Shadowed Cocktails: The Plays of Phillip Barry from Paris Bound to The Philadelphia Story Donald R. Anderson. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2010.

Shadowed Cocktails: The Plays of Phillip Barry from Paris Bound to The Philadelphia Story Donald R. Anderson. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2010. Southern Illinois University Press' "Theater in the Americas" series has always sought to explore the American Theatrical canon. This might lead one to assume that the series would serve to simply re-examine and re-evaluate fixtures of the American theater canon like Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller. Instead, the series and its editor Robert Schanke have sought to expand the very nature of the American theater canon to include groundbreaking works by artists that were marginalized because of politics or deemed unworthy of scholarship due to their connection to popular culture. In Shadowed Cocktails, Donald Anderson and the Theater in America Series argue for the inclusion of Phillip Barry as a playwright whose commercial popularity challenged conventional social ideas and explored the nature of social roles in a changing American society. Phillip Barry is arguably one of the most consistent and commercially popular playwrights and screenwriters of the 1920s and '30s. Barry's plays have been characterized by some scholars as being too light-hearted, too focused on the upper-class, and too dated. These purveying notions have led to a 40-year drought of scholarship on such a fascinating and popular figure in American theater. Anderson argues that Barry was "a compelling artist whose neglect seems to have resulted more from historic accident and laws of cultural inertia than a lack of worthy material that would hold up over time" (165). Anderson succeeds in getting the reader to reconsider Phillip Barry's impact in American theater. Anderson positions this book as an exploration of the Barry canon, an in-depth analysis of his plays and their context within Barry's life. Anderson greatly succeeds in creating a chronological, professional, and commercial narrative of Barry's plays. The author is able to explore the characters, plots, and themes in all of Barry's works and connect them to Barry's personal life and the height of Modernity. Barry is well-noted for how his characters challenged the nature of absolutism and defied conventional social labels. Anderson writes, "It is the kind of gray line Barry was drawn to again and again, where the gray area between good and bad is sometimes almost invisible and given special importance because of how elusive it is" (143). From Barry's early works to his later successes, the reader comes to see Barry as a complicated individual whose characters are an artistic expression of a changing cultural milieu and influenced by the playwright's own life experience. To fully understand how Barry conveyed meanings through his characters, Anderson must employ indepth textual analysis. Anderson's textual analyses of Barry's work are exceptional. He deftly explores the intricacies of each of Barry's plays and turns the craft of textual analysis into an art. Anderson uses his analyses of Barry's plays to explore the interconnected nature of the playwright's craft. Anderson shows how Barry's early works illuminate a growing cynicism shared by artists in the aftermath of WWI. …