Theatre, Society and the Nation: Staging American Identities (review)

The study of American theatre is becoming more and more problematic as America moves away from assimilation, homogeneity, and presumptions of unity and toward diversity, difference, multiculturalism, pluralism, and identity politics. Even to posit "America" presupposes an imaginable community or at least the chance of resolving disparity despite our growing sensitivity to the potential for race, gender, sexuality, class, sensibility, myth, and history to serve as wedges to drive people apart. Scholars face the challenge of theorizing a cultural paradigm that supports the possibility of an American theatre.

In Theatre, Society and the Nation, S. E. Wilmer proposes to examine "the notion of nation," but he seeks to balance "hegemonic nationalism" with the study of "counter-hegemonic and subaltern discourses"; that is, "plays and performances that formulated a positive identity for marginalized or oppressed groups in society and that posited an identity for the nation that privileged rather than minimized the position of such groups" (3). Wilmer hopes to find in America a place for those whom America seems to exclude. Unfortunately, in the process of pulling the margins under the American roof, he leaves the notion of America intact and largely unchallenged.

Most of the book deals with traditional theatre. The first chapter treats the drama that addressed the experience of the colonies approaching the point of rupture with Britain (Androboros, The Candidates, The Fall of British Tyranny, various college dialogues, and loyalist propaganda pieces), while the second focuses on selected works by John Burk and William Dunlap as the new nation sought a sense of self during the 1790s. In the fifth chapter, Wilmer juxtaposes Amiri Baraka and Luis Valdez (clearly following Harry Elam's example, but without crediting him), studying the work of both writer/directors as nationalist theatre and concluding with the anti-war efforts of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War in order to round out a sampling of social protest drama of the 1960s. The chapter on "suffragette and feminist" plays moves quickly through Mercy Otis Warren, Anna Cora Mowatt, Rachel Crothers, and Susan Glaspell to focus on Elizabeth Robins's Votes for Women, before jumping to second-wave feminism in a rapid tour through playwrights Ntozake Shange, Cherríe Moraga, Wendy Wasserstein, Caryl Churchill, and Eve Ensler; artists Carolee Schneeman, Karen Finley, and Martha Rosler; and companies At the Foot of the Mountain, the Los Angeles Feminist Theatre, the Women's Experimental Theatre, and Split Britches. The volume concludes with a chapter on "the multicultural nation in the 1990s," discussing Anna Deavere Smith, Tony Kushner, Velina Hasu Houston, Brenda Wong Aoki, the Coatlicue Theatre Company, and Guillermo Gómez-Peña.

Wilmer begins each chapter with a quick survey of ostensibly relevant cultural and historical materials; for example, the chapter on the 1960s recapitulates the anti-Communist hysteria of the 1950s and asserts that "the American values that were sanctioned under this Cold War culture of containment privileged the position of white heterosexual males who were to be supported by women in domestic roles" while such television shows as "Ozzie and Harriet and Leave it to Beaver suggested an ideal sense of security, conformity, and homogeneity" (127). These prefaces do not appear to be the products of original research, and because they cover so much territory in such brief spaces, they resemble the introductory comments an instructor might offer in an undergraduate lecture before getting down to business. They also too glibly accept well-worn neoliberal viewpoints on race, gender, class, and privilege. Wilmer too often simplifies the material he borrows; his division of feminist ideology into just three "strands" (liberal, radical, materialist) overlooks recent theoretical complexities.

Wilmer takes an unusual turn when he investigates the Ghost Dance religion that the Paiute prophet Wovoka brought to the native American peoples in 1889. In an attempt to pursue his interest in "subaltern discourses," he declares that the United States government...