| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Odai Johnson. Absence and Memory in Colonial American Theatre: Fiorelli's Plaster. (Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History.) New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2006. Pp. x, 322. $69.95.
The intriguing subtitle of Odai Johnson's book refers to the plaster casts that a nineteenth-century archaeologist, Giuseppi Fiorelli, made of the Pompeian victims of Mount Vesuvius's eruption in 79 A.D. Johnson uses this image to explain his methodology. Much of early American theater is no longer present: theaters were pulled down long ago, playbills were discarded, contracts were never written down, and performances, by their very nature, were ephemeral. Johnson's challenge, then, is to reconstruct American theater and theatrical experiences through the historical equivalent of Fiorelli's plaster casts.	1
Johnson's second task is to argue against the accepted historical narrative on early American theater. He sees most of the writings about colonial theater as oppositional, pitting "Puritans against players" (p. 5). Johnson claims that theater historians' overreliance on legal documents concerned with banning theater has led to the assumption that colonial Americans were generally opposed to theater. Not so, as Johnson explains. Marshalling a diverse array of evidence—some overlooked by past scholars—Johnson presents a good case for throwing out the oppositional paradigm and replacing it with a more complex and theater-friendly one. Johnson demonstrates how, when, and the degree to which colonial Americans enjoyed, welcomed, and encouraged theater.	. . .

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