Theatre History Studies 2 0 0 9 VOLU M E 29
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Edited by
R HON A J UST ICE - M ALLOY
PUBLISHED BY THE MID - AMER IC A TH E AT R E CON F E R E NCE A ND THE U NI V ER S IT Y OF A L A B A M A PR E S S
Copyright © 2009 The University of Alabama Press Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380 All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Designed by Todd Lape / Lape Designs Typeface: Minion Articles appearing in this journal are abstracted and indexed in Historical Abstracts and America: History and Life. ∞ The paper on which this book is printed meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.
MEMBER CELJ Council of Editors of Learned Journals Cover: Annie Russell as Puck, Department of College Archives and Special Collections Olin Library, Rollins College, Winter Park, Florida Editor Rhona Justice-Malloy, University of Mississippi Book Review Editor Cheryl Black, University of Missouri Editorial Associate Catherine Mayhew Editorial Board Mary Cutler, President of MATC Felicia Hardison Londré, University of Missouri– Kansas City Ron Engle, University of North Dakota
Consulting Editors Rosemarie K. Bank, Kent State University Suzanne Burgoyne, University of Missouri Peter Campbell, Ramapo College of New Jersey Stacey Connelly, Trinity University Tracy Davis, Northwestern University Lesley Ferris, Ohio State University Margaret Knapp, Arizona State University Christopher McCollough, Exeter University Kim Marra, University of Iowa Elizabeth Reitz Mullenix, Miami University of Ohio Scott Magelsson, Bowling Green State University Heather Nathans, University of Maryland John Poole, Illinois State University Joseph R. Roach, Yale University Denis Salter, McGill University Catherine Schuler, University of Maryland Delbert Unruh, University of Kansas Les Wade, Louisiana State University Daniel J. Watermeier, University of Toledo Don B. Wilmeth, Brown University Past editors of Theatre History Studies Ron Engle, 1981–1993 Robert A. Schanke, 1994–2005
Theater History Studies is an official journal of the Mid-America Theatre Conference, Inc. (MATC). The conference encompasses the states of Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wisconsin. Its purposes are to unite people and organizations within this region and elsewhere who have an interest in theatre and to promote the growth and development of all forms of theatre. President Mary Cutler, University of North Dakota 1st Vice President Ann Haugo, Illinois State University 2nd Vice President, Conference Planner Scott Magelssen, Bowling Green State University Associate Conference Planner John Fletcher, Louisiana State University Secretary Kathy Privatt, Lawrence University Treasurer Jennifer Blackmer, Ball State University
Theatre History Studies is devoted to research in all areas of theatre history. Manuscripts should be prepared in conformity with the guidelines established in the Chicago Manual of Style, submitted in duplicate, and sent to Rhona Justice-Malloy, Editor, Dept. of Theatre Arts, 110 Isom Hall, University of Mississippi, Box 1848, University, MS 38677-1848, or by e-mail to
[email protected]. Consulting editors review the manuscripts, a process that takes approxi-
mately four months. The journal does not normally accept studies of dramatic literature unless there is a focus on actual production and performance. Authors whose manuscripts are accepted must provide the editor with an electronic file, using Microsoft Word. Illustrations (preferably high-quality originals or black-and-white glossies) are welcomed. Manuscripts will be returned only if accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope bearing sufficient postage. This publication is issued annually by the MidAmerica Theatre Conference and The University of Alabama Press. Subscription rates for 2009 are $15 for individuals, $30 for institutions, and an additional $8 for foreign delivery. Back issues are $29.95 each. Subscription orders and changes of address should be directed to Allie Harper, The University of Alabama Press, Box 870380, Tuscaloosa, AL 35487 (205-348-1564 phone, 205-348-9201 fax). Theatre History Studies is indexed in Humanities Index, Humanities Abstracts, Book Review Index, MLA International Bibliography, International Bibliography of Theatre, Arts & Humanities Citation Index, IBZ International Bibliography of Periodical Literature, and IBR International Bibliography of Book Reviews, the database of International Index to the Performing Arts. Full texts of essays appear in the databases of both Humanities Abstracts Full Text and SIRS. The journal has published its own index, The Twenty Year Index, 1981–2000. It is available for $10 for individuals and $15 for libraries from Rhona Justice-Malloy, Editor, Dept. of Theatre Arts, Isom Hall 110, University of Mississippi, Box 1848, University, MS 38677–1848.
CONT ENTS
List of Illustrations {ix} An Uncommon Woman: An Interview with Wendy Wasserstein
{1}
—JACKSON R . BRY E R
Thresholds of Pain in Performance: Tormenting the Actor and Audience—{18} — C A ROLY N D. ROA R K
Designing American Modernity: David Belasco’s The Governor’s Lady and Robert Edmond Jones’s The Man Who Married a Dumb Wife {32} — CHR IST IN E SSIN
A Historiography of Informed Imagination: A (Hi)Story Drawn from the Correspondence of Annie Russell and Faith Baldwin {52} —JOSE PH BROMF IEL D A N D JE N N IFE R JON E S C AV E N AUGH
The Miseries of History: Shakespearian Extremity as Cautionary Tale on the Restoration Stage {81} —ROBE RT SH IMKO
The Final Straw: Producing James Purdy at the Trinity Square Rep {95} —VA L L E R I J. HOH M AN
Disappearing Frontiers and the National Stage: Placing the Portland Federal Theatre Project {103} —EL IZ A BE T H OSBOR N E
{ v }
C ON T E N TS
“Can’t Someone Find Him a Stimulant?” The Treatment of Prohibition on the American Stage, 1920–1933 {122} —L A R RY D. C L A R K
The Tricks of Lun: Mimesis and Mimicry in John Rich’s Performance and Conception of Pantomimes {148} —M A RC M A RT IN E Z
Sensational with the Greeks and Daring with Shakespeare but Not So Sure about Shaw: Performance of George Bernard Shaw at Terence Gray’s Festival Theatre, Cambridge, England, 1926–1935 {171} —PAUL COR N W E LL
B O OK R E V IE WS Robert A. Schanke, ed., Angels in the American Theater: Patrons, Patronage, and Philanthropy { 201}
R E V IE W E D BY C YN T H I A L. ALL AN
Barbara Ozieblo and Jerry Dickey, Susan Glaspell and Sophie Treadwell R E V IE W E D BY A N N E BECK
{ 203}
David Krasner, ed., Theatre in Theory, 1900–2000: An Anthology R E V IE W E D BY H E N RY BI AL
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Hazel Waters, Racism on the Victorian Stage: Representations of Slavery and the Black Character R E V I E W E D BY JO CE LY N L. BUCK N E R
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Romeo Castellucci, Joe Kelleher, Nicholas Ridout, Claudia Castellucci, and Chiara Guidi, The Theatre of Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio R E V IE W E D BY M AT T H E W C AUSE Y
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Tice L. Miller, Entertaining the Nation: American Drama in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries R E V IE W E D BY L A R RY D. C L AR K
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Paige Reynolds, Modernism, Drama, and the Audience for Irish Spectacle R E V IE W E D BY ME R E DIT H CON T I
{ vi }
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C ON T E N TS
Rhonda Garelick, Electric Salome: Loie Fuller’s Performance of Modernism { 218}
R E V IE W ED BY PAT R IC I A K. DOW N E Y
Paul Fortunato, Modernist Aesthetics and Consumer Culture in the Writings of Oscar Wilde { 220}
R E V IE W ED BY HEPH Z IBA H D. DUT T
Zander Brietzke, American Drama in the Age of Film R E V IE W ED BY K URT E ISE N
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William W. Demastes and Iris Smith Fischer, eds., Interrogating America through Theatre and Performance { 226}
R E V IE W ED BY H A R RY J. E L A M JR .
John Patrick Diggins, Eugene O’Neill’s America: Desire under Democracy { 228}
R E V IE W ED BY FON Z IE D. GE ARY II
Harriet Hyman Alonso, Robert E. Sherwood: The Playwright in Peace and War { 231}
R E V IE W ED BY SCOT T R . IR E L AN
Jason Shaffer, Performing Patriotism: National Identity in the Colonial and Revolutionary American Theatre R E V IE W ED BY ODA I JOH NSON
{ 233}
Benjamin Harshav; Benjamin Harshav and Barbara Harshav, trans., The Moscow Yiddish Theater: Art on Stage in the Time of Revolution R E V IE W ED BY C A RY R . LE IT E R
{ 237}
Laurence Senelick, Historical Dictionary of Russian Theater R E V IE W ED BY F EL IC I A H A R DISON LON DR É
{ 239}
Esther Kim Lee, A History of Asian American Theatre R E V IE W ED BY M A R ÍA ISA BE L SEGURO
{ 241}
Judith Curtis, “Divine Thalie”: The Career of Jeanne Quinault R E V IE W ED BY JE AN N E W ILLCOXON
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Philip C. Kolin, ed., Contemporary African American Women Playwrights R E V IE W ED BY K IR K WO ODWAR D
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{ 246}
C ON T E N TS
Scott Magelssen and Ann Haugo, eds., Querying Difference in Theatre History R E V IE W E D BY PAT R IC I A Y BAR R A
Books Received
[253]
Contributors [255]
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I LLUSTR AT IONS
ES S IN Figure 1. The Childs Cafeteria onstage at the Republic Theatre in Alice Bradley’s The Governor’s Lady (1912) {33} Figure 2. Robert Edmond Jones’s set design for Anatole France’s The Man Who Married a Dumb Wife (1915) {35} BROMFIELD AND C AV ENAUG H Figure 1. Annie Russell as Puck in 1906 {56} Figure 2. Mary Bok and Annie Russell in 1931 {70} Figure 3. Faith Baldwin {76} OS BOR NE Figure 1. Timberline Lodge {110} Figure 2. Amphitheatre at Timberline Lodge
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\ An Uncommon Woman An Interview with Wendy Wasserstein — J AC K SON R. BRY E R
When, on January 30, 2006, Wendy Wasserstein died of cancer at age fifty-five, at Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital in New York City, the American theatre suddenly and prematurely lost one of its most eloquent and distinctive voices. Less than four months earlier, on October 24, 2005, Wasserstein’s play Third had premiered at the Mitzi Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center in New York City. Third was an expanded, full-length version of a one-act play with the same title that had its world premiere with another Wasserstein one-act, Welcome to My Rash, in January 2004 at Theater J in Washington, D.C. Wasserstein’s previous full-length plays and musicals include Any Woman Can’t (1973); Happy Birthday, Montpelier Pizz-zazz (1974); When Dinah Shore Ruled the World (with Christopher Durang) (1975); Uncommon Women and Others (1977); Isn’t It Romantic (1983); Miami (1986); The Heidi Chronicles (1988), which won the Pulitzer Prize, the Tony Award, and the Drama Desk, the New York Drama Critics Circle, the Outer Critics, and the Susan Smith Blackburn awards; The Sisters Rosensweig (1993); An American Daughter (1997); and Old Money (2001). She is also the author of numerous one-act plays; a children’s book, Pamela’s First Musical (1996); three books of essays, Bachelor Girls (1990), Shiksa Goddess (Or How I Spent My Forties) (2001), and Sloth (2005); a posthumously published novel, Elements of Style (2006); and several screenplays and teleplays. This interview, conducted on March 7, 2004, in the Kogod Theatre of the Clarice Smith Center for the Performing Arts at the University of Maryland in College Park, was certainly not the last interview Wendy Wasserstein gave, but it may well have been one of the last in-depth public conversations in which { 1 }
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she participated. It is published here essentially in its original form; in a few instances, information deemed helpful to the reader has been inserted in brackets, and a few questions from the audience are not denoted as such. For assistance at numerous stages of this project, I thank Carolyn Bain. bryer: Let’s start with a little biography. You were born in Brooklyn but were brought up in Manhattan and went to private school there and then went to Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. Did you know that you wanted to be a writer fairly early on or not? wasserstein: I used to go to the theatre a lot with my parents. I grew up actually taking dancing classes at the June Taylor School of the Dance. They were the dancers on The Jackie Gleason Show that did faux Busby Berkeley dancing. I really am not much of a dancer, but my mother did make me take those classes and then took me to see plays afterwards. When I was in high school, every year we had something at the school called the mother-daughter fashion show, and I quickly realized that if I wrote the show they’d let me get out of gym. I knew nothing about fashion, but I knew I really wanted out of gym! Those were the first shows I wrote in New York. bryer: When you went to college, did you think at that point that you wanted to be an English major or major in writing? wasserstein: No, I was going to be a history major, and then I wasn’t quite clear as to what I’d do. How I ended up taking playwriting was I was at Mount Holyoke and I was studying to become a congressional intern and I was reading the Congressional Digest. I kept falling asleep and my friend Ruth said to me, “Why don’t we take playwriting at Smith and then we can go shopping?” I answered, “I don’t know much about fashion, but I’m sort of interested in shopping. This is a good idea.” So we went there and I actually had the good fortune of having a great college teacher. A man named Len Berkman, who still teaches at Smith, was my playwriting teacher, and really I think in terms of finding a voice or even thinking I could have a voice very much came from my time with him. bryer: At that point, did you say to yourself, “Hey, this is something maybe I could do”? wasserstein: Well, the first play I wrote in his class was called “Velvita Goes to Taco Bell.” It’s true! It’s about a girl who went to a Taco Bell stand and the machine broke and she got torpedoed by five hundred burritos and had to eat her way out. Len Berkman told me I’d have a hard time finding someone to do this every night and I’d be better off doing it as a film. But I so much enjoyed my time with him that I did independent work in playwriting the follow{ 2 }
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ing year but still without any thought of a career. It’s very hard to say, “I’m going to go be a playwright.” My parents weren’t saying, “Oh, darling, we dream of you being in the nonprofit theatre. Do us a favor and not have health insurance.” That was not what was going on. bryer: The summer after you graduated from Mount Holyoke, you went to California briefly, didn’t you? wasserstein: I did. I moved to Long Beach State, to a dance program. bryer: You were still harboring possibilities of dance as a career? wasserstein: Harboring possibilities, and I thought, “I’ll just move to LA and write for television.” I actually thought I’d write the Rhoda show. I was always funny, so I thought that’s what I could do. But I can’t drive. I grew up in Manhattan, so the thought of me in California just didn’t make a whole lot of sense; it seemed pretty clear to me. So I came back to New York, and my friend David Rimmer, who is a playwright who I went to Amherst College with (when I left Mount Holyoke and went to Amherst for a year), was starting to take playwriting at City College from Israel Horovitz. They were starting a creative writing program; it was Israel Horovitz and Joseph Heller. So I did that. bryer: You got a graduate degree there, didn’t you? wasserstein: Yes. I also had odd jobs. I had this crazy job, taking inventory for the Board of Higher Education. I personally went around the New York City higher education system with a ruler. Can you imagine? I went and I measured the desk of the chairman of the Board of Education in New York. That’s what I did, and then I wrote it up. To this day, I can walk into a room and recognize a Steelcase desk with the measurements. bryer: Is it about then that you wrote a play that was optioned by Playwrights Horizons? wasserstein: It’s a funny story. Joe Heller, who was really such a smart man, grew up in Canarsie and had a thick Brooklyn accent. Because I’m from Brooklyn too, I liked him very much. I remember I had lunch with him—I was twenty-one, he was fifty—and before the lunch I tried to think of every intelligent thing I could think of to say. I’m thinking of Gravity’s Rainbow and things like that, and Joe Heller said to me, “Wendy, writers talk about real estate.” Then he also said to me, “Wendy, don’t you have a real name? What’s your middle name?” I said, “It’s Joy.” And he said, “Forget it.” Israel Horovitz told me I had a beautiful name and I told him, “Only someone named Israel Horovitz could think that!” I wrote short stories for Joe, and I wrote a play called Any Woman Can’t in Israel Horovitz’s class. It was about a girl from Smith College who came to New York and made a bad marriage. How my first play came to be done was my mother Lola, who’s a dancer and figures in a lot of my work, was walking { 3 }
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down the street and she ran into a lady named Louise Roberts who used to be the secretary at the June Taylor School of the Dance and Louise said to my mother, “How’s Wendy?” And my mother started hyperventilating and saying, “She’s not going to law school. She’s not marrying a lawyer,” and just breathing heavily. Louise said, “I work at a new dancing school called the Clark Center in the Y on Eighth Avenue and across the hall is a new theatre called Playwrights Horizons, so if you give me Wendy’s play I’ll give it to them.” That’s how my first play was done. bryer: It’s all about contacts! wasserstein: Contacts. It’s Lola Wasserstein. bryer: What made you decide to go to drama school after you had gotten the graduate degree in the city? wasserstein: I think it was having that play done. The thing I think about being a dramatist is once you see it done, once you hear it, that’s very exciting. I applied to business school and drama school, and I thought, “Whoever takes me, that’s what I’ll do.” I’m from a business family, so I thought, “I’ll go to business school. I’ll move to Chicago.” bryer: Then at Yale Drama School, you of course fell into an incredibly rich period in that school’s history. wasserstein: I did. I credit Yale with a lot. I met Christopher Durang my first day at school, and actually the first thing that Chris said to me was, “You look so bored, you must be very bright.” That’s the first thing Peter Patrone says to Heidi in The Heidi Chronicles, and that play is dedicated to Chris Durang. Not just that play but a lot of me and my own feelings of confidence in my own work and in humor had to do with that friendship. bryer: There were others too, weren’t there? Albert Innaurato, Meryl Streep? wasserstein: Albert Innaurato, Ted Talley, Meryl Streep, Sigourney Weaver, William Ivey Long, the great costume designer who did Hairspray, Cabaret, Nine, and Chicago. I was on his costume crew; me on a sewing machine is not something you want! William Ivey Long did his all-caftan production of Twelfth Night, and the costume crew was me and Stephen Graham of the Graham family and we were supposed to take care of the caftans. I told Stephen, “This is crazy; we can’t do this. We’re going to take William’s clothes to the dry cleaner because it’ll just be better. These are beautiful caftans.” So I took them to the dry cleaner. I showed up to pick them up before the show and the dry cleaner was closed. From that time on, William Ivy Long had me and Stephen painting styrofoam balls gold.
