Introduction

Introduction In April of 2006 Atlanta’s Agnes Scott College hosted the ¤fteenth annual SETC Theatre Symposium. The focus of the gathering was theatre and the moral order, a broadly de¤ned topic that drew more than thirty-¤ve participants from throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe. The purpose of the gathering was to investigate how, historically, the theatre has been perceived as a focus of moral anxiety or, conversely, as an instrument of moral and social reform. These two perceptions of the stage—the one grounded in neoPlatonic anxieties about the putative moral dangers inherent in performance itself, the other in the Aristotelian celebration of the utopian possibilities and regenerative potential of theatrical “instruction”— form a familiar trope repeated by critics throughout history, from Plato, Tertullian, William Prynne, and Jessie Helms at one pole to Aristotle, Moliere, Henry Irving, and Hallie Flanagan on the other. Theatre and Moral Order begins with essays by our two distinguished keynoters, Professor Rosemarie K. Bank of Kent State University, author of Theatre Culture in America, 1825–1860, and Steve Scott, actor, director, and associate producer at Chicago’s Tony Award–winning Goodman Theatre. In “Don’t Let What Really Happened Get in the Way of the Truth: Re®ections on Theatre, Ethics, and ‘The Moral Order ,’” Professor Bank considers George Catlin’s Indian Gallery (1844); Buffalo Bill’s engagement at the Columbian Exposition of 1893; and other ethnographic depictions of the savage “other,” the moral rami-¤cations of “staging” the “native,” and, as she puts it, “the power of the ungenuine, the ¤ctive, the performative to be more true than the true.” Written from the viewpoint of a professional theatre practitioner, Scott’s “What Moral Order? Observations from the Trenches” grapples with the moral function of theatre in an increasingly fragmented world where any notion of a moral order has been replaced by multiple moral and ethical codes. The following three essays are concerned with the early American stage as a vehicle for social and cultural reform. Dave Carlyon looks at the surprisingly antitheatrical impulses of William Dunlap, the “Father of the American Theatre,” while John Frick examines the sometimes complicated relationship between the so-called moral reform melodrama and the broader reformist ideologies and movements of the nineteenth century. For the producers of moral reform melodrama the stage was a place for the fruitful intersection of commercial interests and social consciousness (albeit not always seamless), whereas for Dunlap the stage is a place where practitioners must remain vigilant against the theatre’s own worst impulses and excesses. Eileen Curley looks at the ways in which organizers of charity theatricals negotiated standards of middleclass respectability (particularly with regard to women) even as the lines between the socially acceptable amateur stage and the morally ambiguous professional world became increasingly blurred in the late nineteenth century. Curley’s article reminds us that moral ambiguity has fallen hardest on women and, certainly within the canon of Western dramatic literature, on “fallen women.” Rachel Rusch tracks the doomed courtesan—speci¤cally the paradigmatic character of Marguerite Gautier—as she becomes a barometer of the constantly shifting ground of late nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury moral and sexual discourse. In her treatment of Aphra Behn’s The Feigned Courtesans Leah Lowe demonstrates the ways in which Behn, the ¤rst professional female playwright of the English-speaking world, collapses the traditional binary of virgin/prostitute and creates a liminal space in which “feminine sexual self-determination” subverts Restoration patriarchal norms. Next the collection offers two essays linked to what has in recent years been loosely termed “the culture wars.” Roger Freeman looks at the disjunction between text and performance in two productions of The Laramie Project, particularly the ways in which these productions impose an extratextual moral gloss on what Freeman considers a morally “neutral” text. The ¤nal essay is Jim Fisher’s personal memoir of the controversy surrounding his production of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. Fisher, one of the country’s foremost Kushner scholars, recounts the attempt by of¤cials at one of the nation’s prominent liberal arts colleges to censor a theatre production, a chilling reminder that the academic and artistic freedom so many...