McKee Rankin and the Heyday of the American Theater by David Beasley (review)

522 REVI EWS tion of the American self in recent years. Here, as elsewhere. Wilmer never pauses to glance back at the implications of his own previous chapters, avoiding any real thread of American nationhood or identity and giving each chapter an odd feeling of disconnection from the rest of the book. For all of its diligent historical detail and close textual readings, there is very little "here" here. Wilmer's discussion of the Black Revolutionary Theatre and EI Teatro Campesino in his chapter on the 1960s might have been linked at least tangentially to either the Ghost Dance for its radical ethnic consciousness or to the class divisions so crucial to the workers of the Paterson strikers' pageant. The best part of this essay deals with the anti-war theatre of the decade, though its focus is actually on 1970 and a reality-theatre project called Operation Rapid American Withdrawal undertaken that year by Vietnam Veterans Against the War and documented in the film Different Sons. As with the 1913 pageant, Wilmeris at his best in this account of a"four day search-and-destroy mission" (William F. Crandell, qtd. in Wilmer 146) that sought to show residents of New Jersey something of what civilians in Vietnam were suffering every day_ Perhapsthe least successful chapter traces the history of feminism in American theatre. It has more than its share of errors and questionable judgments, such as that Ibsen's Dol/'s House "justifies a woman walking out on her husband and children" (153), or that in Susan Glaspell's Trifles the two women "destroy" (154) the evidence they find (in fact they merely suppress it, a crucial distinction in the context of the play). Karen Finley's name is spelled " Finlay" (167), and at one point Wilmer veers into a brief discussion of British playwrights Caryl Churchill and Sarah Daniels without seeming to notice that he has strayed from his focus on US theatre. Despite its broad chronological scope, its factual detail, and its frequent attention to important political moments and cultural theories, Wilmer's Theatre , Society and the Nation is ultimately not an ambitious rereading of American theatrical history. Its primary value lies in its mix of texts and in its resolve to leave alone some of the more dominant and well-studied figures in American drama, such as O'Neill, Odets, Miller, and Shepard. Though he is wise not to offer sweeping or definiti ve theories of "American identity," a stronger web of connections among these essays would have generated a more compelling vision of how theatre makes a nation. DAVID BEASLEY. McKee Rallkill alld the Heyday oj the Alllericall Theater. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2002. Pp. xvii + 520, illustrated. $39.95 (Pb). Reviewed by Rosemarie K. Bank, Kent State University The career of Canadian-born actor and manager McKee Rankin offers readers of this biography a micro-history of North American theatrical production Reviews 523 methods during the last half of the nineteenth century. That history details the shift from local repertory companies in the 1880s to the control of actor-managers and their companies by theatrical middlemen and, ultimately, business corporations. Instructive in McKee Rankin's case is the fact that, despite ofttold tales of Syndicate control, an energetic manager was able to keep old plays and a company on the road well into the twentieth century, to bring out stars, operate an acting school, and write, adapt, or rewrite existing plays. Former research librarian David Beasley has gathered a great deal of information concerning Rankin's life and career, largely derived from newspapers and archival holdings in the United States and Canada, augmented by a dissertation and a handful of articles about Rankin, his plays and companies, his actress-wife Kitty Blanchard, and his protegee and mistress Nance O'Neil, the whole offered to historians as "meat for their grinder" (xvi). Theatre scholars will indeed be glad to have so much food for thought about Rankin and the American theatre gathered in one place. Given the obvious labor the book has cost, the author and the subject have been ill-served by a failure to exert editorial control over this work. Of course...