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Taking its cue from Eugene O’Neill’s questioning of «faithful realism», voiced by Edmund Tyrone in Long Day’s Journey into Night, this book examines the distant legacy of the Irish American playwright in contemporary multiethnic drama in the U.S. It explores the labyrinth of formal devices through which African American, Latina/o, First Nations, and Asian American dramatists have unconsciously reinterpreted O’Neill’s questioning of mimesis. In their works, hybridizations of stage realism function as aesthetic celebrations of the spiritual potentialities of cultural in-betweenness. This volume provides detailed analyses of over forty plays authored by such key artists as August Wilson, Suzan-Lori Parks, José Rivera, Cherríe Moraga, Hanay Geiogamah, Diane Glancy, David Henry Hwang, and Chay Yew, to give only a few prominent examples. All in all, Labyrinth of Hybridities invites its readers to reassess the cross-cultural patterns characterizing the history of twentieth century American drama. «Marc Maufort’s impressive study, ‘Labyrinth of Hybridities’, puts critical works of contemporary African American, Asian American, Native American and Latino/a drama into productive conversation. Maufort insightfully argues that these works purposefully push against the limitations of conventional realism and indeed hybridize the form. This is one of the few scholarly works that examines multi-ethnic dramas comparatively. Consequently, this is a text that scholars and students of American drama and literature must read.» (Harry J. Elam, Jr., Olive H. Palmer Professor in the Humanities, Stanford University) «‘Labyrinth’ is a thoroughly researched monograph with copious footnotes and perspicacious readings of well-known and lesser-known multi-ethnic American playwrights and their works. Maufort brings to light stylistic, thematic, and dialogic techniques pioneered by O’Neill and taken up by the playwrights included in the book. ‘Labyrinth’ is thorough, concise, and astute in its treatment of a cornucopia of contemporary plays while it investigates O’Neill’s legacy in postmodern experimental theater.» (Jeremy Ekberg, The Eugene O’Neill Review 33, 2012/2) «In his Epilogue, Maufort elucidates the many similarities among the ethnic dramatists he is examining without flattening them into a single mold. His analysis makes us aware of the intensely vibrant and experimental theater scene that these playwrights were helping to create at the end of the last century and the dawn of the twenty-first. Maufort’s book reminds us of the richness and complexity of the many cultures that make up the ‘American.’ And even while he shows us the frequent marginalization of ethnic work, he helps to embed that corpus more firmly in mainstream American drama. This is a volume that should be of great interest to anyone interested in Ethnic Studies, American Studies, and Theater Studies as well as literary scholars and comparatists.» (Kathleen L. Komar, Recherche Littéraire/Literary Research 28, 2012)...
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