Edwin Forrest
Edwin Forrest

Author: Arthur W. Bloom

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2019-05-03

Total Pages: 345

ISBN-13: 1476635927

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Edwin Forrest was the foremost American actor of the nineteenth century. His advocacy of American, and specifically Jacksonian, themes made him popular in New York's Bowery Theatre. His rivalry with the English tragedian William Charles Macready led to the Astor Place Riot, and his divorce from Catharine Sinclair Forrest was one of the greatest social scandals of the period. This full-length biography examines Forrest's personal life while acknowledging the impossibility of separating it from his public image. Included is a historical chronology of every known performance the actor gave.

Passing Performances
Passing Performances

Author: Robert A. Schanke

Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 356

ISBN-13: 9780472066810

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Passing Performances gathers a range of critical and biographical essays on notable personalities whose major contributions to the stage occurred before 1969, the year of the Stonewall riots that kicked off the gay rights movement in the United States. How these theater practitioners variously "passed"-- i.e., managed unconventional sexual inclinations both on- and offstage--significantly determined the course of their personal and professional lives and thus the course of U.S. theater history. The actors, directors, producers, and agents examined here include Edwin Forrest, Charlotte Cushman, and Adah Isaacs Menken, whose personal lives and careers traded on the same-sex erotics of "true love" in the antebellum period; Elisabeth Marbury, Elsie de Wolfe, Elsie Janis, Nance O'Neil, and Alla Nazimova, whose intimate female liaisons were variously interpreted around the turn of the century; the "lavender marriages" of Alfred Lunt to Lynne Fontanne and Guthrie McClintic to Katharine Cornell; the lesbian collaborations of Margaret Webster and Cheryl Crawford; the comic antics of Monty Woolley, which negotiated codified constructions of homosexual perversion in the post-Freudian interwar years; and the on- and offstage performances of Mary Martin and Joe Cino, which resisted the paranoid enforcements of heterosexual normality in the McCarthy era. Central to these investigations are the complex connections of performances of sexuality and gender and their different implications for men and women practitioners working under pervasive sexism and homophobia. The volume also includes striking archival photographs of the performers and their performances, and an index to facilitate the cross-referencing of subjects' intersecting careers. Passing Performances will engage both general and academic readers interested in theater, gay and lesbian history, American studies, and biography. Robert A. Schanke is Professor of Theatre and Chair of the Division of Fine Arts, Central College, Iowa. Kim Marra is Associate Professor of Theatre Arts, University of Iowa.

Redface
Redface

Author: Bethany Hughes

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2024-12-03

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13: 1479829404

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Considers the character of the “Stage Indian” in American theater and its racial and political impact Redface unearths the history of the theatrical phenomenon of redface in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America. Like blackface, redface was used to racialize Indigenous peoples and nations, and even more crucially, exclude them from full citizenship in the United States. Arguing that redface is more than just the costumes or makeup an actor wears, Bethany Hughes contends that it is a collaborative, curatorial process through which artists and audiences make certain bodies legible as “Indian.” By chronicling how performances and definitions of redface rely upon legibility and delineations of race that are culturally constructed and routinely shifting, this book offers an understanding of how redface works to naturalize a very particular version of history and, in doing so, mask its own performativity. Tracing the “Stage Indian” from its early nineteenth-century roots to its proliferation across theatrical entertainment forms and turn of the twenty-first century attempts to address its racist legacy, Redface uses case studies in law and civic life to understand its offstage impact. Hughes connects extensive scholarship on the “Indian” in American culture to the theatrical history of racial impersonation and critiques of settler colonialism, demonstrating redface’s high stakes for Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike. Revealing the persistence of redface and the challenges of fixing it, Redface closes by offering readers an embodied rehearsal of what it would mean to read not for the “Indian” but for Indigenous theater and performance as it has always existed in the US.

Dressing In Feathers
Dressing In Feathers

Author: S. Elizabeth Bird

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-02-02

Total Pages: 334

ISBN-13: 0429969457

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One hundred members of NatChat, an electronic mail discussion group concerned with Native American issues, responded to the recent Disney release Pocahontas by calling on parents to boycott the movie, citing its historical inaccuracies and saying that "Disney has let us down in a cruel, irresponsible manner." Their anger was rooted in the fact that, although Disney had claimed that the film's portrayal of American Indians would be "authentic," the Pocahontas story the movie told was really white cultural myth. The actual histories of the characters were replaced by mythic narratives depicting the crucial moments when aid was given to the white settlers. As reconstructed, the story serves to reassert for whites their right to be here, easing any lingering guilt about the displacement of the native inhabitants. To understand current imagery, it is essential to understand the history of its making, and these essays mesh to create a powerful, interconnected account of image creation over the past 150 years. The contributors, who represent a range of disciplines and specialties, reveal the distortions and fabrications white culture has imposed on significant historical and current events, as represented by treasured artifacts such as photographic images taken of Sitting Bull following his surrender, the national monument at the battlefield of Little Bighorn, nineteenth-century advertising, the television phenomenon Northern Exposure, and the film Dances with Wolves. Well illustrated, this volume demonstrates the complacency of white culture in its representation of its troubled relationship with American Indians.