Performing the American Frontier, 1870-1906 (review)

216Comparative Drama will continue that pattern. Alexander Shurbanov and Boika Sokolova are guardedly optimistic—an optimism that rests largely on the capacious shoulders of Shakespeare. Felicia Hardison Londre University ofMissouri-Kansas City Roger A. Hall. Performing theAmerican Frontier, 1870-1906. Cambridge Studies in American Theater and Drama 13. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xii + 297. $55.00. In the spring and summer of 1876, an avid playgoer in Chicago may very well have found him- or herselfat Hooley's Theatre for the premiere ofBret Harte's California mining camp melodrama Two Men ofSandy Bar, which would open in New York a few months later. Audiences in Rochester, New York, no doubt looked forward to the return of Frank Mayo, who came to the Corinthian to perform, for the thousandth but hardly the last time, the title role in Davy Crockett, with which he had succeeded fantastically on Broadway. During this same theatrical season, NewYorkers might have enjoyed Frank Frayne in a play called Si Slocum, which featured the trick-shooting prowess ofthe actor turned cowboyturned actor, and theymight also have attended a performance ofDashing Charlie starring Texas Jack Omohundro, a frontier scout who along with Buffalo Bill Cody had begun a few years earlier to perform for Broadway audiences a series of highly stylized, action-oriented renditions of life in the postCivil War West, ostensibly as he and Cody had experienced it. Or, a NewYorker might have gone during the winter to see Codyhimselfin Life on theBorder, one ofhis typical earlyblood-and-thunder melodramas. (In the 1870s, prior to embarking full-time as a traveling showman, Cody performed on the New York stage during the winters and scouted on the Plains for the military during the summers.) By 4 July, reports telling ofthe destruction ofCuster's Seventh Cavalry at Little Bighorn had begun to appear, and six weeks later, on 14 August, a loose dramatization of these events called Sitting Bull; or, Custer's Last Charge opened at New York's Wood's Theater. A few weeks after this, Custer and His Avengers opened at the Bowery. Finally, in what is frequently recognized as one of the most significant instances of a person's crafting a persona and an autobiographical record via the staging of history, Cody's The Red Right Hand; or, Buffalo Bill's FirstScalpfor Custer appeared on Broadway in 1877 to recount the already famous tale ofCody's hand-to-hand battle with a Cheyenne named Yellow Hand a few weeks after Custer's defeat. Reviews217 With respect to the representation oftheWildWest onstage, however, these examples from the United States's centennial year represent but a fraction of what was a tremendous cultural phenomenon. Even a cursory glance at Roger A. Hall's Performing the American Frontier, 1870-1906will convey the vital role of the frontier West in post-Civil War attempts at cultural and national selfdefinition . This strikingly thorough book documents and describes roughly 150 theatrical productions from the last three decades of the nineteenth century (up until the arrival of cinema) that in some manner relied on the frontier as setting or backdrop. This does not mean, however, that anything resembling a genuinely accurate rendition ofwhat was happening on the frontier could be found in New York City's popular theater. At the outset of his book Hall acknowledges that"[t]he drama of the frontier as it was presented to eastern audiences in the late nineteenth centurywas certainly fictional, even when it sprang from actual events. It both perpetuated myths and provided realistic images. Theatrical presentations reinforced popularbut misleading images ofwhite settlers as victims ofnative populations, responding with violence only when provoked by savage atrocities" (3). The full measure of Hall's extensive research thus emerges in his wonderful explication ofthe many and often contradictory ways in which a popular dramatic art form imagined and translated, usually into melodrama, the facts ofcross-cultural encounters, imperial expansion, and racial conflict. To be sure, not every play mentioned in Performing theAmerican Frontier was necessarily engaged in furthering an ideology of conquest. However , the extraordinary popularity of many of the productions that Hall mentions does raise the question oftheater's ability to affect...