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

Almost inevitably, theater functions either to reinforce cultural, economic, and political norms or to subvert them. It does the former by re-inscribing social codes through actions that lead to a celebration of the status quo. The weddings, banquets, and dances at the end of classical comedies, and the reestablishment of sociopolitical order at the conclusion of tragedies, are the most obvious examples, but this function is also reflected in many popular dramas and comedies. Subversive theater undermines societal codes by presenting alternatives to cultural norms in its dramatic content or structure. This can be found in the darker comedies of Molière, the work of Anton Chekhov, and much of the experimental and avant-garde theater of the twentieth century. Yet, despite the quantity of literary and theatrical analyses of postwar American drama, few scholars have examined this topic in the context of the Cold War. Did the plays of Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, and William Inge or the musicals of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, for instance, reflect or question the values that were being shaped by political and economic developments in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s?

Bruce McConachie, a professor of theater at the University of Pittsburgh who has previously written about nineteenth-century American theater, comes up with a novel slant on the subject. Rejecting formalistic approaches found in semiotics and phenomenology and the postmodernist tropes derived from Jacques Lacan that dominated much literary scholarship through the 1990s, McConachie turns to cognitive psychology. In particular, he draws on the work of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, who posit a theory of "containment" to explain how human beings tend to categorize experience. As McConachie notes, this process "involves necessary relations among an inside, an outside, and [a] boundary between them" (p. 10). McConachie then adapts historian George Lipsitz's term "corporate liberalism" to produce his own notion of "containment liberalism." Although such categorizations seem almost instinctive in the context of Cold War history, McConachie's insight is to find these patterns in the Broadway fare of the era.

The primary plays that he chooses are a surprisingly disparate lot: A Hatful of Rain,The Seven Year Itch,Dark at the Top of the Stairs,Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,A Raisin in the Sun, and The Crucible, among others. Although some of these seem obvious candidates for Cold War analyses, the most surprising, and perhaps the most successful in terms of applying the containment theory, is the 1951 musical The King and I, forever associated with the actor Yul Brynner. In retrospect it is easy to see the cultural stereotyping and condescension that suffused the production, particularly in the casting of Siamese characters who were drawn from a broad spectrum of ethnic and racial groups—as if to suggest a universality to the idea of "other." The result was that the actors' physiognomy provided no clue about the cultural identity of the character, and the actors' makeup and costume became essential semiotic tools. "In effect," McConachie explains,

spectators were induced to understand "Siamese" as a performance in itself, a matter of external role-playing involving a darker or lighter shade of grease paint and other theatrical trappings. With Western characters, however, the audience could presume that the "inside" matched the "outside"; the actor underneath the role always looked the part. Since essentialism in casting was the norm for Western characters, Rodgers and Hammerstein's characters from other cultures appeared to lack an essence, an "inside." Following the cognitive logic of containment in characterization, when any performer can play Siamese, the "inside" of any Siamese character can be anything at all. Hence, the lack of discernible casting conventions contributed to the audience's belief that Siamese people already were or could easily become just like "us," like white Americans.

(p. 159)

In addition, McConachie cleverly shows how capitalism became associated with nature in the production (in...