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While late nineteenth-century America had yet to achieve the empire of some of its European counterparts, the American desire for this Imperialist gaze is clearly manifest in American institutions of the day. This essay will focus on the effect this gaze had on representations of Chineseness in the drama of the period and subsequent re-inscriptions of these into the cinema. In this regard, I will examine the evolution of the anthropological gaze which, while denying overt connection with empire, nonetheless allowed America to claim equal status in the community of Imperialistic Western powers, but under the sign of altruism. In turn this altruistic anthropological desire enslaved the Asian subject to yield a kind of stage character befitting the imperialistic gaze, now reconstituted as American.

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On 1 September 1797, both the John Street Theatre and the New Theatre, Greenwich-Street advertised Sheridan's The School for Scandal. Although the company at the John Street Theatre subsequently postponed its performance, this confrontation was typical of what G.C.D. Odell referred to as the “Battle Royal of 1797,” New York City's first competitive theatre season. While most scholars of the American theatre are familiar with the history of the John Street Theatre, very little has been written about New York City's first “regular opposition theatre,” the Greenwich Street Theatre. Lack of information combined with scholarly bias has left us with only impressionistic images of this theatre's place in history.