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UNCLE TOM'S CABIN ON THE AMERICAN STAGE AND SCREEN. By John W. Frick. Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History series. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012; pp. 328.
John Frick's Uncle Tom's Cabin on the American Stage and Screen provides an impressive chronicle of one of the most famous stories in American literary history. Immediately identifying Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel as "a phenomenon that . . . shaped, at least partially, a racial dialogue" (xi), Frick traces the evolution of Stowe's characters through the primary stage adaptation of George Aiken, into the various offshoot Tom shows of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and onto the screen. Frick's book demonstrates the ways in which stage and screen presentations of Uncle Tom's Cabin both advocated social change and resisted it, while also providing the most thorough scholarly exhumation of the details of production available. Frick synthesizes the extensive existing literature on Uncle Tom's Cabin with his own archival work in order to present previously unstudied information about the performers, stagecraft, and production practices of every major Tom production for seventy years, making this a landmark study of both the play and the period.
Frick uses chapter 1 to foreground the political issues surrounding the play. He lays the groundwork for later exploration of how Uncle Tom's Cabin was used by progressive and conservative forces to advance their respective ideological agendas. By identifying Stowe's ambivalent portrayal of African Americans, Frick locates in the source text ambiguities that were later used in service of a wide range of ideological ends. Frick, as others have, attributes this...