Theatre Journal

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 original and persuasive is "Celebrating Childhood on the Vaudeville Stage," wherein Gillian Arrighi profiles three popular child performers in a bid "to worry and contribute to received understanding of why professional child performers proliferated during this period and, in doing so, further understand the changing attitudes to childhood therein" (163).

While such fresh takes on old topics are welcome, Performing the Progressive Era is arguably most stimulating in those instances where the contributors address subjects that extend beyond the traditionally theatrical. Notable in this regard are "Immigrant Civic Performances and Historical Pageantry: Columbus Day in Chicago, 1892–1913," by Megan Geigner; "New Women and Girls of Today in Motion: The 'Strenuous Clasping' of Tango Teas," by Ariel Nereson; and "Monstrosity or Medical Miracle? Incubator Baby Sideshows and the Contradictions of the Progressive Era," by Susan Kattwinkel. In the case of Geigner and Nereson, both offer astute considerations of how [End Page 116] performances within nontheatrical contexts were instrumental in the shaping of attitudes regarding national and individual identities and did so in ways that reflected the contradictions, ambivalences, and paradoxes that defined the era. The steadfast sense of ambiguity that defined the era is also central to Kattwinkel's argument: while the demonstration of baby incubators in sideshows and fairs, as well as vaudeville performances that referenced the technology, were admittedly somewhat niche and as such did not influence "national conversations surrounding child-rearing or entertainments exploitation of the 'Other'" in ways profound, they nonetheless "served as a microcosm of those debates and as a promise that all citizens could be part of the Progressive Era trope of physical strength as a symbol of U.S. superiority and ingenuity" (181).

The strength of Performing the Progressive Era is due to the editors' success in gathering together essays that are topically and methodologically expansive, while at the same time constructively unifying those explorations with a concern for the tensions and negotiations that accompanied performance during a time when the United States was embracing a vision of itself that was multicultural and pluralistic. In light of this, the collection holds the potential to spark questions that will fuel further research, as well as lead readers to reflect on how contemporary social, political, and artistic practices in the United States, which are similarly shaped by conflict, contradiction, and debate, resonate with the Progressive era.