American Stage Research Articles

:Yellowface: Creating the Chinese in American Popular Music and Performance, 1850s‐1920s

Similar to recent works on U.S. orientalism, Krystyn R. Moon's book argues for the centrality of popular cultural discourses on Asians and Asian Americans in shaping American culture and national identity. Moon's monograph examines how white, Chinese American, and African American songwriters, musicians, and performers have constructed and contested racial differences and hierarchies through the practice of “yellowface,” a set of racially coded modes of musical production and theatrical practices that conveyed notions of “Chineseness” as inherently foreign and inferior to American or European culture and society. While previous scholars have discussed yellowface as part of their inquiry into the formation of American orientalism, Moon is the first to provide a broad survey of yellowface performance and music in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By placing the history of yellowface alongside more familiar forms of racial performance such as blackface minstrelsy, Moon points out that yellowface's emergence was part of the broader formation of a national racial vernacular on the American stage that delineated the boundaries of American identity, marking certain racial groups such as blacks as American and others such as the Chinese as perpetually foreign and incapable of national incorporation. Even as yellowface performances became more totalizing and codified with specific practices ranging from costume, makeup, orchestrated gestures, dialect, props, and musical sounds, Moon argues that yellowface constructions of racial difference and hierarchies remained unstable and ambivalent, with Chinese simultaneously taking on the polar extremes of “aversion and fascination.” She proposes viewing the history of yellowface performance in dialectical terms as a contestation between white musical composers and performers and Chinese and Chinese American performers. Even as white performers and songwriters highlighted the exoticism or cultural and physical inferiority of the Chinese in their racial performances, Chinese and Chinese American performers through their physical presence and performance on stage challenged white hegemony over the constructions of Chineseness.

The Gay and lesbian theatrical legacy: a biographical dictionary of major figures in American stage history in the pre-Stonewall era

The Gay and lesbian theatrical legacy: a biographical dictionary of major figures in American stage history in the pre-Stonewall era

Politics, Playhouse, and Repertoire in Philadelphia, 1808

In theatre and drama histories, the politics of the American stage has most often been judged by the litmus test of nationalism, primarily in the “rise” of American-authored drama set in America, the development of American character types, and the appearance of American-born actors on the stages of the early United States. To uncover in the old playbills the mention of a performance of Royall Tyler's The Contrast, to celebrate the development of the stage Yankee, or to focus on Edwin Forrest's muscular rant in The Gladiator is to score a palpable hit for national theatre. Given the scarcity of American texts before the War of 1812, this search for national needles in the (British) theatrical haystack is understandable. But the politics reflected in the theatre in early America is far more complex than traditional theatre histories have acknowledged. Fortunately, there are signs of a new historiography at work. Heather Nathans's recent history of the postrevolutionary playhouses (to 1800) in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, for instance, uncovers a web of economic and social relationships among the shareholders in the various theatres, which shows that simple party definition hardly accounts for a clear sense of who supports the stage and who does not. Examined more closely than as buildings in which to launch “Jonathan,” American theatres reveal their own traditions for handling topical material, a particularly thorny problem for cultural spaces dominated by British plays and actors. In other words, beyond identifying stage Yankees or following Forrest, finding the political in the theatrical may require other strategies of reading in order to determine the full range of interaction between the political and theatrical spheres.

Polite Gaiety: Cultural Hierarchy and Musical Comedy, 1893-1904

In 1903, Alan Dale, the theater critic for theNew York American and Journal, when contemplating the state of the American stage, came to the conclusion that “the only national theatre I can find, after severe cogitation, is that beautiful, flip, and classic commodity known as musical comedy.” Dale pointed out that musical comedy's exorbitant popularity was a recent development, emerging only in the previous five or ten years, and that his anointing of the form as the national theater would not sit well with more serious-minded devotees of drama. “Well read gentlemen with heavy minds,” wrote Dale, would prefer different sorts of productions, plays that “mere commercial managers don't want to stage and mere amusement seekers don't want to see.” Seeking an improbable bridge over this cultural divide, Dale suggested that “[Henrik] Ibsen might air his neat little views on heredity in happy verse set to music…[His] favorite subject of maggots on the brain” could feature a “chorus of pretty girls disguised as maggots.”

