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  • Strange Duets: Impresarios and Actresses In the American Theatre, 1865–1914
  • Eileen Curley
Strange Duets: Impresarios and Actresses In the American Theatre, 1865–1914. By Kim Marra . Studies in Theatre History and Culture Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2006; pp. xxii + 352. $47.95 cloth.

Kim Marra crafts an intricately woven discussion of managerial and personal relationships between three American managers and actresses that developed amid shifting theatrical trends and social mores between the Civil War and World War I. The post–Civil War reconstruction of national identities and negotiation of gender roles provide a complicated backdrop for an exploration of the careers of Augustin Daly and Ada Rehan, Charles Frohman and Maude Adams, and David Belasco and Mrs. Leslie Carter. Yet, Marra takes the reader into an even deeper world of biological, racial, sexual, and class-based power struggles, both real and assumed, and yet always exploited for optimum publicity and profit. The presentation of their leading ladies in elaborately controlled and coded productions allowed the three managers to become successful with an audience to which they themselves did not belong due to their own social, sexual, and/or racial outcast status. In part, their escape from poor immigrant backgrounds and ultimate success as theatrical tycoons came through the literal and theatrical conquering of the female bodies and emotions of their actresses.

Marra argues—in part through an unexpected yet thoroughly apropos discussion of the Phantom of the Opera in her epilogue—that for each manager, his leading "actress is a mask for her impresario to conceal his reviled traits, assert his power in high society, and gain public approbation. She is a mask also for the audience to remain in denial about the repressed sources of its pleasure" (259). The author unravels the intricate, coded messages and cultural biases that formed the basis of the relationship between manager and audience and were negotiated through the body of the actress. Each manager's ability to control his public image relied on his dexterous manipulation of the audience's assumptions about the sexuality of his leading actress, and the sexual relationship between actress and manager. "Public on a vast scale yet also intriguingly private, their relationships inspired visions of both idealized and forbidden conduct in a climate of increasing turmoil between men and women, management and labor, and white and non-white 'races'" (xxi).

Daly's 1887 production of The Taming of the Shrew with Ada Rehan as Katherine provides a fitting framework for the discussion of their relationship and a delightfully graphic opening to Marra's introduction. A suggestive letter, found during Daly's ongoing flirtation with Phoebe Russell, caused Rehan to assume that her affections had been betrayed and led to a delayed curtain and bloodshed at the 1888 premiere in London. Marra uses the episode to underscore how Daly directed Rehan to success, but was still dependent on her. Indeed, this interdependency between manager and actress is shown in all three relationships. The author emphasizes how Rehan, like the other women, "held the power, in spite of Daly's much vaunted omnipotence, to determine the success of the production" (39).

The Shrew discussion also introduces the complex interaction among actresses, their emotions, and their managers that provides a through-line in the book. Marra argues that the managers' publicly displayed control of the actresses and their emotions amid the extravagant presentation of a unified managerial vision enabled each manager to overcome his own individual societal and evolutionary shortcomings. For Daly, the "conquest of an actual woman, which the impresario appeared spectacularly to enact on the actress's body, metonymically signified the conquest of the feminine traits within himself" (52).

Each manager manipulated theatrical productions to show his respectable audiences that he could overcome his socially problematic traits through staged conquests of equally troublesome traits in leading actresses. For Daly and Rehan, contemporary views of Irish immigrants presented social barriers. Yet, Daly's dictatorial control over Rehan's grueling rehearsal and performance schedule would enable her to keep her natural emotional excesses under control, and allow him to satisfy his desire for respectability and upward mobility because he had conquered the "savage" actress.

Conversely, Maude...

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