some way to contextualize the playwright "that would avoid
threatening the male dramatic bastion.''(ll)
Although Dolan's findings aptly illustrate the sexism of the
New York literati (which is hardly a controversial finding), they do
not justify her oppositional stance towards the commercial theatre.
She argues with very little evidence (beyond a design concept that
differed from Norman's instructions in the script) that the Broadway
production compromised its author's intent, suggesting (again,
without much evidence) that the author is inevitably powerless in
the face of institutional approbation. "Her collaborators . . . imposed
their own readings,"(12) complains Dolan, as if such compromise
cannot apply to an equal extent within the non-commercial theatre.
Dolan even goes so far as to to suggest that the literary industry were
in a league of conspiracy with "Norman's collaborators," against the
play's universal vision. That is obviously absurd.