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bryer: There were a couple of long-since-forgotten shows that you wrote at Yale, weren’t there? wasserstein: Yes, Christopher and I wrote When Dinah Shore Ruled the Earth, an excellent show, and we did Any Woman Can’t, Montpelier Pizz-zazz, and a lot of shows. bryer: Going to New York from Yale, did you feel as if you had a group that you could be part of ? wasserstein: Yes. Also what I did was when I was graduating from Yale I sent my play Montpelier Pizz-zazz to Playwrights Horizons; Playwrights Horizons had just moved from the Clark Center to Forty-second Street. They were the first theatre on the new Forty-second Street. They were in the old Maidman burlesque house and upstairs was the Sex Institute of Technology. They did this play of mine and there were some people in raincoats who wandered into the wrong theatre. Then I got a job working for The Eugene O’Neill Theater Center. I was the director, Lloyd Richards’s, “go for.” I used to take dictation from Lloyd and I used to deliver the scripts for the O’Neill [new play] competition on the subway to the various readers. That was the job. bryer: Didn’t you also have one of your plays done at the O’Neill? wasserstein: I did. I submitted Uncommon Women and Others to Playwrights Horizons; they did it as a reading, and I submitted a rewritten version to the O’Neill. bryer: Uncommon Women was based on your experience at Mount Holyoke. It’s about a group of women who were together in college and what has happened to them seven years later. It was eventually produced in New York, wasn’t it? wasserstein: It was done very soon in New York, in 1978, with Glenn Close, Swoosie Kurtz, and Jill Eikenberry. Then we did it for television and Glenn got a job in the musical Barnum, so Meryl Streep was in it. If you ever see it, as a document it’s really interesting because it was done in 1978 and all of these actresses are around twenty-seven, twenty-eight years old. bryer: Then you wrote Isn’t It Romantic, which takes the female characters a little further along in their lives. Isn’t there a story about your mother and the opening of Isn’t It Romantic? wasserstein: Oh, well, there are so many Lola stories—and all of them are totally true! Isn’t It Romantic is about two girls and their mothers. In a way, Isn’t It Romantic is a real precursor to Sex in the City. It’s two girls on the town and their two mothers. The Jewish mother calls her daughter every morning to
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sing “Sunrise, Sunset” to her and to ask her when she’s getting married. That is autobiographical material. We were turning thirty and my best friend was getting married. This is my best friend who told me, “You’ve got to live alone. You’ve got to work.” She was set on this feminist doctrine, meets a guy, and three weeks later is getting married. I didn’t know what was happening, so I wrote this play. There are many stories about Isn’t It Romantic. It starred Betty Comden, who I adored, playing my mother. She went up to my mother at the opening night of Isn’t It Romantic and said, “You must be so proud of your daughter.” And Lola said, “Yes, we’re all so proud of Georgette.” But if we’re on a Lola diversion, that’s not her best line. It’s so hard to even think of writing a Lola play because she’s always written it better herself. Lola’s best line ever was at the opening night of The Sisters Rosensweig on Broadway—big party at Tavern on the Green. I’m a New York kid and I think, “This is a big deal. I have a play on Broadway, read all about it.” It’s nice. The dramaturge at Lincoln Center, Anne Cattaneo, who’s known my mother since I was at Yale, at least twenty-five years, goes up to Lola and says, “You must be so proud of Wendy.” And Lola says, “Yes, this is nice, but wouldn’t it be nicer if this was Wendy’s wedding?” That on an opening night! On a Broadway opening night! That’s classic. That’s better than “We’re so proud of Georgette.” bryer: Then you wrote The Heidi Chronicles mostly while you were in England on a grant, didn’t you? wasserstein: I did. I got a letter from the British-American Arts Association telling me I had won a grant “for mid-career stimulation.” I thought, “How do they know I need this?” Actually, Marsha Norman and Lloyd Richards had nominated me for it. So I went to London and I lived in a place called the Nell Gwynn House, which is actually in a very nice neighborhood now but it was then a kind of transitory apartments kind of place. A friend of mine said, “Does your father know you’re living in this place?” But I just loved it and I wrote The Heidi Chronicles there. bryer: Is that the only play you’ve written in a secluded situation like that? Have you written most of the others as part of your daily existence? wasserstein: Mostly I’m much better writing in seclusion. I’ve often checked into hotels and written. I used to go up to Dartmouth and stay at the Hanover Inn and use the library—only because I knew no one in Hanover— and would write. I used to love going to hotels to write. I can’t do it anymore because I have a four-year-old daughter. bryer: By the time you start to write, do you usually have arc of the play in mind or not? When you go to that hotel to start writing, do you know pretty much where you’re going with the play? { 6 }
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wasserstein: Sort of. What’s nice is to start to get something down on paper enough that you can kind of make not an outline, but at least know where the play’s going to land. Then what’s joyful is to be in the middle of a play, to know that for the next four months this is what I’m going to do because I’ve gotten this jump start on it. Usually my plays are something I’ve been thinking about for a long time. The two recent one-acts were different. bryer: Where do the plays usually start? Do they start with a character? Do they start with a situation? Or have they started in all sorts of different ways? wasserstein: With The Heidi Chronicles, I felt very confused at the time and I didn’t know where the confusion was coming from. I felt that a lot of my friends were off to change the world, were off to buy second homes, and I didn’t know where that was coming from. And because I was living in London, I was very interested in the notion of how the times you live in and societal change affect your personal choices. The other thing was because I’ve always been interested in putting women onstage and their choices, I thought it would be interesting to trace the women’s movement and how it affected one woman’s life. The Sisters Rosensweig came from living in London, thinking about identity, and that Chekhov had always had been my favorite playwright. With The Sisters Rosensweig, when I look back on it, I think somewhat it was instinctive because my real sister died five years after that play opened. We just did a reading of that play as a benefit for the Breast Cancer Foundation in New York that Blair Brown played the lead in, and it was as if we were spending time in my sister’s company that night. It made me very happy. I think somehow instinctively that there was something that was urging me to do this. bryer: An American Daughter probably was an idea, wasn’t it? wasserstein: An American Daughter was an idea because of “Nannygate,” because of what was happening. It’s very interesting about An American Daughter, which is a play about a woman sort of based on Kimba Wood. It’s about a woman who was nominated for surgeon general, and then they found out that she misplaced a jury duty notice and there’s a whole media hoopla; it has a lot to do with women and glass ceilings. Of all my plays, it’s the one that’s had the most varied receptions. There are people who think it’s my best play; there are people who don’t like that play at all. Who loved that play was Martha Stewart. Isn’t that interesting? Martha Stewart. She came to the opening night of that play, and she came up to me and said, “You got it.” That’s so interesting. bryer: I wonder why. wasserstein: Persecution and success. bryer: Your most recent Broadway play is Old Money which is, I think, a { 7 }
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fascinating idea for a play—the difference between how money was regarded at the turn of the century and how it is regarded now. wasserstein: It’s funny. That’s a play that didn’t even have a varied reception. It was mostly negative. The British—Sheridan Morley, for example—really loved it. It’s a play about a house in New York and the idea of money a hundred years ago and money now. It’s not an “edgy” play; it’s almost a play about how we live, I think. Its structure is like Arcadia; it does go back and forth in time. I hope I get to see that play again; it’s not chic, that play. bryer: How did you end up having the world premiere of your two most recent plays in Washington, D.C.? wasserstein: I really like doing plays in Washington. Molly Smith, who I adore, did An American Daughter at Arena Stage a year ago, and I thought that was an excellent production. Wendy Goldberg, who’s an artistic associate there, said, “Do you want to write a play for our new plays program?” And I thought, “Well, this is one way to make myself write something, and I really like Wendy and Molly.” So I wrote Welcome to my Rash for their new plays series and it was read one day. I was shy about it and then Ari Roth [artistic director at Theater J in Washington], who was at the reading, came up to me and said, “I’ll do this play.” Actually, there were two plays that night. I wrote “Psyche in Love,” which I later threw out and put into the body of Rash, and Welcome to My Rash. I thought, “This makes sense to me”—because it’s just about putting on a play. Then, over the summer, I went to the MacDowell Colony to work for two weeks and I went to an inn in Hancock, New Hampshire, with my nanny and my daughter and this young man Michael Barakiva who’d come to visit me as a twenty-seven-year-old director. The guy who was waiting on us was a college student and I asked him, “How do you like your college?” He said, “Well, I was accused of plagiarism three times.” And I said, “Really? And were you guilty?” And he said, “No, it’s kind of because of who I am. I went to Andover and I’m a jock.” I turned to Michael and said, “That’s a play. I know that’s a play.” That’s really how Third got started. I thought, “Since Theater J is giving me this chance to do some plays, I’ll write this play for them.” For a playwright, you just need a theatre behind you and then you think “I’m going to do this.” What I’m doing now is expanding Third into a full-length play and so Rash will be separate from that, maybe on a double bill with Chris Durang. bryer: Why of the two one-acts did you decide to develop Third into a full-length play? Did you like it better than Rash? wasserstein: I liked Rash; I think it’s an interesting play. I think the sequences in the middle, the sort of dream sequences, aren’t necessary. In a certain way, I like those two plays together because the one is physically fragile and { 8 }
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the other one is intellectually fragile. The thing about Rash is that she’s going to go on. This isn’t a woman who’s going to die, and I thought that was an interesting thing to deal with. Also, often in plays doctors are bozos and I thought, “This doctor isn’t a bozo. This is an interesting, compelling man.” It’s odd that he’s so obsessed with women’s literature; I found that funny. But I think Third in a way is the more theatrical of the two. The reason why I’m expanding it is you need to know why she goes back and apologizes to that kid, and that’s not clear in the text. It was a fun thing to write about because in some ways it goes against the grain. That play in some ways is politically incorrect; and I like the idea of the reverse discrimination. I think that that’s very interesting—this woman breaking down—so when I think about that play I also want to know more about her, more about her life. I’m going to see what it’s like on its own and see if it works alone or you need the other to balance it. I’m writing it for the Lincoln Center, and what André Bishop [artistic director of Lincoln Center Theater] says is that the female character in Third has more weight and she deserves a larger stage than she’s been given. bryer: Did you like the experience of being out of the glare of New York? wasserstein: I really liked that. I really liked being here. I liked the theatre community. I liked that Molly and Wendy came to see the show at Ari’s theatre. I liked that the kid who played the lead in Third had just graduated from Michael Kahn’s conservatory [at the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington]. The whole thing felt like going back to doing plays at Playwrights Horizons when I first started doing plays. I don’t really write one-act plays—I like a larger canvas—so these two plays I wrote really just to write. I didn’t even know what I had. Kathryn Grody, who was in those plays, was in Uncommon Women at the O’Neill Center in 1978, so in some ways the whole experience was about renewal. bryer: Do you think you’ll do that again? I don’t necessarily mean in D.C.; but you used to do that when you opened your plays at Seattle Rep, where Dan Sullivan directed them. wasserstein: I have a commission from Molly Smith to write a play for Arena Stage, so I’m going to do that. I’ve written a musical with Cy Coleman and David Zippel based on my children’s book, Pamela’s First Musical, that we’re going to do at the Kennedy Center not next fall but the following fall. bryer: What do you think the effect on your work has been of being a lifetime New Yorker? wasserstein: My friend Martin Sherman, who wrote Bent, who I think is very smart and is an old friend of mine who lives in London, came to see The Sisters Rosensweig and he said to me, “You know what’s interesting about this { 9 }
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play, Wendy? These are people you knew when you were eight years old.” One of the characters in The Sisters Rosensweig is a faux furrier, who’s a man who manufactures leopardette, and actually my father manufactured velveteen and he did manufacture suedette, leopardette, zebradette, and all the “ettes.” I think that he was quite right that it was populated by people who I remember as being very colorful. And the sense of humor is very much a New York sense of humor I think. But certainly a play like The Heidi Chronicles has nothing to do with New York; they come to New York, but Heidi is deliberately someone from the Midwest. The Sisters Rosensweig is about misplaced girls from Brooklyn, but it takes place in London. Old Money does take place in New York; but the two recent one-acts have nothing to do with New York. bryer: What about the Jewish aspect of your plays? Isn’t there a kind of Jewish cultural ambience to them? wasserstein: Well, I made my stage debut as Queen Esther in second grade at the Yeshiva Flatbush! In a way, it’s funny with Heidi. People always assume that Heidi was Jewish because I wrote it, and in fact she’s not. I think in many of my own life experiences I have been a Jewish person in a non-Jewish environment—certainly Mount Holyoke is not the Yeshiva. I think there’s more of that in my plays. I did a conversation with Tony Kushner at the Jewish Center on the West Side the other week, and it was interesting hearing both of us talk about Judaism. Tony, who is so smart and well educated and very interested in grappling with the intellectual aspects of Judaism, was talking about his search for the absolute and his search for holiness. And I said, “Tony, here’s the difference between us: you’re looking for the absolute and I’m looking for shrimp.” I think that’s basically it. bryer: Of course, he grew up in Louisiana, which is hardly a hotbed of Judaism either. wasserstein: That’s right, exactly. And that may well be why he’s searching for it. bryer: What kind of humor makes you laugh? Is it the same kind of humor that is in the plays, or is it different? wasserstein: I named my daughter Lucy for Lucille Ball, partially; it’s from my movie [The Object of My Affection (1998)], but I came to that name for the movie when one night I was in Rochester, New York, and I was feeling pretty low. I had just given a speech and I was pregnant; it was three in the morning and I started watching I Love Lucy reruns and there she was. It was the one where she was pregnant and Ricky comes with a voodoo outfit to the hospital, and it just made me laugh. I mean it really made me laugh, and I don’t even know if I was laughing because I remembered when I first saw it or laugh{ 10 }
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ing because of what it was or laughing because Lucille Ball produced the show, starred in it, and was a major force in an industry. There were many reasons why I felt a warmth and humor that night. bryer: Is that the kind of humor that appeals to you? wasserstein: I think it depends. I think mostly I’m an ironist and I’m not interested in pretension. I’m interested in irony and I’m interested in a certain kind of wit. I think that when you write a play that’s humorous, you’re always in danger of someone saying, “Oh, it’s sitcom; it’s just funny.” You have to look at how people use their humor and whether they’re distancing themselves, avoiding things, or if they feel a need to entertain and they so desperately want to be liked and not to be known that they will spend their evening telling you jokes. Or you also have the humor of two people, whether humorist or ironist; that’s what you share. What brings you together is that sense of humor, and that’s what makes you close. The late director Gerald Gutierrez, who passed away three weeks ago or so, was one of the funniest men I’ve ever known in my life. Our friendship had a lot to do with sharing a sense of humor. He used to call himself my husband. He wrote in to, I think, Who’s Who in American Theatre that he and I were married and that we had two children: Ginger Joy (my cat) and Phyllis (his dog). When Gerry died about a month ago, the obituary in the Washington Post said that Gerry was survived by his wife, me, and not only that, it said that we got divorced in 1986—so I took out an ad “in memory of my dear husband, Gerald Gutierrez.” bryer: One of the things you said once is that what you try to do especially with comedy is not write the underneath. That’s what we were just talking about, isn’t it, that it has to be about more than what is on the surface? wasserstein: It has to be more than what’s on the surface. But despite the Oprahfication of America, when a person reveals themselves, especially an intelligent person, and you’re writing dialogue in conversation, it comes at specific times. I think that, in The Heidi Chronicles, the funniest person in it, the wittiest and the most verbally facile, is the gay doctor; so when he finally reveals to Heidi that his friend Stanley has AIDS it’s as if the humor for him gets faster and faster and sharper and sharper until finally it sort of bursts. But it depends on who’s talking. What you’re looking for is texture. The goal is some sort of Chekhovian whatever, like everybody else. bryer: Do you think the situation that Heidi faced in 1988 is significantly different now from what it was? wasserstein: The most interesting thing is having a daughter who’s four years old, because I am intimately in touch with the generations either two generations behind me or one behind me, the mothers. At one of the schools Lucy { 11 }
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went to—she went to a toddler center—there was a parent group. To listen to the parents talk about child raising: “Do you work?” “Do you not work?” “Do you feel guilty about not working?” “If you’re working, do you feel guilty about not staying home?” All of those issues for women in some ways are different. To me, it seemed very clear. It was, “I’m going to write plays and I will do everything I can to write these plays. And if I postpone marriage and family, this is what I’m going to do.” Everything is a bargain. What seems quite interesting to me, and certainly dramatically worthy if drama is about choices, the choices that women are making now are fascinating: where those external pressures come from, where the internal pressures come from. Not to mention what’s going to happen with reproductive rights. Reproductive rights is such a crucial issue here. When I had my daughter four years ago, I was very ill. When I was twenty-four weeks pregnant, a doctor came to see me at Mount Sinai Hospital and said to me, “You have a choice. We believe primarily in the health of the mother, so I want you to know that you can choose to terminate this child. We will tell you what your health prospects are here, and the health of your child.” Even on a magnesium drip, I knew that this was happening to me, and I knew that I made a choice. Around a month ago, my niece ended up in Mount Sinai Hospital at twenty-four weeks in the room next to where I was, and that choice is no longer offered. That is what’s happening to women in this country on a very primary level because of the whole issue of third-term abortion and all of that. I can’t stress enough, especially to younger women, that if we don’t pay attention to what’s happening here, things that you take for granted, your basic rights, will be taken away from you. I don’t write political plays in that way. I’m not the person who’s going to write that play. I think what’s magnificent is in terms of what women can do—job opportunities opening up for women, different choices opening up for women, same-sex marriage and all of that—but simultaneously I really strongly feel that there’s an undertow. I can’t say what’s a better thing for children or not, but I think in terms of drama, in terms of what I do: are there things to write about? Yes. And what’s good about plays is with plays you’ve got the platform to write about it; it doesn’t get winnowed down, because plays are still the home of the individual voice. bryer: Speaking about a younger generation, can you talk about your Open Doors program in New York City? wasserstein: The Open Doors program has really worked out well. I’ll give you the prelude to this and how it came about. After Jane Alexander was in my play The Sisters Rosensweig, she came to Washington and was head of the NEA. During the time she was heading the NEA, the Speaker of the House, { 12 }
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Newt Gingrich, refused to meet with her; so a group called Poets and Writers put together some artists to come down to lobby. The NEA was going to get rid of individual grants to writers, so we went down to Washington; it was Walter Mosley and Melanie Griffith and Joanne Woodward and myself. The Speaker decided to have breakfast with us; it was mainly because he wanted to meet Melanie Griffith. He had written a novel, and if it became a movie he thought maybe she could be in it. They said to me, “Wendy, you wrote The Heidi Chronicles and you won an NEA grant. Why don’t you talk about it?” So I said, “I won an NEA grant in 1984 for twelve thousand dollars and I wrote The Heidi Chronicles. It was on Broadway for two years and toured the country for two years and that meant it kept a lot of cities open and a lot of people employed and that’s a small investment for twelve thousand dollars.” Newt is looking at me like I’m Tony Kushner with a wig on and then he says to me, “You know, Arthur Murray never needed a grant to write a play.” This is really true! I’m thinking, “I know who Arthur Murray is; my mother Lola’s a dancer. You’ve got the wrong girl here.” But I didn’t say anything because I’m a good girl and I think we need the money, so I just go, “Oh, yes.” We’re walking out and I see an aide of his whisper to him and he looks at me and says, “I’m terribly sorry. I meant Arthur Miller.” I said, “Well, you know he did have a grant. It was called the WPA.” Then I thought that if arts funding is in the hands of people who don’t know the difference between Arthur Miller and Arthur Murray this is a problem. When we were walking around Congress that day, people we talked to said, “Oh, I love the ballet, my daughter takes ballet classes, but the government shouldn’t fund this. Don’t you think health and education is more important?” One person did say, “Well, you know, the culture of this country is Hollywood. That’s what represents us around the world.” So I thought really that the future of arts education in some sense had to be taken into the hands of the artists, especially in terms of audience building. Because I grew up in New York and I felt that it was sort of the right of every New Yorker to go to the theatre, I had this idea that I wanted to take eight high school kids, public high school kids who had never been to a play and who were math/science kids, to the theatre for a year and see what it meant. Maybe it wasn’t just an elitist institution. A friend of mine told me we should try going to the Theatre Development Fund because they had an education wing; they’re the people who manage the half-price ticket booth in Times Square. They had a relationship with DeWitt Clinton High School, which is a tough high school in the Bronx. They got me eight kids who had never been to a play. We figured out eight plays that I would take them to and I would go out with them for an hour and a half for pizza after and talk to them. { 13 }
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At the end of the year, I talked to them and said, “Should we continue this?” And one girl said, “I never felt part of Manhattan. I never thought New York City belonged to me in any way. Coming here and going to the theatre I always thought was for rich white people. Manhattan just didn’t have anything to do with me.” And she said, “I feel a part of the city in a way that I never had before.” Another kid said to me that her girlfriends now when they broke up with their boyfriends or whatever came to her for advice because they felt she had critical facilities. So we continued this program and it has now grown to fifteen groups. Taking kids on a small basis to the theatre are Frank Rich, Hal Prince and Alex Witchel, and Bill Finn and Graciela Daniele, and it’s just been really a wonderful thing because the kids are just so appreciative. It’s going to the theatre; it’s talking about the theatre. Any doubt that I had had about the theatre being valid or the exchange of ideas, about catharsis, and community, all of that, have been totally validated by this. My hope is that this kind of program can really become a blueprint for doing this in other cities across the country. bryer: What difference has it made for you as a writer to have a child at this stage in your life—in terms of what you’ll write about? Do you think that having Lucy Jane in your life is going to change the way you look at things? wasserstein: It does change the way you look at things. It changes what you’re writing because you do some things for yourself and you do some things for money. You can’t raise a child on what you make at Theater J, you just can’t. But I think it will change what I’m writing in a variety of ways. Even the play Rash climaxes when she turns to the doctor and says, “But I’m a mother.” It’s that that she has to deal with; that’s the underlying thing. That’s different. I would know it, but I wouldn’t know it in the way I know it now. I told Molly Smith at Arena Stage that I wanted to write her a play about a child physiatrist or somebody who plays on people’s vulnerabilities about children. I certainly wouldn’t know as much as I know about younger women making choices and what those choices are. Why are we postponing marriage and childbirth? What’s the back side of that? All of those things I think will affect what I write, and there’s also my desire to write for children, the desire to get Pamela’s First Musical on. I watch endless animated movies. That’s really what I watch, The Aristocats. My friends talk to me about the Bertolucci movie and I say, “But have you seen—?” Tonight at dinner I found myself talking about Gay Purr-ee, about these cats in Paris who sit and talk. What I have noticed in these animated movies is that they’re male buddy movies. If you look at Monsters, Inc. or Shrek, it’s usually the tough guy and the funny sidekick. You hardly ever see it with two females. Things like that interest me for children.
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bryer: Perhaps now that you’re a mother, you’ll write more about parenting? wasserstein: Parenting isn’t written about much. Friends of mine would say to me, “How’s your baby?” and I’d say, “Fine,” and they’d say, “Isn’t it the best? It’s just the best.” And would I think, “Well, it’s a little more complicated than that.” Or you can run around thinking everyone is saying, “It’s the best. It’s the best,” and you’re the only idiot who’s tired and out of it. I think the whole thing about parenting is that it’s just all a wash. It’s like pregnancy too. Believe me, once you’ve been on a drip at Mount Sinai Hospital, the next time you see some pregnant women doing yoga and saying, “It’s a snap,” you think, “Maybe for you.” I think that all of that has not been really delved into as much. I wrote about the birth of my daughter in the New Yorker, and a lot of people have talked to me about that piece. It had a real resonance because it’s not actually dealt with much. bryer: Do you see humorous possibilities in the American imperial relationship to the rest of the world, in our militarism today, or are there subject areas that you are just not going to touch? wasserstein: It depends how you touch them. It’s hard using comedy. There are plays dealing with extremely serious subject matter that have comedy within them. If you look at a play like Bent, which was about the Holocaust and gay men, certainly there is humor within the play although it is a very serious subject. It also depends what kind of comedy you look at, if you’re talking about Dr. Strangelove or something like that which is dealing with psychoimperialism. It depends on the craft of the writer. I think someone like Brecht was sort of brilliant at holding up the politics of his time in a theatrical, sometimes comedic way. bryer: Do you think humor is more possible at certain times than at other times? Would you agree that the current American political leadership doesn’t have much of a sense of humor about themselves? wasserstein: No, they have no sense of humor at all. I think these people have no sense of humor, but I just wrote a humor piece about Dick Cheney coming to my house at two o’clock in the morning telling me I had to get married. They were rounding up all the single women and I said to him, “Well, who are you going to marry me to?” They were rounding up all the gay men and marrying them all to single women. You just think, “These people are asking for it. They really are.” bryer: Cheney wouldn’t see the humor in that? wasserstein: No, but I did, and it made me feel better.
