Bruce A. McConachie is a United States historian of theatre and film and emeritus professor of Theatre Arts at the University of Pittsburgh. In his early work, he focused on the nineteenth century American melodrama and the historiography of performance. He then studied the American theatre of the Cold War period. In his later work, he applied the cognitive and evolutionary sciences to theatre, performance and film.
McConachie taught at the College of William & Mary and later at Pittsburgh. His first two books were essay collections. Melodramatic Formations: American Theatre and Society, 1820-1870 advanced the concept of a theatrical formation to describe the mutual shaping of audiences and performance conventions. The book won the Barnard Hewitt Award. American Theater in the Culture of the Cold War used the metaphor of containment to read the drama of the period. In his work after 2006, he argued for grounding theatre studies in cognitive science and later in evolutionary theory. In this area, he wrote Engaging Audiences and Evolution, Cognition, and Performance, and edited The Routledge Companion to Theatre, Performance and Cognitive Science. Vanessa Ford and Carina Bartleet have described him as among the leading advocates of that approach. He is also one of the authors of the survey textbook Theatre Histories: An Introduction (2006).
McConachie was president of the American Society for Theatre Research from 2000 to 2003 and received its Distinguished Scholar Award in 2011. He also worked as a director and actor, staging productions at William and Mary and directing in the inaugural season of the Virginia Shakespeare Festival in 1978.
Career McConachie holds an MFA from the University of Minnesota and a PhD from the University of Wisconsin. He joined Wisconsin as a doctoral candidate in theatre and drama in 1973, drawn there by the work of Esther Jackson. He identified her course on theatre and society as his reason for choosing the university. In the autumn of 1973, he made his Madison stage debut in the University Theater's production of Feydeau's A Flea in Her Ear at the Wisconsin Union Theater. He played the double role of Chandebise and Poche. He directed Madison Theatre in the Park the next summer. In February 1975 he appeared in Ronald Ribman's The Journey of the Fifth Horse at the Vilas Hall Thrust Theatre.
He joined the department of theatre and speech at the College of William & Mary in Virginia in 1976, where he was an assistant professor by 1980, an associate professor by the mid-1980s and professor of theatre and American studies by the mid-1990s. With the English professor Robert Scholnick he developed the curriculum and recruited faculty for the college's American Studies programme, established in 1982 as the first graduate course of study in the subject in Virginia. He moved to the University of Pittsburgh in 1997, where he chaired the Department of Theatre Arts from 2006 and retired as an emeritus professor at the end of December 2015. He was president of the American Theatre and Drama Society and later of the American Society for Theatre Research from 2000 to 2003. In the early 2000s he was among the collaborators on Virtual Vaudeville, a digital reconstruction of an 1895 vaudeville performance led by David Saltz of the University of Georgia, which let users watch from the position of spectators of differing social backgrounds.
Theatre practice One of McConachie's earliest credits was his direction, at the University of Minnesota in May 1969, of David Ball's adaptation of Christian Dietrich Grabbe's Jest, Satire, Irony and Deeper Meaning. Before starting his doctoral study he acted in and directed productions at Grinnell College, the University of Minnesota and Emerson College in Boston, and performed with theatre companies.
In 1978 McConachie was company manager of the inaugural season of the Virginia Shakespeare Festival at William and Mary, whose director was the designer Jerry Bledsoe, and he directed the season's Romeo and Juliet. Three plays ran in rotation through the summer, and the company mixed hired professionals with performers drawn largely from the surrounding area.
His other productions at the college included Edward Albee's The American Dream and The Zoo Story in 1977, Georg Büchner's Woyzeck in 1979, for which he also chose the play and assembled its performance text from English translations, and in 1980 Waiting for Godot cast with women in the roles Beckett wrote for men.
From the early 1980s McConachie wrote a stage adaptation of Uncle Tom's Cabin. The finished play, Goin' Home to Freedom, was directed by Leslie Muchmore and opened on 20 February 1986. McConachie cut Harriet Beecher Stowe's plot according to what he called usable history.
In October 1988 he opened the William and Mary Theatre season with The Threepenny Opera, relocating Brecht and Weill's work to contemporary homelessness as a play within a play. In it a group of street people staged the piece in front of an audience with the condition of the poor, so that each student played both a street person of 1988 and a character in Brecht's London. He said the aim was to extend Brecht's satire to present American targets, mainly what he saw as a growing indifference to the poor and homeless in large cities. He cast men in the roles of prostitutes and women as the gangsters.
In 1995 McConachie began a theatre project at William and Mary drawing on local memory of segregation in Williamsburg and the civil rights era. It opened in September 1995 with performances of Junebug/Jack by Roadside Theater and the Junebug Theater Project. Afterwards the audience members were invited into story circles to share their own experiences of the period. The stories collected were developed into a William and Mary Theatre production, Walk Together Children, which McConachie staged with student actors in 1996.
