The Birth of a National Drama

An ambitious volume, this. To encapsulate the history of, and provide a controlling interpretive paradigm for, more than two hundred years of dramatic practice in a country as heterogenous as the United States within four hundred pages (three hundred and fifty, not counting the copious endnotes and index) is a daunting task. Marc Robinson, Professor of Theatre Studies and English at Yale University and Adjunct Professor of Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism at the Yale School of Drama, is up to it. His previous volume, The Other American Drama, promulgated an alternative canon of twentieth-century plays for American theatrical history, offering up Stein, Shepard, and Fornes in opposition to O'Neill, Miller, and Mamet.

Literary canon-building seems, in these days of performance studies—Schechner, Phelan and Lehmann—somewhat oldschool, however revisionist the impulse. Implicitly accepting Eric Bentley's definition of the written play as drama, making a distinction between this literary form and "theatre" itself, Robinson daringly casts an eye on an extraordinarily broad landscape of literary effort, providing close readings of plays from Royall Tyler's 1787 The Contrast to Wallace Shawn's 1996 The Designated Mourner. The means by which he gets from here to there requires an interpretive roadmap, especially as he attempts a radical rereading of American dramatic history.

The metaphors of landscape and mapmaking are deliberately chosen, for his interpretive strategy in The American Play is to consider the means by which American dramatists have explored the nature of visibility and spectatorship in the theatre itself. "In twentieth-century American theatre," Robinson writes in his introduction, "the uncertainties loom as large and grow as vivid as the images. Spectators are asked to scan the stage's uncharted territory as much as stop upon its attractions, to inhabit ambiguities no tableau can relieve, and to let their attention dilate in order to mark the boundaries keeping them from all they cannot see."

Robinson traces these uncertainties and ambiguities of vision and spectatorship from the invention of the American ideal, the cobbling together of an American history or character, to ideas of the American self, expressed as early on as the late-eighteenth century. The grandeur of the American project, he suggests, uniquely places the spectator in a position from which he can choose among a multiplicity of objects on the stage in a freeing of the spectator's imaginative capabilities—the presentation of an American wilderness of the mind, so to speak. Ironically, this realization comes at the close of the American frontier, in the late-nineteenth century. Steele MacKaye's Specctatorium, was a "spectacular" theatrical presentation of the Christopher Columbus saga, and it failed in McKaye's mission to have spectators "lose themselves in all-enveloping imagery and an ecstatic experience of spectatorship," Robinson writes. "They instead contended with the excruciating allure of images and landscapes that remained wholly speculative. The only reliable object of attention was a figure shaped by his yen to see, and to make others see, a performance permanently locked within [MacKaye's] imagination"—suggesting MacKaye as a ur-Richard Foreman, in whose failure a new, unique approach to spectatorship suggested itself.

Robinson draws upon a multidisciplinary toolbox of multicultural references and analytical devices, utilizing aesthetic advances in photography (Matthew Brady), prose literature (Henry James and Edith Wharton) and dance (George Balanchine) to provide innovative manipulations of the alternative canon of American drama he seeks to compile. It is much to his credit that his analytic approach provides convincing contemporary readings of many plays previously consigned to the library shelves. Plays such as William Dunlap's a"first American tragedy" André, set during the Revolutionary War, William Gillette's Secret Service, and George L. Aiken's stage adaptation of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin are ably resuscitated, and here Robinson's study is at its most evocative and compelling. Shifting definitions of visibility and invisibility, of conspiracy and melodramatic revelation, compel many of these dramatists to question the notions of reality or naturalism itself. Robinson also discovers a metatheatricality that...