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bryer: After you’ve finished writing a play and put it in the hands of a director, how much of an effect can that director have on that first production? wasserstein: It really depends. I’ve worked with the same director a lot, Dan Sullivan, who I think is very good on text. It’s interesting that with this play Third we’re talking about enlarging it to a full-length. My plays are usually too long and I cut them, because I don’t write from an outline. I tend to write from character, and sometimes if you make too many changes you get yourself into trouble. I’m very interested in the craft of playwriting. I’m very interested in well-made plays, plays like The Sisters Rosensweig, which is a very well-made boulevard comedy. It lays itself out. I’m actually not that interested in deconstructing plays. I’m interested more in a much more traditionally written play. What drives me crazy is that sometimes in play development in this country you show the play to the dramaturge, they give you notes, you rewrite the play, you do a reading, the play doesn’t get done, you send it to another dramaturge, you rewrite. It’s constantly being developed, and you can develop a play past the point where your initial urges were. What I’m trying to do for myself is answer the questions of the play. With Old Money, there’s a part of me that thinks that I should go back and do the play again and rewrite it until it works, but another part of me thinks, “It is what it is. It’s a gentle play, a certain kind of play. Maybe it’s less successful than the other plays but that’s what it is.” I think you have to answer the questions that your play dramaturgically presents, but don’t turn your play into somebody else’s play, because it won’t work. If someone else’s contributions or suggestions articulate what you were feeling, then it’s a good idea. But if you write and write and write and everything is “throwoutable,” I think you lose the initial impulse for the play, and that’s not a good idea. So when you talk to a director, find somebody who is articulating what you’re sort of thinking. But if somebody comes in with something from left field and you’re just trying to please them because you’re desperate to make it work, my rule of thumb would be that won’t work. bryer: What is your relationship like with your brother, New York financier and venture capitalist Bruce Wasserstein, and how has your family upbringing contributed to your success? wasserstein: I often say Bruce is in for-profit—my brother is the chairman of Lazard, the investment banking firm—and I’m in not-for-profit. I think what’s interesting coming from a business family is that often we separate out those people who are artistic and those people who are business people and assume artistic people know nothing about how to produce or how to make a contract, and we assume the business people know nothing about creativity; neither is true. I think that with the people who are really good the edges blur. { 16 }
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My parents were very interesting people. They’re very much an American story. They’re both immigrants. My father in particular, who died last May, landed on Ellis Island when he was seven years old from Poland. His mother died on the boat, and he came with his brothers and he lived with them in an apartment on the Lower East Side. My father sold newspapers at Ratner’s [kosher restaurant on New York City’s Lower East Side]. He was first in his class at Stuyvesant High School but couldn’t afford to go to college, so they started a ribbon business. My father and his brothers were engineers, and they invented a form of velveteen and manufacturing. My father invented a machine that put wires into ribbons, so bendable Christmas ribbons were invented by my dad. Christmas is our season! Actually, there was a color on his color chart called Wendy Blue that was a discontinued line; of course, Gorgeous Pink, named after my sister, did well! I think that’s partially why I get so mad about this administration, because you do think about American opportunity and inclusion and what’s been so great here. My father’s story was very much that; the factory was in New York on West Eighteenth Street, and my mother Lola’s a dancer. Those two people lived basically the entire century and were very typical of American Jewish immigrants of that time—industrious, hardworking, creative people. bryer: Do you feel that there have been changes in the climate for women playwrights during the course of your career? Obviously, when you started, it was a slightly different climate from what it is now, wasn’t it? wasserstein: Yes. The climate is better. In the 1980s, three women won the Pulitzer Prize for drama—me, Beth Henley, and Marsha Norman—and then more recently Paula Vogel and Suzan-Lori Parks. I know that at the Yale Drama School one year of classes is all women. Certainly when I was starting out, it wasn’t even that there weren’t that many, you could name the women playwrights. I think it is better, but it can still get even better.
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\ Thresholds of Pain in Performance Tormenting the Actor and Audience — C AROLY N D. ROARK
Pain—has an Element of Blank— It cannot recollect When it began—or if there were a time when it was not—
EMILY DICKINSON
Whether we enjoy or deplore overt violence in filmed popular entertainment, we can acknowledge that the stakes of using violence in theatre are different. “Torture porn” has not caught on in plays, yet . . . though Martin McDonagh may be at the head of a trend. Perhaps it is simply more difficult to watch certain types of violent action in a live setting, even with assurances that what the audience sees is not real. In any case, the situation becomes doubly complicated when a performance undertakes to depict violence in earnest. While allowing for certain sanctioned forms of aggression in live entertainment— sports, for example (especially certain forms of sport fighting)—contemporary theatre audiences demonstrate less tolerance for a live spectacle of one human injuring another, especially if they can connect what they see to a vexed cultural context. If the work claims to operate in the service of alleviating social trauma, this adds yet another layer of difficulty. For a powerful example of the artistic limits of depicting human torment onstage, we can look to Chile’s laborious return to democracy in the 1990s and a sampling of theatrical productions from that era. To prepare for more detailed conversation about the productions themselves, it will be useful to describe the sociopolitical circumstances in which { 18 }
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they occurred. Patricio Alwyin assumed the presidency of Chile in 1990, signaling the end of Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship. One of Alwyin’s earliest priorities was the investigation of human rights abuses perpetrated by the previous administration.1 Part of the new process of re-democratization was to put words to the experiences of recent years, which had been permeated by internal violence. The military consolidated its control in a short, bloody coup in 1973. Over the next seventeen years, short periods of stability and economic growth alternated with explosive conflict. Underground resistance pockets fought soldiers on the streets after curfew, police efforts at crowd control resulted in the deaths of protesters, and the populace disputed bitterly over whether the government had saved Chile from chaos or strangled an infant utopia in its cradle. In addition to the public strife came reports of clandestine arrests, abductions, and interrogations. Rumors abounded of beatings and electric shock, concentration camps for political detainees, and mass graves. A grassroots movement, led by mothers and spouses of disappeared citizens, created photo displays of lost loved ones in the Plaza de Armas, demanding information on their whereabouts. After a 1988 plebiscite that effectively ended Pinochet’s presidency, the public greeted the return to democracy with a demand for disclosure regarding government practices of detainment, torture, and disappearance of political prisoners. This was (and always is) a daunting task. Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain addresses the problem facing truth commissions and human rights advocates such as Amnesty International. In addition to an unwillingness on the part of the perpetrators and collaborators to incriminate themselves, the victims are often incapable of adequately expressing their own experiences. Pain, like other psycho-physical experiences, can be exceptionally difficult to describe accurately. Scarry talks at length about the difficulty of grasping someone else’s pain; it is harder still for a third party to offer a compelling explanation of an individual’s pain. Efficacy demands that the most explicit description possible be used, yet social mores require a certain reserve or self-censorship in the name of tact. For, as Scarry reminds us, the infliction of pain often involves “the most intimate realm of another human being’s body [as] the implicit or explicit subject.”2 These two things (tact and immediacy in Scarry’s vocabulary) often work against one another. Nevertheless, Amnesty International’s work begins with the assumption that “the act of verbally expressing pain is a necessary prelude to the collective task of diminishing pain.”3 Starting with Alwyin, three presidential administrations in Chile have adopted that philosophy as part of their official rhetoric. And among the social institutions that sought to follow or improve upon that example, Chile’s theatre stands out as an active advocate { 19 }
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for disclosure and justice. In the name of efficacy, therefore, it is not uncommon for performers and others to transgress social dictums of good taste. Such works are part of a larger category of Latin American drama—plays like Ariel Dorfman’s Death and the Maiden, Augusto Boal’s Torquemada, Mario Benedetti’s Pedro y el capitán, and Eduardo Pavlovsky’s El señor Galindez. Their particular manifestation in Chile in the period following the dictatorship grew out of a performative mode that developed under Pinochet, under conditions of censorship and the threat of retribution. In her 1990 retrospective on Chilean drama, El Mercurio journalist Monica Villaroel describes the dominance of conventions in which “form and content tended to separate and the text became something of a pretext.”4 Its headline summarizes: “The Image Surpasses the Word in Theatre from the ’80s.”5 Villaroel explains that, in the 1970s, the political climate demanded subtlety of expression, and “a theatre compromised by the national censorship suffered an evolution beginning in the 1970s, when it was necessary to find metaphors and formulas to cover their criticism of what was happening in the country.”6 While censorship had relaxed by the mid1980s—as Pinochet looked toward the coming public referendum on his leadership and sought to demonstrate his support for civil liberties—by this time artists and audiences alike had developed a taste for evocative imagery that permeated creative practices, especially those addressing the troubled relationship between the government and its citizens. As Scarry indicates, pain often escapes narrative expression. So the highly visual mode of Chile’s theatre of the moment offered distinct possibilities for those who sought a compelling means of recognizing, recording, and denouncing the suffering of political detainees. In his book Violent Acts, Severino Albuquerque addresses a number of plays that contain varying references to torture, from offstage sounds to the presence of infamous implements (such as the pole and chairs of the parrot’s perch used in Brazil) to wounded and bloody characters to onstage moments of physical harm. Albuquerque insists that “a theatrically effective presentation of torture will convey such feelings of fear and pain to the spectator, who may then reflect on and take action against the evils perpetrated by an illegitimate power structure without his/her consent.”7 But even in the most extreme cases, stage makeup and choreography form an integral part of the depictions. A number of these appeared in Chile over the 1990s, some dealing explicitly with the country’s recent history and others less directly via parallel stories. The former category included Ínfimo suspiro and La muerte y la doncella. The latter included productions of George Tabori’s Caníbales and Jubileo, Sartre’s Muertos sin sepultura, Weiss’s Marat/Sade, and Alejandro Campos’s documentary Deleitos sexuales en Santiago de Chile. These dealt with dif{ 20 }
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ficult subjects—murder, assassination, cannibalism, political oppression—and incorporated staging that heightened the psychological impact. The Universidad de Chile’s theatre group made strategic use of nudity in their Marat/ Sade; Caníbales depicted concentration camp survivors consuming one of their own dead; Theatr and der Ruhr placed actors in suspended stress positions for Muertos sin sepultura; Deleitos sexuales en Santiago de Chile used interviews with convicted Chilean rapists and their victims in a performance that was called the year’s most polemical play.8 All of these used language and blocking to heighten the audience’s reception of the spectacle of human suffering. The productions at the center of this analysis differ from those above in their approach to depicting pain. Instead of relying on suggestion or choreographed simulation, each featured explicit, physical suffering by the actors, some of whom were subjected by their fellows to what amounts to actual torture. Several such productions occurred over the decade; the two most notable are the 1992 Manu militar and 1993 Chilena dignidad. Both productions claimed to present ethical challenges to the military’s tactics, though neither claimed to represent directly the experiences of Chilean detainees. Each play presented a series of actual and explicit violent encounters between performers, foregrounding the relationship of victim and victimizer in each, with the aim of creating a strong aversive response in their audiences. Together, these two productions raise questions about the boundaries for performance in depicting the particular forms of human suffering associated with torture. If to make pain visible is to create knowledge of that pain to a second consciousness, on some level this must be because it creates a sympathetic vibration in the corresponding body. One must have felt pain and discomfort oneself in order to understand it in others, and often the stimulation of that sympathy involves a psychic and physical sensation of discomfort or pain. A common interrogation technique forces detainees to witness or hear the punishments inflicted on fellow prisoners. With that in mind, at what point does the explicit depiction of torture—placing the bodies of the actors in positions of pain and humiliation—approximate a form of torture for the audience based on that experience of sympathetic suffering? Both of these works played in that gray area. Manu militar appeared first, in Santiago in January 1992, as part of a new series of experimental performances sponsored by the Universidad de Chile. The dramatic situation focused on a group of soldiers incarcerated in a military prison—director Abel Carrizo (a Universidad de Chile faculty member) used Kenneth Brown and the Living Theatre’s The Brig as a starting point for the concept. In keeping with one of the university’s theatre program initiatives, the end product emerged from a process of collective experimentation and em{ 21 }
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phasized an innovative approach to staging and dramatic expression. As a result, Manu militar sought less to tell a specific story than to create an environment in which two generalized groups enacted a routine meant to imitate the discipline and hardship of life in a military prison. The cast featured sixteen young men, eleven of whom played prisoners and five of whom played guards. All were students or graduates of the Universidad de Chile program. Newspaper coverage describes a show with little dialogue—mostly orders articulated by the guards and responses from the prisoners—and even less character development. Carrizo emphasized to reporters that this was a conscious choice, that reducing the characters to unnamed and vaguely defined types highlighted the “loss of identity, of humanity” experienced by people in a regimented, authoritarian environment.9 The costuming reflected the uniformity of service life: all actors wore close-cropped hair and military-style garb of camouflage pants and combat boots; production photos show the inmates in white T-shirts and the guards in the dark shirts and black berets of Chile’s elite forces. The core of the play is a fast-paced series of interactions between the performers, depicting the daily routines of the prison’s two groups. The inmates participate in drills, exercises, and chores under supervision; their jailers use physical and verbal abuse as the primary motivators for obedience and attentiveness. The guards subject the inmates to constant punishment, inventing infractions and mistakes as often as they uncover anything legitimate. In one exchange a guard asks a prisoner, “Do you know why I’m going to punish you?” When the prisoner replies that he does not, the guard states, “Me neither,” and erupts into laughter.10 The physical violence escalates as hostility grows between the two groups; at the play’s climax, the guards kill one prisoner who rebels against the abuse. Early in the creative process, Carrizo made a risky decision: the bulk of the physical contact in the play would not be simulated, but actualized. The actors playing the inmates executed grueling physical routines of push-ups and stress positions; they stripped naked on command; they received real punches, slaps, and kicks from the actors playing the guards. Only those actions most likely to produce serious injury or death (such as choking) were mimicked. In order to prepare, the men in the cast participated in three months of training and military-style exercises under the supervision of a specialized trainer. In addition to daily drills in calisthenics and strength training, they practiced hand-to-hand fighting techniques that would allow them to land blows on an opponent’s body or withstand those they received. Throughout the training and rehearsal period, cast and director maintained a firm intention to include these elements in the impending show—essentially, to make the spectacle of their actual physical pain a central part of the drama. { 22 }
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Manu militar began preparing its public for the violence before the show even opened, beginning with a press conference to announce the production as a work the group had been rehearsing in secret. “The actors are prepared to receive real humiliation and blows on any part of their body,” reports El Mercurio.11 According to Carrizo, “In this play there are no stunts. We have erased the distinction between actor and character. It is a brutal task. We are recuperating our artistic vision by presenting ourselves without masks or selfcensorship regarding what we think of our society.”12 He emphasizes that the message of the production is that “there is no human reason that justifies educating someone in the art of killing.”13 Carrizo and his company insisted that they did not wish to castigate young men who served in the armed forces, but rather the military organization and its institutionalized practice of dehumanization. And yet the production itself required that the actors adopt the problematic behaviors that they wished to critique. The most obvious was the bodily harm that resulted from the staging: actors reported three bones broken during the rehearsal process, and performances sometimes ended with actors bleeding. Participating exacted an emotional toll as well. One article focused on the stresses the production placed on those involved. Carrizo mentions that he began with a much larger cast, but several could not take the physical discipline or punishment; another could not bring himself to deliver convincing blows. Journalist Margarita Cea asked Cristián Quezada, cast as the head guard, how it felt to play the role: “Pretty painful, because it has already cost me a lot to mistreat them and hit them. During the rehearsals, they instructed me to strike some of my best friends. But it’s been an amazing experience to be in a cast of all guys. There are no inhibitions. The workshops are incredible. But at the same time it is really disturbing to punish them hard, for real.”14 Cea also questioned Fernando Ortiz, the actor playing the rebellious prisoner, about how it felt to receive real blows. “I’ve never taken part in a play like this,” he said. “It is humiliating. The emotional toll is high, above all when I flinch, it’s very acute. It doesn’t take more than that for them to beat the shit out of you.”15 Carrizo insisted that theirs was a global anti-militarist message. Yet when one considers that military service is compulsory for young Chilean men— and that the armed forces played a key role in the coup, subsequent pacification and law enforcement, and formed the core of Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (Directorate of National Intelligence) elements responsible for the deceparecidos (“the disappeared”)—it becomes clear that this message resonated as much with recent Chilean history as a general pacifist spirit. Locating the play in a military prison rather than regular soldiers’ barracks created further resonance between the play’s soldiers and real Chilean political detainees, { 23 }
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as they faced the same jailers. Such parallels changed the stakes of the physical contact between the performers. What might have been regarded as tasteless, if novel, took on more unsettling implications. Reviewer Carola Oyarzún affirmed this in the final words of her commentary: “The reaction that ‘Manu militari’ [sic] is likely to get from the Chilean public is predictable; at least it is improbable that the director will get his wish that ‘people will come to see it without pre-conceived prejudice.’ ”16 If Carrizo and his cast skirmished at the boundaries of brutality in art, Chilena dignidad, one year later, launched an all-out assault. Sponsored by the same Universidad de Chile initiative, the play appeared during the 1993 Festival of New Directions in Theatre that was held on the university’s campus. Victor Ruiz and his group, Resistencia Cultural, staged what they called a display of sexual torture meant to call attention to other forms of torture used during the dictatorship. Ruiz and his company were already known for their experimental and overtly political work and for preferring what they called “performance”—possibly referencing performance art—over traditional theatrical modes. Reports describe the play as having few lines and no explicit story, instead presenting a series of increasingly violent encounters through choreographed movement and dance. The action takes place at a public dance, which descends into chaos. The initial setting, representing an urban park with a band playing traditional Chilean dance music, would have been familiar to audiences as a place they or their friends might go on a weekend night. And the opening moments are also comfortably ordinary: couples dancing, a group singing “Happy Birthday” to an older woman. A sudden shift occurs a few minutes into the drama, however, as a younger man invites the elderly woman to dance a bolero with him. After they begin the steps, his attention turns to aggression that manifests in a sexual assault observed and accompanied by the trio of musicians. A publicity photograph of the moment shows the woman bent over a café table, her dress around her waist to expose her bare buttocks; the young man stands behind her, forcing her head down and her legs open. This initial event triggers others: another woman, bound and smeared in blood, is dragged on to the stage. A waitress (played by Patricia Rivadeneira), who has calmly served food while witnessing the other events, is attacked by the same young man who committed the first assault. In the forty minutes of the play’s duration, several individuals were stripped and bound, assaulted with food, and trash was strewn across the stage. The pictures show bodies in various stages of undress, seated in chairs with cuffed hands and feet. The nudity and aggression were themselves uncommon but not unprecedented; Chile’s professional theatre had made occasional use of the { 24 }
