Women on Southern Stages, 1800–1865: Performance, Gender and Identity in a Golden Age of American Theater by Robin O. Warren

Abstract

Reviewed by: Women on Southern Stages, 1800–1865: Performance, Gender and Identity in a Golden Age of American Theater by Robin O. Warren Karin Maresh Women on Southern Stages, 1800–1865: Performance, Gender and Identity in a Golden Age of American Theater. By Robin O. Warren. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2016. vii + 267 pp. $35 paper. Women on Southern Stages provides the field of theatre history with one of the few studies focused specifically on the contributions of women to southern [End Page 336] theatres in nineteenth-century America. In fact, a few of the southern stock actresses Warren examines, such as Charlotte Wrighten Placide and Mary Maury Squires Ludlow, have received scant attention by historians as anything other than the actress-wives of their theatre-managing husbands. Additionally, Warren asserts that these regional actresses, managers, and playwrights "occupied influential public roles through which they complicated gendered identity," as well as race, and "made a significant contribution to the antebellum South" (7). Women on Southern Stages is a welcome addition to the publications about early US theatre and demonstrates that a wealth of material remains in this area for historians to uncover and contextualize. Warren's eight chapters are organized by general topic, such as repertory and theatres, rather than by location or individual artist. Chapter 1, cleverly titled "The Cast," provides biographical summaries of about twenty women, most following the family business, who earned recognition during the antebellum period for their theatrical endeavors. One such example is Eliza Arnold Hopkins Poe, whose successful acting career in DC, Virginia, and Maryland began before her twentieth birthday. The future mother of Edgar Allen Poe impressed critics with her "sweetly melodious voice" (12) as Maria in Sheridan's The School for Scandal and, as was common for the period, in some twenty-five other roles. Other actresses helped establish theatres in frontier regions in the South. Julia Drake Fosdick Dean's British acting family made their way to Kentucky via Boston and Albany, New York, making them "the first professional actors to play west of Pittsburgh" (15). Warren argues that this public recognition and mobility enjoyed by Julia Dean and her sister-in-law, Frances Denny Drake, endowed them "with independence that other southern women lacked" (15). Not all the actresses included in Women on Southern Stages are as obscure, especially to scholars of feminist theatre and gender studies. Adah Isaacs Menken, aka "The Menken," is most often mentioned by historians in reference to her scandalous performances of Mazeppa in New York, but, as Warren demonstrates, Menken began her career in New Orleans and toured with a stock company in Los Angeles and Texas before rising to fame in the northern states. The inclusion of Menken is also notable because, unlike most of the women in this study, Menken created a successful career by thwarting convention on and off the stage, playing risqué roles and flouting nineteenth-century traditions of marriage. The following two chapters, "The Theaters" and "The Repertory," offer detailed descriptions, visual evidence, and summaries of the important theatre buildings and plays, respectively, connected to the women examined in the first chapter. Much of the South remained rural and focused on agriculture [End Page 337] throughout the antebellum period, but permanent theatres and acting troupes entertained audiences in the urban centers that did develop as places of commerce. Beginning with the Douglass-Hallam company's Douglass Theatre in Williamsburg, Virginia, Warren explores how the spread of repertory companies throughout the Southern states and territories resulted in the construction of permanent playhouses such as the twelve-hundred-seat Charleston Theatre, in Charleston, South Carolina, built by Thomas Wade West and Thomas Bignall in 1793. This theatre, Warren notes, "reflected the growth of theater in the early republic" (38). The plays that one would expect to see included in a study of antebellum theatre are present—Anna Cora Mowatt's Fashion, Aiken's Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Guy Mannering, one of the plays included in Charlotte Cushman's repertoire—but Warren leaves no doubt that Southern actresses of the time performed in a wide variety of heroic melodramas, sensational melodramas, Shakespearean plays and adaptations, and even Confederate-themed dramas during the Civil...