The Making of American Audiences: From Stage to Television, 1750–1990. By Richard Butsch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000; pp. 438. $69.95 hardcover.

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Although we have long understood that audiences are comakers of meaning in the playhouse, most theatre histories pay scant attention to the role of spectators in constituting periods of theatrical history and motivating historical change. In part, our ignorance of audience dynamics has been due to the difficulty of researching the topic; reliable information on the social profile, expectations, behavior, and response of historical audiences is not easy to acquire. Before Butsch's survey, historians of American acting, playwriting, or theatre architectureindeed, of the entire range of theatrical phenomena that had to accommodate itself to the habits, mollify the concerns, and inflame the desires of past audiencesmight have been excused for their inattention to and/or misleading generalizations about American spectators before 1920. No more. The Making of American Audiences provides a firm foundation upon which a new generation of performance historians might build more socially engaged and responsible histories.