Theatrical Adaptation Research Articles

New Genealogies of Performance Laura L. Mielke (bio) Acts of Manhood: The Performance of Masculinity on the American Stage, 1828–1865. By Karl M. Kippola. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. 264 pages. $85.00 (cloth). Pioneer Performances: Staging the Frontier. By Matthew Rebhorn. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. 224 pages. $65.00 (cloth). Spectacles of Reform: Theater and Activism in Nineteenth-Century America. By Amy E. Hughes. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012. 264 pages. $75.00 (cloth). $27.95 (paper). Whiting Up: Whiteface Minstrels and Stage Europeans in African American Performance. By Marvin McAllister. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. 352 pages. $42.00 (cloth). $29.99 (e-book). Since the 1990s scholars have produced numerous accounts of Uncle Tom’s Cabin as presented on the nineteenth-century stage, emphasizing that more Americans saw Uncle Tom’s Cabin performed than ever read Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel. Treatments by Eric Lott, Linda Williams, Sarah Meer, David S. Reynolds, and John W. Frick, among others, consider the political importance and ambiguities of period theatrical adaptations, their entanglement with blackface minstrelsy, their transatlantic reach, and their persistence in twentieth-century film. The website Uncle Tom’s Cabin & American Culture, directed by Stephen Railton, contains indispensable primary and secondary materials related to theatrical and filmic adaptations.1 The best of such accounts of Uncle Tom’s Cabin onstage and on-screen offer what Joseph Roach calls “genealogies of performance” that “document—and suspect—the historical transmission and dissemination of cultural practices through collective representations.” Such genealogies of performance “draw on the idea of expressive movements as mnemonic reserves”—how a repertoire of movements that is embodied, recorded “in images or words (or in silences between them),” or imagined anew carries along and transforms key elements of a culture.2 Anyone who [End Page 453] has spent time with the images, sounds, and words of the staged Uncle Tom’s Cabin steps away with the conviction that the popular drama did not simply manipulate or express audience sentiment. Rather, the wildly variant performances of Uncle Tom’s Cabin were part of the culture’s rumination (conscious and otherwise) on slavery, African American personhood, and the individual’s moral culpability for the suffering of others. The four books reviewed here present new genealogies of performance practices other than Uncle Tom’s Cabin stagings (with one exception) that are no less rooted in nineteenth-century culture and politics and resonate with all that comes after. Marvin McAllister’s Whiting Up: Whiteface Minstrels and Stage Europeans in African American Performance documents the practice of African American performers putting on markers of whiteness in highly conscious performances of racial privilege from 1820s South Carolina through our “post-soul” present. Amy E. Hughes’s Spectacles of Reform: Theater and Activism in Nineteenth-Century America analyzes mid-nineteenth-century melodrama’s “sensation scene”—a spectacular dramatic moment appealing directly to audience emotion—as a phenomenon with terrific physical impact and a range of political valences. Matthew Rebhorn’s Pioneer Performances: Staging the Frontier spins a genealogy of the nineteenth-century frontier drama intended to challenge our understanding of the frontier not only as theatrical symbol of ascendant white individualism but also as historical fact. Finally, Karl Kippola’s Acts of Manhood: The Performance of Masculinity on the American Stage, 1828–1865 reflects on the opposing forms of white masculinity that vied for dominance of the mid-nineteenth-century stage. Taken together, these books show that (to quote Rebhorn on minstrelsy) “the theater did not so much stage racial construction as it actually theatricalized the construction of race” (73)—and the same holds for gender. As these authors demonstrate, to explore the lineage of whiting up, the sensation scene, the frontier drama, and dramaturgical manhood is to find that theatrical performance does more than represent and participate in existing social practices; it is itself a social practice with far-reaching yet often obscured impact. McAllister’s Whiting Up is a painstakingly researched and revelatory book that recounts a previously neglected history of African Americans’ performance of whiteness—not in the sense of “passing” or “acting white” but in acts that depend on audience knowledge of the...