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combination since an early 1970s production of Marat/Sade. As with Manu militar, the real controversy stemmed from the audience’s awareness that most of the acts they witnessed during the performance were committed in earnest (with the probable exception of the sexual encounter, of which newspaper accounts provided photos but little description). Images show the actors nude or partially nude. One shows Ruiz prodding a handcuffed woman with a long stick; another depicts him fondling Rivadeneira’s exposed pubic area with his hand. One of the actresses was slapped and dragged about; another was doused in soup and anally penetrated with food. One journalist described the final stage picture as “blood, trash, and naked bodies.”17 Resistencia Cultural explained to the media that Ruiz’s character, dubbed “El Muchacho” (The Young Man), serves as an allegorical representation of “Power”—presumably political power. In an interview with the newspaper La Época, Ruiz explained that the motivation behind the piece is “not to provoke, but it wants the Chilean community to feel culpable for the social injuries permitted by their silence.” The article goes on to explain that “Ruiz suggests that common people don’t react when torture or disappearance is mentioned, if they weren’t directly involved. For that reason, the idea of the piece is to place the social burden on everyone.”18 The use of environmental staging, with the actors moving among the spectators, certainly intended to reinforce that notion. It might have inadvertently contributed to the need of multiple spectators to leave mid-performance, as there existed little distance between themselves and the explicit scenes they witnessed. As with Manu militar, many observers insisted that what they witnessed was not theatre. Public reaction to both plays was polarized and strong. Each received criticism from critics and audiences for its content, and both drew for subsequent performances a second wave of observers drawn to the reports of scandal. For Manu militar, the actors received compliments for their physical preparation and discipline, the topic for its relevance, and the production for its unflinching discussion of a social issue. But most commentators saw the brutality as antitheatrical. Some complained that the violence was offered as a substitute for plot or character development. Italo Passalacqua called Manu militar “wooden, violent and negative.” He wrote, “We acknowledge the physical and psychological sacrifices of the protagonists, but Manu Militari [sic] comes across as an act of unpardonable sadism.”19 Another, unnamed critic complained that “in their effort to depict the rigorous routines with the greatest realism, the actors inflict blows upon one another and they forget that what they are doing is theatre (their vocal chords rasp dangerously with each shout).”20 Eduardo Guerrero went further, claiming that the play, “if it can be called a play, obeys mostly { 25 }
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extra-artistic obsessions and nobody, let alone the attending public, should be subjected to these kinds of tortures.”21 Audience responses to Chilena dignidad took a particularly forceful and immediate character. Various newspapers reported some spectators leaving mid-program, others shouting or throwing tomatoes. Two different newspapers reported a spectator calling out, after seeing one actor strike another, “This is an indignity for an actress!”22 Others strongly supported the production, and its run was well attended; reports quote well-known Santiago actor Claudio Rodriguez saying, “For the first time in Chile there is a performance of truth, there’s feeling, violence, and truth. People have not exorcised the violence yet.”23 The strongest denunciation, however, came from members of the Agrupación de Detenidos Deceparecidos (Representatives of the Detained and Disappeared), who read a letter of protest at the end of a performance. Claudia Godoy, the daughter of a deceparecido, serving as spokesperson, asked: “How can you manhandle this drama, in this pigsty that pretends to be a denunciation? This is an ethical problem, not a theatrical production. The blood was blood, not tomatoes. Why attack the Chilean Woman? You are the torturer in this sad spectacle.”24 The use of the terms “sadistic” and “torturer” to describe the producers and their plays demonstrates that a number of audience members equated each performance with the very abuses it sought to denounce. Of course, one profound difference between a theatrical production and an interrogation is the victim’s ability to exit the experience—a right that many spectators of Chilena dignidad exercised. There are implications of consent on the part of both cast and audience members that disrupt a direct parallel between what these plays did and what happened in the dark rooms of detention centers. Torture victims do not seek out the experience of interrogation or choose how long they will participate in it, whereas the actors had an understanding of the parameters before accepting a role. Spectators chose to buy tickets, and those attending after opening night had some advance notice of what they might see. In the case of Manu militar, the company went out of its way to advertise their approach. But perhaps it can be said that performers give consent in a way that audience members do not, as the former have a better understanding of what the performance will entail before the curtain rises. It is difficult for observers to predict their responses when confronted with such spectacles in real time, and in close proximity. It seems that the producers of Manu militar and Chilena dignidad were relying on the same premises that Artaud proposed for transforming the social and personal awareness of the spectator, the creation of physical sensations that stimulate a conviction in the reality or transformative quality of an expe{ 26 }
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rience. The preference for image over word that defined the Chilean stage of the moment might have contributed to this. Obviously, the most effective way to understand pain is to experience it. To experience pain firsthand is to believe in that experience; to be told about another person’s pain inevitably involves a distance, a gap for doubt in its quality, intensity, or even existence. Torture is particularly problematic as it typically happens behind closed doors and is witnessed primarily by individuals whose job it is to keep it a secret. To motivate others to respond to the experiences of torture victims, victims and their advocates must first succeed in getting the public to acknowledge and care. Of course, “doing unto others” to concretize the horror of torture is not a viable or acceptable option in most cultures. So, showing that pain in a live setting can seem like a near second. Theatre—and other performative media—offers a particularly compelling option for creating belief and motivating action in torture cases. Our maxim is “show, don’t tell,” after all. And people do often feel distress and physical discomfort when we watch someone else hurting. It may manifest as a tension, tingling, or ache such as we feel when we witness someone fall or take a baseball to the head. Though Scarry speaks more directly of verbal (spoken and written) testimony, she makes a suggestion that is doubly true for performance: “If the felt-attributes of pain are . . . lifted into the visible world, and if the referent for these now objectified attributes is understood to be the human body, then the sentient fact of the person’s suffering will become knowable to a second person.”25 The conviction of experience that theatre can occasion might in turn produce the mobilizing belief that Scarry has described as so elusive. But what are the ethics of doing that in performance? The reactions of spectators and critics to these productions seem to belie a realization of the producers’ aims. Albuquerque’s response to such productions across Latin America displays a similar discomfort with frank brutality in performance: “The return of the notion that the theatre is essentially a scenic, gestural art seems to have misled some Latin American theatre groups into believing Artaud’s cruelty to be synonymous with violence. Such simplistic interpretation of Artaud’s ideas ignored the French writer’s actual notion of cruelty as the equivalent of vigor, life, necessity, or an expression of total involvement in the artistic experience, and allowed a widespread display of crude physical violence on the stage.”26 One of the problems with performances like the two I have described is that their action is capable of introducing the spectator into a state something like the one Scarry ascribes to the torture victim in the moment of suffering. One’s rational mind, even the ability to think, founders in the overwhelming force of the psychological and physical reaction. So, if these productions made people acutely distressed, how could they accomplish the goal of reflecting and { 27 }
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taking action? And if the audience members were capable of reflection on the experience at a later point, a difficult process if one found it sufficiently traumatic, would these reflections take on a genuine critical character? Or would they be grounded in something more instinctive, such as pain avoidance? Classical conditioning (pleasure seeking and pain avoidance) works to create basic behavior but does little to stimulate a rational commitment to combat injustice. Pain avoidance is essentially anti-intellectual because of the way pain works— erasing the capacity for abstract thought. It creates, as Emily Dickinson eloquently describes, an all-consuming space in which one cannot recall a world without it. In one interview, Ruiz seems to acknowledge this on some level: [RUIZ]— . . . We
cannot build a society on indifference, what I want is for everyone to assume our responsibilities, victims and victimizers, for the violence. [MER A ]— With more violence onstage? [RUIZ]— I reiterate that people who react in a primitive manner aren’t capable of reflection.27 As a director, Ruiz suggests that some spectators bring with them an irrationality (what he calls an inability to control themselves) that prevents them from receiving the play’s message. However, it is equally likely that the sympathetic suffering caused by the experience itself rendered them incapable of rational action during their exposure to the spectacle at hand. It is reasonable to suggest, then, that widespread social change cannot be grounded in the experience of sympathetic suffering. Emotional engagement with another’s plight makes a useful catalyst, but too close identification paralyzes the potential for rational action. After all, widespread democratic social change requires rigorous and extensive thought and the consideration of much information. Choices must be made that weigh the greatest good and fairness for each citizen. Pain, and the fear of pain, will not permit such a process to occur. Societies cannot legislate purely from the memory of pain. With that in mind, Albuquerque raises a key criticism, which he uses to support his insistence that institutional brutality ought to be theatrically depicted through description, metaphor, and illusion. For these require a more active intellectual engagement on the part of the spectator, which in turn stimulates the kind of agency that becomes social action. Still, I do not wish to reduce what the producers of Manu militar and Chilena dignidad do to theatrical torture porn, either. They were not after selling entertainment based on the visceral pleasure of fear. They, too, had lived in Chile during the dictatorship; some had been dismissed from their jobs by the military regime. They saw the { 28 }
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police putting down riots, walked past the mothers on the Plaza de Armas, and perhaps knew artists who survived arrest and went into exile, or others who disappeared. On some level, the social trauma they wanted to see redressed was also their own. Like Claudia Godoy, they are entitled to compassion, to answers, to justice. Nevertheless, their style of performance seems more pathological than purgative, more apt to replicate the brutality than to heal its aftereffects. This is the most subtle and insidious of the effects of such a dictatorship—the means of oppression inscribe themselves so deeply on the victims that they become oppressors themselves. Freire has eloquently described the process: “The very structure of thought has been conditioned by the contradictions of the concrete, existential situation by which they were shaped. Their ideal is to be men; but for them, to be men is to be oppressors.”28 Ruiz in Chilena dignidad offers a key example. His intention was to represent the oppressor’s power through El Muchacho, but he came to embody that power when he used the role to actually commit acts of harm and humiliation upon his fellow actors. They may have submitted where a real detainee might have struggled, but the actions of the tormentor created the parallel physical result in both cases. It invoked a similar horror and disgust from those who watched. Critics of both productions complained that their experiences with the plays too closely mirrored the abuses that the producers intended to condemn. Thus, though the audience and actors gave a kind of consent that the real deceparecidos never would or could, the producers’ interaction with many of them ended up replicating the abuses of Pinochet’s regime.
Notes I am grateful to the Mid-America Theatre Conference for the opportunity to present an early version of this paper. Thanks also to Jason Llewellyn for his comments and conversation. 1. Michael J. Lazzara, Chile in Transition: The Poetics and Politics of Memory (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006). See pages 16–24 for a brief history of how three presidents have tried to develop truth and reconciliation initiatives. 2. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 9. 3. Ibid. 4. “Forma y contenido tiendo a separarse y el texto pasa ser casi un pretexto.” Monica Villaroel, “La imagen supera a la palabra en el teatro de los ochenta,” El Mercurio, December 10, 1989, Universidad Católica Theatre Archive. All translations from newspaper articles are mine. 5. Ibid. “La imagen supera a la palabra en el teatro de los ochenta.”
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7. 8.
9.
Ibid. “El teatro más comprometido con la contingencia nacional sufrió una evolución que se inició en los 70, cuando era preciso buscar metáforas y fórmulas para encubrir una crítica al acontecer del país.” Catherine Boyle, María de la luz Hurtado, and Ariel Dorfman have documented how this was done in Chile. See Catherine M. Boyle, Chilean Theatre, 1973–1985: Marginality, Power, Self hood (Toronto: Associated University Press, 1992); María de la luz Hurtado, Teatro chileno y modernidad: Identidad y crisis social (Irvine, Calif.: Gestos, 1997); Ariel Dorfman, “Tres años de resistencia cultural,” Plural: Revista Cultural de Excelsior 63 (1976): 7–11; Ariel Dorfman, Cultural Resistance in Chile Today: To Dream a Different World, IDAC Series in Conscientisation 15 (Switzerland: IDAC, 1977). Severino João Albuquerque, Violent Acts: A Study of Contemporary Latin American Theatre (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), 177. Descriptions of these plays, staging, and public reception were taken from Cristián Labarca B., “Y que ha pasado con el desnudo en el teatro Chileno?” La Nación, November 15, 1999; Juan Antonio Muñoz H., “De aqui a la eternidad,” El Mercurio, December 11, 1992; Marietta Santi, “Alejandro Campos autor teatral: ‘La violación la consuma la sociedad,’ ” La Nación, December 14, 1997. “de la identidad, de lo humano.” In “Intenso drama de botos,” La Nación, January 18, 1992, Universidad Católica Theatre Archive.
10. “—¿Sabes por qué te voy a castigar? —No sé, señor. —Yo tampoco . . . jajajajajaja.”
11.
12.
13. 14.
15.
16.
Margarita Cea, “Manu Militari: ‘A su orden, Señor,’ ” Revista Analisis, January 20, 1992, 42–43, Universidad Católica Theatre Archive. “Los actores están preparados para recibir verdaderas humiliaciones y golpes en cualquier parte de su cuerpo.” In “Revelan Montaje secreto de la Universidad de Chile,” El Mercurio, January 18, 1992, Universidad Católica Theatre Archive. Ibid. “En esta obra no hay trucos. Hemos borrado la distinción entre actor y personaje. Es un trabajo brutal. Estamos recuperando nuestra vision de artistas en plantearnos sin tapujos, sin autocensuras, acera de lo que pensamos de nuestra sociedad.” Ibid. “No hay razón humana alguna que justifique el educar en el arte de matar.” “Bastante jodido, porque todavía me cuesta tratar mal y pegar. Durante los ensayos me cuestionaba golpear a mis compañeros muy queridos míos. Pero un elenco de puros hombres ha sido una experiencia riquísima. No hay inhibiciones. Las tallas son increíbles. Pero eso mismo es harto fregado castigarlos duramente, de verdad.” Cea, “Manu Militari: ‘A su orden, Señor,’ ” 42–43. Ibid. “Nunca me había tocado participar en una obra así. Es humillante. El desgaste emocional es muy fuerte, sobre todo cuando me quiebro, es muy brusco. No das más y te sacan la mierda.” “La recepción que puede tener ‘Manu militari’ dentro del contexto chileno es previsible; por lo tanto es bastante improbable que los deseos del director en cuanto a que ‘ojalá la gente venga a verla en forma desprejuiciada’ logren complirse.” Carola Oyarzún L., “Crítica de Teatro: Manu Militari,” El Mercurio, February 17, 1992, Universidad Católica Theatre Archive.
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19.
20.
21.
22. 23. 24.
25. 26. 27.
“Y en el escenario, sangre, basura y desnudos.” In “Escándalo en Festival de Teatro,” Las Últimas Noticias, January 12, 1993, Universidad Católica Theatre Archive. “ ‘No es que provoque, sino que desea que la comunidad chilena tome conciencia de que permite los daños sociale cuando calla.’ Ruiz precisa que la gente común no reacciona cuando se habla de torturados o desaparecidos, si no está involucrada directamente. Por eso, la idea de montaje es plantear que la responsabilidad social es de todos.” In “Vicente Ruiz: ‘Estoy cansado de tantos escándalos,’ ” La Época, January 13, 1993, Universidad Católica Theatre Archive. “majadero, violento y negativo . . . le agregamos el enorme sacrificio físico y siquico de los protagonistas, ‘Manu Militari’ se proyecta como un acto de sadismo imperdonable.” Italo Passalacqua C. “Sadismo irracional proyecta panfletario ‘Manu militari,’ ” La Segunda, January 22, 1992, Universidad Católica Theatre Archive. “En su afán de registrar con la mayor veracidad realista el rigor de la rutina, los actores se inflingen golpes y se olvidan que están haciendo teatro (varios se raspan peligrosamente las cuerdas vocales con tanto grito).” “Teatro: Manu Militar,” Revista cosas, February 4, 1992, Universidad Católica Theatre Archive. “si pudiera llamársela obra—obedece más bien obsesiones extrartísticas y nadie, menos el público asistente, debiera ser sometido a tales suplicios.” Eduardo Guerrero, “Crítica de Teatro: ‘Manu Militari,’ ” La Época, February 5, 1992, Universidad Católica Theatre Archive. Carmen Mera O., “¡Tanto escándalo por un desnudo! Buscamos la reflexión de la gente,” January 13, 1993, Universidad Católica Theatre Archive. Ibid. “Es la primera vez en Chile hay una performance y de verdad, hay sentimiento, violencia y verdad. La gente no ha exorcizado la violencia.” “¿Cómo puede usted manosear este drama, en esta chacra salsera que pretende ser denuncia? Este es un problema ético, no un montaje teatral. La sangre fue sangre, no tomates. ¿Por qué atacó a la mujer chilena? Usted es el torturador en su pobre espectáculo.” In Juan Carlos Maya, “Polémica provocó obra sobre la tortura,” La Tercera January 12, 1993, Universidad Católica Theatre Archive. Scarry, The Body in Pain, 13. Albuquerque, Violent Acts, 21. Con desamor no podemos construir una sociedad, yo quiero que asumamos nuestra responsabilidad, víctimas y víctimarios, de esta violencia. —¿Con más violencia en el escenario? —Te reitero que la gente reacciona de manera primitiva, no hay capacidad de reflexión.
Carmen Mera O. “¡Caos! Se desaó en escena.” Las últimas noticias, January 15, 1993. 28. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Continuum, 2003), 45.
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\ Designing American Modernity David Belasco’s The Governor’s Lady and Robert Edmond Jones’s The Man Who Married a Dumb Wife — CHR I ST I N E SSIN
On September 12, 1912, director and producer David Belasco opened The Governor’s Lady at the Republic Theatre on Broadway. Written by Alice Bradley, the play told the story of a tumultuous marriage between Daniel Slade, a nouveau riche millionaire with political aspirations, and Mary, his unsophisticated, increasingly burdensome wife. After staging the first three acts in domestic locations around Denver, Belasco created a homecoming for his Broadway audience, setting the final scene in an authentically reproduced Childs cafeteria. Actually, spectators at the Republic on Forty-second Street were sitting mere steps away from one of the restaurant chain’s better-known locations around the corner of Seventh Avenue.1 Many had passed the Childs on their way to the theatre, and even more would likely pass by after the performance, some perhaps stopping to enjoy a late-night meal before returning home. The Childs setting capitalized on spectators’ familiarity with the popular eatery and the chain’s visually distinct character. As a director/designer, Belasco was notorious for his dedication to realistic detail, using the latest lighting and scenic technology to replicate the locations depicted on his stage with meticulous authenticity. He ensured that the Childs onstage was identical to the cafeteria that audiences encountered in Times Square by ordering equipment directly from the Childs supply company, including the same white tiles, tables, bentwood chairs, cash registers, coffee boilers, and griddle-cake cookers found at each location. His design was not merely a faithful reproduction of a Childs; { 32 }
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Figure 1: The Childs Cafeteria onstage at the Republic Theatre in Alice Bradley’s The Governor’s Lady (1912). Published in the October 1912 issue of Theatre Magazine.
it literally was a Childs, the only difference being that actors instead of customers occupied its tables eating the cafeteria’s signature baked apples. That circumstance, of course, could be reversed after the show when audiences left the Republic Theatre, walked around the corner, and ordered the same menu items they had seen and smelled only moments ago. In 1912, Childs was one of the few restaurants where customers could order the same reasonably priced, similarly prepared food they received at other chain locations. For the twenty-first-century consumer who frequents chains like McDonald’s or Starbucks, such dedication to consistency of taste and experience is expected; for early-twentieth-century New Yorkers, however, food standardization was an innovation, one more sign of their city’s evolving modernization. Belasco’s choice, therefore, to stage this visually recognizable chain location tapped into his spectators’ interest in the commercial practices that were increasingly changing the urban landscape and influencing their daily lives. Public interest in Belasco’s staging, however, was tempered by derisive reviews from progressive critics who decried the Childs setting as a gimmick, merely the latest illustration of the director’s tendency toward the excesses of photographic realism.2 Arthur Feinsod notes that attacks against “Belascoism” increased in 1912, a year that witnessed not only The Governor’s Lady but also the emergence of art theatre projects like Maurice Brown’s Little Theatre in { 33 }
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Chicago, the Toy Theatre in Boston, and the beginning of George Pierce Baker’s Workshop 47 at Harvard University.3 Belasco’s ode to standardization may have captured the spirit of modern living, but his literalness stood in direct opposition to the theories and practices of stage modernism. Critics like Sheldon Cheney, Clayton Hamilton, and Kenneth Macgowan advanced the New Stagecraft theories of European artists like Edward Gordon Craig and Max Reinhardt, who rejected painterly, illusionary staging in favor of simplified, architectural environments that, they believed, gave fuller expression to the central ideas of dramatic texts.4 The “new” stagecraft, as opposed to the “old,” was more than surface decoration or imitation; it was a deliberate process of visual interpretation that drew inspiration from the subjectivity and minimalist aesthetics of modern painters during the same period. Cheney, editor of Theatre Arts Magazine, the journal linked to the art theatre movement, argued that Belasco’s productions were excessive and vulgar, distracting spectators with a barrage of visual minutiae.5 Belasco was a craftsman who merely captured the surface realities of everyday life; conversely, a true artist eliminated the unessential to create more meaningful, expressive stage images. Belasco’s faithful replication of Childs became a convenient target for New Stagecraft advocates, who regularly cited the staging as an example of the illusionism and gimmickry that plagued Broadway. In the years immediately following, progressive critics celebrated examples of European modern design, but it was not until 1915 that they found an American aesthetic counterpoint to Belasco’s commercial realism. A young, native artist named Robert Edmond Jones embodied the New Stagecraft ideal on Broadway with his design for Anatole France’s The Man Who Married a Dumb Wife. Jones’s staging exemplified the simplified, subjective expressions that art theatre reformers advocated as a first step toward a culturally relevant national theatre. Their celebration of Jones as a native triumph in journals like Theatre Arts Magazine not only paved the way for the application of New Stagecraft theory on American stages but also positioned Dumb Wife as a watershed event in American theatre history, a design that marked the progress of theatrical staging from a decorative “craft” to a serious art and secured Jones’s eventual status as the “father of American design.”6 Within histories of American design, therefore, these two productions— The Governor’s Lady and Dumb Wife—serve as signposts marking the aesthetic disparity between commercial realism and theatrical modernism. Design scholar Orville Larson, for example, sets up a visual contrast between Belasco’s realism and Jones’s modernism, using the differences between their aesthetics to mark the origin of American design; Feinsod also uses The Gov{ 34 }
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Figure 2: Robert Edmond Jones’s set design for Anatole France’s The Man Who Married a Dumb Wife (1915). Photographed by White and included in Curtis Hidden Page’s published English translation of the play (New York: John Lane, 1915).
