American Theater in the Culture of the Cold War: Producing and Contesting Containment, 1947-1962 (review)

It may seem at times an over-cultivated and often-tired exercise, but in light of the most recent U.S. presidential election, it is perhaps a good thing that the specter of McCarthyism still hovers close to the surface in American criticism. The inescapable blending of popular culture, political ideology, and the commercial stage, with McCarthyism, the "red scare," and the sudden growth of popular entertainment characterizes the 1950s in America and remains a rich vein, with a renewed relevance in the twenty-first century. Curiously, only a handful of theatre scholars have dealt with the Cold War era in any substantive way and none has looked as closely at the relationship of audience, performance, society, and politics during the 1950s as Bruce C. McConachie in his latest study of American society and theatre.

McConachie is the first American theatre historian to understand and examine in a cohesive manner the complex relationship between the often-odd commercialism of Broadway and the pervasive mindset of commercial theatre audiences during the Cold War era. McConachie's richly researched and multidimensional study provides a close, sociopolitical reading of the major plays of the commercial stage at the height of McCarthyism and anticommunist hysteria. He examines metaphors of containment in a half-dozen major plays of the period and relates them to dozens of other plays that helped define, both publicly and metahistorically, the Cold War.

McConachie begins by offering a genuinely groundbreaking reassessment of what Broadway was in the late forties and fifties, adroitly contextualizing the drama and professional-theatre experience of that era with the political realities of the time. Using the linguistic theory and cognitive psychology recently developed by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson as a methodological foundation, McConachie looks at theatre as part of America's "culture of containment" (9) – a pervasive aspect of the Cold War ethos that essentially delineated common perceptions of what was considered to be either inside or outside sociopolitical norms (the us-versus-them phenomenon). "If this is correct, as it seems to be," McConachie says, "our sensory-motor systems thus limit the abstract reasoning that we can perform. Anything we can think or understand is shaped by, made possible by, and limited by our bodies, brains, and our embodied interactions in the world. This is what we have to theorize with" (26). He also examines containment liberalism – the odd sociopolitical ideology that emerged in the late forties that created the us-versus-them perception that is now a pervasive, perhaps even definitive, part of America. And he establishes the three dominant thematic figures apparent in the contained liberalism of the Cold War era: the empty boys, family circles, and fragmented heroes. In the remaining chapters, McConachie focuses on the development of marginalized otherness – queer, racial, and female – and their collective signifiers: consumerism, suburbanization, and the bomb. More significantly, he explores how these others represent oppositional theatre within the commercial framework of contemporary American entertainment.

McConachie traces the conceptual development of his three thematic types through a careful and skillful blending of close textual analysis and rich cultural contextualization. His comparison, in chapter two, of three key works (Seven Year Itch, Hatful of Rain, and A Cat on a Hot Tin Roof) offers an excellent recital of just what these plays meant to their audiences (or perhaps should have meant) through the imagery of the empty boy – an American hero deflected away from manhood, reflecting a gendered ambivalence that was both attractive and dangerous. Chapter three looks at the containment of family circles and racism, using The King and I, A Dark at the Top of the Stairs, and A Raisin in the Sun. Martha Graham's Night Journey and Archibald MacLeish's J.B. are the basis of chapter four, where McConachie establishes the provocative notion of the fragmented hero's emerging from nuclear narratives, as well as the...