Drama, Theatre, and Identity in the American New Republic

Drama, Theatre, and Identity in the American New Republic investigates the way in which theatre both reflects and shapes the question of identity in post-revolutionary American culture. Richards examines a variety of phenomena connected to the stage, including closet Revolutionary political plays, British drama on American boards, American-authored stage plays, and poetry and fiction by early Republican writers. American theatre is viewed by Richards as a transatlantic hybrid in which British theatrical traditions in writing and acting provide material and templates by which Americans see and express themselves and their relationship to others. Through intensive analyses of plays both inside and outside of the early American ‘canon’, this book confronts matters of political, ethnic, and cultural identity by moving from play text to theatrical context and from historical event to audience demography.

• A thorough discussion of individual plays, including plays written in the New Republic (1775–1825) and also a number of key British-written plays seen on American stages • Considers plays both inside and outside of the early American ‘canon’ • Provides a unique account of an American provincial theatre in Norfolk, Virginia previously undocumented

Introduction; 1. American identities and the transatlantic stage; Part I. Staging Revolution at the Margins of Celebration: 2. Revolution and unnatural identity in Crevecoeur’s ‘Landscapes’; 3. British author, American text: The Poor Soldier in the New Republic; 4. American author, British source: writing revolution in Murray’s Traveller Returned; 5. Patriotic interrogations: committees of safety in early American drama; 6. Dunlap’s Queer Andre: versions of revolution and manhood; Part II. Coloring Identities: Race, Religion, and the Exotic: 7. Susannah Rowson and the dramatized Muslim; 8. James Nelson Barker and the stage American native; 9. American stage Irish in the Early Republic; 10. Black theater, white theater, and the stage African; Part III. Theatre, Culture, and Reflected Identity: 11. Tales of the Philadelphia theatre: Ormond, National performance, and supranational identity; 12. A British or an American Tar? Play, player, and spectator in Norfolk, 1797–1800; 13. After The Contrast: Tyler, civic virtue, and the Boston stage.