“Genuine Negroes and Real Bloodhounds”: Cross-Dressing, Eugene O’Neill, the Wooster Group, and The Emperor Jones

When Eugene O’Neill’s play The Emperor Jones was first performed in 1920, it was hailed as an important landmark for the representation of race on the American stage. For featuring a central black character and for actually casting a black actor to play the role, O’Neill and his work were seen to be radically progressive in an era of widespread blackface minstrel practice on the stage. O’Neill’s play – which tells the story of Brutus Jones, an African American Pullman porter who escapes from a chain gang and becomes the emperor of a Caribbean island – was hailed as a masterpiece for its expressionist investigation of the complexities of race and identity. O’Neill offered his white audiences a sympathetic and powerful African American protagonist, played by a black actor at a time when the representation of blackness on the stage was reserved for whites in blackface. O’Neill’s place in the history books as an important figure in the history of African American emancipation seemed a sure thing.

American plays and musicals on screen: 650 stage productions and their film and television adaptations

As the popularity of film grew and audiences demanded longer stories, Hollywood began borrowing plots as well as actors and directors from Broadway - some of these play-to-films were triumphs and others were inexplicable duds. This reference work is an annotated guide to American stage productions remade for film and television, with works ranging from late 19th-century American plays and musicals, through silent and sound films, to made-for-video productions by PBS, AE it describes what changes occurred between the formats, determines the strengths and weaknesses of each, judges the success of the transition, and describes how the end product was received. A bibliography and name and title indexes complete this cross-referenced work.

Theatre Symposium: Representations of Gender on the Nineteenth-Century American Stage (review)

Theatre Symposium: Representations of Gender on the Nineteenth-Century American Stage (review)

Editor's Comments

This review section covers twenty-one new books by and about women in/and theatre, drama, dance, and solo performance. The conjunctions, commas, and virgule in the previous sentence suggest the multiplicity, overlap, and range of territories that now travel under the rubric "feminist," also, I hope, extending an invitation to think about the complicatedness of what author Elaine Aston calls an "evolving transnational feminism." The books include biographies, an unusual performance text (Heather Woodbury's What Ever), a study of gender politics in contemporary productions of Shakespeare (Sarah Werner's Shakespeare and Feminist Performance), literary criticism, cultural and institutional history (Cheryl Black's The Women of Provincetown), and revisionist historiography (Jacky Bratton's already "hot" New Readings in Theatre History). The authors of these volumes address issues, texts, and lives drawn from four hundred years of women's work in the theatres of several countries. Three books consider the female characters in seventeenth-century British plays; one is a major study of late eighteenth-/early nineteenth-century playwright Elizabeth Inchbald; one anthology is devoted to representations of gender on the nineteenth-century American stage and another is a study of one of that century's most famous cross-dressed performers, Adah Isaacs Menken. Two biographies of twentieth-century American dancers reveal both their aesthetic and their personal contributions to modern and Broadway dance, predictably at great cost. Two books are studies of feminist theatre in late twentieth-century England, one devoted exclusively to the work of British Black and Asian women playwrights. Another book looks at the work and reception of women playwrights in Ireland, where rich theatrical output has generally been resistant to including female writers and directors. Finally, there is a study of Rhodessa Jones's theatre work with incarcerated women. I might have wished for more work by or about Latinas; and none of these books addresses women in Asian, African, or Eastern European theatre. Still, the collection is impressive and enticing. And books that arrived too late to be included indicate that there is more to come. They include a study of Hrosvitha and biographies of Margaret Webster and Lucille Lortel. This is my final issue as book review editor. I want to thank Janelle Reinelt, David Román, Harry Elam, and Jean Graham-Jones for being supportive, insightful, and generous. I also want to thank three people at the College of William and Mary, without whose aid I would not have been able to hold this position. Provost (then Dean) P. Geoffrey Feiss provided funding for an editorial assistant; former department Chair Patricia M. Wesp offered course release; and former Women's Studies Chair Leisa Meyer located an extra office so that the books and assistant's computer could have their own living space. William and Mary supports feminist scholars, and I do not mean just me: Renée Sentilles and Lisa Jo Sagolla, authors of the biographies reviewed here of Adah Isaacs Menken and Joan McCracken, and Rebecca Hewett, reviewer of Beth Henley: A Casebook, are William and Mary alumnae. And a final thank you to the alumna who took the devil out of the details, my editorial assistant of three years, Anne Mills '04. Dorothy Chansky, Editor ...

