Events

Assistant Professor of Theater Brian Herrera critically reflects on his ongoing research into the life and work of Virginia Calhoun. Calhoun is a deservedly obscure early 20th century Californian actress, writer, and producer, who spent three decades failing to bring her theatrical adaptation of Helen Hunt Jackson’s romantic epic Ramona successfully to audiences. Though Calhoun’s uncommonly sustained record of failure happens to chart key vectors of power in the industrial consolidation of US show business in the century’s first decades, her story also activates sticky questions about the Anglo American habit of “playing Indian” for fun, for art and for profit. Considered in the broader historiography of competing theatrical modes of performing nativeness (since Edwin Forrest’s Metamora), this conversation will ponder the thicket of contradictions tangled within Virginia Calhoun’s recurring claim that — “as a Native daughter of California” — she was the ideal enactor of the Ramona character and story on the early 20th century American stage.

The interactive conversation begins at 12:30 p.m. on Tuesday, March 22 at 103 Chancellor Green. Free, but please email cwkessel@princeton.edu for reservations. The event is sponsored by the Princeton American Indian Studies Working Group.

Presented By

  • Program in American Studies

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