Interrogating America through Theatre and Performance (review)

{ 226 } BOOK REV IEWS vites all the elements of the production, including the audience, into one living space, drawn together by the power of spectacle. Part manifesto, part eulogy, American Drama in the Age of Film makes an impassioned case for the persistent significance of live, embodied performance that can never really be satisfied by cinema or fully captured on screen. —KURT EISEN Tennessee Technological University \ Interrogating America through Theatre and Performance. Edited by William W. Demastes and Iris Smith Fischer. New York: Palgrave-McMillan, 2006. 312 pp. $69.95 cloth. In his introduction to Interrogating America through Theatre and Performance, William W. Demastes posits that historically America and the notion of American identity have been continually marked by a spirit of optimism as well as by a corresponding sense of disillusionment. With this proposition as a starting point, Demastes and the authors within this collection set to the challenge of considering how theatre and performance enter into this debate and inform our understanding of American identity. This book project grew out of a 2005 conference for the American Theatre and Drama Society and the University of Kansas titled “Writing, Teaching, Performing America.” Juxtaposing the work of performance scholars and theatre historians as well as senior Americanists and emerging junior voices, this book imagines American identity as not fixed, but made and remade over time. The editors structure the articles chronologically , moving from considerations of nineteenth-century texts and performances up to examinations of post-9/11 American theatre and performance. Critical to all seventeen essays is the notion that performance can be an affective and effective arena for negotiating and defining American identity. This study foregrounds the dynamic power of performance to inform and even have an impact on the historical constitution of America. Accordingly , the articles focus on the intersection of art and politics. Articles take on the canonical figures—Susan Glaspell, Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller, and Tennessee Williams—not in relation to their aesthetic achievement but in terms of how their dramaturgy reflects on the particular social context. Noelia Hernando-Real explores Glaspell’s feminism and challenge to a unifying vision of American identity. Jeffrey Eric Jenkins effectively argues that, when first produced on Broadway, O’Neill’s Beyond the Horizon spoke to and capitalized on a { 227 } BOOK REV IEWS specific cultural moment. Christopher Bigsby’s “Arthur Miller: In Memoriam” points to Miller’s belief in the ability of the theatre to effect change. Bigsby goes on to outline the interrelations among Miller’s personal convictions, his social circumstances, and his theatrical work. Eschewing established critical labels of Williams as solely a “southern” or “apolitical” playwright, Janet V. Haedicke examines how Williams and The Glass Menagerie negotiate the concept of the American dream. Haedicke argues that Williams attempts to critique the borders of race, class, and gender that disprove the idealism inherent in the mythic American dream. Rightly, race and ethnicity are important considerations throughout the anthology. The book opens with Rosemarie K. Bank’s careful consideration in “The Savage Other” of how cultural performances by and about Native Americans at the 1893 Columbian Exhibition in Chicago informed concepts of American civilization and nationalism at that time. Banks frames her argument by making the case for how American cultural historiography has been deeply invested in processes of identifying and repositioning the discourse of the“Other.”Amy E. Hughes, in“Defining Faith: Reactions to Pro-Slavery Christianity in Antebellum America,” maintains that the abolitionist drama of the antebellum period “Othered” supposedly Christian slaveholders by ridiculing the hypocrisy of their faith. Jacqueline O’Connor and Ladrica Menson-Furr examine significant contemporary Chicano and African-American authors, respectively. What makes both articles interesting is that the authors examine the ways in which form informs the content. For O’Connor in “Facts on Trial: Documentary and Zoot Suit”it is Luis Valdez, the founder of El Teatro Campesino, and his seminal play Zoot Suit, which considers the Zoot Suit riots and the Sleepy Lagoon murder trial in Los Angeles 1942. O’Connor explores and analyzes how the play shapes, condenses, and reimagines the facts within its plotline.As O’Connor maintains, Valdez uses the documentary form to serve his...