'While this historiographic imprecision is a drawback, the density of analytic detail and informed criticism which Murphet offers makes the book a crucial contribution to performance studies of Australia and the USA. Murphet's dramaturgy fractures events and experience into a series of not necessarily continuous tableaux or filmic frames, which may then be enacted as theatre (as in his first two plays, Quick Death and Slow Love) or are cinematically projected and layered on to a complex, stratified live performance (The Inhabited Woman and The Inhabited Man). [...] even if Murphet's theoretical architecture is not altogether persuasive from a historiographic perspective, the author's detailed focus on process and his cross-referencing between chapters illuminates a number of varying responses to thematic concerns characteristic of twentieth-century dramaturgy as a whole. [...] it is the amplified commentary from the otherwise unnamed figure of the Voice (often Foreman himself) which links his examination of objects, poses, mute positions, entrances, exits, with the subjectivity which is forced to endure them as an audience.' (Publication abstract)
