Wow! eBook
An Actor's Tale: Theater, Culture, and Everyday Life in the Nineteenth-Century United States
Author(s): Amy E. Hughes (Author), Amy Hughes (Author)
- Publisher: University of Michigan Press
- Publication Date: September 24, 2025
- Language: English
- Print length: 246 pages
- ISBN-10: 0472077686
- ISBN-13: 9780472077687
Book Description
Harry Watkins was no one special. During a career that spanned four decades, this nineteenth-century actor yearned for fame but merely skirted the edges of it. He performed alongside the brightest stars, wrote scores of plays, and toured the United States and England, but he never became a household name. Inspired by this average performer’s life and labor, An Actor’s Tale offers an alternative history of nineteenth-century theater, focusing on the daily rhythms and routines of theatrical life rather than the celebrated people, plays, and exceptional events that tend to dominate histories of US theater and performance. In the process, Hughes asks uncomfortable questions about the existence, predominance, and erasure of White male mediocrity in US culture, both in the past and present. When historians focus only on performers and plays with artistic “merit,” what communities, perspectives, and cultural trends remain invisible? How did men like Watkins advance themselves professionally, despite their mediocrity? Why did men like Watkins embrace and perpetuate myths like the American Dream, the “self-made man,” and meritocracy, and how have these ideals shaped casting, producing, and celebrity worship in today’s US entertainment industry?
Ultimately, Hughes reveals how this actor’s tale illuminates the widespread tendency to ignore, deny, and forgive White male mediocrity in US culture, and how a deeper understanding of people like Watkins can transform our understanding of the past—and our understanding of ourselves.
Editorial Reviews
Review
“After unearthing and co-editing the 1200-page diary of the “lackluster” actor/playwright/manager Harry Watkins, Amy E. Hughes now offers an extraordinarily prismatic and provocative “alternative theater history” focused on his workaday routines and rhythms in the pivotal years leading to the US Civil War. With unflinching intersectional acuity, she artfully distills and structures the book to reveal myriad ways White male mediocrity perpetuated itself at others’ expense that resound to the present day. An Actor’s Tale powerfully culminates her long journey with Watkins and moves theatre and performance historiography in ever more vital directions.” — Kim Marra, University of Iowa
About the Author
Amy E. Hughes is Professor of Theatre & Drama at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Spectacles of Reform: Theater and Activism in Nineteenth-Century America (2012) and co-editor of A Player and a Gentleman: The Diary of Harry Watkins, Nineteenth-Century U.S. American Actor (2018).
