Composing Ourselves: The Little Theatre Movement and the American Audience (review)

Dorothy Chansky's Composing Ourselves: The Little Theatre Movement and the American Audience offers an important contribution to American theatre history. Defining the Little Theatre movement as "a national, multipronged phenomenon, and not just the work of well-known experimenters," Composing Ourselves redefines and expands the parameters of the collective movement that sought to reform theatre as something other than Broadway fare (2). While some books have recently examined theatre artists or theatres in the Little Theatre movement (such as Shannon Jackson's Lines of Activity: Performance, Historiography, Hull-House Domesticity;J. Ellen Gainor's Susan Glaspell in Context: American Theater, Culture, and Politics, 1915-48; or Cheryl Black's The Women of Provincetown), Chansky's is the first extended study since Constance D'Arcy Mackay's 1917 The Little Theatre Movement in the United States and is a welcome addition to that body of research.

Constituted by six chapters, Composing Ourselves is smartly written, weaving archival research, historical context, and critical theory to redefine the Little Theatre movement and its key players. Chansky is careful to avoid hasty generalizations, mapping out the movement's contradictions and ironies while observing it included "forward-looking activism and modernist aesthetics as well as skepticism, nativism, elitism, and nostalgia" (3). Chansky also redefines the Little Theatre movement by pressuring the timetable by which we bracket it. While most historians focus on the work of the 1910s, Chansky broadens the timeline to include the 1920s, arguing "that only the full arc of the work within both decades" can account for the wide array of theatre making in Little Theatres across the country (5). Her discussion of theatre reformers of the 1920s, especially the recuperation of Alice Gerstenberg's career in chapter 5, is among the greatest strengths of the project.

As the title implies, Chansky also focuses on how Little Theatres formulated what she calls "audience construction," or:

the creation of attitudes and behaviors concerning theatergoing in the minds and bodies of actual or potential spectators as well as other Americans. The purpose of audience construction was, beginning in the Little Theatre movement, and remains in the United States, to create and maintain a permanent audience class and a public belief in the importance of theatre in civic and personal life.

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With detailed examples, Chansky shows how audiences were cultivated (and cultivated themselves) during times of dwindling theatregoing. Chapter 2 illustrates various attitudes toward audiences and theatre making by reformers, from those who blamed the audience for their lack of taste or "breeding" (Edward Dithmar and Annie Nathan Meyer), to those who strove for professionalism (Beulah Jay's Little Theatre of Philadelphia), to those who used theatre to serve neighborhood immigrants (Hull-House and Henry Street Settlement).

Chansky's third chapter focuses on two major influences in Little Theatre audience construction: Theatre Arts Monthly and George Pierce Baker's 47 Workshop at Harvard. As divergent as these forces might appear at first glance, Chanksy observes that both were indebted to the view that "the audience must function as an informed participant in the creation of serious theatre, and the audience must be organized so as to guarantee payment for that theatre" (71). As backdrop for that discussion, Chansky gives a helpful, if somewhat overdrawn, historical overview of theatre reformers who published their theories about the new theatre. The chapter is most intriguing when Chanksy shows how Baker's 47 Workshop developed a cadre of educated theatregoers, designers, playwrights, and directors, including Eugene O'Neill, Robert Edmond Jones, and Edward Sheldon. Here, Chanksy's argument is crisp and compelling as she documents Baker's rigorous audience development that, in spite of its success, fell victim to an Ivy League bias.

Another valuable contribution Composing Ourselves makes is its attention to gender, race, and ethnicity in theatre making of the day. Chansky notes how racism and sexism underwrote the movement at the same time that some...