In the introduction to Uncloseting Drama, “Half In and Half Out,” Nick Salvato playfully reinterprets a line from Gertrude Stein's libretto for Four Saints in Three Acts in order to point out the ways in which “closet drama is always half on and half off the stage . . . refus[ing] containment by any single performative iteration” (5). Salvato positions the closet drama as a particularly queer strand of American modernism, while simultaneously troubling the apparent transparency of the category, whose generic label usually denotes dramas not intended for public staging. Via analysis of works by Ezra Pound, Louis Zukofsky, Gertrude Stein, and Djuna Barnes, Salvato locates these oft-neglected texts at the threshold of writing and performance, and problematizes the supposed designation of this type of drama as unstageable through his interrogation of the theatrical and theoretical trope of the closet.

Throughout the book, Salvato employs a revitalized project of “close reading,” or what he playfully rewrites as “close(t) readings” (15), through which he examines primary texts alongside more performative “texts,” such as contemporary stagings, personal letters, and other archival materials. This approach allows him to develop a chapter-length study on each author that provides horizontal as opposed to “text-down” readings. Salvato's goal is to reveal a modernist sexual politics read through the lens of queer performativity, and he examines his subjects’ closet dramas as sites of queer resistance thwarting sexual normativity and theatrical conventionality. He argues further that these dramas anticipate the innovations of postmodern performance that characterize their successful late stagings. Deploying queer and closet anachronistically, Salvato claims that closet dramas have a temporal value that (re)signifies them across what he reads as a queer modernist landscape; in other words, these texts reveal themselves across a time that is not captured within a specified period or textual classification (i.e., “closet drama” or “Modernism”).

In Chapter 1, “Fronting Pound” (each author is campily positioned as “Fronting,” “Bottoming,” “Topping,” or “Backing”), Salvato shifts his analysis from the usual critical focus on Pound's overt sexism, anti-Semitism, and homophobia to examine instead how his drama and his dramatic translations—previously closeted in the archive—explore patterns of violence and queer sexual identification. He claims that Pound identifies with the female characters in his translations of Elektra and Awoi no Uye, highlighting queer parallels between the title characters and Pound himself. In Chapter 2, “Bottoming Zukofsky,” Salvato reads Zukofsky's Bottom: On Shakespeare, “A” and L.Z. Masque, arguing that his “turn from normative dramatic conventions entails a concomitant turn from normative sexuality” (64). He explores how Zukofsky's texts are susceptible to erotic readings, especially in their portrayal of homoerotic friendships and use of multiple voices. In Chapter 4, “Backing Barnes,” Salvato notes that Barnes's early antinaturalistic dramas pushed her offstage and into the closet, where she dealt with sexual repression and taboo in her unruly female characters. Salvato provides useful intertextual readings of these three authors culled from sometimes unexpected sources, which makes his methodology richly queer. The pitfalls of this approach are that his arguments sometimes get lost in the multiple circular readings of the varied texts and performances that dominate each chapter.

Perhaps most effectively developed is Salvato's analysis in Chapter 3, “Topping Stein,” which focuses on the sadistic, erotic, and sexually deviant characteristics of Gertrude Stein's plays. He argues that these texts “constitute an assault on the senses less because of the acts depicted or suggested than because of the style and manner of their representation” (101); he further states that Stein, indebted to cubism and other radical innovations in the visual arts, confronts sex abstractly as opposed to representationally. Salvato contends that Stein's textual approach to sex in her plays is a kind of violent passion fully harnessed through the use of repetition, the lack of discernable plot, and the mixing of act titles, stage directions, and dialogue. This assault on the senses is measured by Salvato through his analyses of Byron a Play and Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights, alongside archival documents, novels, essays, and other materials. For example, Salvato notes how the viper's sting in Doctor Faustus, though never graphically depicted, becomes a violent image exploited through an obsessive language that forces us to question whether the sting (or was it a sting? or a bite?) ever actually occurs, keeping the wound's aftermath indiscernible.

Rather than taking a reductionist stance that posits Stein's plays as unstageable, Salvato maintains an opposed reading and contends that their difficult language and forms offer a firm challenge, perhaps even a provocation from Stein herself: Just try and stage this. While Stein's plays constantly offer ambiguous scenarios that require directorial choices—such as how to stage a character with two names or dialogue that is not differentiated from stage directions and act titles— Salvato reads these ambiguities as violent reactions against dramatic form and structure. He fleshes out this challenge by showing how the nexus of sex, violence, and dramatic experimentation permit fruitful areas of queer inquiry in Stein's work, bringing this tripartite group together through a truly inspired reading of The Wooster Group's 1998 production of House/Lights.

Salvato's identification of closet drama as a theatrical form that often simultaneously flouts theatrical convention allows him to (re)consider the category as operating in a queer mode that constantly exceeds generic distinctions, providing the ground for particularly performative interpretations. He successfully brings to light many works on which there has been little to no scholarship, grounding his readings somewhere between modernist, performance, and queer studies. Readers should be aware, however, that there is little introduction to the genre of closet drama itself here. While it would have been useful for beginner readers had Salvato included a clearer historical tracking of closet drama's development before turning the classification on its head, he nevertheless provides the reader with a valuable set of resources for further research in this area.