$18.95 paper
ISBN 0-8078-5450-6

Published: Spring 2003

 Add Cloth to cart
 Add Paper to cart
 View cart
 Checkout

Copyright (c) 2003 by the University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.




Introduction

An article in the August 1821 issue of the National Advocate announced a newly established "African" oasis on Manhattan's West Side: "[A] garden has been opened somewhere back of the hospital called African Grove; not spicy as those of Arabia, (but let that pass) at which the ebony lads and lasses could obtain ice cream, ice punch, and hear music from the big drum and clarionet."[1] The article's author, Mordecai Manual Noah, also editor of the National Advocate, further explained the necessity of such a retreat: "Among the number of ice cream gardens in this city, there was none in which the sable race could find admission and refreshment." William Alexander Brown, a free man of color and former ship's steward, created this pleasure garden for the benefit of black stewards who were barred admission to white pleasure gardens.[2] Nineteenth-century pleasure gardens were private, outdoor summer venues that permitted urbanites to escape the high temperatures and incessant demands of city life and indulge in ice cream treats, alcoholic concoctions, musical entertainments, dramatic recitations, fireworks, and conversation. Brown would entertain a growing population of Afro-New Yorkers, across caste and class, who were desperately seeking more "refined" leisure pursuits. In addition, Brown quickly attracted curious Euro-New Yorkers, thus launching a series of bold social and theatrical experiments that would integrate American theater onstage and offstage.[3]

This interpretive history argues that William Brown's nineteenth-century Manhattan pleasure garden and subsequent theaters were African-engineered but American-focused entertainments that cultivated an inclusive, intercultural, multicultural, and triracial national imaginary. Confronted with the "twoness" of being both American and "Negro" in the United States, Brown demonstrated that African Americans did not have to privilege one cultural identity at the expense of the other. In fact, as a garden host and theatrical manager, Brown would attempt to represent all New Yorkers—African, European, Indian. From 1821 to 1823, Brown successfully but precariously integrated the U.S. stage and audience; provided African American actors complete yet frequently contested access to theatrical representation; rehearsed his black actors and audiences for full participation in public life; explored multiple but often conflicting European, African, and Indian performative identities; and showcased a New World Africanist aesthetic marked by skilled appropriations and unresolved hybridities. Brown's model national institution emerged in four specific stages or phases: an initial backyard pleasure garden on Manhattan's predominantly white West Side; the Minor Theatre on the fashionable and centrally located Park Row; the American Theatre in the remote Greenwich Village; and finally the African Company, featured in a brand-new Village theater. With each phase in this institutional journey, manager Brown encountered artistic, location, and audience challenges that can prove instructive for any truly diverse American theater.

In this study, I also contend that certain disapproving or dismissive Euro-Americans did not know how to "behave" at these mutually African and American entertainments. Although Brown enthusiastically celebrated the young nation's triracial and multiethnic potential, many white pessimists declared this overwhelming pool of multiplicity unworkable and undesirable.[4] During America's early national period—the formative years between independence and the early 1830s—many Euro-Americans were unwilling to imagine an openly heterogeneous national character that embraced African Americans as legitimate cultural claimants. Specifically, competing white theatrical managers, incensed white newspaper editors, insecure white circus workers, and overzealous white patrons vehemently rejected Brown's intrepid participation in national self-definition. Even as this black impresario designed his entertainments for the pleasure of all Manhattanites, escalating racial divisions in nineteenth-century New York transformed his Minor, American, and African Theatres into exceptionally volatile and even dangerous social spaces. After a physical assault in August 1822, an irate William Brown allegedly responded to the rioters with a provocative sign, claiming that "Whites Do Not Know How to Behave at Entertainments Designed for Ladies and Gentlemen of Colour."[5] The second objective of this project is to analyze those misbehaving whites who attempted to divest Brown's black company of its artistic agency and to erase these legitimate producers of national culture from Manhattan's theatrical landscape.

This study combines North American history, Caribbean history, U.S. theater history, performance theory, and theories of cultural identity to situate William Brown and his mercurial institutions within the country's early years of national and cultural formation. Despite the extensive archival work of many researchers and historians, personal information on this nearly forgotten American theatrical innovator remains extremely rare. Some scholars speculate that William Alexander Brown was born a free man of color in the Caribbean, perhaps on the island of St. Vincent, which was once inhabited by the Garifuna or Black Carib Indians.[6] We do know that Brown earned a respectable living as a steward working aboard passenger packets bound for Kingston, London, Manhattan, and other transatlantic seaports. In the early 1800s he retired from this maritime trade, settled on the island of Manhattan, and rented an apartment in a predominantly white West Side neighborhood. Reluctant to sever his maritime associations, a retired Brown elected to spend his twilight years managing a pleasure garden for black stewards, their wives, other leisure-minded Afro-New Yorkers, and eventually curious Euro-New Yorkers.

