Staging The Slums, Slumming The Stage: Class, Poverty, Ethnicity, and Sexuality in American Theatre, 1890–1916 by J. Chris Westgate (review)

J. Chris Westgate argues that much drama that was incredibly popular and lucrative in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century New York City is overlooked by scholars because of perceived dramaturgical/literary shortcomings. However, by overlooking “slum plays”—plays set in districts dominated by crime and poverty or depicting “respectable” society encountering this area and its inhabitants—he shows that scholars overlook invaluable sources regarding how US society negotiated differences in class, ethnicity, and gender as the Victorian era gave way to the Progressive era. For theatre scholars, this argument and the research that Westgate provides are particularly important for what they demonstrate about the crucial role of theatre in this negotiation, and about the place of theatre in contemporary conversations concerning the Other.

Exemplary of how consistently and thoroughly Westgate contextualizes drama and performance in turn-of-the-century American social thought, he uses a famous “lament” made by theatre critic Charles Darnton in 1913 as a departure point for examining the relationship between theatre and slumming in turn-of-the-century US culture: “Going to some theatres these nights is like going slumming” (1). This lament reflects anxiety that theatre was devolving into a sideshow for audiences to indulge their darker curiosities rather than a place where Victorian morality was reinforced; to Westgate, however, this quote also suggests that audiences went to see these plays because it was like going slumming—a way to experience the seedy side of the city without risking bodily harm. The intention of Staging the Slums, Slumming the Stage is to “determine how these dramas functioned as a bellwether for modernity in theatre and society” (2), and it executes this intention with a wealth of detail and astute analysis that connects literary and performative artifacts to various types of historical sources. As Westgate points out, the turn of the century marked a moment when popular sentiment regarding slums was an overlapping of revulsion, fascination, and genuine desire for social justice, and the theatre provided a nexus for these competing and intersecting voices.

This study is divided into three parts: the establishment of the tourism narrative versus the sociological narrative in slum plays; the examination of how onstage slum settings reinforced sensationalism, as well as the material realities of poverty and difference; and finally, thorough case studies of three well-documented productions that reflect the complexity of the conversation surrounding slum plays. When they first came to popularity, slum plays were primarily a way for middle-class theatregoers to define their own class identity by contrasting it with the sinister criminals, ignorant poor, and laughable foreigners depicted as populating the slums. Plays like On the Bowery (1894) and The Queen of Chinatown (1899) appealed to working- and middle-class audiences, with their sensational plots and outrageous caricatures, whereas plays like From Rags to Riches (1903) and From Broadway to the Bowery (1907) still featured the sensationalist tourism narrative, but also depicted actual social problems with some attention to causality. These sociological plays, however, largely replaced sensationalism with sentimentality, similar to the narrative of the privileged saving the “unfortunate” that still plagues social justice efforts today. This organizational structure develops Westgate’s argument about the way that slum plays directed the public’s attention to economic disparity, even as it allows scholars to consider specific plays in their most productive contexts.

The second portion of Staging the Slums focuses on how typical slumming locales were depicted onstage: the tenement, the immigrant neighborhood, and the red light district. In this portion of the study, Westgate brings out the significance of place, the material reality, in strengthening the sociological narrative of the Progressive era while simultaneously appealing to the exoticism of the tourism narrative that continued to pull in audiences. This historiographic complexity makes this study particularly useful to scholars: Westgate does not reduce or simplify...