ernor’s Lady to exemplify the type of extreme realism that prompted the New Stagecraft’s partiality toward simple stages and subjective expressions.7 Belasco’s imitation of Childs, down to its working ovens and smells of baked apples drifting across the auditorium, has come to signify all that was brash, commercial, and unimaginative. Jones’s Dumb Wife, on the other hand, represents the departure point for American theatrical modernism, with its bold geometric lines and primary color scheme symbolizing innovation and high-quality artistry. These designs, in fact, gained so much attention that the plays’ titles stand in for Belasco’s and Jones’s artistry rather than for Bradley’s and France’s dramatic texts. Since neither play was deemed relevant to chronicling the origin of the American New Stagecraft, their dramatic content has fallen out of the historical record. This erasure is curious, particularly in the case of Dumb Wife, since New Stagecraft theory advocated a careful interpretation of dramatic texts: modern design should not overtly call attention to itself but rather draw attention to the actors and heighten the text’s central themes; thus, without an understanding of the play, a designer’s success can only be determined through a formal analysis of its aesthetics. A recovery of the previously ignored narrative and thematic content of { 35 }
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The Governor’s Lady and Dumb Wife reestablishes the dramatic context that prompted Belasco’s and Jones’s visual interpretations. Analyzed from a dramaturgical rather than aesthetic perspective, their designs share common themes, particularly their critique of the increased commercialization of public space produced by the early-twentieth-century market economy. Jones’s Dumb Wife stage not only looked “modern” but accentuated France’s socialist perspective, particularly his satire of bourgeois affectation and consumer excess. Broadway audiences saw more than just simplified lines and primary colors; they saw a landscape ridiculing the pretensions of professionalism and corruption of capitalism, a parody that implicated their own urban streets and consumer lifestyles. The Governor’s Lady, rather than illustrating the formal aesthetics of modernism, realistically depicted a landscape of American modernity, capturing a moment in New York City’s development when companies designed new consumer spaces to satisfy the needs of urban populations. Even though Belasco used a realistic style, the staging was far from conventional. Its visual specificity, what New Stagecraft advocates found so abhorrent, captured the swift changes endemic to modern cityscapes. Without diminishing the aesthetic differences between The Governor’s Lady and Dumb Wife, the following dramaturgical analyses recognize the ways in which these productions embodied similar critiques of American modernity, continuing previous comparisons between the designs but situating the relationship as complementary rather than antithetical. By recuperating France’s and Bradley’s previously neglected plays and establishing a thematic bridge between Belasco’s and Jones’s designs, I acknowledge the shared cultural circumstances that fostered the productions’ development. Belasco’s stage, previously dismissed as unworthy of critical attention, reveals itself as a relevant cultural text. Concomitantly, an analysis of Jones’s design that shifts attention from its formal aesthetics to its dramaturgical content enriches current understandings of this benchmark moment in the American theatre, adding nuance to the history of theatrical modernism by recognizing its cultural influences alongside its aesthetic innovations. The examination of stage designs as cultural texts—products of ideologies emerging during particular historic moments and from specific cultural landscapes—complements recent scholarship that has challenged the ahistoricism of previous studies of modern drama and theatre. In the first of two special issues of Modern Drama (winter 2000 and spring 2001), editor Ric Knowles identified trends within theatre studies to “put pressure on the sources, origins, and relationships between modernity and modernism, locating ‘modern
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drama’ historically in critical relation to other forms of social, political, and cultural production.”8 In the second issue, Elin Diamond made a case for reconfiguring the formalist nature of modern drama scholarship by substituting the phrase “modernity’s drama.” Her essay centers on the question: “How does one of modernity’s key features—its way of inventing/thinking about historical time—get dramatized, and what would ‘modernity’s drama’ as a configuration do to the ways we think about modern drama?”9 Diamond’s approach is equally useful for a cultural analysis of design. Reframed as “modernity’s design,” Belasco’s and Jones’s contributions can be examined as visual interpretations that embody experiences of American modernity. Their designs conveyed meanings that both complemented and expanded the plays’ narrative and thematic content, particularly in their representation of place, imbuing the dramatic texts with cultural meanings not present before being translated for production. Previous histories of American design have relied heavily on the theories and aesthetics of modernism because the New Stagecraft serves as the point of origin for their narratives.10 Even within general histories of American theatre, the New Stagecraft marks the moment of design’s entry into the conversation, helping establish a twentieth-century recognition of theatre as a commercial enterprise and as a legitimate artistic endeavor. The same biases against commercialism that prompted historians to disparage Belasco’s productions also kept them from chronicling the ways in which the avant-garde aesthetics of artists like Jones participated within the consumer economy, often contributing to the success of various Broadway productions. Additionally, recuperative efforts to correct the relative absence of designers from the larger canon of theatre history that focuses primarily on playwrights, actors, and directors has produced many of the celebratory design narratives that emphasize the talents of artists like Jones to the exclusion of other production collaborators. Thus, in persistent narratives that denigrate Belasco’s theatrical realism in order to applaud Jones’s theatrical modernism, Bradley’s and France’s plays become irrelevant. Playwrights, in fact, often came under attack in the early twentieth century, criticized by art theatre advocates for failing to write texts with the same artistic value as the progressive work of New Stagecraft designers and directors. In American Drama: The Bastard Art, Susan Harris Smith examines how Progressive Era critics like Cheney and Hamilton lamented the state of American drama, with its writers too mired in the mud of realism and commercialism to produce artistic texts.11 In their attempts to define an artistically relevant national theatre, comparable in quality to the European theatre but also responsive to American sensibilities, these critics deemed Belasco’s entire
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repertoire, and The Governor’s Lady specifically, as unimaginative and trivial. Bradley’s play becomes irrelevant not only for its frivolousness but also because the author herself is overshadowed by Belasco’s dominance as a director/ producer.12 France’s Dumb Wife seemingly held more artistic credibility than Bradley’s play, having been penned by a leading political satirist; but written by a European rather than an American author, the play could not contribute to heroic narratives about Jones’s rise as a young native artist whose triumphant Broadway debut marked a significant step forward in the American art theatre movement. As Jones’s star continued to rise, his design came to stand in for the play’s title, effectively erasing Anatole France’s dramatic text. And, in the push to accentuate the aesthetic disparity between theatrical realism and the New Stagecraft, Belasco’s faithfully replicated Childs cafeteria is the only image that remains from The Governor’s Lady. But beyond the surface aesthetics of these designs, both productions provide insight into the cultural landscapes of American modernity. The phrase “American modernity” typically designates a period beginning in the 1890s and continuing to the 1950s or 1960s, an era in which giant corporations emerged, exploited new resources and technologies, and produced a wide range of consumer products, thus generally transforming “familiar modes of economic life” and “hierarchies of social status.”13 This economic restructuring prompted considerable population growth in American cities; places such as New York City, rather than smaller towns, became emblematic of the American experience. Within the metropolis, residents bridged previous spatial and social boundaries, self-consciously aware of the rapid changes affecting their lives. The landscapes and geographies of New York City figure prominently in the following analyses because it was the career base for Belasco and Jones as well as the production site for both designs. New York continued to serve as the center of theatrical production in America during the early twentieth century, a literal and figurative staging ground for national culture. Its presence over artistic production was not neutral, and theatrical designers regularly featured images of the city in their work, shaping national and international perceptions of the quintessential modern American metropolis. A reexamination of Belasco’s and Jones’s designs that emphasizes their capacity to represent the fractured perspectives of citizens living in a rapidly changing urban landscape—the first through photographic accuracy, the second through allegorical expression— grounds their artistry within the cultural, historical, and geographical circumstances of early-twentieth-century America.
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The Governor’s Lady as Modernity’s Design Belasco’s staging for The Governor’s Lady illustrates an early intersection of theatrical design and everyday landscapes, indeed the broader forces of American industrial design and architecture that shaped early-twentieth-century urban settings. The authentically rendered setting of Childs cafeteria both directed the audience’s attention to the commercial environment they currently occupied in Times Square and emphasized trends of chain expansion and industry standardization that increasingly transformed their city, giving spectators the opportunity to repeat similar consumer experiences in different locations. Childs, in fact, was the first restaurant chain in America; brothers William and Samuel Childs established their first New York location in 1889 and within ten years expanded with ten additional locations.14 They implemented a simple design of white tiles, walls, and counters to advertise their dedication to cleanliness, consistency, and quality control.15 Part of the cafeteria’s public appeal was its signature, quickly identifiable interior style. When city dwellers saw a Childs, they knew they could order the same wholesome, reasonably priced food they received at other franchise locations in a comfortable, familiar environment. When Belasco selected a Childs for The Governor’s Lady, therefore, he did so with the assurance that audiences had familiarity, if not intimate experience, with the cafeteria; the Childs just around the corner from the Republic Theatre was one of many locations in New York City. In general, the restaurant industry expanded with other urban growth during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, creating diners, lunchrooms, and cafeterias that catered to businessmen and shop workers who could not return home for midday meals and rooming house residents with no board or kitchen facilities. In the wake of negative press about health concerns at public eateries, Childs implemented a standard decor of white tiles, walls, and counters to promote its locations as hygienic.16 But this visually distinct, instantly recognizable interior design also helped them gain customer loyalty. In addition to New York, the Childs brothers established locations in various cities along the East Coast; for Belasco, this meant preview audiences for The Governor’s Lady at Philadelphia’s Broadstreet Theatre would have the same local referent as eventual audiences at the Republic. Belasco’s insistence on replicating not just any restaurant but an instantly recognizable chain establishment signaled his acknowledgment of public interest in the practices of standardization and duplication of experience that marked this era of mass production and consumption. Belasco’s critics deni-
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grated his staging as mere imitation, but in actuality it was not an imitation; it was a fully functional restaurant containing the exact same furniture, equipment, and food found at each Childs. Belasco did not simulate the look of a Childs with the typical materials of stagecraft—wood, canvas, and illusory scenic techniques—but rather ordered the full inventory of Childs supplies from the company that equipped each location. Indeed, Belasco’s ability to order these items directly from the chain’s supply company exemplifies the extent to which modern methods of standardization had developed by 1912. His staging participated in the same processes of standardization and reproduction that began with the restaurant’s chain expansion. Despite the emphasis on the Childs staging in production reviews and subsequent theatre histories, the restaurant only appeared in the epilogue of The Governor’s Lady, with the majority of the dramatic activity taking place in domestic settings around Denver.17 Belasco’s biographers have disparaged the dramatic content of the play as “negligible” or “paltry,”18 but during the time of production the director promoted Bradley’s play as an up-to-date depiction of the social dilemmas of modern America, the case of a “self-made man, striving to be correct and perfectly at home in a social stratum to which he does not belong” and the inability of his wife, who “remained at home, untaught,” to adapt to their new social circumstances.19 At the heart of the play is the increasingly fluid nature of class in twentieth-century America, the complications that accompany the sudden accumulation of wealth, and the perilous situation of women caught between old-world values and the new rules of social mobility. Daniel Slade is a Colorado miner who strikes it rich and finds himself thrown into an unfamiliar world of senators, ambassadors’ daughters, and industry moguls. He soon realizes that his “homely” wife, Mary, stands in the way of his new career in politics. After an initial separation, Mary discovers that her husband has taken up with another woman: Katherine Strickland, the beautiful and ambitious daughter of a senator. Knowing she cannot compete with Katherine’s ability to further Daniel’s political ambitions, Mary finally consents to a divorce. She moves to New York, a city where a single woman can make a new life. Two years later, Slade, now Colorado’s governor, finds her in a Childs restaurant, a place she often comes because “it seems more homelike” than her hotel. Slade professes his love—“Oh! Hell, Mary, what’s the use . . . You know we were made for each other”—and begs her to forgive him.20 He then picks her up and carries her out into the street, leaving a generous five-dollar tip for the waiter. Mary’s sojourn in New York gave her the kind of exposure to the modern world that she would have never received in Denver, confined to the domestic sphere and society activities expected of political wives. After two { 40 }
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years in the city, the wiser, worldlier Mary is more suited to resume her station as “The Governor’s Lady.” The play’s ending, though forced and melodramatic, attempted to bring serious attention to the social dilemmas caused by fluid economic conditions endemic to modern American culture. While Denver served as the primary milieu for the play, New York City played a significant role in resolving the central conflict: Mary’s old-world upbringing. The Childs setting reinforced an understanding of New York as a place where men and women could escape conventional expectations and establish new identities. Immediately following the production’s opening, reviewer Wendell Phillips Dodge suggested the appropriateness of the location for the Slades’s reunion. He praised Belasco’s refusal to set the scene in an upscale “Broadway lobster palace, as nine out of every ten managers would have done” because Childs’ most characteristic feature is its patrons: “people recruited from literally every walk of life, for who so rich or mighty has not some time or other invaded the democratic precincts of Childs.’ ”21 In this regard, Childs was not only the specific location for the characters’ reunion but also a symbolic representation of democratic, urban spaces within the modern city that permitted a blurring of class boundaries. The restaurant signified neutral ground, a place where socialites and shop girls could believably interact as they shared the same food and experience. By suggesting that millionaires like Slade frequented the restaurant, the performance also certified Childs as a hip location where urban dwellers mixed, creating an aura of popularity around the chain.22 Dodge applauded Belasco’s mastery of stage realism, comparing it to that of the eminent French naturalist Zola. But he drew a crucial distinction between Belasco and Zola, accentuating the setting’s specific encapsulation of the American urban experience: None other, save perhaps a Zola, could have held in his mind’s eye its multitudinous detail, or have had the art to translate that detail into concrete terms. But then, alas for Zola! France has no Childs’. Childs’ is essentially an American institution. . . . There is no genre picture of New York life, or than of Philadelphia, or a half dozen other cities, to be painted without a Childs’ restaurant occupying its proper place in the perspective; a Childs’ with its geometrically arranged assortments of provender, its burnished coffee broilers . . . and, most significant and characteristic of all else, its motley gathering of hungry and hasty patrons.23
In contrast to the criticism of New Stagecraft advocates, Dodge suggests that concepts of artistry and realistic detail are not diametrically opposed, a point he argues through the Zola comparison. He appreciates the location’s value as { 41 }
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a meeting ground for urban residents and characterizes Childs as uniquely American, with its democratic, standardized experience in direct opposition to an upscale lobster house accessible only to socialites. His commentary also hints at the excitement audiences felt encountering a familiar setting but being able to study it with a new eye. Belasco reconstructed the Childs experience with such precision that spectators could easily recognize themselves in the characters/consumers represented onstage, an experience they would likely remember during their next visit to the restaurant. Ultimately, The Governor’s Lady characterized Childs as a place suited to the rapid pace of modern living—convenient, consistent, and efficient—reflecting the beginning of significant commercial design trends. The Childs staging was a theatrical design that invoked commercial design. The white tables and tiles seen on Belasco’s stage were as recognizable to urban dwellers in the early twentieth century as McDonald’s golden arches or Howard Johnson’s orange roofs would be for suburbanites and highway travelers decades later. Indeed, chain standardization, a novelty in 1912, has increasingly become the norm, and the processes that cultural critic George Ritzer identifies as the “McDonaldization” of America—“efficiency, services and products that can be easily quantifiable and calculated, predictability, and control”—began with chain enterprises like Childs.24 Even though Belasco’s staging fell short of the artistic standards of New Stagecraft modernism, it did communicate the urban geographies of American modernity, identifying and anticipating the ways Americans would deliberately shape their landscapes to accommodate their increasingly fast-paced lifestyles. Because previous critiques only recognized the production’s aesthetics (realism) to the exclusion of its dramatic content (a chain cafeteria familiar to urban dwellers), Belasco’s staging became emblematic of the past, particularly in comparison to the “new” stagecraft. But by analyzing The Governor’s Lady dramaturgically and recuperating the production’s cultural circumstances, the Childs setting can be understood as a particularly modern artistic expression, as up to date in narrative content as Jones’s staging for The Man Who Married a Dumb Wife was in aesthetic innovation.
The Man Who Married a Dumb Wife as Modernity’s Design Jones’s Broadway debut has assumed such a high-profile status that theatre history forgets everything else about The Man Who Married a Dumb Wife, even { 42 }
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that Anatole France’s play only served as an opening act for the main event of the evening, the American premiere of George Bernard Shaw’s Androcles and the Lion. Produced by the New York Stage Society, the double bill was directed by British New Stagecraft advocate Granville Barker. Jones’s design was merely one component of an evening meant to show that theatrical modernism did not have to be a “bitter pill.” One critic noted: “the plays are neither pretentious nor precious. They are simply good fun, well done.”25 After underwhelming public responses to the Stage Society’s previous art theatre experimentations, Androcles and Dumb Wife proved that elevated performance did not have to sacrifice entertainment value. Jones’s Dumb Wife design not only broke from aesthetic traditions but also illustrated a profitable scenic alternative to stage realism. Its success stemmed not from any desire to confront Broadway spectators with its modern aesthetic but rather from the effort to delight them with whimsical images that accentuated the farcical and satiric tone of France’s play; thus, a reconsideration of the production’s social context and reception from New York audiences broadens an understanding of how Jones’s design was more than merely innovative but dramaturgically appropriate, underscoring the play’s humor and pointed critique of modern consumer society. In 1915, Jones was a young Greenwich Village artist, a recent graduate from Harvard and participant in the activities that shaped the neighborhood’s nonconformist, bohemian identity: Mabel Dodge’s famous salon discussions (1912– 1913), Liberal Club meetings (1912), the Paterson Strike Pageant (1913), and the early theatrical experiments of the Washington Square Players (1914) and Provincetown Players (1915). Jones absorbed the Villagers’ progressive politics and avant-garde artistry, and their cultural radicalism left an indelible mark on his designs. His symbolic imagery and expressive color choices reveal the dedication to modern aesthetics and spirit of experimentation that he inherited from the Village community. Jones’s Dumb Wife commission arose from this same social circle. Emily Hapgood, sister-in-law to Hutchins Hapgood (another Harvard alum), was the president of the Stage Society and engaged the designer upon his return from Europe, a trip that had been financed by Village associates and had allowed Jones to study at Max Reinhardt’s theatre in Berlin.26 The Stage Society almost canceled Dumb Wife when Granville Barker accepted their invitation to join the season; but when the director saw Jones’s preliminary design, he included the piece as an opening for Androcles.27 Jones’s artistry helped Barker reconsider France’s play as an innovative dramatic text, worthy of Barker’s reputation as an equally innovative director. On January 27, 1915, Androcles and Dumb Wife opened at Wallack’s Theatre. { 43 }
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Jones’s design had motivated Barker’s decision to include the opening piece, but it also complemented Shaw’s dramatic fable, creating an evening of theatre to spark the audience’s imagination. In a contemporary interview, Barker argued that modern audiences needed an “education of [their] imaginative faculty” and therefore selected texts like Dumb Wife and Androcles, a fable of Christian martyrdom set in ancient Rome, that rejected the gritty details of realism to stage a fanciful portrayal of the past.28 Written in 1908, Dumb Wife is a farcical comedy set on a medieval city street. Spectators familiar with France’s socialist politics might have noted the contemporary relevance of the play’s themes, but Jones’s modern aesthetics accentuated these connections further; his simplification of medieval period elements into distinctive lines, geometric shapes, and swaths of pure color prompted them to experience the play not as historical reality but as an allegorical fable intended for their modern eyes. Typical analyses of Jones’s design itemize its formal elements—the unit setting in monochromatic shades of black, white, and gray that contrasted with the boldly colored costumes and the inventive stage-within-a-stage composition that simultaneously revealed the interior activities of residence and street activities below. These critiques neglect the play itself, including how the design complemented its themes, characters, and plot. Most theatre histories assume the play to be an irrelevant, lighthearted farce, but audiences who saw Dumb Wife as part of a double bill with Androcles, whose biting social commentary could not be tamed even by the whimsy of a lion running about the stage, would have more likely recognized the text’s cultural commentary. France’s satiric look at medieval domestic and professional life offered a rich critique of early modern capitalism. As cultural critic Don Slater notes, the “core institutions, infrastructures and practices of consumer culture originated in the early modern period.”29 Audiences saw more than just Jones’s simplified lines and primary colors; they saw a landscape that ridiculed the pretensions of professionalism and corruption of capitalism, a parody that implicated the consumer excesses of their own commercial culture. Although Jones’s medieval street did not resemble the New York streets they traversed—and specifically avoided the style of photographic realism common to Belasco’s productions— the staging visualized a landscape that alluded to contemporary urban settings where someone’s ability to sell, consume, and negotiate defined their social relationships. Like much of France’s writing during the period, Dumb Wife (La comedie de celui qui espousa une femme muette) explores the medieval literature of François Rabelais, a Franciscan monk writing during the French Renaissance.30 The story originates from Rabelais’s description of a performance he attended { 44 }
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as a student, and Molière used a similar plot in The Doctor in Spite of Himself (Le médecin malgré lui). In France’s 1908 version, Parisian judge Leonard Botal marries his wife, Catherine, for her beauty and substantial dowry, not realizing until later that her inability to speak would be detrimental to his business; if she could speak, he speculates, she would provide him with more income, being able to secure the proper gifts from visiting lawyers seeking favorable rulings. One such lawyer recommends a doctor who can cure Botal’s wife; ensuing scenes with a doctor, surgeon, and apothecary satirized the corruptions of the medical profession, just as previous scenes ridiculed the profession of law. When the doctor cures Catherine, her overflowing diatribes on ladies’ fashion, neighborhood gossip, and household details drives her husband mad. Botal demands a cure from the cure and is told that the only feasible solution is to make him deaf. Once “cured,” Botal finds temporary bliss—“ ’Tis delicious. I can’t hear a thing”—only to be attacked by his wife, upset that she can no longer be understood.31 The play ends as madness spreads from wife to husband and then to all the characters onstage who join in the finale, a nonsensical song and dance. The comedy of Dumb Wife draws on the cliché of the loquacious wife. It is not what Catherine says that drives Botal mad but rather her relentless flow of dialogue. Her speeches, however, contain important references to the early modern consumer landscape in which they live. Catherine berates her husband for working so hard that he makes himself sick. She schools him on the high cost of living and entertaining his professional colleagues, the rising prices of caterers, cake shops, and grocers, and the fashion trends that distinguish the ladies in town from those at court. Finally, she mocks the lawyers’ wives who dress above their station and equate social status with the quality of bribe they can offer. Botal never responds directly to the content of Catherine’s speech, only its outward vocal effect. It is ironic, therefore, that theatre historians forget the dramatic content of Dumb Wife and remember only the outward visual effect of Jones’s design. A recovery of the dramatic content, particularly Catherine’s capitalist critique, reveals the cultural commentary of Jones’s design. The majority of the action takes place in Botal’s study and the street outside his residence. Jones’s staging included a large window revealing the study; the opening created a second proscenium through which audiences could view domestic scenes. Outside Botal’s study, the residential street contained the comings and goings of vendors selling birdseed, candles, and other household products. Jones accentuates these consumer practices through his scenic arrangement, revealing the interconnectedness between domestic and commercial space within { 45 }
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this early service-oriented landscape; the movement between spaces is constant as Catherine buys household items from street vendors and Botal engages in business negotiations indoors. Similar to the Slades’ enactment of their domestic relationship within a commercial setting, the Botals’ marriage is connected to the city’s economy; Leonard and Catherine’s relationship is constantly negotiated through lawyers and doctors selling their services and vendors selling their wares. Jones’s staging visualized the early modern time period through simplified shapes and contours rather than explicit details. Jones exaggerated the medieval costumes with bold lines and colors, giving each character a comical hat and garment to emphasize the excesses of their personality. The bright colors created a decorative effect against the monochromatic scenery, drawing attention to the performers and their activities. The set created a simple, black and white, asymmetrical composition of squares and rectangles: a white background with black lines around the tall door with transom, a small double-paned window, and the large study opening. Jones’s New Stagecraft aesthetic, however, was not a natural (or neutral) outgrowth of his dedication to theatrical modernism, as critics like Cheney suggested; it was a specific dramaturgical choice that accentuated the allegorical nature of France’s play. A realistic, or “Belascoesque,” rendering of a medieval street would guide spectators to read the production as a historical fiction, far removed from the concerns of early-twentieth-century spectators. But stripped of specific details, Jones’s fanciful setting encouraged audiences to see the Botals’ story as modern fable. Indeed, the play’s comedy depended on audiences identifying similarities between Catherine’s loquaciousness and their contemporary equivalent. Critic Francis Hackett made the comparison to Belasco’s usual Broadway fare explicit in her review of Dumb Wife: “Where Mr. Belasco would put in the skin, the seeds, the indigestible and innutritious trash, Mr. Jones has given us only golden fruit, assailable, ripe.”32 Such critiques celebrated Jones’s distillation of France’s play into a simplified visual expression. But simplified, in this case, was far from austere or purely abstract. The whimsical, colorful, and decorative staging softened the previous radical character of modern design into a something fashionable. Indeed, the production’s primary intent, supported by Jones’s design, was to develop a new standard of elevated entertainment, a highbrow alternative to current Broadway offerings that still attracted a wide range of spectators. Just as previous art theatre offerings had shown practitioners how to create quality artistic expressions out of minimal resources in an amateur venue, the Dumb Wife design demonstrated how they could use the same approach to produce a Broadway success. { 46 }
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Theatre histories that mark the Dumb Wife design as a significant achievement because it challenged the commercial realism of productions like The Governor’s Lady often overlook the commercial context of the Androcles/Dumb Wife bill or Jones’s translation of the avant-garde for a popular audience. Some of Jones’s Village associates, in fact, criticized this type of commercial art as a watered-down or distorted representation of modernism. But others, sympathetic to Jones’s desire to professionalize, believed that building a popular audience for theatrical modernism was its own sort of activism.33 Jones himself argued that those interested in building a national art theatre needed to reach the public by using the “idiom[s] of their own time.”34 Years later, Jones expressed regret that the New Stagecraft had been only a trend: “the movement is over and done and one reason why it is over and done now is that in some way stage designing became fashionable. Everybody began to talk about stage designs and about the man who made them instead of saying how good the plays were and how well they were acted.”35 Jones seemed to acknowledge his role in the tendency to diminish the dramatic text in the discourses surrounding design; in their rush to publicize the New Stagecraft, critics had made him the story instead of the production. Jones became a celebrity designer, the youth who brought the art of theatrical modernism to Broadway, and the Dumb Wife, regrettably, became an image with no content other than its formal elements. Jones worked as a professional designer until the early 1950s, but in the 1940s he increasingly traveled the country on a lecture circuit, speaking to college students about a future theatre that would finally capture the spirit of modern America.36 He urged this next generation of artists to create a “new and vital form of theatrical expression” that connected with contemporary spectators.37 These lectures, many of which he compiled in The Dramatic Imagination (1941), reveal Jones’s continued allegiance to a theatre that addressed modern audiences through modern styles and idioms. “We must learn to feel the drive and beat of the dramatic imagination in its home. We must take the little gift we have into the hall of the gods.”38 Americans, Jones insisted, needed a theatre that sparked their curiosity and captured the vitality of their modern world. In a 1944 New York Times interview, Jones echoed these same themes. He bemoaned the state of American theatre, describing a conversation at a cocktail party with a woman who raved about a recent production with a “real icebox” and “real ice cubes.” “This gave me something to think about,” Jones mused. “My mind ranged back thirty years to the famous Childs Restaurant which David Belasco set bodily on the stage of his theatre in the third act of ‘The Governor’s Lady,’ complete with real coffee urns and real waiters and real butter cakes. Here we are, I thought, after thirty years, face to face with the old conflict { 47 }
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between realism and imagination in the theatre, the same preoccupation with externalities.”39 By continuing the same comparison between Belasco’s Childs setting and his own New Stagecraft ideal, Jones reified critiques initiated decades before, participating in the same historiographic tendencies that implicitly reject theatrical realism as an imaginative, artistic practice. The persistent comparison between The Governor’s Lady and Dumb Wife— started by early-twentieth-century critics, reinforced by Jones, and solidified by historians—has become a cornerstone in narratives of American design, a means to discriminate the good from the bad, the imaginative from the merely literal. Jones and his Dumb Wife design, in fact, only reached their canonical status through a New Stagecraft discourse that cast Belasco as an unworthy adversary and oversimplified his realistic production aesthetic. Jones’s own despondent cocktail party recollection interprets the woman’s enthusiasm over ice cubes as merely a “preoccupation with externalities.” As much as he previously lamented the tendency to reduce the New Stagecraft to a fashionable trend, he was also unwilling to acknowledge that her interest might have resulted from a setting that communicated a complex cultural critique, indeed that the aesthetics of theatrical realism might prompt spectators to take a second look at the everyday spaces that dominated their modern lives. An acknowledgment of The Governor’s Lady and Dumb Wife as contemporaneous productions that emerged from the same social, economic, and political milieu provides further insight about design as a cultural as well as artistic practice. Even further, this type of historical perspective provokes more complex readings of designs, like those of Belasco, which adopted different styles and dramaturgical strategies or that fall outside a genealogical history that begins with Jones and the New Stagecraft. A cultural history of American design investigates the ways in which theatrical design, an artistic practice that includes a broad range of theories, styles, and techniques, emerges as a significant presence in America, a visual language that both reflects and critiques the everyday landscapes traversed by its residents.
