Drama, Theatre, and Identity in the American New Republic (review)

Readers who enjoyed Jeffrey H. Richards’s Theater Enough: American Culture and the Metaphor of the World, 1607–1789 will appreciate his new book. Narrowing his scope to just fifty years (1775–1825), Richards notes that “little has been said in detail about the particular plays or performances that graced—or disgraced—the stages and pages of American theatres and notebooks in the early republic” (1), an oversight he adeptly corrects. He examines “three interrelated problems”: the “un-Americanness” of the new nation’s theater and its connection to identity; the recognition that most American plays are influenced by other plays; and the response of the spectators, particularly to the identities presented to them on the stage (5). His purpose is “to investigate some of the ways the American theatre and a few playwrights struggled with the bold outlines and curious details of national, cultural, and ethnic representation to American audiences” (14). He aims not only to deepen or transform our knowledge of life in the early republic but also to explore the “confusions in identity raised by the transatlantic nature of the theatrical and dramatic enterprise in America” (15). Given the growing interest in this period of American literary history and the general critical neglect of the era’s playwrights, Richards’s book is especially timely.

After providing an introductory overview and ruminating about American identity and its connection to the stage, Richards launches (in part 1) into a discussion of plays that incorporate events of the American Revolution into their plots. In-depth discussions of such little-known texts as Crevecoeur’s “Landscapes,” O’Keefe’s The Poor Soldier, Murray’s The Traveler Returned, Munford’s The Patriots, and Dunlap’s André reveal that none of the plays are strictly nationalistic, for they all “encode some doubt about what precisely is to be the character of the American people either during the conflict or when the war is over” and “cannot be separated from the anxiety of separation generated by independence” (35). “Landscapes” attacks the American Revolution because it “denies to Americans any identity worth saving” (39). While portraying the war negatively, it also displays a wide variety of identities, and the dramatic form allows Crevecoeur “to explore the voices of arrogance and despair through the experiences felt by individual citizens rather than cast the thousands of small conflicts of the people’s war as one totalizing and abstract cause” (58). In the next chapter Richards shows how the stage history of O’Keefe’s Poor Soldier (which was performed not only by whites but also by an African-American troupe and occasionally by women cross-dressing as men) and how Dunlap’s Darby’s Return (a sequel to O’Keefe’s play which makes the lower-class Darby central to the action) both raise issues of identity. Moreover, by coupling Dunlap’s Darby with Royall Tyler’s Jonathan from The Contrast, Richards demonstrates how these two plays signaled a question as to who would become the American type. This sort of careful intertextualizing characterizes his study and presents a sense of the untapped richness residing within the theater of the era. Richards then shows how, by suppressing transatlantic differences and placing Britain and America on an equal footing, Murray’s play disavows any artistic dependence and advocates a modified Americanized British theater. Placing it alongside “Landscapes” and Munford’s Patriots, Richards deliberately returns to Murray’s play when he takes up the vexed issue of the Committees of Safety and their McCarthyesque activities. Marking how lower-class citizens can be entrusted with too much power, these plays expose the dangerous plasticity of identities taken up and put off at will. Finally, Dunlap’s André negotiates the relation between nationhood and manhood, showing how identity “rests in not simply the representation of some ideal or a type … but a series of unsettling questions about history, memory, and republican...