Heather S. Nathans's study takes an ambitious remit, embracing stage performances; published plays; performative abolitionism; and novels, pamphlets and other narratives which may have influenced theatre managers and authors. The stage is envisaged as a site for negotiating black identity in the new nation, with images of blacks presented either to confirm or to contest their right to participate in a democratic system, a right sometimes predicated on their ability to perform the same emotional attachment to the nation as their white counterparts. A fascinating chapter charts fantasies of Africa in the context of captivity narratives, the colonization movement and the rage for Moorish-inspired spectacles. Nathans's revision of the relationship of the Stage Yankee/Stage African pairing is also persuasive. Usually seen as policing racial boundaries, in some plays the characters begin to merge and share one world; the Yankee's local references and perceived provinciality may have been an asset for the grassroots, personalized approach of the anti-slavery activist (with whom the Yankee was frequently identified). The need to preserve the Union was often expressed through marriage and courtship plots. Beaux without Belles (a cross-dressing farce) includes a discussion of the morality of slavery in a marriage negotiation. Largely omitting Uncle Tom's Cabin, Nathans considers a real wealth of fresh material, discussing (inter alia) the role of blacks in the temperance movement; performances at anti-slavery fairs; Parker Pillsbury baptizing dogs mid-sermon; Henry Ward Beecher, the Barnum of religion, imitating a Kentucky auctioneer in his famous “slave auctions,” in front of 2,000 churchgoers; the first appearance of obeah on the American stage (1792); the first scene of slave emancipation (1794); a moving monologue on the Middle Passage delivered by a woman in breeches and blackface in the middle of a farce; and riots (though anyone who has experienced a riot is unlikely to envisage it as quite so performative.)

This broad range of performative culture makes for illuminating reading but at some points undermines the political role of the stage. The audience is very rarely a focus for the argument, sometimes because there never was one. The distinction between commercial theatre and closet drama needed to be made much more firmly. If only the printer and the author actually read a play, its status as evidence of attitudes to slavery is problematic, and there is a world of difference between a play performed before thousands and one read by a small group of sympathizers. Nathans argues, for example, that a brandy-drinking female slave was unacceptable material for a theatre audience in 1852. Yet the main character of The Christian Slave advocated the bottle in no uncertain terms (and Stowe gives her seven of the last eight scenes, including a four-page monologue) in a series of dramatized readings in 1855–56, performed by Mary Webb, a black actress. Whether or not The Branded Hand was ever performed, the fact that all the characters speak in blank verse in order to embody exaltation of character indicates that it was not designed for the groundlings. Warren may have had amateur readings, though it is difficult to see how a group of abolitionists handled a character being flayed by the claws of a bobcat, and a slave auction which featured much stroking and skirt-lifting. It seems more suited for the study than the parlour. Nathans does some very fine detective work using diaries, reviews and playbills. Aunt Dinah's Pledge (1850) turns up twenty-three years later as part of a temperance evening in a church in Wisconsin. Jonathan Postfree, a major focus in the chapter on the Yankee, was performed in 1810 at a fundraiser at Transylvania University in Kentucky. The Black Schooner, an Amistad-inspired play, has disappeared without trace but seems to have enjoyed popular success. (Nathans does not note, however, that the playbill does not emphasize abolition as much as the “terrible doom” nearly suffered by the captain's daughter at the hands of the chief mutineer.) Ingraham's novel The Quadroon (1841) comes in for substantial discussion, but the dramatic version is not extant and we have little idea how it related to the novel. Going by the example of Dred, it may have been utterly different. Some plays went on being performed for as much as thirty years (Oroonoko, Paul and Virginia, Inkle and Yarico) but in widely differing versions. Ossawattomie Brown, despite being heavily sentimentalized, was a terrible flop, whereas slave insurrection was a hit in The Gladiator (safely set in ancient Rome). Contradictions abound, but Nathans's central thesis works very well for some performances, and the book is certainly essential to the understanding of the early American stage. The index has both errors and omissions.