Twenty-First Century American Playwrights ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018, $24.99). Pp. 220. isbn 978 1 1084 1144 8

Bigsby devotes a chapter to each dramatist, providing pertinent biographical information, analytical summaries of each play, and, when necessary, historical contextual information, for example concerning the Venona project to explain the upsetting revelation in Herzog's After the Revolution, based on her own family story, that a revered socialist grandfather was actually a spy. The discrepancy was variously ascribed to different levels of awareness of King's life (by Chris Jones in the Chicago Tribune), to the conservative preference for realism of American theatre (by Michael Billington in The Guardian), and by Bigsby himself to the more congenial intimate theatre space in London versus the large theatre and star actors used in New York (58–60). [...]he gets at the heart of Lindsay-Abaire's Rabbit Hole – about a couple living with the grief of losing a child to a banal road accident – commenting, “If irony is the conscious use of understatement, here emotional understatement serves to underscore the fact that nothing is commensurate with a loss that blots out all sense of coherence” (133).