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The Simple Stage, Its Origins in the Modern American Theatre. By Arthur Feinsod. New York: Greenwood Press, 1992; pp. 245, 50 half-tone photographs. $45.00 hardcover.

During the decades of the fifties and sixties, aspects of the New Stagecraft Movement in the United States was one of the most popular thesis and dissertation topics in speech and theatre departments across America. Studies of the theories, works, and influences of Edward Gordon Craig, Adolph Appia, Lee Simonson, Robert Edmond Jones, and Norman Bel Geddes were the most popular. There can be little doubt that this was also one of the most recorded periods in the history of twentieth century American theatre. Between 1910 and 1940 there were more critical comments about playwrights, designers, directors and productions than during the last fifty years, a plethora of written material which just seems to invite people to postulate; an act to which this reviewer must confess even he succumbed. There is evidence that economy of means—the financial ability to produce— determined the physical and/or artistic result of most of the productions of the new movement in both the professional and little theatres. One recalls the snide remark (in 1920) of the critic Charles Henry Meltzer about "those awful little theatre settings . . . all platform and grey curtains." Much has been written about the ingenuity of these productions. And now comes Arthur Feinsod's The Simple Stage, Its Origins in the Modern American Theatre, in which he suggests that the scarcity of investiture in the early productions was the product of an artistic theory rather than the economic stringencies of the producing groups. We had some warning of what was coming in 1984 when in The Drama Review Feinsod labeled Robert Edmond Jones "the first minimalist designer." Feinsod turns the simple fact of economic necessity into a new art form which he describes as "the simple stage" with a vocabulary befitting the recent semioticists and symbiosists. After explaining that the simplicity-minded designer reduced the setting to its bare essentials, Feinsod goes on to reveal that