However, I am concerned less with Brown's personal history than with the cultural identities or personas he cultivated through his unfolding entertainment institutions. Stuart Hall contends that cultural identity is a "matter of 'becoming' as well as of 'being,'" and that New World identities are "far from being eternally fixed in some essentialized past" and "subject to the continuous 'play' of history, culture, and power."[7] Hall's process-focused definition of cultural identity is especially appropriate for the United States' unbounded early national moment, and Brown's multifaceted, ever evolving institutional journey was partly a product of an incredibly fluid early national theater. With his initial pleasure garden, Brown embarked on a significant institutional "becoming" that mirrored the young nation's struggle with plurality and its difficult sojourn through a defining period.

Throughout this institutional "becoming," Brown's entertainments were shaped by powerful forces from the dominant culture, including the aforementioned white newspaper editor M. M. Noah. When it came to the critical business of naming Brown's initial summer retreat from Manhattan's hustle and bustle, Noah stepped to the foreground. With his pleasure garden article published in August 1821, Noah christened this new retreat the "African Grove" because it was managed by an impresario of African descent and originally catered to black stewards. The act of naming can grant or deny power, notes performance scholar Brenda Dixon Gottschild, and "what is not named, or misnamed, becomes an impotent backdrop for someone else's story."[8] We lack a record of how the retired black steward originally identified or envisioned his first garden, so it would appear that Noah was telling his particular version of Brown's story. However, this interpretive history will demonstrate that Brown's "becoming" was also a product of his own managerial self-construction, which was marked by an eclectic or hybrid aesthetic and an intense commitment to social integration. Despite Noah's campaign to circumscribe or "ghettoize" the African Grove and Brown's subsequent "African Amusements," the black entrepreneur initially rejected such racially restrictive monikers. When he first advertised an identity in New York newspapers and on printed playbills, Brown brazenly selected provocative yet inclusive titles like Minor Theatre or American Theatre. As for theatrical locations, Brown tended to favor real estate close to the entertainment district of Park Row or the affluent West Side. Nearly all the documentation on his managerial twists and turns points toward one conclusion: this ambitious ex-steward turned theater producer coveted a place in the center, not on the margins, of Manhattan's leisure landscape.

America's amazingly fluid theatrical and extratheatrical performance landscapes had a profound impact on national definition.[9] With multiple ethnicities populating this New World nation, especially in an emerging metropolis like New York City, Americans needed performative outlets to process an unprecedented and increasingly problematic level of diversity. The country's emerging theaters and other extratheatrical venues provided coping mechanisms or processing laboratories through which American social identities could be constructed and transmitted.[10] Whether dressing as natives and dumping tea into Boston Harbor or "blacking up" and parading as Callithumpian Bands, a cross section of early nationalists repeatedly borrowed racial and ethnic personas. In his essay "Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke," Ralph Ellison explains that "[f]or the ex-colonials, the declaration of an American identity meant the assumption of a mask."[11] Before the well-documented national fascination with blackface minstrelsy, newly emerging Americans vigorously appropriated redface, or the mask of Indianness, to declare their national identity.[12]

From the colonial moment forward, transracial, transclass, and even transgender performances became national theatrical and extratheatrical pastimes. In his study of circum-Atlantic New World performance, Cities of the Dead, Joseph Roach explains that when "confronted with revolutionary circumstances for which a few precedents existed," New World subjects "invented themselves by performing their pasts in the presence of others" and by performing "what and who they thought they were not."[13] Roach contends that American moderns, from North America to South America, had to master and perform Indian, African, and European "others" in order to create new selves and new nations. So from the beginning, cross-racial appropriation or mimetically embodying the "other" proved to be a thoroughly necessary American theatrical and social practice. Cultural theorist Michael Awkward contends that much of contemporary American life is still a "meeting ground" where cultural crisscrossings around race, gender, class, sexuality, and religion transpire.[14]

In this highly experimental and variable cultural context, William Brown and other American artists learned to separate color from culture and produced distinctive national forms, one of the most notable and instructive being blackface minstrelsy.[15] Writing about the nation's earliest excursions into blackface performance, theater historian William J. Mahar explains how stereotyping "others" is a normal process of "classifying individuals from different nations" because it helps one understand how the "other" fits into more familiar patterns of behavior. Mahar also warns, however, that artistic efforts to understand the "other" through performance can devolve into acts of representational exclusion or expropriation.[16] As blackface minstrelsy embraced and popularized its commodified version of blackness, this white-authored performance tradition simultaneously denied social legitimacy and artistic agency to African Americans. Ironically, the mere existence of Brown's African American company made minstrelsy in America a theatrical possibility, but the ascendancy of blackface signaled the unfortunate end of Brown's producing career.