The Drama of Gender: Feminist Theater by Women of the Americas (review)

Reviewed by: The Drama of Gender: Feminist Theater by Women of the Americas Margarita Vargas The Drama of Gender: Feminist Theater by Women of the Americas. By Yolanda Flores. New York: Peter Lang, 2000; pp. 132. $32.95 paper. In The Drama of Gender: Feminist Theater by Women of the Americas, Yolanda Flores embarks on the ambitious project of examining how issues of race, gender, and class are represented on the North and South American stages. To illustrate the theoretical and methodological approaches of her study, which entail the application of materialist and radical feminist concepts, Flores reads selected plays by primarily the following playwrights: Leilah Assunção (Brazil), Susana Torres Molina (Argentina), Carmen Boullosa (Mexico), and Josefina López (United States). Flores follows a critical practice she identifies as current among critics of categories such as Latin American theatre. According to her, critics continue to pursue two original objectives of the 1970s feminist agenda: first, the rescuing from oblivion of texts written by women and, second, the study of female characters in male-authored texts. Her main goal, indeed, is to demarginalize and thus introduce Latin American drama, especially that written by women, to North American audiences for whom these works remain a mystery. Flores points outs thatNorth American and European critics are partially responsible for the marginalization of this work. Her most vivid example comes from Diana Taylor's reference in Theatre of Crisis: Drama and Politics to a 1968 issue of The Drama Review in which the editor cited two US critics who described Latin American theatre as backward and a compendium of clumsily borrowed dramatic forms with dead shapes moving about onstage (15). That Latin American women playwrights are still not well known in the United States should not come as such a surprise, for as Flores reminds us, even though Kate Millett's Sexual Politics, which marks the birth of feminist literary criticism, appeared in 1970, dramatic studies had to wait until 1988 for the publication of Sue-Ellen Case's Feminism and Theatre, the first extensive feminist study on drama. Coincidentally, in 1988 the First International Conference of Women Playwrights—the brainchild of Anna Kay France, a professor of English and theatre—took place in Buffalo. Despite her investment in a project of recovery, Flores fails to mention that two of the playwrights in her study—Leilah Assunção and Sabina Berman—participated in this momentous event. In addition to the close readings of each of the plays, readers will find particularly informative the [End Page 526] sociopolitical and literary contexts that Flores provides at the beginning of each chapter. She contextualizes the work of the playwrights in terms of their place in the literary histories of their respective countries, discusses their introduction into the world of letters, and then proceeds to outline their particular projects within race, class, and gender. Flores positions herself within a postmodernist discourse that promotes pluralism over a universalized vision of woman as a single nonracial entity. At the same time, however, she recognizes that it is necessary to presume a signifier "woman" in order to be able to study its misrepresentation and exclusion from the hegemonic discourse, and to identify commonalties among women that will enable them to form coalitions and create social change. Thus, Flores recognizes that her study is caught in the eternal conundrum of the paradox: in order to speak of women as a group, she needs to define them in opposition to the fixed term "man," thus undermining her own postmodern aspirations. One of Flores's smartest moves was to include Chicano theatre in her book, for it affords her the opportunity to speak to questions of class and race and specifically what it means to be a woman of color writing in a first-world country. This materialist approach highlights a stark difference between Latin-American writers, who for the most part come from the upper classes, and Latinas in the United States, who often do not. Flores remarks that all the Chicana writers she has studied are of working-class background and therefore feel more akin to the oppressed groups in Latin America than to other writers. One example she offers is...