Notes I would like to thank my dissertation supervisor from the University of Texas at Austin, Charlotte Canning, and one of my colleagues at Louisiana State University, John Fletcher, for reading versions of this article. This paper was accepted to an articles-in-progress workshop at the 2008 Mid-America Theatre Conference in Kansas City, and I would like to thank Scott Magelssen for organizing the workshop as well as journal editors Carolyn Roark and Rhona Justice-Malloy for their constructive feedback.
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2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8. 9. 10.
The Republic Theatre was located at 207 West Forty-second Street. Wendell Phillips Dodge suggests in “Staging a Popular Restaurant” that Childs was located “around the corner of Seventh Avenue” in Times Square. Theatre Magazine, October 1912, 104. A Childs menu from 1900 lists one of its locations as 1439 Broadway, a block and a half from Belasco’s theatre. Menu posted at http://www.nyfoodmuesum.org/childs.htm. Although the Childs setting generated public interest, inspiring an article in the October issue of the popular Theatre Magazine, the performance only ran for 135 performances, closing in January 1913. Arthur B. Feinsod, The Simple Stage: Its Origins in the Modern American Theatre (New York: Greenwood, 1992), 28–29. Feinsod notes that critical attacks on “Belascoism” started in 1912 with Clayton Hamilton, theatre critic for The Bookman, and continued with Sheldon Cheney and Walter Prichard Eaton’s subsequent critiques. These attacks prompted Belasco to respond with his own criticism of the art theatres in 1917, calling the movement a “fad” and its practitioners “incompetent.” As an artistic movement, the New Stagecraft was influenced initially by Adolph Appia’s and Edward Gordon Craig’s theories, developed during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and circulated in publications like Appia’s Music and the Art of Theatre (1899) and Craig’s journal The Mask (beginning in 1908), On the Art of Theatre (1911), and Towards a New Theatre (1913). During the early years of the New Stagecraft, Americans were more familiar with Craig’s theories than Appia’s. Sheldon Cheney, The New Movement in the Theatre (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1914), 152. Under Cheney and later editors, Theatre Arts Magazine devoted many articles to New Stagecraft artists, including Jones, Joseph Urban, Norman Bel Geddes, and Lee Simonson. In 1923 the publication changed its name to Theatre Arts Monthly, and in 1939 it became known as Theatre Arts. See Ronn Smith’s “American Theatre Design since 1945” in The Cambridge History of American Theatre, vol. 3, Post–World War II to the 1990s, ed. Don Wilmeth and Christopher Bigsby (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 514. Also see Mary C. Henderson’s “Scenography, Stagecraft, and Architecture” in The Cambridge History of American Theatre, vol. 2, 1870–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 487–513; and Orville Larson’s Scene Design in the American Theatre from 1915–1960 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1989). Larson, Scene Design, 50; Feinsod, The Simple Stage, 41–42. Also see Thomas Alan Bloom’s discussion of these productions in Kenneth Macgowan and the Aesthetic Paradigm for the New Stagecraft in America (New York: Peter Lang, 1996), 29, 37. General theatre histories, such as Oscar Brockett’s History of the Theatre, also feature images of The Governor’s Lady and Dumb Wife to anchor their discussions of Belasco’s theatrical realism and the New Stagecraft. See Brockett, History of the Theatre, 10th ed. (Boston: Pearson, 2008), 386, 440. Ric Knowles, “Modern: Drama (Defining the Field), Part 1,” Modern Drama 43, no. 4 (2000): 527. Elin Diamond, “Modern Drama/Modernity’s Drama,” Modern Drama 44, no. 1 (2001): 5. New Stagecraft design has received a generous amount of contemporary criticism, due in large part to sympathetic critics such as Sheldon Cheney and Kenneth Macgowan who were close colleagues with the designers and similarly invested in theatre reform. Subsequent theatre historians had a wide range of artifacts and information on New
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C H R I ST I N E SSI N Stagecraft design, including not only colleague criticism but also writings by the designers themselves and additional drawings created for publication and exhibition. The increased availability of New Stagecraft artifacts compared to previous theatrical staging has played a significant role in advancing the movement as the cornerstone of American design history. 11. Susan Harris Smith, American Drama: The Bastard Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 16, 24. 12. Although Alice Bradley is given credit as author of the play, Belasco historian William Winter, also a theatre critic for the New York Tribune, notes that the play received extensive rewrites by Belasco. At the opening of the New York performance, the lead actor made a speech on behalf of Bradley, making it known that she “disclaimed credit for anything more than the ‘central idea’ of the play.” William Winter, The Life of David Belasco (New York: Moffat, Yard, 1918), 377–79. 13. Steven J. Diner, A Very Different Age: Americans of the Progressive Era (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998), 3. Social historians Elizabeth Ewen and Stuart Ewen also note that “by the early twentieth century, the double-prong of ‘Americanization’—mass production and mass consumption—had dramatically altered the social landscape of American life. Channels of Desire: Mass Images and the Shaping of American Consciousness (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1982), 58. 14. Childs incorporated in 1902, and by 1925 they had 107 restaurants in 33 cities across the United States. Virginia Kurshan, “(Former) Childs Restaurant Building,” Report for Landmarks Preservation Commission (February 4, 2003), 1–2. http://www.nyc.gov/ html/lpc/downloads/pdf/reports/childs.pdf. 15. Richard Pillsbury, From Boarding House to Bistro: The American Restaurant Then and Now (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990), 61. 16. Ibid. 17. The Governor’s Lady used three additional settings, including the Slades’ drawing room, Senator Strickland’s library, and a room in the small cottage where Mary lived during her separation from her husband. Each demonstrated Belasco’s photographic “fidelity to life.” “The Story of The Governor’s Lady Told in Pictures,” souvenir program, Production Photograph Collection, Box 13:53, The Theatre Arts Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin. 18. Lise-Lone Marker, David Belasco: Naturalism in the American Theatre (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 61. Also Craig Timberlake, The Bishop of Broadway: The Life and Work of David Belasco (New York: Library Publishers, 1954), 319. 19. Alice Bradley, “The Play of the Month: The Governor’s Lady,” condensed version published by Hearst Magazine, September 1912, 113. 20. Ibid., 128. 21. Dodge, “Staging a Popular Restaurant,” 104. According to James Traub, the lobster palaces in Times Square catered to a wealthy New York crowd. Unlike Childs cafeterias, lobster palaces were upscale restaurants where those who wanted to be seen could purchase lobster thermidor served on gilded platters. The Devil’s Playground: A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square (New York: Random House, 2004), 27, 35. 22. Belasco’s decision to showcase a Childs cafeteria onstage would presumably prove advantageous for the Childs Restaurant Company, an inventive marketing strategy to raise visibility of the chain and characterize it as a popular establishment. However, I have
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23. 24.
25. 26.
27. 28. 29. 30.
31. 32. 33.
34. 35.
36. 37. 38. 39.
yet to locate any specific business arrangement between Belasco and Childs beyond the director’s negotiations to purchase restaurant equipment and furniture. Dodge, “Staging a Popular Restaurant,” 104. George Ritzer, The McDonaldization of Society: An Investigation into the Changing Character of Contemporary Social Life (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Pine Forge, 1993), 9–10. Ritzer characterizes McDonaldization as a largely suburban phenomenon of the 1940s and 1950s but acknowledges urban enterprises like lunch counters, diners, and cafeterias as ancestors of these processes (36). “Barker’s Season Happily Launched,” New York Times, January 28, 1915, sec. 9:3. Jones left for Europe after the Paterson Strike Pageant, accompanying Mabel Dodge, John Reed, and theatre critic Carl Van Vechten. While in Florence, Jones was unsuccessful in his attempt to meet Edward Gordon Craig; Larson blames Jones’s failure on Dodge’s falling out with Craig. “Robert Edmond Jones, Gordon Craig, and Mabel Dodge,” Theatre Research International 4 (February 1978): 125–33. In addition to his time in Berlin at Max Reinhardt’s theatre, Jones also visited Hellerau, where he saw Adolphe Appia’s “rhythmic space” designs at Jacque Delacroze’s school of eurhythmics. Arthur B. Feinsod, “Stage Designs of a Single Gesture: The Early Work of Robert Edmond Jones,” Drama Review 28, no. 2 (1984): 104. Ruth Gotthold, “New Scenic Art of the Theatre,” Theatre Magazine, May 1915, 248. “Granville Barker May Head the New Theatre Here,” Theatre Magazine, February 1915, 63. Don Slater, Consumer Culture and Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 1997), 9. Curtis Hidden Page, introduction to The Man Who Married a Dumb Wife, by Anatole France (New York: John Lane, 1915), 7. Anatole France originally wrote the play for a meeting of the Society of Rabelaisian Studies. Anatole France, The Man Who Married a Dumb Wife (New York: John Lane, 1915), 90. Francis Hackett, “Granville Barker in New York,” New Republic, January 30, 1915, 25. Dorothy Chansky recognizes how the tension between professionalism and amateurism provoked significant debates among the members of art theatres like the Provincetown Players. Composing Ourselves: The Little Theatre Movement and the American Audience (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004), 46. Also see Brenda Murphy’s The Provincetown Players and the Culture of Modernity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Robert Edmond Jones, “Lecture 1,” MS 51, Robert Edmond Jones Papers, Harvard Theatre Collection, Harvard University. Jones, miscellaneous notes, MS Thr 201.12, Folder 35, Jones Papers. These notes are not dated, but many of the lecture manuscripts in related folders are dated between 1949 and 1952. Ralph Pendleton, ed., The Theatre of Robert Edmond Jones (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1958), 178. Jones, “Lecture #2,” MS Thr 201.12, Folder 33, Jones Papers. Ibid. Jones, “Thirty Years Behind: A Veteran Scenic Artist Calls for More Imagination in the Theatre,” New York Times, clipping, n.p., August 6, 1944, Harvard Collection.
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\ A Historiography of Informed Imagination A (Hi)Story Drawn from the Correspondence of Annie Russell and Faith Baldwin —JOSE PH BROM F I E LD AND J ENNI F E R JONE S C AV E NAUG H
The problem with historical narrative is that while it proceeds from empirically validated facts or events, it necessarily requires imaginative steps to place them in a coherent story. Therefore a fictional element enters into all historical discourse.
G EORGE G. IGGE R S,
Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge
This essay is an experiment in theatre historiography. We have been inspired in part by the methods of creative nonfiction, and more deeply by the writings of historians Hayden White and Peter Burke, to explore the use of the imagination in the writing of theatre history. Our subject is the actress Annie Russell, Shaw’s original Major Barbara and one of Charles Frohman’s early stars. Although the theatre at our college was built for Miss Russell, few of our colleagues knew much about her career, and so we began to explore her history as part of a faculty-student summer research project. In the college archives, in a folder in a basement file, we stumbled upon a small note written by Miss Russell’s greatnephew years after her death. “I fear that Annie’s personal life is hard to get at,” he wrote. “Some kind of Victorian dark cloud was over her reputation. I can only speculate that she was bisexual or that she contracted a social disease from
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her first husband. But mine is an uninformed guess.”1 A clear picture of Annie was indeed “hard to get at,” and as our research progressed we encountered numerous mysteries in our secretive subject’s story: missing years spent recuperating from an unnamed but grave illness in Europe; a first husband whose name is violently scratched out of letters; cryptic references to constant pain, both physical and psychic; and diary entries that fixate on the women in her life. A hint here and there, a tantalizing suggestion, but like so many historical subjects, a sense of the real woman was ultimately elusive. In Annie Russell’s papers at the New York Public Library Manuscripts and Archives Division we found correspondence with nearly every major player in turn-of-the-century British and American theatre, including Maude Adams, Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, Rachel Crothers, Clyde Fitch, and Edith and Israel Zangwill, to name just a few. In her papers we were surprised to find that the largest set of letters came from a woman neither of us had ever heard of: Faith Baldwin. Faith and Annie’s correspondence spanned thirty years and filled nearly a quarter of the archive. Who was this woman? A friend? A confidante? A lover? Another mystery. We soon discovered that Faith Baldwin was a prolific writer of romance novels: she published more than eighty-five books between 1921 and 1977, sold more than ten million copies, and was “one of the handful of . . . novelists to complete a five-foot shelf.”2 Furthermore, Faith first met Annie Russell backstage at the Astor Theater in 1906 when she was a precocious thirteen-year-old girl and Annie was a middle-aged actress at the height of career. After reading more than three hundred letters written between 1906 and 1936, we realized that Faith and Annie’s correspondence could help us to fill in some, but not all, of the gaps in Annie’s story. This brings us back to the historian’s imagination. Most historians would agree that a vivid imagination is an important component of historical investigation. “To be able imaginatively to enter history is one of the great gifts of being human,” writes historian and theologian F. Thomas Trotter; however, it is a gift looked upon with some suspicion in many scholarly venues.3 In the theatre we are creative and imaginative by choice, yet in our historical scholarship we often strive to distance ourselves from our inventive abilities for fear of sacrificing scholarly rigor. Trotter describes how the imagination, once considered indispensable to the historian, has gradually lost credibility as an investigative tool. “In the Middle Ages, the word imagination had a somewhat wider usefulness. . . . It had to do with creating mental images, conceiving reasons for things. . . . Subsequently, reason has come to be used more exclusively in connection with scientific method, where
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the emphasis is on precision of argument, while imagination has been relegated to fanciful reflection. . . . For some time now, the artist has been seen as a decorator or an illustrator, because the artist’s vision has been perceived to be fanciful and, in our society’s judgment, disposable.”4 Whatever the subject of inquiry, gaps in the historical evidence are inevitable, and all historians face the dilemma of drawing conclusions and crafting narratives from faulty, biased, or incomplete data. Peter Burke writes in New Perspectives on Historical Writing, “Historians have long been aware of the difficulty of defining the extent to which evidence can be trusted and the extent to which historians fill in the gaps with the help of their imagination.”5 Although we regularly engage in speculation based upon our research, theatre historians have perceived imaginative intervention as a compensation for limited access to some complete and knowable past. Despite our creative training and heritage, we have been markedly distrustful of utilizing our imagination in crafting our histories. Imagination seems fanciful, to use Trotter’s words, and therefore disposable, lacking historical weight. How, then, should a scholar address the problem of not knowing what occurred between a letter written in 1912 and one written in 1914? Since we don’t know what happened between these two letters, we can either (1) make no speculation at all, (2) craft speculation that we defend as highly probable based upon available evidence, or (3) clearly mark the events that occur between the two letters as fiction. The first option reduces the function of historiography to data gathering. The second option operates on the pretense that speculation carries the same weight and serves the same function as “evidence.” The third option (the one we are exploring here) acknowledges the ethical imperative of historians to make themselves visible in the narrative in order to counter the belief that they are writing what actually happened.6 In addition, this option has heuristic value, provoking otherwise unconsidered insights and possibilities; and who better than theatre historians to appreciate the heuristic value of a good story. So what if we, as artist-scholars, were to engage unashamedly in a historiography of informed imagination? In the light of our facility with processing given circumstances, backstory, character psychology, and conflict, might we be uniquely well equipped to, as Trotter suggests, “imaginatively enter history”? Rather than apologizing for our educated guesses, might we, by using our imagination to “create mental images” and to “conceive of reasons for things,” actually be recovering a valuable, yet neglected, historiographical tool? In the first issue of the journal Rethinking History, founding editor Robert A.
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Rosenstone writes, “We believe that the writing of History can be an art, and that innovation in any art calls for boldness, audacity, and the courage to try out things that can seem strange, even to the author.”7 And so we determined to write a fictional history, not knowing how our historical fiction would be received in a scholarly community. Would the fiction negate the history, or could it be illuminating in its own right? Whether they do so consciously or unconsciously, most historians draw upon literary traditions in order to create a compelling narrative. “Critics from Michel Foucault to Hayden White have argued that written history is a kind of fiction,” writes Rosenstone, “that historians (like scientists) ‘construct’ the facts they study and that their stories follow classic fictional plots such as tragedy or tragicomedy.”8 By any traditional accounting, Annie Russell’s life leaned toward tragedy: an impoverished childhood, a life of illness, professional frustrations, and unrealized career aspirations. But in her letters to and from Faith Baldwin a different story emerges, a story of resistance, humor, and grace. Throughout the tumultuous thirty years of their correspondence, two things remained constant: Annie’s unwavering belief that she, and the theatre itself, were capable of more than commercial mediocrity, and Faith’s unwavering belief in Annie. What follows is our (hi)story based upon intensive research into the thirtyyear correspondence between Baldwin and Russell. Our subject, secretive in life, was fast fading into the obscurity reserved for actors who have outlived their fame. Through our (hi)story we hope to reanimate her, to envision ourselves in her presence, and imagine what she might ask of us. The narrative is largely drawn from the correspondence as well as press clippings, biographical profiles, and other letters in the collection. The words in italics are direct quotes taken from the letters or from articles or speeches written by Annie Russell. We have included extensive endnotes to help the reader identify our source material; however, with no apology, much of what follows springs from our own imagination.
