Early-Twentieth-Century Frontier Dramas on Broadway: Situating the Western Experience in Performing Arts

Frontier dramas were among the most popular and successful of early-twentieth-century Broadway type plays. The long runs of dramas such as Augustus Thomas's Arizona (1900), Owen Wister and Kirke La Shelle's The Virginian (1904), Edwin Milton Royle's The Squaw Man (1905), David Belasco's The Girl of the Golden West (1905), William Vaughn Moody's The Great Divide (1906), and Rachel Crothers's The Three of Us (1906) not only indicate the popularity of these plays but also tell us that these plays offered views about the frontier that original audiences could and did embrace. By focusing on how these and other plays represent the intersection of period ideas about the nature of the frontier process on the one hand, with prevailing dramatic conventions and theatre production practices, on the other, Wattenberg sets the frontier perspective offered in these theatrical works within the larger context of late nineteenth and early twentieth century American culture. Despite differences in how these plays translate the frontier experience into stage action, as a group they delineate the parameters of a coalescing frontier discourse that shaped and has continued to shape American art and thought.