Rogue Performances

Abstract

As Moncreiff’s play tutors audiences in the dangerous appeal of watching and mimicking the urban underworld, other plays demonstrate equally vexed relationships to the forms of stage blackness. Robert Montgomery Bird’s The Gladiator, a melodrama of Roman slave revolt, is one such play Transforming the antebellum low into neoclassical rebels at the Park Theatre, it enacts the problems of redeeming and fitting plebeian types into the selective traditions of America’s neoclassical imagination. The Gladiator also presents a story of the costs of theatrical success, revealing the ways that celebrity and popularity can effectively smooth over troubled underclass performance genealogies.