Staging Whiteness (review)

In Staging Whiteness, Mary Brewer considers how the theatres of Britain and the United States reflected, and frequently challenged, shifting perspectives on race in the twentieth century. This is, needless to say, a rather daunting task. The vast majority of plays in the Western canon were written by white authors for white audiences and populated by white characters to be portrayed by white actors. For Brewer, whiteness, as represented by middle-class, heterosexual Protestants, prevails in its invisibility. The assumed normative space of whiteness renders it invisible, secure, and closed to critique. As a result, the author wishes "to show how the concept of the White 'race' evolved over time in British and US culture, and the resemblances and differences between their respective social and theatrical forms of Whiteness" (xiv–xv). For Brewer, the lens of Critical White Studies allows staged whiteness to be examined, offering the potential to rethink the concept of staged race.

The author works chronologically, beginning each chapter with a brief synopsis of the state of racial politics of the period, followed by readings of plays that exemplify that era. Her choices are usually canonical and the reader has the opportunity to see works by some familiar names—Shaw, O'Neill, Williams, Churchill, and Kushner, among others—anew in the whiteness of their times. While Brewer often overreaches by criticizing older works for lacking a contemporary ideological purity, the scope and research of her work are compelling. Brewer proves how presentations of whiteness have shifted and evolved, always unable to remain unstained by difference.

In the first two chapters, Brewer places the theatre of Britain and the United States in their sorry historical contexts with regard to race; that is, with imperialism and the White Man's Burden in Britain, and slavery and Manifest Destiny in the United States. Her analysis of W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood's The Ascent of F6 is particularly cogent, as the play reveals whiteness "to be a fictional discursive category" (16), a cultural narrative dependent on the perceived centrality of white, middle-class, male heteronormativity. She shows how Auden and Isherwood's attack on colonialism also demonstrates how the rhetoric of whiteness manipulates the perspective of the colonizer and colonized alike.

In chapters 3 and 4, Brewer sets out to explain the changes in the white / black dyad in the post-World War II era as a dominant white culture became destabilized by the growing visibility of an emergent black culture. In her analysis of plays like John Osborne's The Entertainer, she describes how the breakdown of the family of music-hall performer Archie Rice replicates the unsteadiness of whiteness as the final arbiter of success. With the dissolution of empire, exactly "what White Britishness means is nothing more than what one can make of it in the face of very uncomfortable conditions that are largely outside one's control" (60).

Brewer's best work comes in the investigations of those "very uncomfortable conditions" as she considers whiteness as a continuum based on race, gender, class, sexuality, religion, and birthplace. She shows how Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes brought into conflict two varying versions of whiteness, as the old, agrarian South and the commercialized "New South" struggled for the highest rung on the ladder of whiteness. Her critique of Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire presses this point, revealing Blanche Dubois as a figure able to bestow true whiteness on Stanley. When Stanley rapes Blanche and causes her subsequent institutionalization, he is no longer just a "Polack." Through sexual violence, Stanley gains dominion over a woman of whiter pedigree and becomes, finally, "100% American."

In chapters 5 and 6, Brewer looks at the presentation of whiteness in the tumult of the Civil Rights era and Vietnam. In plays such as David Rabe's Sticks and Bones and Edward Albee's The American Dream, she sees a changing white society staged and deconstructed by the encounters with the raced "other." In her examination of Adrienne Kennedy's...