On the Performance Front: US Theatre and Internationalism by Charlotte Canning (review)

I once found myself at a dinner party in a posh Rome apartment, an American theatre person among a clique of American diplomats. After explaining my Fulbright project to one dining companion, his jaw dropped in an incredulous guffaw, “What? We’re giving away Fulbrights in theatre now?!” I wish I could have handed him a copy of Charlotte Canning’s book, On the Performance Front: US Theatre and Internationalism, so that he could appreciate, as I do now, the extent to which the CIA and State Department have historically been invested in sending American artists abroad to do diplomatic work. In the monograph, Canning narrates the intertwined histories of twentieth-century US foreign policy and the development of the United States as a prominent and influential creator of world culture. Canning defines the quests of early twentieth-century US artists for a theatrical utopia between the interwar years and the founding of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) in 1965. Canning cites numerous government organizations that interacted with the not-for-profit American National Theatre and Academy (ANTA) as she traces its trajectory as fundamental to the placement of the United States as an influential player in international venues. Despite its lofty dreams of defining a national aesthetic and attaining international understanding through theatre, ANTA eventually crumbled under the impossible weight of performing an ideal American democracy overseas when that democracy only seems to work “within the mainstream discourse of masculine white supremacy” (230).

Canning approaches her archival research as dramaturgy, imbuing historical theatre and government figures and entities in “a richly textured detail that elucidates the affect of policy-making, racial and sexual identification, and international touring in all their quotidian manifestations” (9). In approaching policy documents as performative texts and construing those findings as mise-en-scene, she argues for theatre’s role in the emergence of the United States as a dominant world power at the height of the Cold War: “If power has depended in part on cultural works as part of its exercise, then culture is similarly partially dependent on that exercise for perceptions of it as legitimate and necessary” (6). To accomplish her arts-administration historiography, she intersperses performance history analyses with chapters that explain the political and creative milieux of the long decades that defined the rise of US theatre organizations key to the development of a robust national theatre in an international context: Theatre Arts Magazine, ANTA, and the US International Theatre Institute (US-ITI). These chapters provide arts and policy (and arts-policy) contexts for the interspersed “Onstage” chapters that illustrate intersections of US arts practice and foreign policy development through targeted performance analysis.

For example, in the first “Onstage” analysis, Canning tackles Hallie Flanagan’s 1927 production of Anton Chekhov’s The Marriage Proposal at Vassar College. Canning posits that Flanagan’s “banal” play choice perhaps had to do with an experiment with Vsevolod Meyerhold’s provocation, “to emphasize performance over literature” (85). Canning chooses this academic performance to demonstrate the impact that international travel had on US theatre artists, and how international performance conventions (primarily European, especially Soviet) were disseminated across the United States to establish a loosely unified theatrical Zeitgeist among non-commercial theatres in universities, little theatres, and other Federal Theatre Project venues throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Canning proposes that US theatrical identity arose not just in conversation with official US institutions, but also within the context of Cold War politics. In subsequent chapters, she develops her argument to suggest that by 1965, US government-supported international tours qua cultural diplomacy were as misrepresentative of Americans’ lived experiences as the propagandistic Soviet performances US theatre artists traveling abroad were so moved by in the 1920s and 1930s. Canning makes this point forcefully in chapter 6, “Onstage III: Porgy and Bess, 1952–1956,” as she interrogates the US government-sponsored tour in which the cast “represented almost every major African American performance tradition of the...