Composing ourselves: the Little Theatre movement and the American audience

Abstract

When movies replaced theatre as popular entertainment in the 1910s, the world of live drama was wideopen for reform. American advocates and practitioners founded theatres in a spirit of anticommercialism, seeking to develop an American audience for serious theatre, mounting plays in what would today be called alternative spaces, and uniting for the cause an eclectic group of professors, social workers, members of women's clubs, bohemians, artists, students, and immigrants. This rebellion, called the Little Theatre movement, also prompted and promoted the college theatre major, the inclusion of theatre pedagogy in K-12 education, prototypes for the nonprofit producing model, and the notion that theatre is a valuable form of self-expression. Composing Ourselves argues that the movement was a national phenomenon, not just the result of aspirants copying the efforts of the much-storied Provincetown Players, Washington Square Players, Neighborhood Playhouse, and Chicago Little Theatre. Going beyond the familiar histories of the best-known groups, Dorothy Chansky traces the origins of both the ideas and the infrastructures for serious theatre that are ordinary parts of the American cultural landscape today; she also investigates the gender discrimination, racism, and class insensitivity that were embedded in reformers' ideas of the universal and that still trouble the rhetoric of regional, educational, and community theatre. Chansky considers the achievements and failures of the Drama League of America, a network of women's clubs, to point out that theatre history has not fully realized the role of women in the Little Theatre movement. Chansky also considers a blackface production of a play about rural African Americans, which was a step towards sympathetic portrayals of minority characters yet still a reinforcement of a white, upper and middle class perspective.