Description
Book SynopsisCarolyn Grattan Eichin's
From San Francisco Eastward explores the presence and influence of theater in the West during the Victorian era. San Francisco, Eichin argues, served as the center of the western theatrical world, having attained prominence behind only New York and Boston as the nation's most important theatrical center by 1870. As a trade center and place of intellectual dynamism, San Francisco exerted a major social influence on western frontier communities that often imitated the cultural production of big-city dynamics.
Using the vagaries of the West's notorious boom-bust economic cycles, Eichin traces the fiscal and literary influences that shaped western theater. With an emphasis on the 1860s and 70s, this thoughtfully researched work uses diverse notions of ethnicity, class, and gender to outline the parameters of Western theater.
From San Francisco Eastward is a thorough analysis of the ever-changing theatrical personalities and strategies that shaped Victorian theater and its eastward expansion, and how these complex environments created a new democratized era of theater in the post-Civil War-era.
Trade ReviewTo date, most large-scale studies of theatrical performance in the nineteenth-century U.S. West have taken the form of chronicles as opposed to analyses, and have tended to be limited in geographical scope.
From San Francisco Eastward is a refreshing departure from this tradition on both counts." —Andrew Gibb, associate professor of Theater and Dance, Texas A & M University
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Chapter I: The Western Setting: Reciprocity with the Hinterland
- Chapter II: Deconstructing Western Audiences; Class, Ethnicity, Gender, and the Necessary Evil
- Chapter III: Earliest Entertainment Venues—Sexualized Genres
- Chapter IV: Theater's Social Setting—Transition to Respectability
- Chapter V: Moving the Cultural Frontier with Combination Companies
- Chapter VI: The Fluid World of Variety Theater
- Chapter VII: Sculptors in Snow: Legitimate Theater Successes
- Chapter VIII: Minority Voices in the Theater—a Productive Dissonance
- Conclusion
- Endnotes
- Acknowledgments
- About the Author