A Much Maligned People: Jews on and off the Stage in the Early American Republic

A Much Maligned PeopleJews on and off the Stage in the Early American Republic Heather Nathans On August 21, 1776, a gentleman of Philadelphia named John Raser inserted an advertisement in the Pennsylvania Gazette complaining that his indentured servant, Philip Marks, had run away that morning. Raser offered a three-pound reward for Marks's return. He also offered the following clues to help his fellow Philadelphians identify the runaway, describing Marks as, "A Jew, about 5 feet 5 inches high, slim made, lisps and speaks bad English, of a dark complexion and long visage, wears his own long black hair." Raser also cautioned his neighbors to beware his Jewish servant, as the man was "addicted to lying and swearing."1 Only a year before Raser's announcement, an audience member watching actor Charles Macklin perform the role of Shakespeare's Shylock had commented on the performer's peculiar fitness to play the role of the villainous Jew: "Picture to yourself a rather stout man with a coarse, sallow face, a nose by no means lacking in any of the three dimensions, a long double chin; as for his mouth, Nature's knife seems to have slipped when she carved it, and slit him open on one side all the way up to the ear." The author also noted that Macklin had mastered the "Jewish" mannerisms of the character: "The first words he utters (he) lisps as lickerishly as if he were savoring the ducats and all that they could buy."2 [End Page 310] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Advertisement from The Pennsylvania Gazette, August 21, 1776 These two descriptions—written only a year apart—provide a virtual catalogue of Jewish stereotypes, from the physical signifiers of a yellow or swarthy complexion and dark curly hair, to the character traits of "lying and swearing," to the speech patterns of "lisping." One is "fact"—a runaway advertisement written to allow strangers to recognize and capture the fugitive. The other is "fiction"—based on the stereotype of Jewishness that Shylock (and Macklin) personified. Yet when set side by side, the similarities in tone, content, and perhaps even underlying ideology that resonate in these two portraits challenge the contemporary historian to ask if there really is "no smoke without fire" in these descriptions. In other words, to what extent do the cultural stereotypes of Jews that prevailed in eighteenth-century culture (and in this case, on the eighteenth-century stage, or the "synagogue of Satan" as one angry Philadelphia minister described his city's new playhouse), correspond to the social, political, or economic realities that defined Jewishness in the early national period?3 [End Page 311] In his essay, "Plays of Jewish Interest on the American Stage, 1752–1821," Edward Colman identifies some twenty-eight productions with Jewish characters that "reached the American stage" in the colonial and early national period.4 However, he declares adamantly, "The point to be noted is that none of these characters bears any relation, political, social, or cultural to the condition of Jews in America."5 Colman's assertion, while understandable, is problematic, since it ignores the historical context in which these characters were created and the uses to which they were put by American audiences and performers. While he may be correct in identifying the characters on his list of plays as stereotypes, his argument suggests that they came into being fully formed and remained static figures throughout their stage history. I argue, on the other hand, that while the stage Jew may have been at times as grotesque a caricature as the stage Irishman or stage slave, it nevertheless bore witness to specific moments in the development of the social, political, and cultural treatment of the Jewish people during the early national period. In the wake of the Revolution, Jews struggled to establish their political and social position in the new nation, and they faced an uphill battle against detractors for whom "Jewishness" remained a problematic concept. For example, just as Jewish characters (or sometimes even Gentile characters masquerading as Jews) became scapegoats on the stage, so Jews offstage became targets of political attacks during the pre-Revolutionary and...

Theatre, Culture, and Temperance Reform in Nineteenth-Century America. By John W. Frick. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. xiv, 256 pp. $60.00, ISBN 0-521-81778-1.)

John W. Frick's volume traces the origins, evolution, and ultimate demise of American temperance drama during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He begins with a somewhat testy discussion of why plays in general, and temperance melodrama in particular, have been until recently dismissed or ignored by literary scholars and theater historians. Breaking with the scholarly tradition of regarding reformist dramas as mere “entrepreneurial exploitations of ideological issues” (p. 10), Frick positions “temperance entertainments within the bounds of temperance activism and not on the margins” and argues for regarding temperance plays as the “most ubiquitous and progressive” of nineteenth-century reform dramas (p. 14). To contextualize temperance drama, Frick devotes an early chapter to a serviceable account of American temperance reform during the nineteenth century. He then proceeds to a discussion of how temperance melodrama incorporated many of the themes and tactics common in nineteenth-century reform literature. Frick's otherwise admirable devotion to context leads him astray in a chapter on British prototypes of American temperance drama. Though he notes the existence of an alcohol reform tradition and temperance plays in Britain, Frick concludes that they exerted a weak, indirect influence at best: the “deterministic style that had dominated early English temperance drama” (p. 111) never caught on in the United States. While the English material is interesting, it distracts from, rather than enhances, the discussion of American drama; a paragraph, rather than a chapter, might have sufficed. Subsequent chapters examine the popularity of temperance plays on the mainstream American stage before the Civil War as well as the postbellum incarnations of temperance drama. The volume concludes by considering the fate of temperance drama in the twentieth century. By the end of the 1930s, Frick observes, changing social attitudes, America's rejection of Prohibition, and the conflicted treatment of temperance themes in early films meant that the “staged drama, as an effective weapon in the temperance arsenal, was dead” (p. 201).

