Performing America: Cultural Nationalism in American Theater (review)

476Comparative Drama Jeffrey D. Mason and J. Ellen Gainor, eds. Performing America: Cultural Nationalism in American Theater. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999. Pp. vi + 250. $44.50. Tony Kushner's epic Angek in America, discussed in this volume's final essay, opens with a Rabbi using a funeral eulogy to reflect on the immigrant experience and the failed construction of America, which he calls "the melting pot where nothing melted"—and claims"[?]o such place exists."Much mainstream popular culture would hold otherwise, eliding differences and divisions to suggest the existence of a monolithic, homogeneous nation. Yet, as Jeffrey Mason argues in his afterpiece, to valorize such a construct as "America" has come to demand excluding what is "not," thus "lead[ing] to a negativist strategy for asserting one's 'American' status by displacing, relocating, or actually erasing the adversary" (234). The essays that he and Ellen Gainor collect here aim not only to "theorize" American drama but also to expand discourse about American theater by demonstrating its sometimes "resistant" and "disruptive" role in performing a national narrative. To accomplish this, the contributors engage a breadth ofcritical lenses—newhistoricist, feminist, postcolonialist, queer theory, cultural studies, and performance theory among them—in order to expose, to "perform," ifyou will, the gaps and fissures beneath those elisions within race, class, and gender/sexuality that Kushner sets out to interrogate. The editors organize fJieir materials into two parts: "Nation Then" and"Nation Now." The first includes essays by Ginger Strand on post-Revolutionary tiieater in Boston;byRosemarie Bank on cultural preservation in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and the appropriation by theater ofthe archival function of museums; by Kim Marra on die actor/manager Augustin Daly and his relationship with the actress Ada Rehan; by Lee Woods on vaudeville as both entertainment and commerce, forming, as it does, part ofthe nation's expansionist agenda in spreading the free enterprise system; by Charlotte Canning on the Chatauqua circuit; by David Krasner on black nationalism in a W. E. B. Du Bois pageant play—raising issues that call to mind the recent contentious debates between AugustWilson and Robert Brustein; and byAnn Larabee on urban noncommercial community playhouses. The second section features Josephine Lee on AsianAmerican drama and the difficulty faced by "hyphenated-identities" (139) in negotiating sex and gender roles; Tiffany Lopez on Chicana theater; Harry Elam and Alice Rayner on Suzan-Lori Parks's America Play, Robert Vorlicky on male monologue/autoperformance theater; and David Savran on Kushner's play and the Queer Nation movement. The essays in part 1 are largely historical and never less than informative, though they tend to be much less dependent upon archival research than one expects for studies ofworks and authors from the period. A few remain discrete Reviews477 studies ofbasicallyone or two plays (this is true ofElam and Raynor's treatment of Parks and Savran's of Kushner in the second section as well) and could benefit considerablyfrom greater allusiveness and expansiveness; and atleast a couple strain to find a continuing relevance for their subject matter through inept analogy or comparison with contemporary issues. The question ofaudience, and ofwhether it was intended as homogeneous or exclusionary in nature, pervades several of these studies. Strand focuses primarily on contrasting Henry Brooke's Gustavus Vasa at the Federal Street Theater and John Daly Burk's Bunker Hill, or the Death ofGeneral Warren at the Haymarket to argue that the choice ofwhich play to attend was a political act and ideological marker ofits audience. Both Canning and Krasner discuss performances that reached vast numbers: Canning conceives of Chatauqua as nothing less than a "cultural assembly line" (94), addressing an audience of thirty million in some twenty thousand cities, while Krasner reports that Du Bois's The Star of Ethiopia, requiring a cast of 350, was once performed before thirty thousand spectators. But whereas Du Bois, writing what he saw as a corrective to a limiting view of négritude as anti-intellectual, expounded a black nationalist and separatist agenda, the neo-evangelical Chatauqua movement fostered assimilation into aunified and undifferentiated whole, reimagined along the British Protestant/Calvinist lines of an ethically sanctioned capitalism . The audience for...