Congressional Theatre: Dramatizing McCarthyism on Stage, Film, and Television by Brenda Murphy (review)

Reviews 503 WORK CITED Dolan, Jill. "'Lesbian' Subjectivity in Realism: Dragging at the Margins of Structure and Ideology." Peiforming Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre. Ed. Sue-Ellen Case. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins up, 1990· 40-53. BRENDA MURPHY. Congressional Theatre: Dramatizing McCarthyism on Stage, Film, and Television. Cambridge Studies in American Theatre and Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Pp. 310, illustrated. $59.95 (Hb). Reviewed by lonathan Chambers, St. Lawrence University Since the early 1990s, the Cambridge Studies in American Theatre and Drama series has been one of the foremost outlets for theatre historians and theoreticians wishing to consider anew the countless shapes and expressions that are American theatre and dramatic literature. Under the editorship of Don B. Wilmeth , this series has published significant works by distinguished scholars seeking to engage the American theatre with vitality and passion. Of particular note are a number of landmark studies on often neglected and marginalized fields of inquiry. Eminent works in this vein include Theatre Culture in America , [825- [860 by Rosemarie K. Bank, The American Stage and the Great Depression by Mark Fearnow, and Demons of Disorder: Early Blackface Minstrels alld Their World by Dale Cockrell. It is within this very strong tradition of constructing a more inclusive and properly historical account of American theatre history that Brenda Murphy posits her outstanding study, Congressional Theatre: Dramatizing McCarthyism on Stage, Film, and Televisioll. In the concise introduction, Murphy sets forth her two primary goals: to identify and examine both the overt and covert dramatic representations of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (the governmental entity that captivated the public and created a political fervor now labeled "McCarthyism" in the middle pan of the twentieth century), and to uncover the social, political, and historical contexts, or "contemporary subtext," of that cultural moment (5). Part One, entitled ''The Committee and the Culture ," is subdivided into three chapters, beginning with "The Stage is Set." In this chapter, Murphy maps the development of HUAC, giving special attention to how that governmental body affected, to varying degrees, the theatrical climate in the United States during a twenty-five-year span. Starting with the Federal Theatre Project in 1938 and moving up through the Hollywood blacklist of the 1950S and early 1960s, Murphy meticulously traces the rise of HUAC, from a partisan and relatively minor agency with the sole; if not explicitly stated, intention of attacking Roosevelt's New Deal, to a bipartisan and powerful legislative organization focused on rooting out Communists 504 REVIEWS from all segments of society. With the larger historical frame established, in chapter two, "The Social Drama," Murphy outlines the method she employs when reading the specific social, political, and historical contexts of this era and the HUAC-inspired theatrical expressions. Drawing principally from Victor Turner's concept of social drama, but informed by Rene Oirard's theory of the scapegoat, Murphy suggests a complex anthropological approach . Specifically, she aims to read both social and theatrical dramas from this era by way of Turner's notion of public action, which involves "four successive phases" termed "breach. crisis, redressive or remedial procedures, and reintegration or schism" (36). The stunning capacity of this complex theoretical lens is first manifest in the third and final chapter of Part One, "Dramatizing Directly," which involves surgical analyses of a number of straightforward theatrical expressions rooted in the social drama of the hearings . Noteworthy in this chapter is the subsection entitled "Investigation," wherein Murphy provides a moving and lucid comparison of the John Wayne film Big .lim McLai1l (1952), an explicit anti-Communist expression that focused on HUAC and its endeavors to expose Communists, and Howard Fast's play Thirty Pieces ofSilver (195 I), a clear-cut denunciation of the antiCommunist movement. Here, Murphy deftly triangulates the direct dramatization impulse, Turner's social drama, and the theatrical genre of melodrama. In so doing, she moves beyond a mere reading of the social and the political in terms of how they affected theatrical representations - or, for that matter, vice versa - and offers instead extraordinarily rich readings involving a consideration of how theatrical anists in the United States at mid-century introduced and perpetuated ideas within a social and cultural field...