Creole Drama: Theatre and Society in Antebellum New Orleans by Juliane Braun (review)

Anyone looking back at the history of New Orleans as Louisiana joined the Confederacy would have been astounded by the changes the city had undergone since it was added to the United States in 1819. Already doubled in size by refugees from St. Domingue—black, white, and mixed-race, slave and free—the French colonial New Orleans maintained a delicate balance of racialized and class power. The large group of gens de couleur libres, free people of color, had rights far beyond those of their counterparts in the rest of the United States. While hardly full citizens, they could testify in court, enter into contracts, and own property. And the city was a stew of languages, ethnicities, and nationalities, from local indigenous people to African slaves to white aristocrats.

As Juliane Braun shows, this was an ideal environment for a thriving theatre scene. New Orleans was a multicultural, polyglot, cosmopolitan city, and a gateway to the Caribbean and Mexico, as well as to the US Southeast, Midwest, and West. The Francophone white-and-black communities supported cultural and political organizations, and each sponsored a theatre to entertain its constituents. Moreover, with the encroachment of Anglophone language and culture, the theatre “represented sites of struggle over cultural sovereignty, ethnic identity, and national belonging” (2). Francophone theatre was a way for French Creoles (the American-born descendants of Europeans) to hold onto their linguistic and cultural identities, pushing back against the intensifying Anglicization of the city. This emerges as one of the themes of the book, as tensions between Francophone and Anglophone residents on the one hand, and white and free black New Orleanians on the other, fell and rose in relation to one another.

There were, of course, obstacles to the development of New Orleans’s theatre scene, but none that its French-speaking residents couldn’t throw money at (indeed, North American Francophone actors made more than their Parisian counterparts). And beyond developing the city as a site of theatrical performance, home-grown playwrights crafted productions that spoke to the cultural and political changes the city and Louisiana in general were undergoing. Not least among these was the meaning of “Creole” in relation to race, which became increasingly limited to white New Orleanians.

One of Braun’s most striking examples of this changing meaning of the identity “Creole” is her comparison, in chapter 2, of three different plays that dealt with the 1768 uprising by French Louisianans against Spanish rule in which several rebels were executed. Each version reflects the New Orleans the playwright would like to see and implicitly offers political solutions to the Francophone/Anglophone divide. One significant development that Braun carefully chronicles is the simultaneous loss of power by French-speaking New Orleanians and the growing power and influence of the Francophone theatre, as though English-speakers were willing to cede cultural influence as long as they could keep hold of the reins of political control.

Even more interesting are Braun’s analyses, in her third chapter, of the roles of free audiences and playwrights of color, and how they used the theatre to protest against their shrinking civil liberties as part of the United States. After the Louisiana Purchase, gens de couleur libres were increasingly removed from white spaces. In response, the black community of New Orleans built their own theatre, the Théatre Marigny, although it did not last longer than seven months in 1838. Even so, New Orleans was possibly the only city in the United States to stage plays for mixed race companies, something unheard of farther North.

Braun convincingly argues that the repertoire of the two theatres that served the black and mixed-race communities reflected and “were powerfully inflected by the local experiences of New Orleans’s free black population” (85). She discusses the relationship between the popular genre of arranged marriage dramas and the custom of plaçage, in which black women were “placed” by older relatives...