We the (Theatre) People

In a historical essay for American Theatre's Summer 2026 issue, marking the 250th anniversary of American independence, theatre historian Charlotte M. Canning reads the history of theatre in the United States not merely as a history of stage and performance but as part of the experience of democracy itself. She begins with John Adams, who predicted July 4 would be celebrated "with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports," and moves to Alexis de Tocqueville, who observed that audiences in democracies come to the stage not for pleasures of the mind but for "the keen emotions of the heart"; a theatre "more striking, more vulgar, and more true." For Canning, theatre in a democracy has always been messy, loud, commercial, artistic, popular, and riven with conflict. The essay follows the American stage from the nineteenth-century theatrical empire of managers Noah Ludlow and Sol Smith across the South and Midwest, through itinerant actors like Harry Watkins, who rejoiced when one good run let him afford both shoes and food, the very world Mark Twain lampooned in "Huckleberry Finn," to Shakespearean rivalries and the bloody Astor Place riot of 1849. American theatre gained recognition as serious literature later than Europe's, Canning notes, but from the start it was rooted in performance innovation, travel, commerce, and direct contact with the public, making the stage at once a site of national imagination and a display of class and racial tension. A significant portion of the essay confronts this history's dark side: blackface minstrelsy, anti-Black stereotypes, and the manufactured image of the "vanishing Indian" in plays like "Metamora." Yet it also attends to resistance within the same stage, from Black artists and their performance circuits to Native artists like Zitkála-Šá, whose "The Sun Dance" sought to voice an Indigenous narrative from inside the theatrical art. Canning also reminds readers that American theatre was never English-only: Spanish-language theatres in California and Louisiana, German-language stages, San Francisco's Chinese theatre, and New York's Yiddish theatre all built the American stage; a history of languages, migrations, and communities who came to the stage to be seen and to endure. The essay closes in the present: America's modern nonprofit theatre was largely built after the 1950s and '60s with support from the Ford Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, foundations now under strain. For Canning, at a moment when plural narratives of American history face threat, the stage remains a place to understand where this country came from and where it is going; a history of art, commerce, innovation, stereotyping, and the breaking of stereotypes: messy democracy in action.

Read the full story at American Theatre →