Description
Book SynopsisThrough both history and personal memoir, examines the role of the Fulton Theatre in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in the shaping of American identity from colonial times to the present.
Trade Review“Rarely does one encounter so trenchant a mix of historical detail (meticulously researched) and personal history (deeply felt). Leslie Stainton weaves the twin strands of her hometown’s Fulton Theatre and her lifelong engagement with drama in ways both delicate and deft; this is one woman’s story, but the story also of our long national wrangle with make-believe and truth. From burial ground to burlesque hall, from jailhouse to opera house and movie theater, the Fulton’s ghosts still haunt this author and, by extension, us.”
—Nicholas Delbanco,University of Michigan, author of The Art of Youth: Crane, Carrington, Gershwin, and the Nature of First Acts
“An effective framework synthesizing personal memoir with historical overview—and case studies drawn from the annals of the Fulton Opera House in Lancaster, Pennsylvania—produces an insightful study, one that offers an innovative, novel microcosm of American theater in small-town America. Stainton’s extensively researched examination begins with the Fulton’s role in such early events as the Paxton Rebellion and the murder of fourteen Conestoga Indians in the town jail, now the theater’s foundation, and ends with the author’s final departure from Lancaster and the beginning of a new life. This is a fascinating, candid, often entertaining journey, with frequent reflections on crucial issues in our history. Stainton’s book makes an important addition to the literature on American theater and culture.”
—Don B. Wilmeth,editor of Cambridge Studies in American Theatre and Drama
“Reading Leslie Stainton’s Staging Ground: An American Theater and Its Ghosts is like having a front-row seat at a thrilling epic drama. Stainton packs her stage with real characters, the famous and the infamous, and events unfold in a tumult of action both tragic and comic and at times heartbreakingly poignant. This book is great theater—immediate, engrossing, cathartic.”
—Helen Sheehy,author of Eleonora Duse: A Biography
“Thanks to . . . Leslie Stainton’s wonderfully unique new book, Staging Ground: An American Theater and Its Ghosts, I find that I care about this building I’ve never seen. . . . I can’t recommend this book highly enough.”
—KeithTaylor Ann Arbor Observer
Table of ContentsContents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Prologue: 1961
1 Haunted
2 Mr. Yecker Opens a Theater: 1866
3 The Killing of the Conestogas: 1763
4 Sacred Space
5 Mr. Hager Builds a Hall: 1852
6 “What Has the North to Do with Slavery?”: 1852–1861
7 Interlude
8 Theater of War: 1861–1865
9 Mr. Yecker Opens an Opera House: 1873
10 In Transit
11 Buffalo Bill and the American West: 1873–1882
12 Memory Machine
13 The Minstrel’s Mask: 1852–1927
14 Empty Space
15 Players: 1886–1893
16 Women’s Work: 1870–1931
17 Cartography
18 Images, Moving and Still: 1896–1930
19 Ghost Dance: 1896–1997
Epilogue: 2008
Notes
Bibliography
Index
