How is the individual and the 'nation' constructed and promoted in American theatre? How does theatre enable a nation to invent and reinvent itself? Who are the 'people' in 'We the People'?
This brief study examines the intersection of the USA's sense of self with its theatre, revealing how the two have an entangled history and a shared identity.
Through case studies of six canonical plays and musicals, such as Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), Oklahoma! (1943), Angels in America (1991), and Hamilton (2015), Theatre and the USA demonstrates how all six of these plays sparked controversy, spoke to their moment, and became canonical texts, arguing that that the histories of these plays are the history of the USA's theatrical infrastructure.
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A succinct overview of the history of theatre in the USA that asks fundamental questions about who "We the People" are, and should be, in ways that continue to shape the theatrical backbone of the nation.
Acknowledgements
1. We the People
2. The People Transformed: Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852)
3. The People Producer Their Stories: Sunday Morning in the South (1925)
and Soldadera (1936)
4. The Peoples Memories: Oklahoma! (1943)
5. An Epic People: Angels in America (1991)
6. Who Tells the Peoples Story?: Hamilton (2015)
Further Reading
Dr. Charlotte Canning received her doctorate from the University of Washington. She is the author of Feminist Theaters In The USA: Staging Women's Experience and The Most American Thing in America: Circuit Chautauqua as Performance which won the 2006 Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research in Theatre History. This award is given each year to the best member of the UT faculty to receive this prestigious award. Her most recent books include Representing the Past: Essays in Performance Historiography, co-edited with Tom Postlewait and On the Performance Front: US Theatre and Internationalism, the latter of which won the Joe A. Calloway Prize awarded every other year for the best book on drama or theatre published during the previous two years. Currently, she is coediting an anthology on global feminist performance.
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