National Abjection: The Asian American Body on Stage (review)

Reviewed by: National Abjection: The Asian American Body on Stage Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns National Abjection: The Asian American Body on Stag. By Karen Shimakawa. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003. For the past decade, we have seen a burgeoning of scholarly production in Asian American theater and performance studies. Archival and theoretical projects on Asian American theater and performance simultaneously developed at the end of the twentieth century.1 In one decade, we witnessed the publication of groundbreaking anthologies like Between Worlds, edited by Misha Berson, Politics of Life, edited by Velina Hasu Houston, and Unbroken Thread, edited by Roberta Uno. Other publications include collections of Asian American theater work such as Asian American Drama, edited by Brian Nelson, Tokens, edited by Alvin Eng, and But Still, Like Air, I'll Rise, also by Velina Hasu Houston. The presence of Asian American theater work in such recently emergent multi-genre literature anthologies like Bold Words edited by Rajini Srikanth and Esther Iwanaga also testify to the liveliness of the field. At the same time, scholarly publications of and that include Asian American theater and performance began to proliferate: James Moy's Marginal Sights, Josephine Lee's Performing Asian America, Dorinne Kondo's About Face, Yuko Kurahashi's Asian American Culture on Stage, Una Chaudhuri's Staging Place, and Meiling Cheng's In Other Los Angeleses, are among the most notable of such critical studies. A welcome addition to the expanding list of scholarly inquiry into the Asian American stage is Karen Shimakawa's National Abjection: The Asian American Body on Stage. National Abjection is an important intervention, primarily in the fields of performance/theater studies and Asian American Studies. While Shimakawa deploys a range of theories including postcolonial theory and theories of globalization, it is Julia Kristeva's notion of "abjection" that is the primary theoretical anchor grounding her analysis of Asian American work. Shimakawa's coupling of the psychoanalytic dimension of the "abject" with U.S. racial formation [End Page 73] and national concerns enriches the possibilities for interpreting and understanding Asian American theater, performance, and arguably Asian American cultural production in general.2 "Abjection," as defined by Kristeva and deployed in this text by Shimakawa, is "a state and a process," "a national/cultural identity-forming process, as a way of 'reading' Asian Americanness in relation and as a product of U.S. Americanness—that is, as occupying the seemingly contradictory, yet functionally essential, position of consistent element and radical other" (3). In other words, the deployment of "abjection" to understand Asian Americanness helps us to see the place of Asian Americans in U.S. (cultural, political, and social) hegemony, and illuminates Asian Americanness, albeit produced as abject, as constitutive of U.S. nation formation. Shimakawa's discussion of various works by Asian American theater artists, including Yankee Dawg You Die by Phillip Kan Gotanda, 12-1-A by Wakako Yamauchi, The Year of the Dragon and Chickencoop Chinaman by Frank Chin, Talk-Story by Jeannie Barroga, Tea by Velina Hasu Houston, and Deshima and Chinoiserie by Ping Chong, elucidates her thesis of Asian American abjection. In her introduction, Shimakawa analyses critical historical moments in Asian American history to delineate how Asian Americans have been made abject within the U.S. national context. Her discussion of the internment of Japanese nationals and Japanese Americans in World War II and the U.S. government's denial of citizenship (and hence benefits) to Filipinos who fought for the U.S. government in World War II sets up her argument of Asian Americans as abject vis-a-vis U.S. nation formation. This engagement with historical events is important given the underlying questions that animate National Abjection: "what is the connection between histories of nationalization/racialization/gendering, and theatrical performance? What can being attentive to the processes of national abjection tell us about performances that take place within the nation? Conversely, what can performance tell us about national abjection? And perhaps most important, what can performance do to/about that process?" (163). Throughout her analysis of the very emergence of contemporary Asian American theater and various play texts, Shimakawa decisively demonstrates how Asian American artists have mobilized the...