The Story Brooklyn, October 1929. The briskness of autumn had returned to New York by the gusty first day of October, and Brooklyn was on fire with the colors of the changing leaves. Along a row of big brownstone townhouses there was one stoop covered in crunchy, brown leaves from the large elms looming overhead. Two floors above, Faith Baldwin sat next to the window at her typewriter, pon-
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Figure 1: Annie Russell as Puck in 1906. Courtesy of Department of College Archives and Special Collections, Olin Library, Rollins College, Winter Park, Florida.
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dering an ending for her latest novel, Broadway Interlude. A woman in a white nurse’s uniform stood behind her massaging her shoulders. Faith said, “Gonnie dear, have you checked on the twins?”9 “Sound asleep, but now that you mention it, I had best go check on Hugh Jr. and Hervey in the front yard to make sure they stay out of trouble.” “What would I do without you, Gonnie?” “Never get any work done, I suppose,” and with that, Gonnie leaned down to kiss her friend on the cheek and made her way downstairs to check on the children. Out of the corner of her eye, Faith saw little Hervey skipping to a pile of leaves situated under one of the massive elms sitting in the front yard. A strong gust of wind blew Faith’s hair back as she watched her daughter playing in a colorful whirlwind of leaves. She was struck with a vivid memory of her own childhood, not playing in a field of leaves, but sitting in a Broadway theatre watching Puck fly about a magical forest in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It had been more than twenty years since she first met her beloved Annie Russell playing that very role, but the memory of their first meeting was still fresh in her mind.
Scene 1 Manhattan, September 1906. The precocious young Faith Baldwin was sitting in the brand-new Astor Theatre, where A Midsummer Night’s Dream was playing with Annie Russell as Puck. A native New Yorker, Faith had the luxury of attending as much theatre as her heart desired. Her father and Charles Frohman, or C.F., as she liked to call him, were on friendly terms, and thus Faith began her love affair with the New York stage from an early age.10 What Faith adored most of all were the prominent players of the day. One month her affections would favor John Drew as the most comedic personality of the American stage. The next she would favor the classical performances of Julia Marlowe. At the present moment, Faith was in love with the young and talented Maude Adams.11 Her father had promised Faith tickets to the Broadway debut of J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan the following month. In the meantime, Faith had to occupy her mind somehow. And so she found herself in the theatre yet again. Faith had never seen Miss Annie Russell perform. She had followed her career abroad in England, where Miss Russell had been hailed as “the Duse of the English-speaking stage” for her portrayal of the title role of Bret Harte’s Sue.12 Faith had also read about Miss Russell’s reputation as “a sensitive wraith { 57 }
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of purity”13 and “a snowflake of womanhood.”14 Most recently in the New York Herald, Faith had read about her triumph abroad in the title role of George Bernard Shaw’s Major Barbara.15 Today she would see if Miss Russell’s critiques were deserved. The lights dimmed, and Faith gave her attention to the stage to soak in another theatrical experience. Miss Annie Russell made her first appearance by descending to the stage. Faith could hardly believe her eyes. She was flying! To be honest, Faith had not expected to see anyone flying onstage until next month, when she was sure to see Maude Adams flying through the air as Peter Pan. Faith watched on in awe as Puck orchestrated the forest around her: from flowers that lit up at her kisses to hoot owls and tumbling fairies. As Puck danced and flitted between flowers, owls, and fairies, Faith thought how absolutely magnificent and exhausting all of it must be. Yet whenever Puck had a speech to make, she gave the verse a full, vibrant voice demonstrating her prowess as an actress.16 Based on her performance as Puck, Miss Russell hardly seemed like the “tender, sensitive plant” that she had expected. By the time the play was over, Faith was head over heels for Miss Annie Russell. She simply had to meet her. After the performance, Faith waited in line to meet Miss Russell with all of the other matinee girls. The line formed by the stage door and snaked around to the front of the theatre. Faith was the last but one in line.17 She waited patiently for her turn as the girls around her tittered and shrieked with delight when supporting actors and actresses such as Thomas Coffin Cooke and Catherine Proctor exited through the stage door, waved, and disappeared into the crowded streets of New York.18 After what seemed like hours, the line of fifty had turned into no less than two—Faith, the last but one girl, and the last girl, Faith’s clever friend Mildred DeHaven, who stood behind her insisting that the best is always saved for last.19 Miss Russell’s assistant beckoned Faith forward through the stage door of the just-completed Astor Theatre.20 Faith followed her down the dark corridors until she reached a door with a star and “Miss Annie Russell” printed across it. Faith felt her heart leap out of her chest as the assistant opened the door, flooding the hall with a bright white light. Miss Russell was just bidding a giddy redhaired girl farewell. Her assistant took the girl’s hand and guided her to the door. Before they left, the assistant announced that they were almost finished, “This is the last but one, Miss Russell.” “Thank you, Agnes.”21 Miss Russell, who had turned her attention to her collection of oriental antiques on her dresser, paused, put on a smile, and turned her attention to the black-haired girl standing before her.22 “Good afternoon. Did you enjoy the performance?” { 58 }
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Faith was frozen, mesmerized by Miss Russell’s telling brown eyes. She stammered out a response, “You look exhausted.” This was not the response Miss Russell had expected. “Excuse me?” “You look exhausted. Not that I blame you. You must work up quite an appetite onstage . . . with all of the flying and dancing.” Clearly unsettled, Miss Russell paused to regain her composure. She had been fighting off a case of bronchitis for the past week. Indeed, Annie had been fighting off various illnesses for years now; it was the shadow that had been hovering over her since childhood.23 Unaware of Annie’s delicate state, Faith moved on to her next announcement. “Just so you know—I don’t think that you’re a ‘Puck in pastel shades.’ ”24 At this, Annie forgot all about composing herself and let out a laugh and a smile. “So you read The New York Times, do you?” “Whenever I get the chance, and I read The New York Herald too.” “I’m glad to hear that you don’t agree with everything you read then. It is good for a young woman to think for herself as soon as she is able.” “Well, how could a ‘sensitive plant’ or a ‘snowflake of a woman’ perform such a physically demanding part as ‘Puck’?”25 “I don’t know, dear.” “Did you know that you are the first major actress ever to play ‘Puck’ on an American stage?”26 “I did not know that,” she said turning to her stationery to begin collecting some of her fan letters. “But I do know how hard I had to fight Mr. Frohman to play something besides those dreadful ‘Annie-genues’ he always has me playing.”27 “‘Annie-genues’?” “Oh, you know, dear—the girl whose highest ambition is to get married to a suitable man. And I’ve played that part a hundred times: in Esmerelda, in Sue, in Mice and Men, and I probably will play it a hundred times more if I continue on with Mr. Frohman. Oh, I should like to play a real live woman; a woman with brains and a will of her own, who doesn’t simply stand around and whimper when Fate slaps her in the Face, but who gets up and does something!” 28 Annie smiled mischievously at the young girl in front of her. “But I love Puck. I have been conventional so long and he is such a delightful escape.29 ‘Puck’ is hardly an ‘Annie-genue,’ and for that I am grateful.” “Father knows Mr. Frohman. Maybe he can tell C.F. how good you were as ‘Puck,’ and you can play Hamlet next,” said Faith, imagining herself playing Ophelia. “Oh my dear, I don’t think Mr. Frohman will be producing another clas{ 59 }
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sic play anytime soon. It was nearly impossible to persuade him to risk his money on this production, ‘I am not in art for my health,’ he told me every time I asked to play Shakespeare. Finally he said to me ‘They will come all right if we bill it like a circus.’ It was either that or nothing, and accordingly we have vulgar posters boasting ‘A hundred and fifty fairies!’ And the people have come in great crowds my dear, but alas I shall never know what induced them to come—the pure love of art, Shakespeare intelligently acted, or one hundred and fifty flying fairies!” 30 “I came to see you.” Faith blushed, and then, as if to cover her embarrassment, she launched into another question. “Why did you pretend to smile when I came in the door?” This question halted Annie. She set down the stack of letters she had collected, turned, and faced this strange little girl, “Pretend to smile?” “Yes. I could tell when I came in that you were tired. And before you looked at me for the first time I saw you turn away and make yourself smile.” “Well, I suppose it was just an instinct. When you are an actress, you get used to smiling a lot. Nobody wants to see an actress exhausted, sick, or depressed. I smile, not because I feel like it, but because I must. The public demands a smiling actress.”31 “I think that is sad.” Faith looked down at her feet for a bit and then around Miss Russell’s dressing room at all of the naked lightbulbs, cards, and flowers. She turned back to Miss Russell and looked directly into her eyes. “What is your favorite kind of flower?” “Any yellow flowers are quite nice.”32 “Then I shall send you some yellow posies, so you can feel like smiling more often.” “Aren’t you a dear. I simply must remember you.” Faith’s eyes lit up. Suddenly, a charming gentleman, whom Faith recognized as Lysander from the play, entered the dressing room without so much as a knock. He spoke with a British dialect, “Darling, it is nearly a quarter to six. I’ve already told Agnes to turn away the last matinee girl. We really must be going.”33 Annie looked back at the sweet, thirteen-year-old girl standing before her. “I’m sorry dear . . . what is your name?” “Faith Baldwin.” “I’m sorry, Faith, but you must excuse me. I have another engagement to attend to. It truly was a pleasure to meet you, Faith Baldwin.” Before Faith knew what had happened, Miss Russell’s assistant, Agnes, had reentered the dressing room, grabbed Faith’s hand, and ushered her back through the dark corridors, out the stage door, and onto the streets of New York. Faith stood perfectly still for a moment to gather herself. She was beaming. { 60 }
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\ Back in the front yard of Faith’s Brooklyn brownstone, Hervey and Hugh had finished playing in the leaves when an elderly woman approached the townhouse. She walked slowly, supporting herself with a walking cane. She looked at the address and then back at an invitation. “Is this 156 Ninety-seventh Street, the Baldwin residence?”34 “Yes, ma’am.” Hugh stood up to greet the strange woman. “You must be Hugh Jr. I’m here to wish your mother a happy birthday.”35 Just then the front door opened framing the woman in the white nurse’s uniform. “Mrs. Yorke?” she asked in surprise. Annie’s face cringed a bit, but she put on a smile and nodded. “We weren’t expecting you until a quarter past, I’m afraid, but not to worry, I’ll have the maids serve the tea shortly. She offered the elderly woman her arm as they climbed the steps. Why don’t you just wait in the library while I tell Faith you’ve arrived?” Gonnie made sure Annie was comfortable and then set off to tell Faith that her dearest lady was here. Gonnie wanted to prepare Faith for Annie’s frailness. It would come as a shock, for in Faith’s mind Annie had always been a tower of strength. In the library, Annie marveled at shelf upon shelf stacked with books— Rudyard Kipling, Gellett Burgess, Guy de Maupassant, Upton Sinclair, Laura Jean Libby, and a growing Faith Baldwin section.36 She began counting Faith’s novels: Mavis of Green Hill, The Office Wife, Sign Posts, Rosalie’s Career, Thresholds, Those Difficult Years, and at least half a dozen more.37 Annie thought to herself how busy Faith must have been the past couple of years—two children, a husband, and what looked like a dozen novels. Feeling a coughing fit coming on, Annie reached inside of her purse for her handkerchief. As she reached, Annie first felt a tattered, old letter. She recognized it instinctively and smiled as she thought back to the first time she had read it nearly twenty years ago, and of the many times afterwards. She pulled out the letter and began reading the familiar passage: But this much I do know and I’d like most awfully well for you to know it too—and believe it. That I’ve loved you ever since I saw you run across the stage to the sleeping fairy—and I love you yet and “I’ve a hunch” that I always will—and I’ve loved your letters ever since the first little one . . . and they never could cease being a source of delight to me—and I’ve loved and valued your friendship—ever since the first and I hope and pray that you will never stop caring for me if only just a wee little bit.38 She ran her fingers across the smooth parchment, folded and unfolded so many times . . .
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Scene 2 Manhattan, November 1916. It was a miserably cold and rainy afternoon. The freezing rain pelted the defenseless city below and anyone daring to venture outside. After months of unemployment, Annie’s husband, Oswald Yorke, had finally gotten an interview with Mr. Comstock, a powerful theatrical manager, so she had taken the opportunity to run some errands. As she opened the door to her three-room pied à terre she was surprised to see Oswald sitting at her writing desk.39 Why was he home? She removed her overcoat, set down her purse on the coffee table, and grabbed a towel to dry off. “Oh, my beloved, you must be freezing.” He crossed to help dry off his wife. “You know you should not be traipsing about the city on a miserable day like this. It is no wonder you come down with grippe every fortnight.”40 “Actually, dear, today is a good day. No pain.” “I worry about you, that’s all. You know just as well as I that it is hard enough for two mature actors to find work in this city right now if we are healthy. You simply cannot expect to find work if you fall ill again.” Oswald wrapped his arms around his wife, holding her tight. Oswald was right, Annie thought to herself; their careers were growing dormant. She had traveled to Worcester, Massachusetts, for her most recent role, and that was over a year ago.41 What’s more, she did not see any major opportunities on the horizon. As she got older, she found the rewards of acting diminishing humiliatingly with the years.42 She shifted gears to Oswald’s career, “Any luck in your appointment with Mr. Comstock?” “None,” he said, pulling away from her. “I didn’t even get to see him. He canceled at the last minute.” “Oh, I’m sorry, dear.” Here it comes, she thought, the accusation she had been hearing for years now. “I’m sorry, too. I’m sorry that you found a way to offend every major manager in all of New York City in your campaign to elevate the art of theatre. You have successfully alienated the entire New York theatre community with your crusade against commercial theatre.”43 “Oh, Oswald, don’t start this again.” Flustered and frustrated, Oswald crossed to the coffee table to pick up Annie’s scrapbook of her published writings. The scrapbook was growing by the month. Now that she no longer acted, it seemed she published an article every week! He flipped the book open and began to read one of her “manifestos”: “ ‘My plans and my work I know, will probably meet opposition from the
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managers of a certain type’ . . . every last manager in all of New York,” Oswald inserted, “ ‘And to bring out a hue and cry from the uncultured, ignorant, and incompetent actor, but I welcome this as a proof that the time and hour is right.’ ” 44 He flipped the page to find yet another confrontational article, “ ‘The responsibility for the sort of plays that are being shown today rests with the theatergoers and not the actors or the playwrights . . . playgoers applaud and encourage insipid works, romantic insincerities, sensational indecency, vulgarity, and coarseness.’ ” 45 He tossed the scrapbook back on the coffee table and looked at his wife. “Thanks to your critical pen, managers refuse to even see me for a part.” “Why are you blaming me for your canceled appointment? I’m sure Mr. Comstock just had something come up at the last minute.” “I doubt it. This is the third time he has canceled on me in the past month. The truth is that he doesn’t want anything to do with you. Your ‘good cause’ is killing both of our careers.” “Is it so wrong to believe that the theater is capable of so much more than leg shows and vulgar comedians? I’ve told you that I will sacrifice to create the ideal theatre, but you have no right to blame your unemployment troubles on me, unless you blame me for your successes as well.46 You did not blame me when you were playing Lysander in A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Astor Theatre or when you were playing Malvolio in Twelfth Night at the New Theatre.”47 “But I do blame you for conning me into performing Malvolio with the New Theatre.” “That’s absurd. You asked me to get you a part in that play.” “That was one of the worst decisions I ever made—following you into that wretched New Theatre.” “Yes, Oswald, The New Theater was a failure, done to death by a scornful press and an indifferent and abusive public, who really prefer the offerings of the commercial manager; the kind who translates brilliant French and Italian plays with the collaboration of the stage carpenter so that the English may not be too highbrow!” 48 Oswald began to protest. “Don’t!” commanded Annie. “Whatever the faults and failures of the new theater were, and there were many, its aims and its achievements were fine and great.” 49 Oswald stared at Annie. “I’m not going to argue.” He turned abruptly, opened the front door, and stormed down the stairwell. Annie’s head began to throb. It seemed as though her afternoon in the freezing rain was catching up with her, and arguing always triggered headaches
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and agitation in her lungs. Checking to see that Oswald had not returned unexpectedly, Annie crossed to one of her favorite antiques, a Louis XV desk. She often wondered to whom this desk belonged, what kind of letters and documents were written upon it. What secrets had it held? 50 She opened a hidden drawer and pulled out a stack of letters tied up with a blue ribbon. Her correspondence with the young Faith Baldwin had been a constant comfort over the last ten years, though she’d had to hide Faith’s letters ever since Oswald had denounced Faith and her liberal politics.51 From the top of the stack she pulled out a wellworn letter dated October, 1910; she smiled at the familiar salutation, “Dearest Lady,”52 and sighed, “What are we going to do, Faith, what are we going to do?” She held the oft-read letter close to her breast. She knew the words by heart, “ ‘But this much I do know and I’d like most awfully well for you to know it too— and believe it. That I’ve loved you ever since I saw you run across the stage to the sleeping fairy—and I love you yet and “I’ve a hunch” that I always will—and I’ve loved your letters ever since the first little one . . . and they never could cease being a source of delight to me.’ ” 53 Over the years she had received thousands of letters from fans chiefly consisting of every kind of request—requests for positions, interviews, for photographs, autographs, souvenirs—from her handkerchief to her household furniture—for loans or for gifts.54 But Faith, dear Faith had given her love unconditionally, asking for nothing in return. Although they rarely met in person, Annie felt a deep connection to her “last but one girl.” Now that the world seemed done with her, when she had outworn her popularity and had nothing left for herself, Faith’s belief in her was more important than ever.55
Scene 3 Sitting in the library of 156 Ninety-seventh Street, Annie stared at Faith’s letter. It was remarkable how one small piece of paper could bring back so many memories. The library door creaked open to reveal a full-grown, dark-haired woman. Annie had not heard it open, so Faith stood in the doorway and watched her for a moment. Twenty-three years ago, she had fallen in love with this woman as she danced and flew freely about the stage as Puck. She could not endure to see her winged Puck shackled to a cane.56 Annie snapped out of her reminiscent gaze and moved from the wall of shelves to the mantle over the fireplace to inspect some pictures. All of the pictures, save one of Faith and Gonnie, were of the children. By the looks of things
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there were not two, but four of them. “Good heavens,” Annie said under her breath. “Good heavens, indeed!” echoed Faith’s voice from the doorway, giving Annie a bit of a shock. “Let me give you a hug, Dearest Lady.” The two women embraced. “Happy Birthday, my last but one girl!” “Oh—thank you, Annie. May I escort you to the living room for a nice cup of tea? I’m so anxious to hear what you’ve been up to these past couple of years.”57 Holding Annie’s hand in her own, Faith led her out of the library, through the foyer, and into the small, but cozy, living room. The tea tray was already in place with a steaming pot of tea, a plate of biscuits, and two china teacups. The room was brightened by a vase of yellow posies, centered on the table. Annie smiled as she took her seat. As Faith began serving the tea, Annie remarked, “I’ve already had the pleasure of meeting your two oldest on the front steps this afternoon, but I had no idea that you had two more.” “Oh—Stephen and Ann are twins and only just eighteen months,” said Faith as she offered Annie a biscuit. “I know I’ve been awful at keeping in touch these past couple years. We must make a resolution to keep one another better informed.” Annie declined the biscuit, sipped her tea, and nodded in agreement. “It’s no excuse, but I have been rather busy since the birth of the twins.” “Understandable, my dear.” “Really, it has just been one damned thing after another 58 ever since Stephen and Ann were born last April.” “Has Hugh Jr. stayed out of trouble since his accident with the match? That was the last letter I’ve had from you.”59 “Unfortunately, he has been in and out of the hospital, but he has been out of any major trouble. That child will be the end of me. Since he stole and secreted a match and burned himself all over his right side, he has had abscessed ears, his tonsils and adenoids removed, double pneumonia, a collapsed lung, septic poisoning, and a fine case of the chicken pox.60 Then all four had the measles and finally whooping cough. I am fortunate in that my best friend is a trained nurse.61 You met her down in the foyer, I believe. We have only just now become a relatively healthy, sane household. And much of that is thanks to the simple fact that Big Hugh is gone for good.”62 “Oh my dear girl! When did he die?” “Oh, Annie, not like that. Although I would be lying to say that his pass-
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ing would not have made things much easier and certainly cleaner.” She gave a nervous laugh to show that everything was fine, “Really, it has been coming for four years . . . in August I told him we must separate.”63 “But why, dear?” “My reason for a separation is a maladjustment of sex,” Faith declared. Annie raised her eyebrows in surprise, but Faith continued. “I have had to work hard and contribute nine tenths of our income. This is quite all right, we have never quarreled about money. You know I would not. I have borne four children. The two eldest are sixteen months apart, the twins came along in two more years. I worked all thru my hard pregnancies and immediately after my deliveries. I had to. But despite this—I must be frank . . . I had continuous demands upon me, every night of my life. I saw several doctors thinking my lack of response was an abnormality. But they were horrified. Any compromise was simply effected by force and resulted in such sulks and weeps that I always submitted. I have been a fool.” 64 “No more of a fool than most of us, my dear. Sometimes I wonder why we even bother with the creatures at all.” Faith smiled and then Annie took a deep breath, looked into her friend’s eyes, and seemed to brace herself. “I’ve some news of my own . . . Oswald has left me.” Faith moved to the chair next to Annie’s and took her hand, “No! Annie, I can’t believe it.” “Oh, believe it, my dear. Two years ago, Oswald left me for a younger woman. I had to testify to his infidelity in open court. It was . . . humiliating.” Annie’s hands shook as she set her teacup down. “I won’t try to tell you about the different kinds of hell I have been through. You’ll understand what it has meant after twenty three years of effort to lift that creature up to a plane where I could love and respect him—and the useless years fighting against his domineering—his hatred of my preeminence—his hatred of my family—his hatred of America— hatred, hatred, hatred—meaning hatred of everything and every person I had any least contact with—and last of all his ill concealed hatred of me.” 65 “Oh, Annie, I had no idea! I know he was distant with me, but I always believed Oswald adored you.” Annie let out a short, bitter laugh. “Do you remember when Oswald traveled to France to entertain the troops just after the war ended in 1919?”66 “Oh, I remember the Great War quite well, and yes, I remember his travels. You were so lonely.”67 Annie’s frail hand twisted and untwisted the pearl necklace at her throat. “While I was at home volunteering for the Stage Women’s War Relief and missing my husband, that man was . . . picking up diseases from harlots in France.68 { 66 }
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Of course when he came home I was so glad to see him . . . I didn’t know.” Faith felt the anger rising in her chest. “As you can imagine, I have been quite sick these past ten years. While he traveled to perform wherever he could get work, I stayed home to face the leftovers of my life—loneliness, blindness, and disease. I can barely see anymore, my lungs are failing, my throat bleeds, the headaches are constant . . . Damn this body—I have fought it my whole life.”69 Annie pushed her cane away with a violence that surprised them both, and her tears began to flow freely. For once, Faith Baldwin, prolific writer that she was, was at a loss for words. Gently she took Annie into her arms and stroked her hair. “There, there,” she whispered as she held on to the woman whom she had loved these many years. When Annie’s tears had subsided, Faith finally spoke, “I feel so hideously disappointed in my illusion of Lysander,—yet, in reality, I only knew him through your eyes and my hopes.” 70 “And I suppose neither was terribly trustworthy,” Annie said in a whisper. Faith responded softly, “Our husbands were both charming creatures, especially when things went well. Oh but they were also weak and drifting . . . And bullies too! We sacrificed so much of our work so that they could feel important.71 How could two such brilliant women as ourselves have wasted so much time with such dullards. Let us agree here and now to be done with the lot of them!” “Indeed, we are better off with each other.” Annie agreed. “Men are such fools!” “Oh, Annie, that would make a wonderful book title—may I steal it?”72 “I give it to you with my love, dear girl. Consider it a birthday present.” “Now in all seriousness, dearest lady, since we have agreed to put our mistakes behind us and to soldier on, I must ask you: When will you return to the stage? Have you been to the theater lately? It is all dancing girls and vulgar comics!73 The theater is in desperate need of your good service and you have been shirking your duties, hiding yourself away in Florida of all places! I have missed reading your declarations of war against the tired businessman and the mediocrity of commercial theater.” “My ‘militant manifestos,’ as Oswald use to call them. Much good they did.” “No, you were just ahead of your time, dear lady. Oh, I shall never forget your address to the Women’s City Club of New York. There you were, all five feet and two inches of you, up on that podium telling the ladies of Park Avenue that the theater was ‘filled with good millinery, good looks, high kicking and low thinking!’ and what were they going to do about it? And then you told them to ‘keep { 67 }
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their daughters away from vulgar plays’ and take them to Shakespeare instead.” 74 Faith’s eyes twinkled as Annie smiled broadly for the first time that day. “Oh, you were a force to be reckoned with, Miss Russell! Don’t tell me you have given up the fight.” “Well, actually, my dear,” Annie said with uncharacteristic shyness, “I may be returning to the theatre very soon.” “Well, bully for you, Annie, it is about time! What role will you play? When? Where? I’ll call for tickets today.” “Now don’t get ahead of yourself, my girl. I said I might be returning to the stage. It’s rather a long story.” “Oh, but I love stories,” Faith said as she poured them each another cup of tea and settled back into the sofa. “I’m all ears.” “You remember my good friend Mary Curtis Bok of Philadelphia? I’m sure you’ve heard me talk of before.” “Oh yes, I know she has been a wonderful friend to you these many years.” Faith thought she detected a slight blush on Annie’s cheek. Annie continued, “Mary wants to give Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida, a theatre in my name with the stipulation that I be the producing director.”75 “What wonderful news, Annie!” “Well, it is much too early to say, and at the present moment I don’t know if I am even up to anything theatrical, especially given my wretched health.” “But Annie, this is your dream. To have your own company to guide and nourish as you see fit. To produce theatre that you want to see done, to play roles that you want to play. No producers telling you what to do or financial strains holding you back!” “Yes, Faith, but . . .” “But what, Annie? How could you possibly turn such an offer down?” “I am an old lady now, Faith. My Old English Comedy Company was my chance at my dream. I was fifty then, and we lasted less than two years.”76 “Then be grateful that Mary has given you a second chance.” “But I’m so tired, Faith, I don’t think I can do this.” “Nonsense! Annie, you have come too far, you are too strong, and you have sacrificed too much to turn this down.” Annie paused and pictured a brand-new theatre bearing her name in Winter Park, Florida. She saw full audiences packed into the red velvet seats, visiting guest artists performing and teaching, and most important of all, she saw students engaged in a theatre of distinction and purpose. “Maybe it is time for me to move on to the next chapter of my life.” { 68 }
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“Maybe?” Faith raised her eyebrows as she sipped on her tea. Annie stared back at the woman sitting next to her so full of life and energy, “Fine, it is time for me to move on.” Faith lit up with a broad smile, and she instantly recognized the twinkle that had appeared in Annie’s eyes. Mischievous Puck was back to play.
