Pioneer Performances: Staging the Frontier by Matthew Rebhorn, and: Early-Twentieth-Century Frontier Dramas on Broadway: Situating the Western Experience in Performing Arts by Richard Wattenberg (review)

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

Reviewed by: Pioneer Performances: Staging the Frontier by Matthew Rebhorn, and: Early-Twentieth-Century Frontier Dramas on Broadway: Situating the Western Experience in Performing Arts by Richard Wattenberg Karl M. Kippola Pioneer Performances: Staging the Frontier. By Matthew Rebhorn. NewYork: Oxford University Press, 2012; pp. 224. Early-Twentieth-Century Frontier Dramas on Broadway: Situating the Western Experience in Performing Arts. By Richard Wattenberg. Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History series. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011; pp. 280. Matthew Rebhorn and Richard Wattenberg each use Frederick Jackson Turner’s landmark paper “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” delivered at Chicago’s 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, as a framing bookend to their exploration of the American frontier and its performance. Shortly after the US Census of 1890 announced that the frontier region no longer existed, Turner argued that the juncture and tension between the civilization of society and the savagery of wilderness forged American character and democracy. In a mutually transformative, evolutionary process, settlers of the frontier tamed the wild, while the challenges of the wild created strength and individuality in its settlers. Rebhorn explores a wide spectrum of performances from the Jackson era to Turner’s announced closing of the frontier. Wattenberg more narrowly focuses on a handful of frontier-themed Broadway plays opening between 1899 and 1906. In many ways, these two works, while radically different in tone and intention, represent intriguing companion pieces grappling to define, theorize, and complicate a genre and identity that remains relevant in entertainment and the public sphere. Building his study, Pioneer Performances, around two competing genealogies of American frontier performance, Rebhorn contrasts Turner’s binary of civilization and savagery with a New Western historian’s view of the frontier stage as “an aesthetic space for performing,” and sometimes upending, “the tenets of US imperialism” and Manifest Destiny (18). Rather than confining frontier to the purely geographic, Rebhorn broadly and inclusively explores the concept of frontier as a line between the known and the not yet known, which can lead him down paths seemingly removed from his central thesis. This lens often proves a major strength in his study, leading the reader to previously unimagined layers of connection; but occasionally the theoretical shades of frontier become so omnipresent, and their link to the geographic frontier become so tenuous, that they lose their intended power. Focusing first on two popular star vehicles, John Augustus Stone’s Metamora (1829) and James Kirke Paulding’s The Lion of the West (1830), Rebhorn suggests that both works in performance prompt a feeling of “wonder [that] occurs at the horizon line of what is potentially knowable, but not yet known” (35). In Edwin Forrest’s performance of Metamora, Rebhorn persuasively argues for the actor’s performance as confronting a frontier of emotions (coinciding neatly here with the geographic frontier), which defies cultural expectations of control. Simultaneously, the power of Forrest’s performance made his Indian character sympathetic, which subverted “the deployment of the Indian play . . . as an agent of American imperial expansion” (42). In adaptations of The Lion of the West that made the disruptive, crowd-pleasing Nimrod Wildfire increasingly central, the moral ambiguity of James Hackett’s performance of the frontiersman violated melodramatic rules and expectations. By utilizing the wondrous qualities of the frontier, its wildness and fluidity, Paulding’s play “staged not just a space for the enactment of Manifest Destiny but one that also attempted to articulate a different future for the American aesthetic and national project” (70). Connecting Thomas Dartmouth Rice’s Jim Crow and The Virginia Mummy’s (1835) version of the frontiersman Nimrod Wildfire, Rebhorn attempts to conflate the frontier with racial difference and hints at “how the minstrel show used the shifting terrain of the performative frontier to envision a more flexible understanding of racial identity” (73–74). He uses this argument more effectively in analyzing Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon (1859), demonstrating the hybridity of both the stage Indian, Wahnotee, as well as the Irish author who played him: “Boucicault imagines the frontier embodied in Wahnotee as a pleasurable and nonessentialized shuttling between various overlapping and interweaving performances of the self” (111). Rebhorn also draws striking parallels of...