The ‘Wicked City’ Motif on the American Stage before the Civil War

By the middle of the nineteenth century, the characterization of the big city as evil incarnate – a veritable latter-day Sodom – had achieved the status of national myth in both the United States and Britain, and had become a popular theme for journalists, novelists, and playwrights alike. John Frick examines this phenomenon – what came to be known as the ‘wicked city motif’ – as it manifested itself on the antebellum American stage. Originating in the urbanization of the eighteenth-century gothic novel and the French feuilleton roman and coalescing in Eugène Sue's Les Mystères de Paris and G. W. M. Reynolds's The Mysteries of London, the city mysteries narrative successfully negotiated the unstable border between the public and private spheres to examine the depravity and danger of the modern metropolis. Disseminated through populist politics, sensationalized journalism, popular fiction, and – the focus here – dramatic renderings, the apocalyptic vision of the modern city with its inexplicable and impenetrable secrets became commonplace in the 1840s and 1850s. John Frick is Professor of Theatre and American Studies at the University of Virginia and teaches in the M.Litt. program at Mary Baldwin College. His most recent book, Theatre, Culture, and Temperance Reform in Nineteenth-Century America, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2003.

Contemporary gay American poets and playwrights: an A-to-Z guide

Gay presence is nothing new to American verse and theater. Homoerotic themes are discernible in American poetry as early as the 19th century, and identifiably gay characters appeared on the American stage more than 70 years ago. But aside from a few notable exceptions, gay artists of earlier generations felt compelled to avoid sexual candor in their writings. Conversely, most contemporary gay poets and playwrights are free from such constraints and have created a remarkable body of work. This reference is a guide to their creative achievements. Alphabetically arranged entries present 62 contemporary gay American poets and dramatists. While the majority of included writers are younger artists who came of age in the post-Stonewall U.S., some are older authors whose work has continued or persisted into recent decades. A number of these writers are well known, including Edward Albee, Harvey Fierstein, and Allen Ginsberg. Others, such as Alan Bowne, Timothy Liu, and Robert O'Hara, merit wider recognition. Each entry is written by an expert contributor and includes a biography, a discussion of major works and themes, an overview of the author's critical reception, and primary and secondary bibliographies.

Rap's Unruly Body The Postmodern Performance of Black Male Identity on the American Stage

In response to the question, Does rap bear any “social message,” Ice Cube was careful to make a distinction between the occasions when rappers are “just having fun” and when they are performing a more serious “social message.” “Gansta rap” or “reality rap” are self-conscious performances of the complexities and commodifications of black male identity in America. Gangsta rap, the most theatrical style of rap, comments on the place of black masculinity in the American value system, and imagines alternative spaces where the power structures may be redefined.

Damaged Goods: Sex Hysteria and the Prostitute Fatale

In 1913, the play characterized in the popular press as “unquestionably the most widely discussed play of a decade” was not a brilliant interpretation of a classic, one of Shaw's problem plays, or one of David Belasco's realist inventions. The production that took the country by storm, Eugène Brieux's Damaged Goods (Les Avariés), was the first play on the American stage to deal openly with syphilis as a central theme.The staging of Ibsen's Ghosts in New York in 1894 was the first reference to venereal disease on the American stage. Unlike Ghosts, which never explicitly mentions syphilis, Damaged Goods focused on venereal disease as a central theme and discussed the condition in vivid medical terms. Though celebrated at the time as “The Greatest Contribution Ever Made by the Stage to the Cause of Humanity,”“Excerpts, Opinions, Etc. of Damaged Goods,” unidentified pamphlet in the Damaged Goods clipping file in the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Billy Rose Theatre Collection [hereafter, the NYPLPA]. this forgotten play merits the modern scholar's attention not only because its immense popularity has been overlooked or because it broke what turn-of-the-century narratives called the “conspiracy of silence.” Rather, this essay will argue that the performance history of Damaged Goods, far from marking a threshold-crossing freedom in sexual discourse in Progressive Era America, reveals how Progressives utilized the stage to normalize and reinforce the social centrality of bourgeois marriage, reproductivity, and traditional gender norms, much as they had wielded other discourses to study, contain, and discipline sexuality during previous decades.Scholars bracket the Progressive Era differently, depending on their scope of study. I agree with social historian Ruth Rosen's definition that the Progressive Era marks the time of intense American reform movements from the turn of the century until 1918. This is not meant to erase extensive reform efforts as early as the 1830s. Perhaps it is more accurate to describe this period (1900–1918) as the latter half of the Progressive Era. See Lewis L. Gould's America in the Progressive Era, 1890–1914, Seminar Studies in History (Essex, U.K.: Pearson Education Limited, 2001). For Progressive reformation, see Mark Connelly's The Response to Prostitution in the Progressive Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), and David J. Pivar's Purity Crusade: Sexual Morality and Social Control, 1868–1900 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1973). While this regulation of sexuality rested upon a conservative agenda that the ostensible liberalism of the play obfuscated in its (and even our) own day, the play's portrayal of prostitution demonstrates a rather clear, though vexed, relationship between contagion and the dangers of unsanctioned sex.

