America in the Round: Capital, Race, and Nation at Washington, DC’s Arena Stage by Donatella Galella (review)

Mirroring the various viewpoints audiences experience in arena-style staging, Galella purposely creates this critical history of Arena Stage by considering its ongoing legacy through the lenses of money, diversity, and place/relationship to the nation. Rather than replicating or commenting on Maslon’s The Arena Adventure: The First Forty Years, this work builds from that source and a myriad of others, as well as effectively leveraging the author’s “insider” status as a summer dramaturgy intern to obtain some internal documents and include first-person accounts. A very clear structure guides the reader, and thorough documentation provides strong support for the author’s arguments.

The book is structured in three thematic sections drawn from the title: Capital, Race, and Nation. Each section could be read alone based on a reader’s interests, but consuming the whole text feeds the richness of the argument, as the inevitable overlapping between sections deepens the conversation. For example, in the “Race” section, Galella identifies Arena’s “commitment to the local black community” as part “social conscience” and part “economics,” thus echoing the previous section on “Capital.” Each section looks at Arena from that particular vantage point and includes an in-depth consideration of a production. The introduction, chapter intros, and epilogue sections each repeat the framework and major claims of the author’s arguments so, even in detail-dense sections, the reader keeps a sense of context and how the moment-in-time being discussed fits into the larger argument. The author consistently draws from multiple sources for each of the critical frameworks used, and the text includes sufficient explanation to allow the reader unfamiliar with the sources to keep reading or easily find more information. This approach also offers great clarity about the influences on the author. For example, as the author addresses national identity as “competing claims for communal definition and inclusion,” she bookends her conclusion with relevant works by S. E. Wilmer and Jeffrey D. Mason (156– 57). With similar thoroughness, Galella also considers absences or gaps as relevant parts of this critical examination, such as the time gap between the first and subsequent productions of a play by a Trinidadian playwright (107).

As Galella brings the book to a close, she concludes that “nonprofit status, blackness, and an inclusive definition of Americanness” allowed Arena to survive through the decades and reminds the reader that her text has established the ongoing tension between “glimpses of equity” and times that Arena “capitalizes on the minoritized” (225). She begins the book with the suggestion that Arena, and other regional theatres, have been largely unexamined because they reside in the middle, between high and low art goals (7). She finds Arena particularly worthy of consideration because it exhibits and exemplifies racial liberalism as further evidence of this “middle,” and she traces that concept through the theatre’s engagement with race, its location in the nation’s capital, and its status as a nonprofit entity (8–9). The first section, “Capital,” includes a chapter on the change from for-profit to nonprofit status and Fichandler’s ability to navigate the tension between art and commerce. Chapter 2 presents the productions of The Great White Hope as racial liberalism enacted by presenting significant black characters and carefully orchestrating the difficult topics raised, which led to a Pulitzer Prize (60–61) and financial success (68). “Race,” the second section, traces the development of a producing mission that began with a global emphasis and shifted to an explicitly African American emphasis. By using today’s eyes to look back, Galella identifies the limitations of early activities aimed at diversifying the theatre, including an in-house publication designed to educate staff “about histories of people of color in the United States and anecdotes of perseverance and microaggressions that staff of color had personally experienced” (114). The next chapter is an in-depth examination...