Cross-cultural or transracial performance in the early national United States was marked by such dualities. Postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha further defines stereotyping as a kind of fetish that "gives access to an 'identity' which is predicated as much on mastery and pleasure as it is on anxiety and defence, for it is a form of multiple and contradictory beliefs in its recognition of difference and disavowal of it."[17] As evidenced by blackface minstrelsy and Indian-inflected masking, early national performance embodied these contradictory impulses toward mastery and anxiety, pleasure and defense. According to Bhabha, the colonial subject and colonizer, dominant and subordinate groups, reconcile their multiple or contradictory beliefs about the "other" and the "self" through accumulated stereotypes. Therefore, he cautions that any examination of stereotyping "should shift from the ready recognition of images as positive or negative, to an understanding of the process of subjectification."[18] Bhabha claims that if we study the colonial interaction of dominant and dominated without judgments, stereotypes become "a complex, ambivalent, contradictory mode of representation, as anxious as it is assertive."[19] This project endeavors to approach the nation's cross-racial performance—blackface, redface, or whiteface—with an appreciation for its complexity, ambivalence, and contradiction.

Another significant theoretical assumption of this study is that Americans of African descent were uniquely qualified or perhaps ideally suited to participate in the nation's theatrical and extratheatrical laboratories. Like their fellow New World arrivals, nineteenth-century African Americans were remarkably proficient at multiracial appropriations and representational contradictions. Early America's commitment to mutability and masking partly explain Brown's institutional phases, which metamorphosed from African Grove to Minor Theatre to American Theatre and finally to African Company. However, the profound impact of slavery and the retention of distinct Old World African values may have rendered New World Africans even more skilled than the average Euro-American. W. E. B. Du Bois's early twentieth-century theory of "double consciousness," being both American and "Negro"—or African—ascribes a potentially liberating "second sight" to African Americans.[20] More recently, black Atlantic theorist Paul Gilroy traces this doubleness, in particular its performative component, back to enslavement and colonialism. Gilroy writes, "Survival in slave regimes or in other extreme conditions intrinsic to colonial order promoted the acquisition of what we might now understand to be performance skills, and refined the appreciation of mimesis by both dominant and dominated."[21] For enslaved and free African Americans, it was paramount to accept and perform the role of dominated while also understanding and mastering the characteristics of the dominant classes. Brenda Dixon Gottschild also recognizes an intrinsic duality at the core of New World African performance, both theatrical and extratheatrical. This duality "can be understood as a precept of contrariety, or an encounter of opposites. The conflict inherent in and implied by difference, discord, and irregularity is encompassed, rather than erased or necessarily resolved."[22] Gottschild maintains that African American cultural claimants never completely resolve the various dualities created by their slave or colonial experiences. Instead, black performers maintain an Africanist "precept of contrariety" and continue to embrace opposites and multiple possibilities.

Within the slippery world of postrevolutionary U.S. theater, New World Africans crafted complex, contradictory, and multilayered performances that celebrated, parodied, and even historicized Indian, African, and European others. Before blackface minstrelsy imposed substantial limitations on the African American image, no established rules delineated which roles black actors could perform. Within the supportive confines of Brown's African garden and theaters, the range of representation for the black performer was unbounded. At the African Grove, black social performers indulged in a preexistent tradition of whiteface minstrelsy—blacks performing white privilege—which was seemingly designed for mere entertainment but was potentially a rehearsal for future racial equality. On his stage, Brown would encourage a versatile company of black actors, singers, dancers, musicians, choreographers, and dramatists to explore a range of theatrical material; in particular, Brown introduced stage Europeans—blacks performing white dramatic roles—to the national laboratory. In the same way that European immigrants looked to Indianness for national and personal definition, Brown's black audiences and actors performed whiteness to construct African American identities. Beyond conventional stage Indians and stage Africans, Brown's featured performers like James Hewlett and S. Welsh presumed they could effectively embody a dynamic sampling of stage Europeans, from English royalty to Scottish rebels.

