Beat Drama, edited by Deborah R. Geis, is an important contribution to beat studies and scholarship on the avant-garde theatre of the 1950s and 1960s. As Geis points out, drama has been a neglected genre within beat literature – so much so that most readers encountering this title would find it difficult to identify any plays as examples. Although many of the more prominent beat authors did write plays, they have been chiefly recognized for their poetry and prose, while a number of other beat writers’ work – mostly of a younger generation born after 1930 – has been overshadowed by their legendary forerunners. Another factor contributing to neglect is that beat writers, as dramatists, participated in a broader avant-garde movement in which writers, painters, filmmakers, dancers, actors, and audiences collaborated in performances that were often ephemeral experiments – plays that were not published and are now found only in library archives. Furthermore, although this theatrical creativity was beat-inflected in its challenge to conventional aesthetic and social norms of the Cold War period, many of the dramatists did not themselves identify as beat, although several in interviews later in life acknowledged beat influence, particularly that of Kerouac and Ginsberg. They are the “Howl generation” of Geis's subtitle.

Geis's collection thus performs a valuable service in drawing attention not only to individual authors and their plays, but also to the impact of the beat aesthetic on American drama in the second half of the twentieth century. She has gathered together twenty-four essays that provide a comprehensive survey of plays and performances by a wide range of beat writers and others participating in the same counterculture. Discussion of individual authors is enriched by placing them within the collaborative and cross-disciplinary work of the Cambridge Poets’ Theatre, the New York Poets Theatre, the Living Theatre, and off-off-Broadway.

Geis argues that performance was central to the beat aesthetic, and several essays show how beat performance led to a new kind of drama. Tim Hunt points to the improvisational aesthetic and sense of intimacy exemplified in Kerouac's narration of the film Pull My Daisy (1959), but lacking in his play The Beat Generation (written in 1957). John Whalen-Bridge explores the community-building purpose of Ginsberg's poetry readings/performances. Amor Kohli interprets Ted Joans's “Bird Lives” graffiti project as collaborative performance art. Thus beat performances fed into theatrical experiments with collaboration, spontaneity, and interaction with the audience.

The collection brings to the fore the important role of women in the avant-garde theatre of the period: Bunny Lang and Diane di Prima were the driving force behind the Cambridge Poets’ Theatre and New York Poets Theatre respectively, and the essays about them are welcome. Heidi Bean traces the history of Lang's central role in the Cambridge Poets’ Theatre in addition to discussing her plays. Di Prima's largely unknown and inaccessible early plays are the focus of Nancy Grace's essay – hers is an example of the archival research done by many of the contributors. The essays on Rochelle Owens and Rosalyn Drexler by Amy Friedman and Dorothy Chasky are reminders of the prominence of women in the off-off-Broadway scene. Although both playwrights received Obies, awards did not lead to continued opportunities in the theatre – a common pattern for women playwrights, in contrast with the mainstream success of Lanford Wilson, Tom O'Horgan, and Sam Shepard, among others. Geis's essay makes a strong case for the beat foundations of Shepard's early off-off-Broadway plays, as she points out the parallels with the poetry of Ginsberg, Corso, and Ferlinghetti, and Kerouac's On the Road (1957).

The volume concludes with a section on films about the beats – early Hollywood disasters and more recent biographical films. Terence Diggory's analysis of Big Sur – both Kerouac's novel (1962) and Michael Polish's movie (2013) – is notable for its insight into Kerouac's complex fictionalized autobiography employing cinematic tropes in contrast to Polish's collapsing of the novel into a single biographical narrative. Other essays on film also document the difficulty of translating Kerouac's books into another medium and the attractions of biography. It is surprising that Geis does not include any examination of the underground films paralleling the underground drama of the time.

A focus on beat drama/performance situates beat writers within a broader avant-garde that changed American theatre and also clarifies the role of the beat aesthetic – and of poets – in the experimental drama of the post-World War II period. As Geis says, this artistic community transformed the very definition of theater, and the beats were major participants.