Theatre and Travel: Tours of the South.

Theatre and Travel: Tours of the South. Edited by Susan Kattwinkel. Theatre Symposium. (Tuscaloosa: Southeastern Theatre Conference and the University of Alabama Press, c. 2005. Pp. 128. Paper, $22.50, ISBN 0-8173-5255-4.)

This new volume in the Theatre Symposium series, published by the Southeastern Theatre Conference, has much to recommend it. While not all of the essays are strictly about theater, travel, or the South, the volume does provide interesting and often quite useful reading for those interested in theater or cultural history in the United States. The essays range from discussions of the dangers and difficulties faced by itinerant performers in the United States--including fire, floods, and lynching--to contemporary phenomena such as the National Black Theatre Festival and the remarkable success of playwright Tyler Perry in creating new audiences among urban African Americans. Like many books of conference proceedings, the approaches the participants take are as varied as the quality of the essays.

Dawn Larsen's essay entitled "Hysterical Historical Fun: The Last of the Old-Time Tent Shows" gives an unusual insight into an almost lost tradition, the touring "Toby Show," which provided melodrama and vaudeville entertainment, often under canvas, in the rural Midwest throughout much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Larsen runs a theater company dedicated to preserving those traditions, and her essay, based in part on the scripts, designs, and other materials left by the Rosier Players (one of the last surviving Toby companies), gives a very practical and concrete view of the performance traditions used in these shows and reveals much about the audiences in the rural and small-town Midwest.

Altar,; of Steel, one of the few successes of the Federal Theatre Project (FTP) in the South, is illuminated by Elizabeth A. Osborne's useful introduction to this very interesting and extremely controversial play. Altars of Steel opened in Atlanta in 1937 and was supposed to showcase the Atlanta company of the FTP. Because it dramatized labor conflicts, it was compared to The Cradle Will Rock and Waiting for Lefty. Atlantans flocked to it, and critics praised the acting and production while expressing concern about its "'Communistic'" ideas (p. 51). When it prepared to open in Birmingham, Alabama, the controversy over its content engaged the Klan, conservative ministers, and leaders of the steel industry. It is a very interesting story, generally well told and useful to the study of American theater history as well as southern cultural and economic history.

Both J. K. Curry's article on the National Black Theatre Festival (NBTF) and kb saine's piece on Tyler Perry's Madea plays deal with very current issues in African American theater. Together they call attention to the challenge issued by W. E. B. Du Bois at the beginning of the twentieth century and August Wilson at the end of it for African Americans to create a theater that speaks both about them and to them. Speaking to them means creating an African American audience, and both the NBTF and Tyler Perry have tried to accomplish this. The conflict between the very commercial Perry and the art-and politics-driven NBTF reflects the clash between the small and generally badly funded African American theater companies that are starving for audiences as well as money and the "gospel/urban" theater of Perry and others that delights its audiences of working- and middle-class churchgoers. The Perry plays are enormously profitable on the basis of both touring performances and revenue from videotapes and DVD's that are sold in churches, corner stores, and barber shops and have become bestsellers with people who never actually go to the theater themselves.

There are a few factual errors, and the quality of writing is occasionally uneven. One author notes (with appropriate references) that the terrible fire that destroyed Ringling Brothers Circus menagerie tent on July 6, 1944, marked the end of that great circus's tent-show performances forever. That they actually continued for some years is noted in the first sentence of the next essay. As a whole Theatre and Travel: Tours" of the South is a worthwhile addition to this series and will be useful to a variety of readers interested in American cultural history.

H. THORNE COMPTON

University of South Carolina