The American Play, 1787-2000 (review)

{ 272 } Book Reviews see Ibsen live and breathe on the stage, the book is provocative and invaluable. We are left with a sense of Ibsen grasping the ankle of the angel“Idealism”until it blesses him, and he can move on. Joe Martin — Johns Hopkins University \ \ The Ameri­ can Play, 1787–2000. By Marc Robinson. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. 405 pp. $45.00 cloth. Marc Robinson’s The Ameri­ can Play, 1787–2000 explores the “nourishing form of ecology” (2) that shaped two centuries of Ameri­ can theatre. Robinson questions how Ameri­ can drama recycles and reinvents themes and forms, highlighting links between melodrama and the avant-­ garde, between Ameri­ can tragedy and vaudeville. The work offers both a general survey and a series of microhistories , cutting a wide swath through Ameri­ can dramatic and cultural history , while at the same time providing detailed textual analysis of a diverse array of materials. Robinson divides the study into an introduction and seven chapters.Though the book moves (essentially) in chronological order, Robinson avoids a strictly linear or evolutionary narrative by focusing on what he characterizes as the permanently unstable state of Ameri­ can theatre and culture and by questioning the meaning of time and timeliness in Ameri­ can drama. For Robinson, chaos, confusion, and self-­ doubt seem not only the hallmarks of many Ameri­ can dramas but the very qualities that underscore their “Ameri­ canness.” He prizes this “productive instability” as generative and even necessary (13). Robinson situates Royall Tyler’s The Contrast (1787) and William Dunlap’s André (1798) in his introduction, offering these two well-­ known plays as early examples of the ways in which Ameri­ can dramatists destabilized efforts to establish any kind of national aesthetic. He moves quickly past the history of the early Ameri­ can theatre into chapter 1, “Envisioning the Nineteenth Century.” Here he focuses on the visual literacy of Ameri­ can audiences, who, he argues, were conditioned to read multiple layers of meaning into the images they witnessed on the stage. Robinson begins the chapter with Henry James’s childhood recollections of the theatre (and will return to James throughout the book) and then segues into the staging history of plays such as The Drunkard (1844) and { 273 } Book Reviews Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), underscoring the intersections between the stage tableaux of the nineteenth century and silent-­ film spectacles of the twentieth. While Robinson acknowledges that the visual spectacle of the nineteenth-­ century theatre seldom held the audience enraptured for the entire play, he does suggest that the audience was “invested with the authority to engage the stage’s visual propositions, versed in the gestural languages that convey emotion and thought, and aware that spectatorship confirms or prefigures the acts of recognition by which one joins the surrounding culture” (42). His discussion of the visual seems particularly applicable to the realm of urban theatre, which might boast some of the more elaborate spectacles that he describes, as well as more sophisticated audience members (sophisticated in the sense that they were in the habit of attending theatre on a regular basis—whether at the Astor Place Opera House or the Bowery). For example, Robinson describes the intricacy of George Aiken’s adaptation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, noting that Aiken “makes visual and aural rhymes that complement Stowe’s narrative ones,” and that he “works out variations on a simple gestural or choreographic theme, and manipulates the stage itself as one might turn shapeless nature into a cultivated, symbolically coded landscape” (54). Given how widely Aiken’s play toured and how frequently it was adapted, truncated, or otherwise altered in its stagings throughout the United States, it would be interesting to speculate on how or whether these alternate versions managed to sustain the visual impact that Robinson argues for. Chapter 2, “Staging the Civil War,” examines the inadequacy of the post– Civil War theatre to express the full horror of the nation’s trauma. For Robinson , the visual spectacle that had dominated the antebellum period gave way to a diminished palette of image and gesture that expressed the literal poverty of Reconstruction and the emotional devastation that paralyzed the country. Robinson also...