The Colonial American Stage, 1665-1774: A Documentary Calendar, and: Colonial Women: Race and Culture in Stuart Drama (review)

Reviewed by: The Colonial American Stage, 1665-1774: A Documentary Calendar, and: Colonial Women: Race and Culture in Stuart Drama Jeffrey H. Richards (bio) The Colonial American Stage, 1665–1774: A Documentary Calendar. Odai Johnson and William J. Burling. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2001. 519 pp., maps [by James Coombs]. Colonial Women: Race and Culture in Stuart Drama. Heidi Hutner. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. ix, 141 pp. Despite what has traditionally been understood as a paucity of drama and theater in colonial America, there is much more to be found than one might expect from the standard histories. It is a matter of knowing where to look. On the one hand, as Heidi Hutner suggests in her study, Colonial Women: Race and Culture in Stuart Drama, British plays of the seventeenth century contain a number of references to things and situations American, most particularly for her purposes those related to the representation of Native women; but we can easily move from her focus to the larger matter of how the colonies in general were rendered on the London boards. To take just a few examples, most lying outside Hutner's purview, Samuel Foote and Richard Cumberland both portray West Indian planters—and their African-American slaves—in The Patron (1764) and The West Indian (1771), respectively. Native Americans appear in Aphra Behn's The Widow Ranter (1689), Thomas Southerne's Oroonoko (1695), John Dennis's Liberty Asserted (1704), and George Colman, Jr.'s Inkle and Yarico (1787). Some British authors refer to the Revolutionary War, albeit only briefly, as in Frederick Pilon's Fair American (1782) and John O'Keeffe's popular after-piece, The Poor Soldier (1783). At any rate, whatever the conditions of the American theater, British stages reflected a variety of (mis)understandings about the large, unruly, and troublesome lands across the ocean that early Americanists would do well to recognize. On the other hand, looking at the texts of British drama does not mean we should ignore the American stage. As Odai Johnson and William J. Burling show in The Colonial American Stage, 1665–1774: A Documentary History, there were many attempts, particularly after 1700, to put on plays, [End Page 174] even in the face of political or religious opposition to the theater. Indeed, after reading through the annals in this book, one comes away with the idea that there were probably many more performances and attempts to mount dramas on stage than the authors can with certainty give credence to. For one thing, Johnson and Burling note that earlier historians of the American theater often omitted or disregarded "amateur" performances, even when those might not have been as "amateur" as the historians let on. For another, they include under one roof (or between two covers) performances in English in such venues as the Danish West Indies and Nova Scotia, parts of the wider theatrical network of North America usually marginalized or ignored by scholars of American theater. These hints at a virtual underground of dramatic renderings suggest that Americans were far more interested in the theater than we have understood them to be. Taken together with British interest in American subjects on the London stage, this American interest in staging British plays on their own platforms indicates a rich and largely unknown world of textual and performative complexity not given its full due. Hutner's book indicates how much an investigator can find even with a narrowly conceived thesis. The author examines a select group of plays from Jacobean and Restoration England in pursuit of the methods by which the dramas evoke certain paradigms related to the figuration of Native American women in the theater. For Hutner, there are two key founding myths, the stories of Pocahontas and Marina/Malinche, Native female go-betweens whose functional taming by European males masks the latter's anxiety over the wildness and uncontrollability of women in patrilineal, patriarchal societies. In many ways, as Hutner notes, the drama elides the Native female subject, even as it calls her to mind. Shakespeare's The Tempest, for instance, would seem to bring forth an American Native presence on Prospero's colonized island; but the only...

