The Most American Thing in America: Circuit Chautauqua as Performance, and: Composing Ourselves: The Little Theatre Movement and the American Audience (review)

Though paired because they concern roughly the same theatre historical period, Charlotte Canning's study of American Chautauqua and Dorothy Chansky's of the Little Theatre Movement are useful reminders of the need for clarity about a book's plan and scope and for a firm authorial and editorial commitment to critiquing and revising what is thought and said.

The Most American Thing in America concerns the "ideological apparatus" (20) represented by circuit Chautauqua, the network of touring companies and routes organized by the Redpath Lyceum Bureau beginning in 1904 and a commercialization of the independent Chautauqua Institution, founded in 1874 to train Methodist Sunday School teachers. A mix of education and uplift, the Chautauqua Institution had expanded to two-hundred rural, summer "pavilions" in thirty-one states by 1900 (7–8). The circuits combined the content of, and venues for, the institution's independent assemblies with a touring road system that shared information and personnel through the International Lyceum and Chautauqua Managers Association. The Association, founded in 1914, was an "informal monopoly" designed to regulate contracts, routes, and bookings among the independent circuits, which are said to have numbered in excess of nine-thousand Chautauquas by 1921 (9–10). Each town along a circuit posted a guarantee, recouped through tickets sold by local residents for a different program of lectures, musical entertainments, play and poem readings, circus, vaudeville, and other acts for each of three to seven days. Performers moved from outfit to outfit along a circuit's route, playing in Chautauqua's signature brown tents, until the circuits went out of business, for the most part during the early 1930s (some locations, however, survive to the present).

With these parameters established, Canning takes up a number of key concerns. Chapter one considers the national issues addressed by Chautauqua (including upward mobility, mobilization, and assimilation). Chapter two examines the community focus of the circuits (involving support, inclusion, and empowerment, but also those aspects of community involving control, exclusion, and surveillance, reflected in race and gender). The brown tent serves as a metaphor for Chautauqua's liminal status in chapter three, between its community-based moral and religious claims and its nationally based commercial entertainments. Chapter four considers Chautauqua in the context of oratory, as "both the repository of that tradition and the site of its failure" (22), and chapter five explores Chautauqua's attempts, in the era when the circuits moved toward fully mounted (if edited) productions of Broadway hits, to separate an uplifting view of the drama from the popular ("immoral") aspects of performance and production.

Though the number of memoires, histories, dissertations, and articles about circuit Chautauqua that predate Canning's study hardly supports a view that it is an understudied subject, Chautauqua is a rich performance site, whether the subject in view is education, politics, reform, community building, or theatre. Some studies echo the view of Chautauqua expressed by Sinclair Lewis in his 1920 novel Main Street – that it was banal and self-satisfied – while other studies argue for Chautauqua's populist and liberating qualities. Though readers may find Canning's conclusion that Chautauqua was both smug or narrowminded and liberating (228) less than definitive, The Most American Thing in America offers hearty food for thought. A season bundling together a racial supremacist orator, Israel Zangwill's play The Melting Pot, the Cambridge (Shakespeare) Players, and a "Kaffir Boy's Choir" begs to be unpacked, as do the careers of female Chautauqua managers, (well) paid the same as men and able to rise through the ranks but fired at will by conservative supervisors for giving "the wrong impression" (94).

At every point in The Most American Thing in America, source specificity and time specificity are at issue, since...