American Theater in the Culture of the Cold War: Producing and Contesting Containment, 1947-1962 (review)

What made Broadway Broadway at the height of the Cold War? Bruce McConachie's provocative new book uses cognitive science to parse the workings of popular productions from the era. Workings here means the dramaturgical and thematic mechanics attributable to playwrights, but also includes the contributions of directors, choreographers, and actors to character construction, and designers' roles in defining reality. Most ambitiously, the book is an effort to construct a historically and psychologically responsible way to answer the entwined questions of what audiences wanted and what they perceived in the dozens of plays and handful of movies, musicals, and modern dances McConachie analyzes.

The cognitive psychology and linguistics of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson are McConachie's primary theoretical lens. According to Lakoff and Johnson, "mental concepts arise, fundamentally, from the experience of the body in the world"; humans arrive, via this "embodied realism," at metaphors, without which "most conceptual thinking cannot occur" (13). McConachie is quick to point out that "cognitive" in this science goes beyond its usual definition and includes—since "[c]ognitive processes are presemiotic" (25)—unconscious as well as conscious meaning-making. "The minds of audience members," he observes, "shaped by evolution, the experience of living on earth, and historical culture, will tend to take well-traveled routes of cognition to gain comprehension" (25).

The metaphor on which McConachie stakes his claim is containment. This works on both a national/political and an individual/psychological level, as the business-class audience on which he focuses experiences itself collectively as part of a nation hell-bent on keeping communism out, and individually as devoted to creating or maintaining mental health within. The nation and its citizens are containers for all that is good, but both are at risk for invasion or corruption by an array of dangers, from nuclear fallout to homosexuality, immaturity (bad for married men), and lack of nurturance (bad for women). The good nation and its moral citizens simultaneously exercise "innocence and arrogance" (176) in pursuing a belief that all humans are part of the Family of Man (the Siamese of The King and I can be just like us with a little effort) concurrent with embracing racism (A Raisin in the Sun's African Americans are good people but would be bad neighbors) and homophobia (exorcised by death in both The Dark at the Top of the Stairs and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof).

The most engaging and persuasive strands McConachie pursues are radiophony and projection. Radio produced, during the 1930s and 1940s, a gradual shift in mainstream perception of "the real" (29), as the possibility of disembodied sound as a source of information challenged the primacy of photography, silent film, and print. McConachie's discussion of Death of a Salesman brilliantly deploys an understanding of "radio-influenced theater" (49) to show how different the fragmented self, back-and-forth-in-time storytelling, and Jo Mielziner's famous "bare-bones outline" set were from their analogues in Awake and Sing, which had, a mere fourteen years earlier, dealt with the struggles of a similar lower-middle-class New York family. Projection is the process by which audiences experience theatrical pleasure. In advisory projection, an audience member projects personal values onto a character's experience; in empathetic projection, audience members experience a character's life, but with the character's values projected onto the viewer's "subjective experience" (20). For the most part, McConachie assumes audiences exercised advisory projection onto presumably bad characters and empathetic projection onto hegemonically conceived good ones.

Each of the three chapters following the synoptic introduction takes up a different kind of containment problematic. "Empty Boys, Queer Others, and Consumerism" focuses on boyish men who need to grow up in order to claim a safe place among American citizens. The popularity of psychiatry among "business class" (passim) Broadway audiences made internal struggles and the search for...