Between the Cracks: The Performance of English-Language Opera in Late Nineteenth-Century America

The performance history of English-language opera in the United States of the antebellum era has been sufficiently researched during the last decade to establish its importance to the American popular stage.1 The same cannot be said, however, for English-language opera in postbellum America; so little is known of the performance history of this genre, in fact, that it is little better than historiographical terra incognita. As a result, scholars have erroneously assumed that English-language opera essentially disappeared from the American stage, supplanted on the one hand by the foreign-language opera companies supported by the social and economic elite of American society and on the other by plays-with-songs, spectacles, variety shows, and operettas that were so prominent a part of the American theater of the final three decades of the century. The assumption that English-language opera became extinct in the United States is tacitly supported by the marked absence of any mention of English-opera performance (in the secondary literature);2 this lacuna has led scholars to conclusions that must be called into question now that additional research is being conducted.3

The real Nick and Nora: Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, writers of stage and screen classics

Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett wrote the screenplays for some of America's most treasured movies, including It's a Wonderful Life, Thin Man, Easter Parade, Father of the Bride, Naughty Marietta and Brides for Seven Brothers. Legendary films, indeed, but writing both the play and screenplay for Diary of Anne Frank was their crowning achievement. Controlled chaos best describes their writing method. They discussed a scene at length, sometimes acting it out. Afterwards, they each wrote a draft, which they exchanged. Then, Frances said, 'free criticism' - which sometimes erupted screaming matches. Noisy and contentious, the method worked splendidly. Enormously successful and remarkably prolific, Goodrich and Hackett began their 34-year collaboration in 1928. Married after the first of their five plays became a hit, they were in many ways an unlikely pair. Frances, the privileged daughter of well-to-do parents, graduated from Vassar, then played minor parts on Broadway. Albert's mother him on stage at age five, when his father died, to help pay the bills, and he became a highly paid comedian. The Hackett's were known for their wit and high spirits and the pleasure of their Bel Air dinner parties. They waged memorable battles with their powerful bosses and were key activists in the stressful creation of the Screen Writers Guild. Once they had created Nick and Nora Charles, Thin Man's bright, charming, sophisticated lead couple, played memorably by William Powell and Myrna Loy, many people saw a strong resemblance, and the Hacketts acknowledged that they put themselves into Nick and Nora. This text is an assemblage of anecdotes featuring some of the most talented writers and the brightest lights of American stage and screen. The work was arduous, the parties luminous. On any given night the guests singing and acting out scripts at a party might include F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sheilagh Graham, S.J. Perelman, Oscar Levant, Ogden Nash, Judy Garland, Abe Burrows, Hoagy Carmichael, Johnny Mercer, Ira Gershwin, George Burns and Gracie Allen, Pat O'Brien, Dick Powell and June Allyson, Dashiell Hammett, Lillian Hellman, James Cagney and Dorothy Parker.

Nahma Sandrow, ed. God, Man, and Devil: Yiddish Plays in Translation. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1999. xii, 321 pp.; Robert Skloot, ed. The Theater of the Holocaust. Vol.II. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999. viii, 407 pp.

It has been a quarter century since the last collections of Yiddish plays were published in America: Joseph Landis' Great Jewish Plays and David Lifson's Epic and Folk Plays of the Yiddish Theater. As Sandrow informs us in the “Appendixes,” translations of a few individual plays are found in scholarly journals or mostly out-of-print books. For this reason alone, the beautiful new volume from Syracuse is a welcome arrival. Another reason is Sandrow's insightful introductions to the five plays featured: Jacob Gordin, God, Man, and Devil; Peretz Hirshbein, Green Fields; H. Levick, Shop; David Pinsky, The Treasure; and Osip Dimov, Bronx Express. Her remarks touch on the works' stage history detailing who played what role, and how the plays fared on various European and American stages.