Pioneer Performances: Staging the Frontier by Matthew Rebhorn (review)

“Go West, young man, and grow up with the country”: that imperialist bromide of nineteenth-century American Manifest Destiny long ago became a catchphrase conjuring images of covered wagons spreading across the plains and freedom-seeking settlers battling “savage” Aboriginals. In the twenty-first century, this advice might readily be offered to scholars seeking new territory in dire need of historical re-examination. Matthew Rebhorn’s Pioneer Performances undertakes this arduous journey on our behalf and arrives on a contested patch of ground where at least three important developments in recent humanities scholarship intersect. First, in adumbrating a performative history of the American frontier, that unparalleled lieu de memoire, Rebhorn provides a valuable supplement and corrective to the late-twentieth-century school of New Western History, which interrogated and uncovered the ideological underpinnings of the westward expansion. Second, Rebhorn’s focus on depictions of Native Americans in a variety of nineteenth-century performance texts enhances (and again, occasionally counters) work by Philip J. DeLoria, Laura M. Stevens, and Gordon Sayre analysing depictions of Native Americans in texts meant chiefly for consumption by white audiences. Lastly, Rebhorn takes a major step westward toward exploring a performed frontier that has been indicated but not yet mapped in detail by American theatre historians, such as Rosemarie K. Bank, Joseph Roach, and Marc Robinson. Rebhorn hitches his wagon and lights out for the territory, showing readers that the “frontier” myth is as much a creation of north-eastern urban theatres as it is of the westward expansion. He also demonstrates that the definition of this seemingly limitless dream space allowed for visions of freedom that challenged the hegemonic racial and gender norms that, for so long, formed the stuff of not only mythical but also historical narrative.

Showing a gift for uncovering apt intersections of time, place, and dramatis personae that marks the entire book, Rebhorn opens his analysis at the World’s Columbian Fair in Chicago in 1893, where Frederick Jackson Turner gave the lecture that would birth the historiography of the frontier, roughly half a mile from the performance site of Buffalo Bill Cody and his Wild West show. Rebhorn unfolds the key ideological similarities between Turner’s and Cody’s depictions of the frontier through his own method, which he refers to as “New Western Genealogy” (6). This theoretically nuanced intervention into the “march of progress” histories of both the United States and its performance culture assumes that the manufactured imaginary space of the frontier was “thematically richer, more diverse, and more radical than has previously been supposed” (5). Rebhorn not only rereads well-known nineteenth-century texts but also rescues from obscurity once-popular plays, such as Wep-Ton-No-Mah, the Indian Mail Carrier,in which the Native American actress Gowongo Mohawk toured, in a breeches role, as a muscular young man dreaming of the sort of freedom available only on a frontier. Such a performance resists the sort of civilizing petticoat that Turner and Cody pinned not only to the West but also to Cody’s star performer, the trick-shot artist Annie Oakley (11).

Rebhorn’s broad scope touches on a number of the most important aspects of the nineteenth-century American popular theatre: the popularity of “redface” performances of Native American heroes, such as Edwin Forrest’s star turn in Metamora; the emergence in comedy of the frontiersman character, such as James Kirk Paulding’s Nimrod Wildfire in The Lion of the West; blackface minstrelsy’s interconnection with the frontier, not only through the evolution of T.D. Rice’s “Jim Crow” character on the road, but also through the “wild” nature of the character himself; the rise of race-driven melodrama, such as Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon, which Rebhorn brilliantly repositions as a frontier text; and the effort of postbellum playwrights, such as Augustin Daly, to shift the national imagination once again toward the West, through the stage. At each turn, he offers a revision to the...