A complex and varied set of practices, monologue inexorably leads us to fundamental questions about the essence of theatrical performance, its effects and affects. In its late twentieth-century incarnations, monologue's blurring of the boundaries between personality, persona, personification and impersonation is intensified by nuanced linguistic textures, self-conscious technological mediation, and a prevalent scepticism towards narrative cohesion and coherence. Eddie Paterson's neatly structured study convincingly argues for the recognition of monologue as an ‘exemplary American form of contemporary performance’ (p. 1), one that is distinct in its uses of parody, mediatization and personae (p. 5). Rooted in the understanding of such performances as politically oriented counterspeech, he elaborates his claim with case studies on the work of four remarkable solo artists: Spalding Gray, Laurie Anderson, Anna Deavere Smith and Karen Finley.

The period in focus stretches from the 1980s to the first decade of the twenty-first century; the work of the four artists is explored primarily as a response to American sociocultural and socio-economic conditions. Paterson provides an informative, highly readable synthesis of existing scholarship on monologue in theatre and as performance. He goes on to render monologue in more culturally defined terms by dovetailing an account of American oratorical traditions with twentieth-century political debates and countercultural movements. There are some suggestive ideas here, not least Sacvan Bercovitch's linking of the New England Puritan jeremiad with a New World optimism that is eventually formulated as the American Dream (p. 41). However, the logical thread tying traditions of political and religious oratory with twentieth-century solo performance in all its diversity, from Lenny Bruce to Alan Ginsberg and back to Jay Z, at times almost disappears in the close weave of a discussion that somewhat truncates these histories and their disjunctions.

That said, the core chapters of The Contemporary American Monologue are an excellent resource for those seeking insights into the political contours of the genre, or who want to introduce these artists to students. Paterson deals with four categories of monologue – confessional, post-punk, rights and radical – and spotlights Gray's Swimming to Cambodia (1984) and Morning, Noon and Night (1999); Anderson's Home of the Brave (1985) and Empty Places (1989); Smith's Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (1993); and Finley's Shut Up and Love Me (2000), Make Love (2003) and The Passion of Terri Schiavo (2005). This selective focus effectively foregrounds multiple facets of the political in American solo performance since the 1980s, while at the same time restricting the analysis to manageable proportions.

Spalding Gray's fretful, confessional mode of address is read by Paterson as complexly parodic, permitting ‘a critique of American culture from within’ (p. 69). He defends Morning, Noon and Night from charges of nostalgia by suggesting that Gray, rather, is excavating American insularity at the century's end. By contrast, Laurie Anderson's ‘post-punk’ monologues turn away from the highly personal un/truthful selves that abound in Gray's work, to the technologically enhanced possibilities of the solitary figure onstage. Paterson delves into the implications of Anderson's use of digital mediation to alter, multiply and make strange her own voice. The depersonalization of the speaker in Home of the Brave and the observational style of Empty Spaces are aptly connected with epic traditions and a critical attitude to the fragmenting, alienating effects of neo-liberal ideology. If both Anderson and Gray might be said to speak obliquely of political issues, then Anna Deveare Smith's performances are patently much more direct in their embrace of mimicry, documentary and verbatim theatre. As Paterson rightly observes, there is a ‘complicated ethics’ to Smith's ‘curated diversity’ (p. 112, emphasis in the original), in which she inevitably chooses whose voices will be heard. That complicated ethics is also traced in what Paterson calls the ‘radical’ monologues of Karen Finley and their ‘antagonistic engagement with contemporary culture’ (p. 154).

The Contemporary American Monologue concludes with a mapping of Hans-Thies Lehmann's post-dramatic theatre onto the monologue to arrive at a future where ‘postmonologues’ might evolve. Given the heterogeneity of monologue performance practices, not least those so carefully analysed here, it is a challenge to see how ‘postmonologue’ might come to any tenable definition. In the meantime, Eddie Paterson's insights into the political potential of monologue to engage with the postmodern, neo-liberal American condition are well worth our attention.