Staging American girlhood the pleasant way: Centering girls in history and performance with the American Girl Theater kits

ABSTRACT In this article, we consider the performance of girlhood represented in the American Girls Pastime Theater Kits from the 1990s. The kits included scripts, cast lists, programs and tickets, and a director’s guide that offered clear instructions to help girls become theatre directors, producers, and designers. We argue that the kits provide multiple pathways for centering girlhood in performance. With their introduction of professional vocabulary and basic theatre skills, the director’s guides lead girls to develop agency in and control over theatrical production. We also contend that the scripts contained within each kit reframe historical narratives by placing young girls at the center of important moments in American history or key cultural developments. The themes in the plays deal, in part, with serious problems that most child-centric narratives avoid, like death, injury, and injustice, allowing the girl-actors to explore trials and trauma through acting/play. In general, we suggest that the kits offer girls an avenue for self-expression and girl-centered storytelling largely absent in professional theatre and historical fiction, but it does so in ways that limit girls’ self-expression to pleasant narratives that elide socioeconomic, racial and ethnic differences. Ultimately, we suggest that the theatre kits serve as a fascinating case study for self-made girlhood performances, but question what meaning is neglected or lost when the Pleasant Company dictates the historical narrative being enacted.