“In its ability to integrate the knowledgeable interests of a literary critic and theorist of broad disciplinary expertise with the experience and practical knowhow of a man of the theater, Get the Guests is unparalleled.”

♦ Frank Lentricchia, Duke University

“What is so exciting about this book is the way it goes against so much conventional wisdom on modern drama and the current American theater scene…and against so many second-hand ideas about psychoanalytic criticism and academic interpretation. . . . Davis practically demolishes the ritual-based readings of theater, and shows them to be a way of avoiding the kind of individual introspection and ruthless honesty about our psyches that only a tragic outlook can satisfy.”

♦ Timothy Wiles, Indiana University

“There's nothing else on American drama anything like it. The demystifiers of current 'discourse' won't know what to do with the violent honesty of your hermeneutic mission, nor are the incessantly proclaimed wish-fulfilling transgression of cultural studies anything like the violations you have in mind as you press without quarter on the nerve-ends of a text. Given the creative aggression of your book, and the existential plenitude of its undeterrable passion, rare on the current scene, I can only salute your commitment to the true business of criticism — the attempt to 'get the guests' by stripping away all defences and complacencies. This is a deep and complex book, a real challenge to engaged thinking.”

♦ Herbert Blau, Artistic Director of experimental theatre group KRAKEN; author of Take Up the Bodies, The Audience, and numerous other works on theatre, culture, and postmodern theory; Byron W. and Alice L. Lockwood Professor of the Humanities, The University of Washington