White People Do Not Know How to Behave at Entertainments Designed for Ladies and Gentlemen of Color: William Brown's African and American Theater (review)

Marvin McAllister's engaging White People Do Not Know How to Behave at Entertainments Designed for Ladies and Gentlemen of Color joins two other recent publications (George A. Thompson's Documentary History of the African Theatre and Shane White's Stories of Freedom in Black New York) in recovering one of the most significant moments in early African American theatre and culture—the history of New York's short-lived African Theatre Company. McAllister's study provides an interpretive history that frames the theatre as "an inclusive, intercultural, multicultural, and tri-racial national imaginary" (1). He argues that by studying the audiences for William Brown's theatrical ventures (both its black supporters and white detractors), contemporary historians may come to a greater understanding of the complex forces that have shaped American theatre (2).

Comparatively little is known about William Brown. A ship's steward for many years, he retired to New York in the early nineteenth century and opened a pleasure garden for the city's African American community. His success there inspired three successive theatrical projects that McAllister describes as the Minor Theatre, the American Theatre, and the African Company. Yet, McAllister notes, "I am concerned less with Brown's personal history than with the cultural identities or personas he cultivated throughout his unfolding entertainment institutions" (4). McAllister offers Brown as a case study for the process of nineteenth-century African American identity formation. Tracing Brown's process of "becoming," McAllister divides the work into five thematically organized chapters, each of which explores a new stage of Brown's development. Throughout his study, he explores Brown's own sense of agency in shaping his identity, as well as his larger mission to create a fully integrated American culture. He also contends that in attempting to define identity through performance, Brown was participating in a broader American tradition that had emerged during the Revolution as colonists appropriated diverse racial and ethnic masks in their efforts to negotiate new social, political, and cultural boundaries. As Brown interwove African, white European, and Indian identities on his stage, he invited audiences to simultaneously embrace and question the numerous contradictions embedded in American culture.

Chapter 1 describes the creation of Brown's pleasure garden (known to the city's white community as the "African Grove"). It also examines a phenomenon that McAllister describes as "whiteface minstrelsy," a process through which blacks perform/embody the traits of white privilege (15). McAllister claims these performances as evidence of a "growing, unsanctioned, black-dominated counterculture" that laid the foundation for Brown's next venture (21).

Chapter 2 explores what McAllister defines as Brown's "first self-articulated institutional identity"—his "minor theatre" (39). Central to McAllister's study, the phrase, "minor theatre" springs from a seventeenth-century English tradition, regulating distinctions between "major" licensed theatres that were entitled to produce certain kinds of "legitimate" drama versus their "illegitimate" counterparts, the so-called minor theatres that focused on pantomimes, ballad operas (considered a more popular/populist form of musical theatre), and dance. Though no formal licensing system existed in the United States, an informal hierarchy prevailed, and New York's "major" theatre was the Park Street playhouse. Brown's first theatrical efforts dwelt in the shadow of this theatre, though Brown's playhouse quickly emerged as a rival to the Park (if only for curiosity value at first). McAllister also credits Brown with the development of what he terms the "stage European," a theatrical type he says, that "can be succinctly defined as black actors performing whiteness through white characters" (51).

Throughout his study McAllister draws on the work of Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Homi Bhabha, Joseph Roach, bell hooks, David Roediger, Jose Munoz, and others to frame his discussion of...