Staging the slums, slumming the stage

J. Chris Westgate

Slum plays represent the different locations, attractions, and challenges of life in the slums such as tenements and tenants' rights, immigrant neighborhoods and nativist prejudices, and red-light districts and prostitution. This genre's rise in prominence took place precisely when the United States was shifting from one discursive regime of the slums to another: from Victorian notions of individualism and moralism to modern notions of spectacle and sociology. The productions of slum plays functioned as sites for the negotiation, interrogation, and dissemination of new and competing discourses of the slums for Broadway audiences during the Progressive Era. Drawing on traditional archival research, reception theory, cultural histories of slumming, and recent work in critical theory on literary representations of poverty, Westgate argues that the productions of slum plays served as enactments of the emergent definitions of the slum and the corresponding ethical obligations involved therein.