Reviewed by Amelia Howe Kritzer | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 64.2

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Reviewed by Amelia Howe Kritzer | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 64.2 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Performance, Theater, and Culture in the Colonial Americas and Early United States

Amelia Howe Kritzer, University of St. Thomas

Absence and Memory in Colonial American Theatre: Fiorelli's Plaster. By Odai Johnson. Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History. New York: Palgrave, 2006. 332 pages. $75.00 (cloth). Drama, Theatre, and Identity in the American New Republic. By Jeffrey H. Richards. Cambridge Studies in American Theatre and Drama. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 404 pages. $85.00 (cloth). Colonial Encounters in New World Writing, 1500–1786: Performing America. By Susan Castillo. London: Routledge, 2006. 288 pages. $100.00 (cloth), $33.95 (paper).
These three books attest to the vibrant state of contemporary scholarship in the once-neglected area of American theater studies. Each makes a significant contribution to increased understanding of theater and performance in the colonial Americas and the early United States. What emerges in these studies is not only a more complete picture of theatrical activity in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries but also a much more nuanced view of American cultures during the period of colonial settlement, independence, and the establishment of nationhood.	1
Odai Johnson's Absence and Memory in Colonial American Theatre introduces a creative and useful paradigm for research on colonial American theater. This paradigm appears as the book's subtitle: Fiorelli's Plaster, which refers to the models made of the impressions in volcanic ash left by the bodies incinerated by the eruption of Vesuvius at Pompeii in 79 CE. Centuries later, when the ruins of Pompeii were excavated and studied, the bodies had long since disappeared, yet plaster casts made of the impressions in the hardened volcanic ash restored the bodies' appearance in remarkable detail. The approach based on this model makes the most of the meager evidence of theater's existence and practices in colonial North America. Johnson finds revealing traces by broadening the scope of inquiry beyond the records directly relating to theater and by examining a variety of phenomena from the social environment in which theater was embedded.	2
Drawing from disparate sources including archaeological digs, maps, personal engagement diaries, expense records, membership rosters for societies of Freemasons, and ships' passenger lists, Johnson puts together a convincing and cohesive narrative of the development of theater in the American colonies. This study disproves the received history of American theater as a simple contest between acting companies and antitheatrical Puritans and offers evidence of complex interactions among factors such as economic interest, antitheatrical religious principles, social pressures, and personal desires. It builds on the impressive body of evidence assembled in The Colonial American Stage, 1665–1774, which Johnson cowrote with William Burling, but goes much beyond the earlier book in evoking, in Johnson's words, "the potent ghost of performance" (15) and placing colonial American theater within American cultural history and the history of English drama.	. . .

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