Composing Ourselves: The Little Theatre Movement and the American Audience (review)

In Composing Ourselves, Dorothy Chansky presents performance studies scholarship at its finest. What separates Chansky's work from other scholarship regarding the Little Theatre movement is not so much that the audience is her subject, but rather that her focus on the audience allows her to offer multiple perspectives from those on- and offstage: from the usual suspects—Provincetown Players, Washington Square Players, Neighborhood Playhouse, etc.—to the unusual suspects— the immigrant population of the Lower East Side, the readership of Theatre Arts Magazine, high school and college theatre students and instructors, and more. Through her tightly constructed narrative, Chansky challenges common assumptions about the Little Theatre movement as a theatrical genre practiced by a "few well-known experimenters"; she claims it a "national, multipronged phenomenon" that refuses to be encapsulated in a neat package and can not be understood through one vantage point (2).

Chansky examines the web of contradictions and paradoxes that created both the stability of the movement's progressive/revolutionary nature and the instability of the tenants that served as its mission. While other scholars (particularly feminist scholars) treat the paradoxes as a part of the movement, Chansky defines the Little Theatre movement through them. Indeed, Chansky begins her book with the claim that "much of what was touted as serious, uplifting, educational, and universal in Little Theatre rhetoric and productions was often racist, sexist, self-absorbed, and exclusionary" (11). Notwithstanding this focus, Chansky never diminishes the value of the movement despite the obvious tensions created by these characteristics.

The book is broken up into six chapters that traverse the different geographical and ideological territories through which Chansky defines the Little Theatre movement. Chansky's first chapter, "Little Theatre Audience Construction: A Modern(ist) Project," in setting her tone of inquiry, questions both the current definitions of the Little Theatre movement and the seemingly stable terms that underlie any theatre history study, such as "'American Theatre,' 'Legitimate Theatre' 'Mainstream Theatre,' or even the separate words 'American' and 'Theatre'" (12). She marks the life span of the movement from 1912 to 1925, when, she claims, "So pervasive was the Little Theatre outlook in criticism, sophisticated scenography and lighting, award-winning playwriting, and educational theatre endeavors that actual Little Theatres could now be treated as a subcategory of the mindset they created" (18).

Although no chapter disregards issues of race, class, gender, or national identity, many of the chapters pair a specific bias with a theatre practice. Each chapter, thus, is both autonomous and firmly entrenched in the book's overall intellectual arc. For example, chapter 2, "Imagining the Little Theatre Audience," scrutinizes the relationship between white native-born theatre practitioners and an immigrant population as subject/object for the stage and subject/object of the audience. Much of the chapter examines the Neighborhood Playhouse's settlement house theatre for immigrants, which, in an effort to use theatre as a means to recognize cultural difference, "systematically erased, elided, or misread customs or practices from various traditions in pursuit of 'oneness'" (61). Chapter 3, "Producing the Audience," analyzes direct audience training with close readings of both the periodical Theatre Arts Monthly and George Pierce Baker's famous 47 Workshop at Harvard. In chapter 4, "Fall Girls of Modernism:Women and/as Audiences," and chapter 5, "Textbook Cases: Learning to Be and See LittleWomen," Chansky examines the antifeminist trends that overlapped with emergent possibilities for women as audience members and educators/practitioners (chapter 5). Chapter 6, "Modeling a Future: The Dallas Little Theatre and 'The No 'Count Boy,'" is perhaps Chansky's most provocative chapter. Here she analyzes the Little Theatre's creation of plays authored by white practitioners dealing with African American subjects but written for white audiences with the hope of fostering racial tolerance.

Chansky begins and ends the book with an anecdote from Al Pacino's film, Looking for Richard. Her eye to the present both informs her critique of current scholarship's...