Enacting History ed. by Scott Magelssen and Rhona Justice-Malloy (review)

Enacting History is a collection of ten essays that considers questions about the relation of lived pasts to enacted presents in the contexts of living history, museum theatre, community theatre, theatres of reconciliation, and experience tourism, predominantly in the United states. Conceived through discussions at the Mid-America Theatre Conference in the mid-2000s, the book offers analyses of performance practice as historical engagement. All essays presume that performances of the past produce embodied knowledge that can have cultural value and sometimes counter-hegemonic potential, and so each critiques the specifics of enacting history from the perspectives of insiders to theatre and living-history traditions. Enacting History presents a number of original insights for scholars working in the domains of museum studies, affective labor, history and memory, theatre studies, ethnic studies, and performance studies; it also provides reflections that practitioners in living-history venues and community theatres may find useful in thinking about their own roles as actors, directors, and administrators.

In the introduction, scott Magelssen frames the book as a contribution to theorizing the past as a “repository of material for public consideration and reworking,” and insists that it is essential for theatre studies scholars to analyze the burgeoning varieties of historical performance conducted outside of traditional proscenia as part of this project (2). The first several essays attempt to erect that bridge, using theatre theory to consider identity-formation in performances that commemorate historical events. In “Present Enacting Past: The Functions of Battle Reenacting in Historical Representation,” Leigh Clemons explores the conservative politics of authenticity in the reenactment of the Battle of Coleto Creek and the Goliad Massacre, which commemorates the execution of 342 “Texian” rebels by the Mexican army in 1836. Lindsay Adamson Livingston’s “‘This Is the Place’: Performance and the Production of Space in Mormon Cultural Memory” analyzes discourses about sacred places in origin stories of the Mormon Church. She argues that the sites of significant events on the path undertaken by the Latter-Day Saints, who migrated from New York to Nauvoo, Illinois, and then on to Utah in the 1820s through the ’40s, are endowed with a performative aura for contemporary church members who embark on pilgrimages to these places. Amy Tyson’s “Men with Their Muskets and Me in My Bare Feet: Performing History and Policing Gender at Historic Fort Snelling Living History Museum” draws from her own experience of working at the site between 2001 and 2006 as a living-history interpreter. She employs Erving Goffman’s notion of the “organizational self,” or the self performed in such a way as to embody the key ideological values of a particular institution, to emphasize the ways in which a gendered “culture of worker-on-worker surveillance” developed and operated at the fort (53, 61).

The next three essays focus on the question of balancing accessibility to diverse audiences with the responsibility to re-member historical atrocities absent from archives in theatrical productions. In “History, Archive, Memory, and Performance: The Lewis and Clark Bicentennial Play as Cultural Commemoration,” Richard Poole reflects on the notion of selective reading in relation to a play he wrote for the Lewis and Clark bicentennial commemoration, working through the troubling intimations of racism implicit in commemorating an expedition originally carried out on behalf of imperial expansion. Aili McGill’s “Defining Museum Theater at Conner Prairie” assesses the author’s experience in writing, staging, administering, and acting in a series of short theatrical performances at a living-history park, and argues for the affective value of theatrical forms of expression blended into sites that are otherwise dedicated to living-history interpretation (93). Patricia Ybarra, in “Performing History as Memorialization: Thinking with … And Jesus Moon-walks the Mississippi and Brown University’s Slavery and Justice Committee,” argues for the value of the affect of rage over rational dialogue in grappling with the insidious legacies of slavery. She identifies Marcus Gardley’s play, which embeds archival ambiguity into its text to provoke uncertainty and moral...