Native Americans as Shown on the Stage, 1753-1916 by Eugene H. Jones (review)

292Comparative Drama There is virtually nothing to fault in this extraordinary book. Whether one is already familiar with this period or not, Russian and Soviet Theater 1905-1932 is a fascinating, often moving, and always inspiring recreation of perhaps the greatest era in modern theatrical art. JAMES FISHER Wabash College Eugene H. Jones. Native Americans as Shown on the Stage, 1753-1916. Metuchen, New Jersey, and London: Scarecrow Press, 1988. Pp. ix + 210. $22.50. From the time the native people of the American continents were first depicted in two Jacobean masques composed for the marriage of James I's daughter Elizabeth in 1613 (one by Sir Francis Bacon, the other by George Chapman, both in elaborate productions by Inigo Jones) and mentioned in Ben Jonson's play The Staple of News, numerous authors—including William Davenant, John Dryden, Aphra Behn, John Dennis, John Gay, Jean Philippe Rameau, Voltaire, and John Cleland, among many others—wrote works featuring native American characters. The first play about Native Americans written and performed in America, Le Père Indien, did not appear, however, until 1753. Composed in French by an otherwise unknown writer, Le Blanc de Villeneuve, an officer stationed in the colony of Louisiana, the play was performed by an amateur company at the governor's mansion, no proper theater having yet been built at that time. And though plays about Indians held the stage for several centuries in England and on the Continent (and in America from middle of the eighteenth century)—all written by white playwrights—it wasn't until Lynn Riggs' The Cherokee Night was performed in 1930 that a stage work by a full-blooded Native American had ever been performed. Eugene Jones' purpose in Native Americans as Shown on the Stage, 1753-1916 is "to examine the attitudes toward Native Americans as demonstrated in the ways they were characterized by white playwrights" and "to show how these characterizations apparently masked white people's fear of Indians as obstacles to the fulfillment of their desire to settle in the New World." Jones examines some nearly three hundred theater works featuring Native Americans (plays, ballets, operas, and pantomines) to demonstrate how they evolved from racist stereotypes— the Noble Savage, the Pathetic Dusky Maiden, the Indian as drunken parasite—to individuals with distinct personalities, "honorable human beings with a right to exist." The principal forces which helped bring about more realistic presentations of Indians, Jones argues, include the influence of the women's movement toward emancipation; a growing sense of pride in all things American, including Indians (accented by the Centennial celebrations of 1876); the end of any presumed Indian menace on the vanishing Western frontier in the 1890's; the rise of the American local color movement in which many writers dramatized the everyday life of plain people; and the urban growth and technological changes and their effect on American social life, including the entertainment industry. Reviews293 Jones details many works, among them Edwin Forrest's greatest hit, Metamora; the wonderful burlesque Po-Ca-Hon-Tas; or The Gentle Savage (a two-act musical in which the traditionally accepted version of the Pocahontes story is turned topsy-turvy); and Mary Austin's tragic The Arrow-Maker (Austin had lived with the Indians of the California desert, was a prominent feminist—and one of those exceptional writers who came to prominence at the turn of the twentieth century, including Willa Cather, Kate Chopin, Sarah Orne Jewett, and others). Of special note is an appendix, "A Chronological Checklist of Plays and Other Theatre Works Featuring Native American Characters," which begins with the 1658 William Davenant play, The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru, and concludes with Lanford Wilson's 1982 Angels Fall. Eugene Jones' fascinating little book is not well written; it is redundant and quite frustrating. But it examines a form of American drama against the social, political, and technological changes in American Ufe, and in the process opens doors and windows everywhere else. JOHN H. STROUPE Western Michigan University Per Scheide Jacobsen and Barbara Fass Leavy. Ibsen's Forsaken Merman : Folklore in the Late Plays. New York and London: New York University Press, 1988. Pp. xiv + 350. $42.00...