Pioneer Performances

Pioneer Performances: Staging the Frontier offers the first synoptic treatment of the history of American frontier performance ranging from Jacksonian America to Buffalo Bill's Wild West show at the Columbian Exposition of 1893. This project is not simply an addition to the history of the American theater. It reconceives how the frontier was--and still is--defined in performance, and what it means for that frontier to be called "American." This project finds, in a series of plays written between 1829 and 1881, a theatrical genealogy that worked aesthetically and politically to challenge Manifest Destiny. By tracing performances of frontiersmen and freaks, Indians and octoroons in theaters stretching from Massachusetts to Georgia, this work shows how a succession of authors created the image of a transgressive frontier. They put that transgressive image with its fluid construction of identity up against the melodramatic frontier of hegemonic expansion that led to Buffalo Bill. This project argues that American theatrical aesthetics changed to accommodate alternative modes of performance in the nineteenth century, making the performance of the frontier the central genre in the construction of American drama. The American frontier is not just a historical "process" or a geographic "place," as recent revisionist historians have argued. Rather, it is a set of performative practices conditioned by history and geography. Most Americans did not travel outside the metropole. For them, the "frontier" was created as much on the footboards of New York City as on the plains of the West, and for them, the frontier performed in the theater was thematically richer, more diverse, and more radical than critics have acknowledged.