To summarize, early American theatrical and extratheatrical spaces functioned as laboratories where three races—Indians, Europeans, and Africans—performed one another in order to comprehend and conquer the "other," discover new "selves," and "become" an unparalleled New World nation. African American performers, equipped with endless dualities and a healthy appreciation for contrariety, proved the ideal clinicians for these performative labs. Once these early national African American cultural claimants are restored to their rightful place in the theatrical narrative, a truer profile of nineteenth-century U.S. performance emerges. The first four chapters of this interpretive history advance the argument that Brown's aesthetically "African" garden and theaters were the most "American" institutions in Manhattan's nascent theatrical landscape. Throughout these chapters, the focus is more thematic than chronological. Each chapter concentrates on a particular aspect of Brown's "becoming," one of the four phases, but continues to monitor ongoing institutional developments, such as Brown's ever evolving hybrid repertoire and his increasingly integrated yet volatile audience.

Chapter 1 introduces Brown's first venture, a semiprivate pleasure garden where ladies and gentlemen of color gathered to appropriate and parody Euro-American privilege. Rooted in a "second sight" predicated on Africanness and Americanness, Brown's culture-craving black patrons nightly performed a kind of cross-racial "becoming" that I term whiteface minstrelsy. This underestimated extratheatrical tradition, firmly rooted in master-slave or dominant-subordinate relations, entertained, but also trained, the emergent Afro-New Yorker community for an expanded role in American society.

In Chapter 2, I analyze Brown's Minor Theatre, the phase in which he ventured into theatrical production, appropriated Shakespeare, and dared to challenge Manhattan's Park Theatre. The Park was Manhattan's previously undisputed "major" theater and was managed by Stephen Price, a lawyer who became America's first noteworthy theatrical producer. Price would prove an important and debilitating rival for Brown's upstart African American theater. The chapter introduces and examines the company's unique contribution to American theater performance, the stage European. As the theatrical complement to extratheatrical whiteface minstrelsy, this strictly dramatic vehicle allowed black actors to investigate and complicate white dramatic roles, including the Duke of Gloucester and Lady Ann in Shakespeare's Richard III.

Chapter 3 chronicles the American Theatre phase during which William Brown proclaimed his national pride, constructed a brand-new theater catering to all New Yorkers, and staged various Native American identities from North America to South America. This section features a discussion of Afro-America's first known drama, William Brown's Drama of King Shotaway, which recreated a Carib Indian rebellion on the West Indian island of St. Vincent. For Brown and other early U.S. dramatists, the consummate New World spirit was not naturally embodied by the European or African arrivals but was fully represented by the initial inhabitants: Native American nations.

Next, Chapter 4 concentrates on the African Company phase, the most conflicted leg in Brown's institutional "becoming." In the company's final year of existence, Brown experimented with a brief yet provocative exploration of black characters or caricatures crafted by European writers. By the early 1820s, white theaters had become increasingly enamored with stage African material, and Brown's African Company joined that popular trend by featuring "real" blacks performing stage African roles free of brown or blackface. Brown's two documented stage African performances achieved a precarious balance of comic and dramatic blackness that, compared with most Euro-American appropriations of Africanness, communicated a more intricate and nuanced portrayal of slavery in the New World.

Chapter 5 and the Conclusion concentrate on white misbehavior and Brown's legacy. For many Euro-New Yorkers, Brown's dualistic theatrical vision and integrationist experiments never registered as significant threats to their Manhattan. Tolerant whites merely indulged these African entertainments as pleasurable artistic and social curiosities. But for more observant or perhaps paranoid whites, the company's fresh perspectives on the culturally and politically dominant "other"—as exhibited in whiteface minstrelsy and stage Europeans—undermined previously unquestioned assumptions of white supremacy. The "colored" company negated Euro-America's self-image as the primary claimant on national definition, thus causing certain displeased and powerful white citizens to attack its productions and hasten Brown's managerial demise. Chapter 5 reconstructs and examines a range of white unruliness that materialized as political, cultural, physical, and metaphorical assaults on the theory and reality of an African and American theater. These attacks were directly or indirectly engineered by the company's two primary detractors: M. M. Noah, editor and political operative, and Stephen Price, manager of the "major" Park Theatre. Finally, the concluding chapter recovers verifiable nineteenth-century black responses to the misbehaving white patrons. The Conclusion also summarizes Brown's potential legacy by examining the theatrical activity of Brown protégés Ira Aldridge and James Hewlett. This black theatrical first was not simply a short-lived, "colored" aberration destined to be displaced by blackface minstrelsy; rather, Brown's "becoming" can serve as an invaluable blueprint for an inclusive national theater. In the face of constant white resistance to African American cultural claimants, Brown's boundless black performers designed and staged multiple New World identities for all Americans.