Performing the Progressive Era: Immigration, Urban Life, and Nationalism on Stage (Studies in Theatre History and Culture) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1609386477 ISBN 13: 9781609386474

Verlag: UNIV OF IOWA PR, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

The American Progressive Era, which spanned from the 1880s to the 1920s, is generally regarded as a dynamic period of political reform and social activism. In Performing the Progressive Era, editors Max Shulman and Chris Westgate bring together top scholars in nineteenth- and twentieth-century theatre studies to examine the burst of diverse performance venues and styles of the time, revealing how they shaped national narratives surrounding immigration and urban life. Contributors analyze performances in urban centers (New York, Chicago, Cleveland) in comedy shows, melodramas, Broadway shows, operas, and others. They pay special attention to performances by and for those outside mainstream society: immigrants, the working-class, and bohemians, to name a few. Showcasing both lesser-known and famous productions, the essayists argue that the explosion of performance helped bring the Progressive Era into being, and defined its legacy in terms of gender, ethnicity, immigration, and even medical ethics.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Max Shulman is assistant professor of theatre in the Department of Visual and Performing Arts at University of Colorado, Colorado Springs.

J. Chris Westgate is professor of English at California State University, Fullerton. He is the author of Urban Drama: The Metropolis in Contemporary North American Plays and Staging the Slums, Slumming the Stage: Class, Poverty, Ethnicity, and Sexuality in American Theatre, 1890–1916.

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Performing the Progressive Era

Immigration, Urban Life, and Nationalism on Stage

By Max Shulman, J. Chris Westgate

University of Iowa Press

Copyright © 2019 University of Iowa Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-60938-647-4

Contents

Foreword by Laurence Senelick, 
Introduction The Destiny of a Nation, by Max Shulman and J. Chris Westgate, 
1. Rural Life with Urban Strife: The Evolution of Rural Drama in the Late Nineteenth Century by Amy Arbogast, 
2. Marching Off-Beat and On-Screen: New York City's Reform Movements and Charles Hale Hoyt's A Milk White Flag by Hillary Miller, 
3. "Wasn't America Crowded Enough Wid Out You Forrinners?": Staging Immigration, Assimilation, and Social Mobility in the Rooseveltian Nation by J. Chris Westgate, 
4. Systematic Vaudeville and Systematic Farce: The Unlikely Team of Taylor and Schmidt by Michael Schwartz, 
5. Immigrant Civic Performances and Historical Pageantry: Columbus Day in Chicago, 1892-1913 by Megan E. Geigner, 
6. "Art in Democracy" and the Early Houses of the Cleveland Play House by Les Hunter, 
7. New Women and Girls of Today in Motion: The "Strenuous Clasping" of Tango Teas by Ariel Nereson, 
8. Keaton, Class, and Social Control: Comic Vaudeville in the Progressive Era by Rick DesRochers, 
9. Celebrating Childhood on the Vaudeville Stage by Gillian Arrighi, 
10. Monstrosity or Medical Miracle?: Incubator Baby Sideshows and the Contradictions of the Progressive Era by Susan Kattwinkel, 
11. The Progressive Era's Doctor-Doper Dyad by Max Shulman, 
Conclusion Pitfalls, Methods, and Legacies by Max Shulman and J. Chris Westgate, 
Notes, 
Bibliography, 
Contributors, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Rural Life with Urban Strife

The Evolution of Rural Drama in the Late Nineteenth Century

AMY ARBOGAST

The unprecedented industrialization and urbanization that defined the late nineteenth century had a profound impact on theatregoing and dramatic offerings in the United States, both plays set in cities, where most industry thrived, and plays set in the country, where rural life was undergoing its own transformations. These rural plays, which are the focus here, had long been popular as a genre in the United States, providing urban audiences with nostalgic portrayals of simpler times and patriotic images of the country's rustic citizenry. Yet, if we look at popular rural plays from the 1890s to the turn of the century, it becomes clear that escapism and nostalgia were no longer the only — or even the primary — functions. Instead of transporting audiences to an isolated idyll, many rural plays emphasized the increased interconnectedness of urban and rural life. Instead of romanticizing an agrarian past, these plays projected a bright future in which the trappings of modernity, including new technologies and socially progressive ideals (with important limitations), played key roles. As rural and urban life changed in the United States, and as the barriers — physical and psychological — between them began to dissipate for some citizens, playwrights changed their depictions of the environments and the corresponding lifestyles. In the process, they reflected and contributed to evolving perspectives of the countryside, the city, and the relationships between them during the Progressive Era.

