Early-Twentieth-Century Frontier Dramas on Broadway: Situating the Western Experience in Performing Arts

ISBN-13: 9780230111448 / Angielski / Twarda / 2011 / 267 str.

Richard Wattenberg

Opis

Frontier dramas were among the most popular and successful of early-twentieth-century Broadway type plays. The long runs of dramas such as Augustus Thomas's Arizona (1900), Owen Wister and Kirke La Shelle's The Virginian (1904), Edwin Milton Royle's The Squaw Man (1905), David Belasco's The Girl of the Golden West (1905), William Vaughn Moody's The Great Divide (1906), and Rachel Crothers's The Three of Us (1906) not only indicate the popularity of these plays but also tell us that these plays offered views about the frontier that original audiences could and did embrace. By focusing on how these and other plays represent the intersection of period ideas about the nature of the frontier process on the one hand, with prevailing dramatic conventions and theatre production practices, on the other, Wattenberg sets the frontier perspective offered in these theatrical works within the larger context of late nineteenth and early twentieth century American culture. Despite differences in how these plays translate the frontier experience into stage action, as a group they delineate the parameters of a coalescing frontier discourse that shaped and has continued to shape American art and thought.

Recenzje

"The wealth of allusions, ranging from Theodore Roosevelt's role in shaping attitudes about the frontier to the impact of railroads, enlivens the evocation of this crucial decade in American self-definition . . . Recommended." - CHOICE

'Wattenberg's work is intelligent, well-informed, and wide-ranging, and his analyses of the plays are excellent. It delves in detail into material that has been too often overlooked and underappreciated. There is really nothing like this.' Roger Hall, Professor of Theatre, James Madison University

Spis treści

PART I: THE AXES OF ANALYSIS: FRONTIER WESTERN DISCOURSE AND THEATRE PRACTICE The Frontier Western Discourse at the Turn of the Nineteenth to the Twentieth Century The Turn-of-the-Century American Theatre Context PART II: THE PLAYS Discipline and Spontaneity: Clyde Fitch's The Cowboy and the Lady and Augustus Thomas's Arizona Drama from Novels: John Ermine of the Yellowstone and The Virginian Variations on the Frontier Myth: Edward Milton Royle's The Squaw Man and David Belasco's The Girl of the Golden West From Melodrama to Realism: William Vaughn Moody's The Great Divide and Rachel Crothers's The Three of Us

O autorze

RICHARD WATTENBERG Professor of Theatre Arts at Portland State University, USA.