Laboring to Play: Home Entertainment and the Spectacle of Middle-Class Cultural Life, 1850-1920, and: The Most American Thing in America: Circuit Chautauqua as Performance (review)

acknowledges, it is challenging to select scripts for an anthology. Some other superlative examples of children’s theatre plays for future consideration include Nilo Cruz’s A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings, José Cruz González’s Lily Plants a Garden, Kevin Henkes’s Lilly’s Purple Plastic Purse, Luis Alfaro’s arrangement of Black Butter®y, Super Chela, Piñata Woman and Other Super Hero Girls Like Me, Naomi Iizuka’s Citizen 13559: The Journal of Ben Uchida, Kia Corthron’s Snapshot Silhouette, and Karen Zacharias’s Einstein Is a Dummy. Theatre for Children: Fifteen Classic Plays is structured similarly to another excellent theatre for young audience anthology, published in 1998 and also edited by Jennings, Theatre for Young Audiences: Twenty Great Plays for Children. Jennings’s respect for the child audience is evident with his discerning selection of artistically evocative, highly entertaining, and educational plays. He boldly assembles plays that ask the questions youth are seeking answers to and that challenge conventional boundaries of what children should be privileged to see as audience members. —KRISTIN LEAHEY University of Texas at Austin \ Laboring to Play: Home Entertainment and the Spectacle of Middle-Class Cultural Life, 1850–1920. By Melanie Dawson. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005. x + 257 pp. $39.75 cloth. The Most American Thing in America: Circuit Chautauqua as Performance. By Charlotte Canning. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press,2005.xi + 268 pp. $34.95 hardcover. In Laboring to Play, Melanie Dawson invites her readers on an insider’s guided tour of home and community entertainments between 1850 and 1920, when ordinary Americans enjoyed games, charades, tableaux vivant, amateur theatricals , recitations, and pageants. The pre-airwaves entertainments, like today’s video games and electronic equipment, came with written rules and instructions , and these guidebooks are at the heart of Dawson’s investigation. Her thesis is that the texts “implicitly argue that how one used leisure time was just as signi¤cant as how one earned a living” (13). Dawson proposes to explore this high-stakes recreation as “a performative, re®ective space, a place to test out visions of a culture in the process of (trans)formation. Through the physical, temporal, spectacular, and ultimately, self-conscious practices of home enterBOOK REVIEWS { 148 } tainment, [where] middling Americans could perform their new postures, attitudes , and behaviors—during their leisure hours and in the everyday scenarios that followed” (19). Does my choice of the word proposes in the previous paragraph suggests equivocation? Yes. Although Dawson concludes that home entertainment has “dual roots in both texts and performances” (209), the performance historian may be disappointed by this book, which gets closest to dealing with what real people were actually doing when it deals with the instructions that came in entertainment guides. There is frustratingly little about the “everyday scenarios that followed”(or preceded) the entertainments. Suchscenarios primarily emerge in Dawson’s analysis of novels, as well as a few short stories and plays. A short list of these includes Jane Eyre; The Wide, Wide World; Uncle Tom’s Cabin; The House of Mirth; The Tragic Muse; My Antonia; Main Street; Louisa May Alcott’s novella “Behind a Mask”; and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland . While Dawson asserts that we cannot know exactly what ordinary people thought or did, she does not hesitate to attribute meaning to the labors she describes and uses her readings of the novels to stand in for what citizen practitioners might have done or thought. More attention to daily life would have contextualized the leisure practices that too often emerge here via a kind of belletristic rhetoric. Nevertheless, Dawson covers fascinating terrain. If she fails to stop at many performance junctures, she still scores a verbal hit with every textual site she visits. Her ¤rst three chapters offer numerous examples of entertainments that required physical involvement and often elaborate costumes and props. The paradox (and therefore, probably, the appeal) at the heart of midcentury games like “The Genteel Lady,” “The Trades,” “The Stage Coach,” “I’ve Come to Torment You,” or “Blindman’s Bluff” is the specter of people who were striving for gentility in their everyday lives using their leisure hours indulging in bodily distortion...