Early American Theatre from the Revolution to Thomas Jefferson: Into the Hands of the People (review)

At the close of William Dunlap's History of the American Theatre, the protohistorian of the American stage appended a reflection on the ideal model for the young nation's theatre—France's national theatre, the Comédie Française. Dunlap's hope of a similar American National Theatre of well-paid actors and judicious authors subsidized by the state ("the public") rather than private patronage in which Americans as subjects and audience of a democratic utopia found "pure and noble" representations never happened. Why the noble idea never happened is part of the interesting project that Heather Nathans undertakes in her study of post-Revolutionary theatre in America. Company names notwithstanding (Old American Company, New American Company), the theatre in the new republic remained a competitive, commercial enterprise of British-trained actors and London repertory, indebted to the old patronage system, as it had been before the Revolution and continued so through Dunlap's lifetime. In a way, this book is part of a far larger conversation about the many attempts and as many failures for America to establish a National Theatre. Indeed, there seems to be something inherent in the very idea of America that resists the notion of a single national identity, hence the difficulty in using the theatre to create one. This was the challenge in 1800 for William Dunlap, who envisioned a theatre "in the hands of the people," and the challenge for Nathans documenting it two centuries later.

Early American Theatre from the Revolution to Thomas Jefferson: Into the Hands of the People pursues this problem of constructing homo Americanus in the nationally formative period between 1780 and 1800. Nathans traces out the post-Revolutionary theatre that emerged in Boston, Philadelphia, and New York with an ear tuned to the cultural conversations that surrounded that elusive American identity in the representations, audiences, and playhouses. What she pursues in this admirable work is not the debate over the theatre—that's a bit of a trope—but the unpredictable and often messy process of working out what the business of theatre might mean in the emerging democracy that hosted it, what it might have been in this era of nation-building and great promise.

The book begins in familiar territory, rehearsing the pre- and immediately post-Revolution opposition to theatre as an extravagant Tory pastime, but quickly moves into deeper waters—the inceptive period of the mid-1780s and early 1790s, when the professional companies returned. The book hits its stride in chapters 3, 4, and 5, in which Nathans focuses on the local social and political landscape of her three case studies—Philadelphia, Boston, and New York. She examines the establishment of playhouses in the context of other emerging associations—the Tontine Association in Boston, the Tammany Society in New York—to offer an insightful local read. Nathans employs a few lesser known "native geniuses" (American-born John Murdock, the barber-turned-playwright, and William White, the Boston Brahmin-turned-actor) as well, as subjects through which to interrogate the function of both nationalism and class in the early republic. In particular, Nathans maps out how the working class of New York artisans and small merchants made their presence felt as a potent force in the theatre, though the accomplishments of their working-class author were short-lived. In Boston, the elite may have promoted its native son William White on the stage, but the Boston mechanics boycotted and established their own playhouse. These chapters reveal a world that has replaced American-British hostilities with one of homegrown American political class factions, of mechanics and merchant elites supporting, detracting, boycotting, and contesting authors, actors, even the architecture and seating arrangements of playhouses. What emerges is the imagined democratic community of Dunlap quickly eroding into open anxieties of class. Even the playhouses themselves, like the Chestnut Street theatre, retained the class division of pit...