MICHAEL D’ALESSANDRO Harvard University Childless “Fathers,” Native Sons: Mississippi Tribal Histories and Performing the Indian in Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses WHEN ASKED ONCE ABOUT THE ORIGIN OF HIS NATIVE AMERICAN characters, William Faulkner openly admitted that he “made them up” (Dabney 11). Later he asserted that such characterizations might be accurate strictly because he eschewed research: “I never read any history. . . . I talked to people. If I got it straight it’s because I didn’t worry with other people’s ideas about it” (Cantwell 57). Despite these statements, critics have continually tried—and failed—to tie the Native Americans of Faulkner’s fictional Yoknapatawpha County to the actual Choctaw and Chickasaw tribes who inhabited Faulkner’s native Mississippi before their expulsion in the 1830s. Duane Gage concludes that “Faulkner’s Indians are not history’s Indians. They are William Faulkner’s Indians, . . . created from fantasy, lore and incidental history to suit the author’s needs” (27). Similarly, Howard Horsford affirms that “the blunt truth is that [Faulkner] shows very little familiarity with early Mississippi history or with the Choctaws and Chickasaws who were its victims” (311). Thus most scholars have conceded Faulkner’s Native American creations to be unapologetic fictions. These critics appear satisfied with the mere discovery of the author’s erroneousness. They rarely explore the larger ramifications of Faulkner’s inaccurate Native American representations,particularlyregardingthemuddledfolklorethattrickled down to local Mississippians. These critics also focus too heavily on the one-dimensional Native Americans of early stories like “Red Leaves” (1930) and “Lo!” (1934).1 Yet the dignified figures of later fiction, particularly Sam Fathers in Go Down, Moses (1942), represent equally broad and perhaps more troubling caricatures. A half-Chickasaw elder and wilderness guide to Yoknapatawpha’s youth, Sam serves a crucial 1 For examples, see Gage, Parker, and Sayre. 376 Michael D’Alessandro role in young Isaac (“Ike”) McCaslin’s miseducation. As a ten-year-old boy in 1878, Ike stands in line to inherit his grandfather’s plantation.2 But after learning of his ancestors’ sordid histories, he identifies an alternate birthright as a Native American. Throughout a trilogy of stories within Go Down, Moses—“The Old People,” “The Bear,” and “Delta Autumn”—readers observe Ike’s naïve worship of Sam and his performance of presumed Native American traditions, few of which evince any factual validity. Such efforts of “playing Indian” manifested throughout turn-of-the-century America and reveal how white Americans often struggled to confront a modernizing nation. Contrary topreviouscritics’assessments,Faulknerseekstodrawreaders’attention to, and not distract notice from, this inherent performativity. Examining Go Down, Moses against anthropological histories of Choctaws and Chickasaws reveals that the novel’s historical inaccuracies —includingfactualdiscrepanciesintheMississippitribes’languages,oral narratives, relationships with nature, and hunting rituals—ultimately serve to magnify Faulkner’s construction of Sam Fathers as a performative, false Native American. This playacting has severe ramifications for future generations. Young Ike believes he can honor Mississippi history most purely through renouncing his inheritance to his family’s plantation and accessing a Native American past instead. But Ike’s misreading of his spiritual father Sam as a genuine Indian marks his wilderness initiation as a sham and his enactment of inherited Native American traditions as afailure.Faulknerimpliesthatwhitedescendants’overeagernesstobelieve such a theatrical version of race constitutes perhaps the most dangerous quality of a South rushing towards modernization in the late nineteenth century. Tragically, this false South becomes the inheritance of those who, as represented by Ike and later his descendants, remain incapable of reading history and irresponsible in trying to preserve it. Chickasaws, Choctaws, and a Willful Ignorance Only in the past few decades has ethnographic research filled in the histories of Mississippi’s early Native American tribes. Following France’s devastating defeat of the Natchez tribe in the 1730s, the two remaining tribes—the Chickasaws and the Choctaws—separated across 2 Timelines and characters’ ages are taken from Nancy Dew Taylor’s annotations (10, 110, 137). 377 Childless “Fathers,” Native Sons Mississippi territory (Dabney 7). By the beginning of the nineteenth century, roughly 15,000 Choctaws inhabited the southern part of the state while also holding land in Louisiana. Meanwhile, about 4,000 Chickasaws occupied northern Mississippi, including...

Theatrical Adaptation Research Articles

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Theatrical Adaptation Research Articles

Related Topics

Articles published on Theatrical Adaptation

Remediating Fassbinder

"Cinco horas con Mario" a teatro: riflessioni traduttive per un adattamento in lingua italiana

Enter the 2-Disc Platinum Edition: Bruce Lee and Post-DVD Textuality

New Genealogies of Performance

Bleak House on London's East End Stage, 1853: George Dibdin Pitt and Dickens at the Royal Pavilion Theatre

«The White Guard» on TV: fascinated by masscult mythology

A Study of the Principle of Children’s Theatre Adaptation －In the Example of Kim Mingi’s &lt;We are Friends&gt;－

On the Ukrainian Cinematic Tradition, the Dovzhenko Film Studio, and Ivan Mykolaichuk

Katja Krebs, ed., Translation and Adaptation in Theatre and Film

Editorial: The Importance of the Astonished Eye

E. Michael Gerli Celestina and the Ends of DesireCelestina and the Ends of Desire. E. Michael Gerli. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011. Pp. xiv+258.

Conflicting Nostalgia: PerformingThe Tale of Ch'unhyang(春香傳) in the Japanese Empire

Playing with Form: Possessed by Witold Gombrowicz

Joyce Smithy: A Curated Review of Joyce in Visual Art, Music, and Performance

Childless “Fathers,” Native Sons: Mississippi Tribal Histories and Performing the Indian in Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses

A Body that Matters: Tom Kilroy's Talbot's Box

“We really can’t be doing 1603 now. We really can’t”: Katie Mitchell, Theatrical Adaptation, and Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness

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Cultural Re(production) in Maruxa Vilalta’s Pequeña historia de horror (y de amor desenfrenado)

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A Study of the Principle of Children’s Theatre Adaptation －In the Example of Kim Mingi’s <We are Friends>－