Engagingly written, featuring a thorough but by no means overwhelming scholarly apparatus, and reflecting keen awareness of the paradoxes that would lead the "true blue Sons of Liberty" of the 1780s to see themselves as wage slaves by the 1840s, Chinn's book is a welcome entry into the field of early American theater studies. She ably tackles the contingent nature of the class, gender, and racial identities that underpinned so much of the early history of the American theater -- and of the United States itself.