Absence and Memory in Colonial American Theatre: Fiorelli’s Plaster (review)

In 2001, Odai Johnson and William Burling published The Colonial American Stage, 1665–1774: A Documentary Calendar (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press), a comprehensive listing of performances and key events in British North American theatrical history. It was the first significant book devoted exclusively to colonial theater since Hugh Rankin’s The Theatre in Colonial America (University of North Carolina Press, 1960) and brought to light many details ignored, forgotten, misinterpreted, or unknown by Rankin and previous historians of the colonial stage. The book’s very existence also highlighted the relative critical and historical obscurity into which theatrical activity prior to the Revolution had been cast. Indeed, there is a stark contrast between the recent rise of studies on early republican drama and theater and the relative paucity of investigation (until very recently) into the colonial stage. In the book under review, Odai Johnson confronts the matter not only of scholarly but also of evidentiary “absence” in consideration of theatrical activities in the mainland and West Indian island playhouses of the eighteenth century. In an extraordinary reading of the gaps, lacunae, and documentary holes in the historical and material record, Johnson recovers—at least in part—elements of American theatrical culture heretofore given little play in most studies of the period.

Johnson’s governing figure for this project is the archaeological work undertaken by the Italian Guiseppi Fiorelli at Pompeii and Herculaneum in the middle nineteenth century. While digging amidst the ash-covered ruins of those famously buried cities, Fiorelli came across holes in the dirt that he puzzled over. Intuiting that such holes might in fact be the spaces once filled by specific objects, he developed a technique whereby plaster casts were made of the holes before the holes themselves were destroyed in the excavation. What Fiorelli found in his plasters were the outlines and shapes of human bodies, at the moment of their deaths from the debris spewed by the erupting Mt. Vesuvius. From nothing something: that might be the motto not only of Fiorelli but also of Johnson in this exploration of the frequent nothingness one finds in engaging the hole that is pre-Revolutionary theater.

One example of Johnson’s method is the matter of playbills. Although a few of these ephemeral advertisements of coming attractions survive in archives, they represent the tiniest fraction of the number of playbills likely struck off by printers for theater managers in almost every city on the east coast of British North America. Sometimes all that survive are invoices presented by printers or payments recorded from managers rather than the playbills themselves—but from those payments one can adduce a certain number of bills in circulation. With a few other fragments, including memories of old buildings being torn down and a few posted playbills found on the weathered walls, Johnson asks us to imagine that in towns where theatrical activity occurred, one could not have ignored the presence of such bills, plastered over by the next show’s notices, but not totally obscured either. From an absence of imagination even to see playbills in the first place, Johnson asks us now to see dozens of such bills, on prominent walls, as commonplaces of colonial society—so common, in fact, that few diarists or letter writers bother to mention their sight. But if we fail to imagine such walls of performance ads, sometimes printed in brilliant red type, we miss an integral aspect of the colonial urban landscape.

The other key term in Johnson’s title, memory, has many resonances in this book. Sometimes that means a person’s ancient memory is all we have of a troupe or a performance—not necessarily a dependable document, but a hint of a glimpse into experiences that the newspapers of the time give no play. Those memories can sometimes be supported—and sometimes contravened— by other fragmentary evidence. A servant’s recollection of lighting the way for his master and mistress to the theater not published...