Performing the American Frontier, 1870-1906 by Roger A. Hall (review)

Reviews ROGER A. HALL. Performing the American Frontier, 1870--1906. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. 262, illustrated. $54.95 (Hb). Reviewed by Rosemarie K. Bank, Kent State University The introduction to Roger Hall's Performing the American Frontier, 1870-1906 raises several analytical strategies to view: audience reception - how frontier plays enabled audiences to "[claim] ownership of the territory" (3) and "supplied a popular outlet for the public's fascination with border events" (19); 2 genre analysis - an examination of types of melodrama (6); 3 cultural history - the rise of frontier plays to critical acceptance (IS); 4 social/economic history - "the unresolved tension [between wildness and development] that in fact kept melodrama of the West continuously alive on stage for thirty-five years" (8); 5 biography- giving "serious consideration" to now forgotten performers (16); and 6 drama and theatre history - exploring "the breadth of frontier melodrama and the contradictions inherent in the material" and locating "the plays in the context of their time" (17). . The form of the book is a "review of frontier drama" (8), and, more specifically, a "survey" of frontier "plays performed in New York" (20) and of "the frontier drama as a production experience" (2 I). Performing the American Frontier, 1870--1906 is divided into six chapters, which follow a temporal and create an evolutionary sequence: "Reemergence" (1870-1872); "Explosion" (1872-1876); "Prominence" (1877- 1883); "PhenModern Drama, 45:1 (Spring 2002) REVIEWS omenon" (1883-1892); "Respect" (1893-1899); and "Dominance" (18991906 ). Chapter I introduces plays resembling in style the border dramas of the 1840S -Across the Continent (1870), Horizon (1871), and Kit, the Arkansas Traveller (1871) - and gives Hall a chance to sketch the histories of those earlier plays, few of which survive. Chapter 2 takes up William F. ("Buffalo Bill") Cody's stage career, Frank Mayo's hit Davy Crockett, the careers of actors whose repertories included several frontier plays, and plays that featured or were about current events (such as Donald MacKay's victory and Custer's defeat). Despite the presence ofnewsmakers, however, the chapter is less about the frontier than about melodrama, less a cultural than a conventional history of theatrical productions. The major plays examined in chapter 3 - The Danites (1877) of McKee Rankin and '49 (1881) of Joaquin Miller, two adaptations of Bret Harte's M' /iss (1878), and Bartley Campbell's My Partner (1879) - indicate the presence of authors with aspirations to literature and of performer-producers who achieved and sustained star status through frontier characters. Their claim to "prominence," however, seems no greater than that of their "explosive" contemporaries in the prior chapter; indeed, the three plays produced after the death of Jesse James in 1882 seem one with their Cody, MacKay, and Custer predecessors. The number of dramatized frontiers in these years, on the other hand (Mormon, miner, scout, outlaw, cavalry, rancher. and trapper), strains for a spatial rather than temporal analysis. In chapter 4 the time-line format staggers to its knees, unable to bear the demand for contextualized cultural analysis presented by Buffalo Bill's Wild West, "Doc" Carver's Wild America, "Pawnee Bill" Lillie's frontier circus, the Miller Brothers' 101 Ranch (with its ties to early film), and Zack Mulhall's Wild West (with Will Rogers). Frontier productions in theatres in the 1880s also beg for a cultural reading, and no "phenomenon" more than Indian actress Gowongo Mohawk, who successfully performed the male title character in Wep-ton-no-mah, the Indian Mail Carrier for more than two decades. These performances are indeed "phenomenal" when viewed in the context of the Battle of Wounded Knee, ethnocidal reservation policies, and the Ghost Dancers paroled to Buffalo Bill's Wild West. Whose frontier isthis? Whose America? In the march of time that governs this survey, however, the phenomenal yields to theatrical respectability rather than to cultural analysis of the issues Hall can do little more here than raise. Chapter 5 visits the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 and gives conventional treatment (biographies of authors, producers, production histories, reviews) to Belasco's The Girl I Left Behind Me, and Augustus Thomas' midwestern In Mizzol/ra. These, Hall argues, represent frontier drama which "acquire[d...