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conceptions of national character came up in comic and serious characters, most notably in the first successful American play, Royall Tyler’s The Contrast (1787). Tyler’s protagonist, Jonathan, becomes “Brother Jonathan,” the graphic emblem of the United States that emerged before the Uncle Sam figure. Jonathan is the first successful stage Yankee and the first renowned American stage character. The stage was, from the Revolutionary era on, the bellwether of American identity.
Conventional thought would dispute this, citing patriotic opposition to the stage, which lingered through the Federal era. Said antipathy was based on the supposition that the theatre was so un-American that it was alien––and equally important––that it was undemocratic. It was presumed that most actors were English, that most plays were of British origin, or that their themes were aristocratic. Yet, in such dramatic incarnations as Tyler’s Jonathan, Mowatt’s Adam Trueman, and the transatlantic theatrical sensations of “Yankee” Hill and Chanfrau’s “Mose,” eighteenth- and nineteenth-century audiences would applaud both American types and performers as national heroes.
Returning to cultural location, how can there be outposts of cultural certitude in our time? Is the Piccolo Teatro Italy’s national theatre? Or is it one of the given theatres of the European Union? In North America, what ought one make of Canada’s de facto national theatre, The Stratford Shakespeare Festival, which has been a cultural muddle almost from its first season? Perhaps we know what a national theatre is when we see it, and the audience members recognize it while they are there, and can even confidently refer to it, but when pressed to address its function beyond that label, one discovers no adamant definers. Given these problems, I would submit that the National Theatre of “N” is best thought of only as a place, that is, as a playhouse per se. Albeit it is a privileged one, chiefly because it is subsidized by