He continued to perform and direct during his eighteen years at Pittsburgh, acting with regional companies including Quantum Theatre and the Unseem'd Shakespeare Company, and directing Chekhov's Uncle Vanya at the university, American Humbug for the Three Rivers Arts Festival and A Streetcar Named Desire at Queen's University Belfast.
Works and publications McConachie has written on nineteenth century American melodrama and on the historiography of performance, and on the American theatre of the Cold War period. From the early 2000s he argued that theatre and performance studies should be grounded in the cognitive and, later, the evolutionary sciences. Vanessa Ford and Carina Bartleet have each described him as a leading advocate of the approach.
Theatre for Working-Class Audiences McConachie's first book was Theatre for Working-Class Audiences in the United States, 1830-1980. It was a collection of thirteen essays co-edited with Daniel Friedman. He added an essay of his own to the book. Rather than assessing theatre primarily in terms of artistic merit, the editors focused on the social groups served by particular theatres. They defined the working class broadly as those who sell their labour without controlling the institutions that employ them. In his own chapter, McConachie linked apocalyptic melodrama at Bowery playhouses to preindustrial rioting in antebellum New York. He argued that the catharsis of staged vengeance paralleled that of the theatre riots of 1834 and 1849.
Mari Kathleen Fielder called the book a seminal recovery of neglected material. However, she found several essays descriptive rather than interpretive. Thomas A. Greenfield wrote that the book was a superb and important collection but objected that the editors overstated the field's neglect. He also felt that the absence of an essay on black workers' theatre was a serious omission. Michael Fellman found the introduction dogmatic in treating agitprop as the authentic form of working class theatre. However, he singled out McConachie's essay as the one place where it becomes clear how far the theatre discussed belonged to workers rather than being aimed at them.
Interpreting the Theatrical Past McConachie co-edited Interpreting the Theatrical Past: Essays in the Historiography of Performance with Thomas Postlewait. It was published in 1989 and gathered essays on research practice and presuppositions in theatre history. The project began at a meeting of the American Society for Theatre Research in the mid-1980s. His own essay proposed cultural hegemony as a basis for writing theatre history, bringing together Antonio Gramsci and Kenneth Burke to argue that valid claims about reality are reachable only through symbolic communication shared by culture and history. He took the argument and applied it to Dion Boucicault's plays of the 1850s. Timothy Murray grouped the essay with the politically engaged contributions to the volume but wrote that it passes over Burke's move away from Marxism. Rosemarie Bank thought that as applied to Boucicault it revealed little a historian of McConachie's standing could not have established without the theory. Both reviews were mixed on the collection. Bank wrote that she felt that most contributions illustrated existing practice instead of advancing method. Murray thought its strongest essays were the cross-disciplinary ones, and valued the way they complicated the claims of other contributors who were still trying to establish theatre history as an independent discipline.
Melodramatic Formations In 1992, Melodramatic Formations: American Theatre and Society, 1820-1870 was published in Postlewait's Studies in Theatre History and Culture series. The book was published a decade after McConachie held a National Endowment for the Humanities grant to examine the relationship between antebellum melodrama and the values of its audiences. It advances a concept he terms a theatrical formation, which is an interactive account in which audiences shape dramatic styles and conventions while those performances in turn seek ways to please their public. The book divides the period into three overlapping phases, a paternalistic theatre which is controlled by a declining elite, a Jacksonian theatre, which is marked by yeoman independence and a theatre of middle class respectability. The book also distinguishes five varieties of melodrama: fairy-tale, heroic, apocalyptic, moral reform and sensation. The analysis draws on Raymond Williams's cultural materialism as well as Meadian sociology, materialist feminism, new historicism and Burke.
The book won the Barnard Hewitt Award. Reviewers praised its documentary details but questioned its interpretive reach. Benjamin McArthur called the study imaginative and impressively researched and placed it among the significant histories of the American stage. However, he objected to its Marxist premises. Laura McCall wrote that the book points in the opposite direction from Faye Dudden's account of women in the American theatre. Thomas E. Luddy found the study important but thought its criticism did not bring the period alive.
American Theater in the Culture of the Cold War In 2003, American Theater in the Culture of the Cold War: Producing and Contesting Containment, 1947-1962 was published in the same series, which Postlewait edited. In the preface McConachie writes that he distrusts the usual approach of interpreting plays and their reception by placing them in their social and political context. The primary framework is the cognitive linguistics of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, from which he takes the view that concepts arise from bodily experience. Alongside plays the book analyses a number of films, and its material extends to musical theatre and dance and to the influence of radio and photography on stage practice.