154 Time’s Books John H. Muse, Microdramas: Crucibles for Theatre and Time. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017. 248 pp. In this compelling study, John H. Muse argues that very short theatrical works (plays that can be performed in under twenty minutes) have much to teach us about the experience of time, both in the theatre and outside of it. These “micro- dramas,” despite or indeed because of their sometimes exceptional brevity, can serve as laboratories for temporal experimentation, teaching their spectators or readers about the complexities of time and offering meta-theatrical lessons on the temporal rhetoric of theatrical composition and performance. Muse reminds his readers at several points that he is less interested in defin- ing a genre or subgenre than he is in using the microdrama to better understand “the sorts of temporal experience theatre provides” (8). For this reason, he does not offer an exhaustive account of the microdrama so much as take his read- ers through “four episodes in the history of very short theatre” (3) in the book’s four central chapters: from France in the 1880’s to the Italian Futurists of the early twentieth-century; from late period Samuel Beckett to the marathons of very short plays penned by Suzan-Lori Parks and Caryl Churchill in the twenty- first century. This is the first critical account of the history of very short plays and certainly the first study to consider them as having made an important contribution to the history of Western theatre. With the notable exception of Beckett’s increasingly brief later plays, the works under consideration here, including nineteenth-century French quarts d’heure (“quarter hour plays”), symbolist one acts, and theatrical shorts by Italian Futurists, have more often been treated as oddities or comedic provocations with little to contribute to a larger understanding of theatre’s role within modernism or its engagements with modernity. Throughout the study, Muse’s analytical focus is often on the theatrical experience itself rather than simply on the written word. His attention to “the unavoidable phenomenological density of theatre’s materials” (27) leads to some of the finest insights of the book, as when he suggests that for all their emphasis on abstraction and immateriality, symbolist plays by authors like Maurice Maeterlinck embraced the physicality of theatrical performance rather than evading it, leading to “their dual status as material spaces and as spaces of the mind” (38), or when he argues that for all of her rhetoric of democratic engagement and inclusion, Suzan-Lori Parks’s epic three hundred and sixty-five play cycle (one for each day of the year), tends more to evacuate the spectator’s empathy for any of the cypher-like characters briefly featured in it than to encourage identification. Indeed, Muse often reads against the © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/15685241-12341461 Time’s Books 155 pronouncements and ideological claims of the authors of the microdramas to get at deeper truths about what these plays are doing to and with theatrical time. The Italian Futurists saw brevity as “a recipe for intensity,” for example, a means of challenging bourgeois convention as well as spectatorial compla- cency; yet plays like Francesco Cangiullo’s Detonation or Decision (both only a handful of stage directions or lines long) end up depending on the very con- ventions of theatre they are attacking. In Muse’s words, Futurist “excerpts” such as these have “not just been trimmed down but emaciated to an impoverished dramatic structure that relies for its completion on the mental architecture of a public weaned on familiar dramatic pieces” (72). This, as one can see, is no fanboy celebration of the radicality or ideological claims of the microdrama so much as it is a compelling contention that for all their shortcomings (pun intended), microdramas can and do reveal aspects of theatrical time that are obscured by plays of more conventional length. They reveal the tension between temporal abstraction and theatre’s inevitable spatialization of time (in light, bodies and sound), the intensely complex het- erogeneity of even the briefest of moments (on stage or in life), the status of the event in the midst of duration, and the extent to which theatrical absorp- tion, interest and empathy demand time. In serving as artificial timepieces unyoked from nature, short works by Beckett, for example, draw attention to the oddity and artificiality not only of theatrical time but of any and all con- ventional timepieces or means of temporal measurement. Muse never makes explicit the philosophical approaches to time that inform his study. To a certain extent, it is refreshing not to be confronted with an introductory chapter on the topic “what is time?” when such gestures usu- ally feel obligatory and (necessarily) perfunctory. The problem is that Muse does seem to be operating with theories of time and temporality that go largely unacknowledged, aside from passing references throughout to St. Augustine, Henri Bergson and Paul Ricoeur. He tells us that “lived time,” like time in the theatre, is marked by its oddity, complexity, and heterogeneity. Thus, it is sug- gested that at least in modernity, theatrical time reveals some fundamental truth about how time works. Surely, though, much of modernist and postmod- ernist art has focused equally as much on temporal heterogeneity, complexity, and oddity? What does the microdrama teach us about lived time that we wouldn’t already learn from any of the European great modern time-novels (all of them as metatextual as the average microdrama, though most of them sev- eral thousand times as long: Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time or Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain)? The insights into theatrical time that Muse elic- its from the microdrama are always profound; but what he and the plays have Kronoscope 20 (2020) 135-160.