Composing Ourselves: The Little Theatre Movement and the American Audience. By Dorothy Chansky. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004; pp. 256; 15 illus. $55 cloth; Summer Stock! An American Phenomenon. By Martha Schmoyer LoMonaco. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2004; pp. 320; 25 illus. $27.95 cloth.

Extract

The theatre has long been recognized as a site from which national and social values can be promoted, and this was particularly the case with the Little Theatre and summer stock phenomena. Even when performing non-American plays, these movements addressed the education of the audience, as Dorothy Chansky and Martha Schmoyer LoMonaco make apparent in two rigorously researched studies. Both have chosen to focus on the audience as an integral component of the theatrical event and, eschewing postmodern theories of the spectator's gaze, they bring a sociohistorical perspective to their findings, which are based on in-depth research of theatre documents, memoirs, and reviews. Chansky examines how the Little Theatres constructed and educated their audiences, whereas LoMonaco, in tracing the history of a number of summer-stock theatres, uncovers the hold that the audience has on artistic and financial policies. The two books cover areas and aspects of theatre history not frequently studied; they examine the complex artistic and economic issues involved in founding and running a theatre, while also certifying that American theatre has never been contained by a few streets in the vicinity of Times Square.