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• Performing the Progressive Era: Immigration, Urban Life, and Nationalism on Stage ed. by Max Shulman and J. Chris Westgate
• Jonathan Chambers

As its ascribed name implies, the Progressive era in the United States is typically regarded as a period of vibrant and uncomplicated progress. Conventional scholarship on the decades from 1890 to 1920 underscores this historical narrative, situating the activist, systematic, and rational advances that influenced all phases of private and public life—including enlightened and liberalizing social programs, reformist political endeavors, and avant-garde artistic innovation—as easily integrated, uniformly accepted, and unproblematically absorbed. Although these established scholarly visions of the era do allow for some modicum of resistance (for example, while there was a loosening of conventional views of sex, there remained an abiding sense of moralism), such tensions are considered occasional bumps on an otherwise smooth road toward a brighter, more tolerant, and egalitarian future. More recently, however, scholars have challenged this too-simple account, arguing instead that not only was this period in US history vexed and rife with contradictions, but that those oppositions, in fact, gave rise to the very social energy that constituted the Progressive era. With Performing the Progressive Era: Immigration, Urban Life, and Nationalism on Stage, editors Max Shulman and J. Chris Westgate add to this broadly conceived revisionist project, persuasively situating performance as both a producer and product of the social conflicts, cultural contradictions, and national debates that defined those formative decades in the history of the United States.

The centrality of a performance culture that proffered conflict, contradiction, and debate that were indicative of the Progressive era enterprise is central to both the moving foreword authored by Lawrence Senelick, and the thoughtful introduction, "The Destiny of the Nation," authored by the editors. In the latter, Shulman and Westgate assert their primary interest in opposition and tension, as well as the ways in which that impulse was manifest across a wide variety of performances in the years considered: "[W]e want readers to experience something of the abundance, variety, and contradictions, of the performative offerings" of the era (10–11). It is no surprise then that the eleven essays that follow address a broad range of performances, including not only the traditionally "theatrical" (for example, the Broadway stage, vaudeville, and early film), but also performative genres and sites that have often been marginalized or ignored (tango teas, sideshows, and parades), and do so through a variety of methodological approaches (textual analysis, spatial analysis, reception theory, and so on). Forgoing a clearly delineated chronological and thematic structure and wisely eschewing the impractical task of attempting to offer the complete picture of the era's performance culture, the collection instead engages the reader to imagine the sundry performances explored as fragments illustrative of the broader cultural mosaic of which they were a part.

While the subjects attended to by some of the contributors are meticulously explored in extant scholarship—including the Little Theatre movement, the plays of James A. Herne and David Belasco, and American vaudeville—the considerations of these well-trod topics offered in Performing the Progressive Era are methodologically inventive, deeply researched, and novel. For instance, with "'Art in Democracy' and the Early Houses of the Cleveland Play House," Les Hunter not only extends a consideration of Little Theatre beyond the most often discussed companies (for example, the Provincetown Players and the Washington Square Players), but also gainfully adds to Little Theatre scholarship through a semiotic consideration of how theatre spaces promising inclusion and professing an interest in diversity (in the case of Cleveland, in its vibrant immigrant communities), in fact enacted a "tacit system of exclusion" that benefited the social elite (107). Likewise, with "Rural Life with Urban Strife: The Evolution of Rural Drama in the Late Nineteenth Century," Amy Arbogast, in an inventively close and contextually aware reading of the most popular scripts from the rural drama phenomenon, argues that they reflect "the increasing interconnectedness of urban and rural life" (17). Equally...

审核人：

• 表演进步时代：舞台上的移民、城市生活和民族主义。作者：Max Shulman 和 J. Chris Westgate
• 乔纳森钱伯斯

顾名思义，美国的进步时代通常被认为是一个充满活力和简单进步的时期。对 1890 年至 1920 年几十年的传统学术研究强调了这一历史叙述，将影响私人和公共生活各个阶段的激进主义、系统性和理性进步置于其中——包括开明和自由化的社会计划、改革主义政治努力和前卫艺术创新——易于整合、统一接受、毫无问题地吸收。尽管这些既定的那个时代的学术观点确实允许一些抵抗（例如，虽然传统的性观念有所放松，但仍然存在一种持久的道德感），但这种紧张关系被认为是在原本平坦的道路上偶尔出现的颠簸朝着更光明的方向，更加宽容和平等的未来。然而，最近，学者们对这种过于简单的说法提出了质疑，他们认为，美国历史上的这一时期不仅令人烦恼且充满矛盾，而且事实上，这些对立引发了构成进步主义的社会能量。时代。和在舞台上表演进步时代：移民、城市生活和民族主义，编辑 Max Shulman 和 J. Chris Westgate 加入了这个广泛构思的修正主义项目，有说服力地将表演定位为社会冲突、文化矛盾和民族主义的生产者和产物定义了美国历史上那些形成的几十年的辩论。

提供冲突、矛盾和辩论的表演文化的核心是进步时代企业的标志，这对于劳伦斯·塞内利克 (Lawrence Senelick) 撰写的动人前言和由编辑。在后者中，舒尔曼和韦斯特盖特断言他们对反对和紧张的主要兴趣，以及这种冲动在所考虑的几年中在各种各样的表演中表现出来的方式：“[我们]希望读者体验一些时代的表演产品的丰富性、多样性和矛盾性”（10-11）。毫不奇怪，接下来的 11 篇文章涉及广泛的表演，不仅包括传统的“戏剧”（例如，百老汇舞台、杂耍表演和早期电影），还有经常被边缘化或忽视的表演类型和场所（探戈茶、杂耍表演和游行），并通过各种方法论方法（文本分析、空间分析、接收理论等）。该系列摒弃了清晰描绘的时间顺序和主题结构，并明智地避开了试图提供该时代表演文化全貌的不切实际的任务，而是让读者将所探索的各种表演想象为片段，说明他们所探索的更广泛的文化马赛克。是一部分。并通过各种方法论方法（文本分析、空间分析、接收理论等）来做到这一点。该系列摒弃了清晰描绘的时间顺序和主题结构，并明智地避开了试图提供该时代表演文化全貌的不切实际的任务，而是让读者将所探索的各种表演想象为片段，说明他们所探索的更广泛的文化马赛克。是一部分。并通过各种方法论方法（文本分析、空间分析、接收理论等）来做到这一点。该系列摒弃了清晰描绘的时间顺序和主题结构，并明智地避开了试图提供该时代表演文化全貌的不切实际的任务，而是让读者将所探索的各种表演想象为片段，说明他们所探索的更广泛的文化马赛克。是一部分。

虽然一些撰稿人所关注的主题在现存的学术研究中得到了细致的探索——包括小剧院运动、詹姆斯·A·赫恩和大卫·贝拉斯科的戏剧，以及美国杂耍表演——但在《表演进步时代在方法论上具有创新性、深入研究和新颖性。例如，在“‘民主艺术’和克利夫兰剧院的早期房屋”中，Les Hunter 不仅将 Little Theatre 的考虑扩展到了最常讨论的公司之外（例如，Provincetown Players 和 Washington Square Players） ，但也通过符号学考虑剧院空间如何承诺包容和表达对多样性的兴趣（在克利夫兰的情况下，在其充满活力的移民社区），实际上制定了一个“默认的排斥系统”，从而有益地增加了小剧院的学术研究。使社会精英受益（107）。同样，与“城市冲突的乡村生活：十九世纪后期乡村戏剧的演变”，艾米·阿博加斯特，在对乡村戏剧现象中最受欢迎的剧本进行创造性的近距离和情境意识阅读时，他认为它们反映了“城乡生活日益紧密的联系”（17）。相等...