Drama

Last year’s survey concentrated on performance’s effect on dramatic criticism. Meaning enlarges as new productions reveal added dimensions to a script, so that the meaning, in a sense, is ever expanding with each significant production or reinterpretation. This year’s works, however, are most notable for expanding the study of drama considerably by stretching the work through time. The result is fascinating dialogues with history enlarging both. Another new topic heading is “Drama and Capitalism,” and the other studies fit more comfortably into the more traditional headings of theory, groupings of plays, and individual studies of playwrights.

i Drama as History

The 2012 Outstanding Book Award winner from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education is Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights (NYU). In it Robin Bernstein examines Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin both as novel and as play through later material traces, especially using an illustrated handkerchief that depicts little Eva with her hand on Uncle Tom’s thigh: “[Playwright George] Aiken embedded in his script tableaux that restaged each of the six illustrations that Billings created for Jewett’s first American edition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin—including the arbor scene imprinted on the handkerchief and so many other items of material culture” (such as knickknacks in the theatre lobbies). Thus for Bernstein, the text for Uncle Tom’s Cabin includes not only the novel and the play versions but all the spin-offs imprinted with scenes from the work, even though such scenes were not in the novel and may have been initiated by the popular play versions or the later illustrations.

Bernstein’s materialist historical method is “the scriptive thing” that “captures the moment when dramatic narrative and movement through space are in the act of becoming each other. The handkerchief is both an artifact of and a scriptive prop within a performance.” And by tracing such scriptive things over time, Bernstein demonstrates how an antislavery novel became, later in the century, a sentimentalized view of life on the plantation in which slaves showed love and concern for benevolent masters. “The idea of childhood innocence and the bodies of living children have historically mystified racial ideology by hiding it in plain sight,” Bernstein argues. “Thus blackface imagery, which has been banished from polite society, thrives under the light cover of children’s culture and its penumbra of racial innocence … persist[ing] not only in Raggedy Ann and the Scarecrow [of Oz] but also in the faces and gloved hands of Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny.” Such analysis is surprisingly convincing and opens the way to a whole new approach to drama using this vastly expanded set of artifacts as they are revealed over time.

I am less comfortable with Bernstein’s announcement that “to the modern nose, much nineteenth-century literature might seem to stink of pedophilia.” The “proof” is given at the outset of the chapter on the play: “Uncle Tom spies Little Eva on the steamboat and ‘cut[s] cunning little baskets out of cherry-stones’ to ‘attract’ the child. Little Eva is initially ‘shy,’ and Tom finds it ‘not easy to tame her.’ But the girl ‘bashfull[y]’ accepts Tom’s gifts and soon the two get ‘on quite confidential terms.’ In this reading the seduction culminates when Eva ‘whisper[s] softly … “I want him.”’” The problem is that the proof is not strictly in the text, unfortunately, but is still evident “for scholars who read in this mode…. Such arguments that Little Eva and the Little Boy [with Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus] either reflect or produce eroticism inevitably fall short because they seek sexual content in Stowe’s and Harris’s prose—and that content is, in truth, sparse.” So to arrive at this interpretation of sexual intention, one needs to begin with the assumption that “physical tenderness can function as a necessary component of racial domination and violence.” Without textual proof for assertions of pedophilia, such assertions seem less than tenuous. But the new vistas revealed through historical method examining and privileging artifacts over text can legitimately expand the quest...