In recent years there has been renewed interest in the American West, and the role that region plays in shaping our national character. Contemporary historians have re-evaluated the assumptions of previous generations and turned their attentions to how history creates rather than responds to the past. Geographers have re-defined the formal structures of landscape and how we interact with constructed and natural spaces, in the process creating a new discipline of spacial studies which examines and interprets how social forces convert geographic space into cultural place. Cultural scholars have re-considered popular entertainments such as dime novels and Western films in an effort to understand the forces and features which shaped our century, and thus expanded their studies in an attempt to be more inclusive. Yet despite this interest and activity, little attention has been paid to stage representations of the West, and what has been written focuses mainly on isolated moments, canonical texts, and theatre as a responsive form.
In this paper I take another path by examining the way in which selected plays presented on the New York stage during the 1920s actually construct an image of the eastern tourist in a western landscape. In plays ranging from The Nervous Wreck by Owen Davis (1923), to Me by Henry Myers (1925), to No More Women by Samuel Shipman and Neil Twomey (1926), to The Golden Age by Lester Lonergan and Charlton Andrews (1928), the American West is shown as a refuge from the trials and terrors of the urban East; a place where love-sick flappers, hypochondriacal dudes, ailing businessmen, misanthropic men-about-town, and deserters from a world gone mad could all seek solace in a wilderness of simplicity. Yet as these dramas unfold, the West they construct is not so much the "new world for the taking" so prevalent in other writings of this time, but rather a transformative space where identity becomes fluid and regional differences become less a feature of origin than of experience.
In examining these plays I make use of a wide variety of critical approaches, drawing from established theatre history and criticism, western history, and American studies, as well as the work of cultural geographers such as Yi-Fu Tuan, D. W. Meinig, and David Lowenthal. In the final analysis, what I have come to realize is that for the pre-depression New York stage, the American West was a cultural space that acted on national identity as much as it was enacted by regional representation. The East/West conflict, personified by eastern characters in a western setting, yielded not so much a battle of ideology or a clear victory of one section over another but rather resulted in a confluence of characteristics that led, in the later decades of the twentieth century, to a redefinition of "American-ness." Thus the traveler from the East, who is so often defined by negative traits, becomes re-born in the West as someone stronger, healthier, and more fit morally and ethically to lead the nation in the years to come.
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