The Most American Thing in America: Circuit Chautauqua as Performance (review)

Since its inception, the field of performance studies has widened theatre scholars' and practitioners' views of what constitutes performance, where it can be found, and what cultural work it accomplishes. At its best, this type of research also shows us how in certain instances performance can be a powerful embodiment of and influence upon the most fundamental and enduring beliefs of a community or a nation. Such a book is Charlotte Canning's The Most American Thing in America.

Canning's first challenge is in dealing with an American performance phenomenon that is largely unknown, and in many ways alien, to our contemporary culture. Rooted in a desire for rational education and moral entertainment on the part of nineteenth-century Methodists, and flourishing in a rural America distrustful of big-city entertainments, Chautauqua grew into a uniquely popular institution whose audience, as Canning describes it, was "small town, Protestant, agricultural, and patriotic; in short, mainstream midwestern America" (76).

From its beginnings in 1874 at Lake Chautauqua in upstate New York as an educational summer camp for Sunday-school teachers, Chautauqua expanded to provide larger audiences a season of edifying lectures, wholesome entertainment, and carefully controlled recreation. This formula proved so popular that hundreds of other cities and towns built their own permanent or "independent" Chautauquas. When the competition for Chautauqua "talent" became fierce and the routes of the entertainers chaotic and unprofitable, professional managers, who both believed in Chautauqua's ideals and understood its commercial potential, conceived of mobile Chautauquas that would travel to a town or small city, set up their characteristic brown tents, provide a week's worth of programming for adults and children, and then move on to the next locale on the tour. It is this "Circuit" Chautauqua, begun in 1904 and continuing until the end of the 1920s, that is the focus of Canning's research.

Even in its own day, Circuit Chautauqua constructed an ideal American world far from the experience of many in its audience, as well as of those who lived in larger urban centers where Chautauqua was unknown. Nevertheless, as Canning argues, in an era before sound films and radio, Chautauqua was an incredibly powerful unifying and vivifying influence on American culture. The strength of Canning's study lies in her careful reconstruction and analysis of the ways in which the Circuit Chautauquas performed "American." Canning asserts that "one could use the Circuits to write a history of the United States during the beginning of the twentieth century" (21), and her book demonstrates that this is in no way an overstatement. Out of the long, tangled, and often underdocumented annals of Circuit Chautauqua and of the period in which it flourished, Canning deftly chooses the threads that weave Chautauqua, performance, and America together. Chautauqua ratified the most cherished convictions of its small-town audiences by performing an image of the rural community as "the source of American values, morals, and beliefs" (75). Reinvigorated by seeing their principles articulated and validated in Chautauqua, rural populations worked harder to bring their ideals of community into being. Chautauqua managers viewed their shows as a kind of Greek agora, where the pressing issues of the day were debated and the populace was able to speak up in an exercise of their democratic rights. Canning argues that this ideal of participatory citizenship masked the comforting blend of Protestant religion and traditional moralistic culture that Circuit Chautauquas performed for their audiences.

As Canning points out, in its envisioning of community, and to a greater extent in its performance of "American," Circuit Chautauqua also reified and perpetuated racial, ethnic, and gender stereotypes, thus contributing to the construction of women and people of color as "other." A vivid example is the racist "Klantauqua" put on by the KKK and never fully condemned by the Circuit Chautauqua managers or companies.

In the second part of the book, Canning discusses...