Performing the Progressive Era: Immigration, Urban Life, and Nationalism on Stage ed. by Max Shulman and J. Chris Westgate (review)

The so-called Progressive Era (henceforth PE) covers thirty years (1890–1920) during which profound demographic shifts, technological advancements, and political changes reshaped the United States of America as a modern empire. Max Shulman and J. Chris Westgate’s collection contains eleven chapters about performances largely taking place in the Northeast (especially New York City), Cleveland, and Chicago. Laurence Senelick’s foreword celebrates the European immigrant culture of his 1940s Chicago youth and its connection to PE urbanism, arguing that “the Progressive Era is not simply a temporal rubric. . . . It brought modernism to the United States, setting the course for the political, social, and artistic movements of the next decades” (xi). The introduction draws on Sabine Haenni’s The Immigrant Scene, Shannon Jackson’s Professing Performance and Lines of Activity, and Ric Knowles’s Reading the Material Theatre to substantiate the book’s foundational argument that “the Progressive Era was brought into being in no small part through the ubiquity of performance” (3).

Shulman and Westgate identify the significance of the “top-down perspectives” of governments and reform organizations during the PE. Some were conservative and “attempted to define and implement limits of acceptability for the nation” (6), while others were “more liberal” and focused on acculturation (6). Jane Addams’s work with the Chicago settlement Hull House and her 1909 book The Spirit of Youth and the City represent the top-down acculturation model. In contrast, performances by and for “immigrants, the working class, and bohemians” reveal “heterogeneous ambitions and collisions with mainstream society” (7).

Several essays explore understudied theatrical texts. The cogent opening chapter by Amy Arbogast evaluates three plays from the 1890s that represent ruralness in New England, the South, and the West. Arbogast convincingly shows that representing ruralness no longer meant looking to a bucolic past or separate space. Instead, rural plays were future-oriented and saw “the country-side as . . . an evolving part of the nation that both contributed to and benefited from . . . industrial and technological developments” (33). Hillary Miller deftly draws on scholars Daniel Czitrom and Esther Romeyn to evaluate Charles Hale Hoyt’s 1894 musical farce A Milk White Flag “as a subversive commentary on the regulation of representation” (38) that pointedly engaged with New York City police’s anti-vice reform efforts. Miller turns to film studies to think through the filming of key scenes from Hoyt’s work, and this disciplinary diversity enhances the volume. Westgate revisits James Halleck Reid’s 1907 play From Broadway to the Bowery, examining the representation of Irish, Chinese, and black servants. He claims that the play “endorsed and perhaps accelerated the shift toward the conservative tradition of racial nationalism” (56) in what Gary Gerstle calls the “Rooseveltian nation.” By explicating three plays depicting narcotics addiction within the context of antidrug legislation, Shulman contends that the plays “reveal the overlap of medical science, reform movements, and popular culture” (213). Together, these four essays indicate that PE drama frequently used melodramatic structures and genre mixture even as playwrights grappled with con- tentious social issues.

Three spectacle-focused essays evince deep archival research and attention to subjects that would readily pique the interest of readers in and beyond theatre and performance studies. Ariel Nereson brings a welcome dance studies lens to the tension surrounding the public and private freedoms during the PE. The tango sparked fears that nonwhite tango experts would dismantle “the long-established gate-keeping work of whiteness” (133). Women’s “tango teas served as ambivalent sites of possibility for women” (126), particularly regarding political mobilization for suffrage versus consumerism. Similarly paradoxical, Megan E. Geigner argues that Chicago’s Columbus Day parades fostered a “hybrid ideal of Americanness” that embodied “the tensions between Columbus Day as an Italian American holiday and . . . as a civic-pride day” (101). Susan Kattwinkel turns a critical gaze to the liminal humanity...