Three of the most successful rural plays from the late nineteenth century are representative of this trend: Augustus Thomas's Alabama (1891), James A. Herne's Shore Acres (1892), and David Belasco's The Girl I Left Behind Me (1893). Each is set in one of the major regions of the country that rural plays typically dramatized: the South, New England, and the West, respectively. Each play was enormously successful, achieving runs well over the "century mark" of one hundred performances in New York City — a benchmark of success in the late nineteenth century — and packing theatres during traveling productions. Alabama, Shore Acres, and The Girl I Left Behind Me helped audiences in New York City, Chicago, Boston, and elsewhere reimagine rural life and themselves as part of an increasingly modernized United States. Importantly, this reimagination of the United States was primarily Anglo-American in its perspectives, values, and demography and did nothing to challenge racial tensions lingering from the Civil War or apprehensions about immigration at the turn of the century. If anything, the version of the United States advanced in these rural plays may have provided a balm for Anglo-American audiences through erasure of racial and ethnic concerns from questions of the nation. Nevertheless, these plays depicted a unified national value system that incorporated diverse personal and political freedoms through their representations of new commonalities between urban and rural citizens and the integration of different ways of life. Whether the urban and rural characters were more effective together because of their differences or whether those differences were not as great as imagined, the rural plays of the late nineteenth century suggest a new direction in the country's identity.

Throughout the nineteenth century rural plays were by and large celebratory, depicting the countryside as a peaceful and uncorrupted idyll filled with virtuous, hard-working citizens. Although rural plays primarily featured characters who were residents of the countryside and plots revolving around rural life, several were set in the city and used the urban environment and characters as foils for rural protagonists. Unsurprisingly, the protagonists of rural plays were typically white and male, such as Jonathan from The Contrast or Davy Crockett and Kit Carson from plays about the frontier. Antebellum plays likely promoted national unity by broadcasting a racially homogeneous nation. Yet they featured regional divisions, presenting country folk as more humble and admirable than their urban compatriots and frequently linking urban with European. This allowed writers of rural plays to assert not only the virtue and lack of pretension of the United States but its superiority to the Old World citizenry and culture as well. Rural plays set in the Northeast, often labeled "Yankee plays" after their country bumpkin Yankee protagonists, included The Contrast (1787), The Saw-Mill; or, A Yankee Trick (1824), The Forest Rose (1825), and The People's Lawyer (1839). The antebellum South also attracted audiences in plays like Dion Boucicault's The Octoroon (1859) and the numerous dramatizations of Uncle Tom's Cabin beginning in 1852. These plays did represent racial concerns, but through the perspective of white Anglo-Saxon society. The frontiers of the West provided breathtaking spectacles in Across the Continent (1870), Horizon (1871), Davy Crockett (1872), and My Partner (1879), among others, often at the expense of Native American populations.

During the nineteenth century, rural plays served several functions, including escapism, allowing urban audiences to leave the city behind imaginatively for a quieter, seemingly more peaceful experience. Gary Richardson argues that Yankee characters and the plays that featured them "humorously provided a means of recovering the urban audience's rural roots and imaginatively reuniting city and country citizens." Additionally, these plays extolled the values of republicanism and democracy central to U.S. citizenship in the first half of the nineteenth century. Rural...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: UNIV OF IOWA PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2019
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1609386477
• ISBN 13: 9781609386474
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 298
• Herausgeber: Shulman Max, Westgate J. Chris
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar