Redefining America, Arena Stage, and Territory Folks in a Multiracial Oklahoma!

In 2010, Arena Stage, the pioneering regional theatre of Washington, D.C., celebrated its sixtieth anniversary and new theatre complex with a multiracial production of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! This production helped to rebrand the company as “Where American Theatre Lives” by mobilizing a popular musical of American nation-formation populated by multiracial territory folks on the frontier and in the nation’s capital. This essay argues that Arena’s production stages a utopian performative of inclusion and harmony, but that utopia troublingly rests on indigenous genocide and elision of racial difference and inequality. Both parts of this argument are crucial when many Americans openly celebrate diversity, but deny the structural significance of race and racism despite vast disparities. To understand how bodies become variously interpellated and interpreted into existing racial projects and the shifting (re)productions of Americanness, the essay theorizes three terms for the production and consumption of this Oklahoma! : multiracial-conscious , whitened , and post-racial . Spectators could view the territory folks as people of color, whites, and/or beyond race. The casting, marketing, and critical reception reveal the struggles for defining race and American identity at a moment when people of color appear to have significant representation, enabling a post-racial project in which many with privilege disavow that privilege and perpetuate existing inequities.