Performing America: Cultural Nationalism in American Theater. Edited by Jeffery D. Mason and J. Ellen Gainor. Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 1999; pp. 250. $44.50 hardcover.

Abstract

How has “America” been performed, reimagined, and contested for the past 250 years? Or as J. Ellen Gainor puts it, what “role” has theatre played in the “construction of American identity”? One need not concur with Jeffrey D. Mason's foreword that there is a “void” of theatre scholarship on this topic (remember the pioneering histories of Richard Moody and Walter Meserve) to agree with him and his co-editor, J. Ellen Gainor, that questions of nationalism and cultural representation in the United States remain far from exhausted (4). As evidence for this claim, Mason and Gainor invoke a bibliography of recent (and not-so recent) scholarship by “New Americanists” like Sacvan Bercovitch, Annette Kolodny, Donald Pease, Myra Jehlen, and Lauren Berlant that should rightly spur theatre scholars to engage the problem of “performing America” with fresh vigor.