The Theatre in America During the Revolution

The Theatre in America During the Revolution The Theatre In America During The Revolution. Jared Brown. Cambridge Studies in American Theatre and Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995; pp. 229. $54.95.

Jared Brown's The Theatre in America During the Revolution covers an intriguing period of American theatre history. During the revolutionary war, Puritan moral opposition to the theatre, combined with both economics and an Atlantic republican tradition that cast the stage as harmful to political life, led to the Continental Congress's 1774 ban on all theatrical entertainments. Curiously, plays were still written by American authors, and distributed in pamphlet form as political propaganda. And even with the ban in place, American soldiers got up amateur theatricals between skirmishes. But by far the most theatre happening in the colonies during the Revolution was put together by British occupying forces, who in many eyes added insult to injury when they commandeered American buildings as makeshift theatres. Brown meticulously traces the history of these performances: his book even includes an appendix listing every known production during the war. By the end of the conflict, the author asserts, these British affronts to American propriety had ironically done Yanks the favor of fostering native drama by creating an audience ready to rethink their earlier hostility to the stage.

Although theatre gets attention in Moses Coit Tyler's Literary History of the American Revolution and Kenneth Silverman's Cultural History of the American Revolution, there have been no full-length studies devoted to the Revolutionary stage. Histories of early American drama tend to focus themselves geographically: before Brown, the...