Book Review: Black, Cberyl. The Wom...

Book Review: Black, Cberyl. The Women of Provincetown, 1915-1922 Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Pres 2002

Chansky, Dorothy. Composing Ourselves: The Little Theatre motion and the American Audience. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Pres 2004

Two lately published books enlarge and complicate our understanding of Little Theatre and its influence forward the development of modern American drama. Dorothy Chansky invites us to examine an infrequently discussed aspect of Little Theatre: its construction of the kind of audience that would be receptive to and supportive of noncommercial theatre. Cheryl Black focuses forward perhaps the most famous of American Little Theatres, the Provincetown Players, documenting the many characters that women played in its exhibition and analyzing the ways in which they achieved, maintained, and wasted power within the company.

Dorothy Chansky's Composing Ourselves: The Little Theatre motion and the American Audience follows to explode stereotypical notions of the motion as largely comprising famous experimental theatre assemblages such as the Provincetown Players. She investigates theatre reform undertaken at not only amateur theatre companies, if it be not that committees, clubs, university theatre departments, adjustment houses and other entities that staged live performance, intended as serious art rather than entertainment, for the drift of moral uplift, spiritual fulfillment, civic improvement, cultural enrichment, or social change. She courts to broaden our concept of Little Theatre to include a wide range of performance activities in diverse venues; thus, she examines not and nothing else major centers of Little Theatre like as New York City and Chicago, still also theatre activities in Madison, Wisconsin; Dallas, Texas; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Providence, Rhode Island, and many other sites where challenges to commercial theatre evolv in the early twentieth hundred Throughout her study she emphasizes the pervasive participation of women in Little Theatre, as playwrights, teachers, scholars, editors, activists, organizers, managers, and audience members and point out tos how their efforts were frequently dismissed, criticized, and undervalued.

In her first chapter, Chansky establishes the parameters of her cogitation She posits a time frame of 1912 to 1925 starting with the founding of Boston's Toy Theatre and Chicago's Little Theatre and ending with a year that by means of and large saw the nationwide acceptance of Little Theatre and its ideals. Thus, she conceptualizes Little Theatre's trajectory as "a continuum rather than a of gold age of enlightenment followed according to a capitulation to popular taste" (7) and lay asides the commonly accepted concept of an experimental Little Theatre motion of 1912-1918 that devolved into community theatre in the 1920 Her inferior chapter analyzes the commentary of a number of early twentieth-century scholars, critics, theatre practitioners, and intellectuals that addressed the question of audience and, in in the same manner doing, revealed their critical and sometimes prejudiced attitudes toward theatregoers of that day. The third chapter apply the minds at theatre reform discourse that embraced audience reform as part of its delineate focusing on two major forces in building the Little Theatre audience: the journal Theatre Arts Monthly and Harvard professor George Pierce Baker's 47 Workshop. The in the greatest degree interesting chapter, although a little off-message, examines the "fall girls of modernism," showing to what degree women at all levels of theatrical involvement were denigrated and repeatedly blamed for the poor quality of theatre audiences. This chapter also discusses the feminist orientation of the Drama League of America and its part in promoting culturally uplifting theatre and developing an audience capable of appreciating and supporting it. The penultimate chapter analyzes the part of high schools, colleges, and universities in offering opportunities for women to become involved in noncommercial theatre and in institutionalizing Little Theatre values. Here the careers of teacher and scholar Dina Ree Evans and playwright and theatre activist Alice Gerstenberg are shown to exemplify the values and objectives of educational theatre. In chapter six, Chansky provides an in-depth examination of the Dallas Little Theatre's 192 5 production of Paul Green's The No 'Count lad which, she argues, represents the fulfillment of the Little Theatre ideal: a production of an original American play that "challenges mainstream audiences without alienating them" (187) She also explores The No "Count Boy's potential, as a folk play, to change the national general [i]or[/i] abstract notion of what it means to be an American.

Chansky asserts that despite the heterogeneity, diversity, and diffuseness which characterized Little Theatre, efforts to give rise to serious as opposed to commercial, dramas in the United States did share any common traits, among them the commitment to cause to grow an audience for such plays by dint of doing theatre in venues friendly to nontraditional theatre goer (children, bookish mans poor people, immigrants, and farmers), the influence of European designs (the Irish Players,the Moscow Art Theatre), and the nurturing of recently made known American playwrights. The better-known clumps (Washington Square Players, Chicago Little Theatre) are discussed, however the less-studied practitioners of the motion such as settlement house workers and theatre professors, are also examined. She acknowledges the influence of Little Theatre forward Broadway in terms of the innovative writers, directors, and designers that went forward to succeed in commercial theatre however emphasizes that its major contribution was the creation of a stake of attitudes and behaviors about theatre-going that would establish a permanent audience who believed in the vital part that theatre could play in American life. Little Theatre practitioners, by the agency of "reformance" activities designed for the mutual influence of initiators and recruits, sought to achieve this objective, in order to make theatre competitive with with radio and film in consequence of the development of a national "imagined community" of theatre audiences. She also examines Little Theatre's influence in succession regional, educational, nonprofit, and government-supported theatre, claiming that the significance of Little Theatre quiets less in the quality of its works and more in the pervasiveness of its rhetoric and ideology in advocating an important cultural function for theatre in the United States.