Tracking genealogies of performances of the American frontier from the days of Buffalo Bill's Wild West to George W. Bush's 2006 cedar-wacking episode, Matthew Rebhorn has produced a challenging revision of nineteenth-century American theatre. In a broad examination of well-known and lesser-known plays ranging from Thomas Darmouth Rice's minstrel shows to Gowongo Mohawk's play Wep-Ton-No-Mah, the Indian Mail Carrier, Rebhorn shows that this long-fetishized space generated, in fact, a contested set of performative practices that disrupt the dangerous mindset “that there was ever an authentic frontier distinct from its performance on numerous stages” (20). Pioneer Performances successfully maps out competing theatrical representations to reveal the performed frontier and its characters as sites of political tension. Rebhorn continually guides the reader through past and present academic discourses, often with succinct clarity, before updating them with his own ideas. This is as much a fascinating story of previous interpretations of the American frontier as it is of Rebhorn's own convictions, and the author builds on rather than dismisses the foundational work of others. Treating past critics and theorists (from as early as the nineteenth century) as worthy contemporaries, Rebhorn creates the effect of fluid, ongoing dialogue rather than strict linearity in his historical analysis, in turn easing the passage of modern-day relevance into his conclusions.

Thick with the author's own holistic understanding of the period, the work displays alternative performances of the frontier to complicate the dominant ideologies popularized by Bill Cody and Frederick Jackson Turner. Rebhorn begins with a critical engagement of Cody's contemporary, Gowongo Mohawk, and her play, which featured a thrill of “swashbuckling knife fights, sensationalist physical feats, rodeo tricks” (6) performed by Mohawk herself, who cross-dressed as a male Indian. Skewing notions of gender roles, race and “freedom,” Mohawk invited nineteenth-century audiences to consider the frontier in a different, more multifaceted way (as indeed does Rebhorn in his analysis) while subtly offering her own subtle critique of entrenched social narratives of the day. The author does not seek to debunk Cody's hegemony, he explains, but rather to tease out the interplay between these differing representations and “the ways they generated cultural energy through their heated scrimmages over ideology and aesthetics” (21). This charting of the busy “cultural energy” that flowed between stages across Northeast America is perhaps the author's greatest contribution to the study of this subset of American theatre, which has tended to essentialize and simplify those “seemingly monolithic figures” (14) that interpreted the frontier through drama.

This “discursive flickering” between different theatrical forms is perhaps best interrogated in Rebhorn's examination of the hitherto little-known interplay between frontier and minstrelsy, showing that performative practices were continually “repossessed, reimagined, and redeployed” (79) between these traditions. These two mutually constructed categories have from the outset much in common, in that “blackness was no more based simply on representing black figures than the frontier was on representing the West” (94). They were literally performed side by side in some cases: Thomas Darmouth Rice sang numbers associated with the greatest of frontiersmen, Davy Crockett, while blacked up in Philadelphia in 1833. Again, Rebhorn uses one stage performance to complicate another, showing how Rice's minstrelized interpretations of the popular fictional characters of other playwrights such as Paulding and Hackett disrupted the inherent racism of frontier ideology embodied within them. A fascinating argument, then: a minstrel reperformance of frontier performativity as a method of social critique.

Less convincing is Rebhorn's engagement with Brokeback Mountain in the afterword, which by his own admission is an overly contested hotbed for critical and queer analysis. The author's foray into the debate comes off somewhat lukewarm: I found his decision to read the film through scenes depicting meat and its symbolism – “meet/meat” – tenuous and a little forced. Not everything else in the book read smoothly either: occasionally readers might appreciate a more generous introduction to lesser-known plays, which are placed in the narrative without sufficient plot summaries. I was also left wondering whether Rebhorn had occasionally overread some texts, though through his structured, point-by-point arguing these fears were often dissipated. Nevertheless, thanks to Rebhorn's innovative and colourful analysis of an eclectic range of frontier performances and the many subjects encompassed in this book (theatre, minstrelsy, critical race theory, frontier, queer), Pioneer Performances is a worthy intervention in the field of theatre studies that will prove a useful resource for many scholars and students of American culture.