White People Do Not Know How to Behave at Entertainments Designed for Ladies & Gentlemen of Colour (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: White People Do Not Know How to Behave at Entertainments Designed for Ladies & Gentlemen of Colour Harvey Young White People Do Not Know How to Behave at Entertainments Designed for Ladies & Gentlemen of Colour. By Marvin McAllister. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003; pp. x + 239. $45.00 cloth, $18.95 paper. The extraordinarily lengthy title of Marvin McAllister's new book draws its inspiration from a placard that, according to rumor, William Brown, the former ship's steward turned theatre impresario, placed in the window of his vandalized American Theatre shortly after the August 1823 riot that had erupted there. The riot, created by fifteen white employees of a nearby circus, not only prompted Brown to assert, in print, that "White People Do Not Know How to Behave at Entertainments Designed for Ladies & Gentlemen of Colour," but also bankrupted him, thus forcing him into retirement. Although McAllister, the author of this intricately researched and potentially groundbreaking study of William Brown, contends that the sign most likely did not exist, he uses the placard to foreground the central theme of the [End Page 527] book: William Brown's ongoing struggle with the white theatre community of New York City. William Brown, the driving force behind the African Grove, the Minor Theatre, the American Theatre, and the African Company—all black institutions that, like a flashbulb, had a brilliant but short-lived career—sought to create entertainment venues for both black and white audiences. Rather than establish his theatres or stage his productions in predominantly black areas of New York City, Brown, according to McAllister, deliberately opened his theatres in primarily white sections of New York. In his call for an integrated audience, Brown met with resistance from the nearby white theatre owners, specifically Stephen Price of the Park Theatre, who orchestrated campaigns against him which ranged from making noise complaints to the police during Brown's shows to encouraging white audiences to disrupt—at a variety of levels, including full-scale rioting—the performances of Brown's productions. What makes McAllister's book so thought-provoking is its exhaustive investigation of William Brown, an often overlooked and underexamined figure in early American theatre. The author zooms in on Brown's activities between 1821 and 1823. Despite the fact that few historical documents remain (for example, Brown never published any of his plays), McAllister gathers the few surviving documents and stitches together a coherent and plausible study of the former steward. This "stitching" approach results in several significant claims, including McAllister's assertion that Brown created not only the first African American theatre, but also the first integrated American theatre. Although the absence of history, which makes the author's claims both possible and difficult to refute, may never fully confirm McAllister's conclusions, it is worth noting that the benchmarking of Brown does promise to have an immediate impact on the manner in which the contemporary academic community understands the role that Brown played in the founding of early American theatre. McAllister's text begins slowly, mired in a survey of cultural criticism that neither introduces his subject matter nor provides a useful theoretical lens through which to evaluate the merits of his project. After sprinting through summaries of the various writings of Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, W. E. B. DuBois, Joseph Roach, and José Muñoz among many, many others, the author begins to focus on Brown's efforts to establish an integrated theatrical audience. In the sections where McAllister writes about Brown, his conclusions are consistently engaging and thought-provoking. They seek not only to give an adequate portrait of Brown's struggles throughout the three-year span of the study but also to read Brown's activities in the sociohistorical context of his time. In these moments, McAllister's text, as a narrative history, proves as compelling as the most informative American Studies texts. In style, it is reminiscent of Robert C. Allen's influential book on nineteenth-century American performance culture, Horrible Prettiness.Unfortunately, these moments do not always flow together. The author tends to shift from intelligent close analyses of historical moments to somewhat abstracted cultural theoretical criticism. With each move...