\ The story didn’t end there, of course. Mary Curtis Bok did give Rollins College the money to build the Annie Russell Theater in Winter Park, Florida, and the cornerstone was laid on January 9, 1932, three years after Annie and Faith’s last meeting in Brooklyn. Mary Curtis Bok could not attend the ceremony but sent Annie a telegram with the following message: “Regret infinitely my inability to be with you today for the laying of the cornerstone of the Annie Russell Theater. The building is just my loving tribute to you as a woman and artist and dear lifelong friend, but you will give it a soul. Your spirit and knowledge and artistic integrity will be the inspiration for the youth of Rollins College privileged to work under your guidance. My love to you and God speed the project.”77 In writing this (hi)story we have been searching for “the soul” of the woman whose name graces the building we work in every day. In the course of our experiment we have drawn upon many of the skills that drew us to theatre in the first place. As researchers we have immersed ourselves in diaries, letters, and personal ephemera. As playwrights we have reconstructed the given circumstances of Faith and Annie’s world. And as actors we have imaginatively entered their psyches. We are committed to the rigor of meticulous research, but it was the “filling in the rest” that created an intimate engagement with our subject.
The Research Although the finished product of our experiment in theatre historiography may flow easily, the process of crafting it did not. The journey from reading the first letters of the correspondence spread out on the office floor to our finished (hi)story was messy and unpredictable. We began our summer research project with a simple question: What do we expect to learn about Annie and Faith from reading their letters? Our answers became some of our initial research goals: uncover Faith’s development as a writer, follow the progression of their { 69 }
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Figure 2: Mary Bok (left) and Annie Russell, together in 1931 just before the laying of the cornerstone of the Annie Russell Theatre. Courtesy of Department of College Archives and Special Collections, Olin Library, Rollins College, Winter Park, Florida.
relationship with one another and with their respective husbands, and unearth how these two women conformed to, and resisted, traditional gender roles of their period. When we asked if the project held any significance beyond satisfying our own curiosity, we decided that for our own community the significance lay simply in shedding light on the faded figure of Annie Russell, after whom our theatre is named. But when we asked ourselves if this project could have any significance for those beyond our local community we were less certain. The realization that the creation of the (hi)story itself would become significant came to us much later in the process. The correspondence seemed to fall into three phases. The first (1906–10) featured Annie in the prime of her career and Faith as a “matinee girl” fan. The second (1911–19) explored Annie’s role as an activist in the theatre and as a mentor for Faith, who was coming of age both as a young woman and a writer. The third and final phase (1920–36) followed Annie’s declining career and failing health as well as Faith’s struggles to balance her difficult husband, rambunctious children, and blossoming literary career. In addition to the correspon{ 70 }
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dence, we sought out supplementary material to help us contextualize the letters and to explain unfamiliar references. Our first stop was the Archives and Special Collections at Rollins College’s Olin Library, where we found an abundance of material on Annie Russell. We combed through boxes of personal diaries, reviews, interviews, and literary works as well as the small library of books Annie left to the college. Despite Faith’s immense popularity as a romance novelist in the 1930s and 1940s, contextual information on her life and career proved a bit more difficult to uncover. Luckily, her letters, especially her earlier ones, are much more detailed than Annie’s, and we were able to use references in her letters to better understand her world. An example: she referred to her schooling at Mrs. Dow’s in Briarcliff, New York, and we were able to uncover that Mrs. Dow’s was a finishing school for rich young society women. We are also fortunate that Faith left behind more than eighty-five novels for us to draw from. We read several of them in order to better understand her development as a writer and her nascent feminism. One of the novels, Self-Made Woman, tells the story of a career-driven woman struggling to choose between her lucrative career in real estate and the prospect of marrying and raising a family. This would ultimately influence how we drew Faith’s character in the (hi)story. At the conclusion of our summer research, we felt as if we were standing in a long corridor lined with doors stretching as far as the eye could see. We had a great deal of information but no clear understanding of its historical significance. Should we explore the women’s various career paths? Their dysfunctional families? Their devotion to each other and other women? Their disappearance from the historical record? Their politics? Their sexuality? With so many different doors, how could we decide which of them deserved opening, and more importantly, which one deserved entering and exploring? And finally, how were we to format our findings in a way that engaged an audience, pleased us as researchers, and honored Annie and Faith?
Discovering a Structure We continued working into the school year, and one afternoon as we debated possible thesis statements for an article, Joseph said, “Too bad we can’t just write a play or a story. After all, Annie was an actress and Faith was novelist. It would seem fitting.” “Interesting,” I replied. “But that’s way too far outside the box. It wouldn’t be scholarly.” { 71 }
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“Why not?” he asked. Why not indeed? I found I had no clear-cut answer to his question. That started us on an exploration of the genre of creative nonfiction. Lee Gutkind, founder and editor of the scholarly journal Creative Nonfiction, describes creative nonfiction as “dramatic, true stories using scenes, dialogue, close, detailed descriptions and other techniques usually employed by poets and fiction writers about important subjects. . . . [It] allows a writer to employ the diligence of a reporter, the shifting voices and viewpoints of a novelist, the refined wordplay of a poet and the analytical modes of the essayist.”78 This seemed like the perfect solution. By combining primary-source research with the tools of creative nonfiction, such as dialogue and detailed description, we could reanimate Annie in three critical scenes representing the three major phases in her relationship with Faith. Creative nonfiction would allow us to personalize the historical record these two women left behind, paying respect to the creative nature of each, and making theatre history come alive in a narrative reminiscent of a romance novel or a play. It would also foreground the fact that the letters left us with many unanswered questions that our imaginations, informed by research, unsurprisingly sought to answer. Unfortunately, there was one rather significant problem with this idea. One of the basic tenets of creative nonfiction is that you “do not add”; in other words, you cannot make up something that didn’t happen. You may condense or even reorder events, but you cannot create them from your imagination. So although creative nonfiction gave us a starting point, it would not allow us to imaginatively enter Annie and Faith’s history. Although we ultimately gave up the idea of writing a creative nonfiction essay, the fact that the genre had been significantly theorized gave us the confidence to go forward with a creative essay. We decided to write three scenes in which we would illuminate important facets of Annie and Faith’s lives while reinforcing the importance of their relationship during times of crisis. Before writing each scene we made a list of the “historically significant information” we wanted the scene to convey. In other words, if the scenes were traditional academic essays, what information would they include? For example, in the first scene our list included Annie’s reputation as a “delicate flower” juxtaposed against her personal strength; Charles Frohman’s power as part of the Syndicate and Annie’s dependence upon him for employment; Faith’s precociousness and infatuation with Annie; Annie’s desire to play roles that challenged her in plays that she felt would elevate the state of the theatre; and a physical description of Annie’s performance as Puck. After we had developed our list, Joseph would draft the scene; then we would then work together to ensure that the stories were communicating the historical informa{ 72 }
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tion that we had intended. When we got stuck we would ask: Where is the history here? What do we want people to know about the past and about Annie and Faith in this moment of the story? Scene 1 explored the first meeting between the two women after a matinee performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Astor Theatre in 1906. As Annie was forty-two years old and Faith thirteen at the time of the first meeting, the scene proposed an answer to a fundamental question: How did this correspondence begin, and why did it continue? Scene 2 jumped ahead ten years to a rainy Monday afternoon in Annie’s apartment in New York City and switched the focus to Annie’s rocky marriage with Oswald Yorke. Although Faith was not physically present in the scene, her letters were present and provided a source of conflict between Annie and Oswald. Because the letters were our inspiration, it was important to us to have a letter figure prominently in the narrative, so it seemed fitting to use Faith’s love letter as a central prop in the scene. Scene 2 proposed to answer the question of how important the correspondence was to each of the women, how it offered a unique support as they fought battles, both public (suffrage, Annie’s campaign to elevate the American stage) and private (marital, career, and health). Scene 3 leaped ahead a decade and a half to Annie’s visit on Faith’s thirty-sixth birthday, the scene that we ended up using as the present day for our (hi)story. It proposed to answer the question of how intimate the relationship was and how representative it may have been of the female-centered relationships in each of their lives. Together these three separate but interrelated scenes comprised about thirty pages and would become the foundation upon which we built our final (hi)story, though we would end up cutting, revising, and shuffling portions from each of the original three scenes. And even though we were placing the women in imagined situations, we sought to retain some sense of the mystery that had drawn us to their story in the first place. Although our research had given us a much better sense of Annie and Faith’s professional lives and of Faith’s personal life (she was far more forthcoming in her letters), many aspects of Annie’s personal life remained obscure. Her first marriage, her illness in Europe, and her sexuality were as unclear to us as they had been when we started. Our interpretation of Annie’s story would have to maintain certain ambiguities if we were to conscientiously engage the nature of the evidence.
Deep and Apparent Subjects The stories were written, but they needed a framework to clarify what we were trying to do with them and how we imagined other theatre scholars might be { 73 }
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able to use them. While researching the genre of creative nonfiction we had come across the terms “deep subject” and “apparent subject.” Myrna Kostash explains, “Every piece of writing has an apparent subject; it’s the one that answers the question ‘What are you writing about?’ But if you spend enough time and thought with your material you will eventually uncover the deep subject, the one that is driving the apparent one.”79 Annie and Faith’s correspondence was clearly our apparent subject, but what was our deep subject? What was driving us in our investigation into their lives and letters? After a good deal of reflection, we realized that our deep subject was actually the writing of theatre history itself. These women were vanishing from the historical narrative, but in their letters to each other they had been writing a kind of history that had been left to us to interpret and to share. Although our artifact, the correspondence, was fragmented and imperfect, it awakened in us a deep attachment to Annie and Faith and a subsequent desire to reanimate them so that we might deepen our connection to our past. This led us to craft stories that both posed and answered research questions: Why did two women so different from each other in circumstances begin a correspondence that lasted so long? How intimate was their relationship? How did they influence each other’s careers? How important was this correspondence in their lives? As we wrote, we had been answering these questions by combining our research data with our scholarly intuition and ultimately our imaginations. The discomfort I felt utilizing my imagination so freely in a history essay compared to Joseph’s adventurous leap into uncharted waters (Why not?) made me keenly aware of the institutional constraints theatre historians deal with on both a conscious and subconscious level. As a veteran of academia I was inured to traditional ways of doing things; my training, my past publication experiences, and my participation in the field limited my vision even as they gave me professional credibility. As an acting student who had taken no theatre history courses at the time our research started, Joseph came to the project wanting to learn and teach through storytelling. In the joyful collision of actor, storyteller, data gatherer, historian, writer, and director that emerged in our collaboration we discovered the deep subject of the essay. Now we needed to edit the stories, frame them with a discussion of historiography and imagination, and let readers make of it what they may. Out of the thirty pages of the three separate scenes we combined, revised, and crafted our final unified (hi)story of twenty pages. In order to do this, we had to reexamine each of the stories to create a singular focus to give the finished product an overall through-line. When we took a fresh look at the original scenes
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we decided to focus on Annie as the central character supported by Faith. The through-line would be Annie’s desire to elevate the American stage and her belief that she was capable of more than she was being allowed to do. We trimmed away ten pages of material and added material from Annie’s newspaper and magazine interviews, and the result was a narrative that was clearly focused on Annie’s professional life but still included information about her personal relationships. We did, however, have to cut some very interesting parts of Faith’s story. For example, in scene 2 Faith is present only through her letter. As it stands now there is one brief reference to a conflict between Oswald and Annie over Faith: “though she’d had to hide Faith’s letters ever since Oswald had denounced Faith and her liberal politics.” In our original scene, the conflict between Annie and Oswald erupted because of Faith. The scene had opened from Oswald’s perspective. He sat staring out the window on a rainy afternoon waiting for his wife to return. As he waited, the mail arrived with a letter from Faith. Oswald thought that he and Annie had agreed to break off communications with Faith, because Faith maintained a neutral stance in World War I. Faith’s neutral stance can be attributed to her two-year visit to Germany in the years just before the war broke out. Sent to live with her aunt and cousin after graduating from finishing school, Faith fell in love with a young German boy, who joined the army at the onset of the war. Because of this she could not bring herself to view Germans as “the enemy,” a position that angered Oswald and prompted him to write her a scathing letter.80 In our first draft, Oswald opened Faith’s letter and discovered Faith’s political stance and read her declaration of love for Annie. When Annie returned from her errands she found Oswald reading her letter; thus their argument first centered on Faith’s relationship with Annie and then moved to Oswald’s and Annie’s failing careers. Unfortunately, there was not room in the final version to discuss Faith’s experience in Germany as we prioritized Annie’s professional struggles in the scope of the overall (hi)story. Other interesting material from the letters that didn’t make it directly into the (hi)story but nonetheless influenced it include (1) Annie’s confession that she enjoyed playing hooky from her responsibilities by writing long letters to Faith while she was on tour; (2) Faith’s acquaintance with several prominent theatre people who were her family’s neighbors on Long Island (including William Gillette, whose boat she snuck onto one night when she was fourteen); (3) Annie’s advice that Faith be a writer and not an actress and her own confession that she wished she had been a writer instead of an actress; (4) Annie’s dependence upon, and infatuation with, philanthropist Mary Curtis Bok in her
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Figure 3: Faith Baldwin, years after seeing Annie Russell as Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, went on the become a prolific American romance novelist. Courtesy of Department of College Archives and Special Collections, Olin Library, Rollins College, Winter Park, Florida.
later years; and (5) Faith’s battles with depression as well as her periodic financial difficulties. In the end our experiment produced a document that had no real prototype as far as we knew. It wasn’t a fiction, it wasn’t a history; it was a hybrid in need of a name. And so we called it a (hi)story, feeling the story had the most { 76 }
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weight in the equation. Although we took many twists and turns arriving at it, we found that our historiography of informed imagination actually had a clear methodology: 1. Primary-source research must happen first; 2. Questions arise from the evidence that cannot be completely answered by the evidence; 3. Contextual research is conducted; and then 4. The writers use their informed imagination to create an answer (not the answer) to the questions. How useful any individual (hi)story produced by this method might be to another historian will depend on the interests of that scholar. It cannot be used as historical evidence itself—not in its entirety—but portions of it can be, and another scholar might, with a different set of lenses, write another (hi)story based upon that same evidence. The two could then be put into dialogue, creating a potentially useful exploration of historical discourse itself. This historiography of informed imagination has pedagogical value as well. While Joseph and I were working on this project, I was teaching undergraduate theatre history and I thought it might be interesting to incorporate our methodology into the class. I asked students to craft a story or a scene that allowed them to demonstrate their understanding of the historical evidence, but I also asked them to speculate on questions for which we have no firm answers. For example, one question read: “Shakespeare, Giacomo Torelli, Lope de Vega, and Madeline Bejart are sitting together in a theatre pub. Aside from arguing over the bill, what would they each say are the most pressing problems facing theatre practitioners in their country? What would they say were their greatest accomplishments?” It was fascinating to watch my students practice on a small scale what Joseph and I had been working on for over a year. They responded with great enthusiasm, writing elaborate scenes and nuanced stories full of historical detail and humor. The exercise allowed them to draw upon skills practiced in other theatre classes (acting, design, and directing) and to apply them to a class they had previously thought of as theatrical only in subject matter. Almost all reported spending much more time on this assignment than any other; and they eagerly shared their scenes with each other, creating an extended creative dialogue based upon, but not limited to, historical evidence. When they were asked to imaginatively enter the history of their chosen profession, students forged a link with their ancestors, drawing upon their theatrical skills to become active participants in the history they were studying. { 77 }
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What my students wrote, and what Joseph and I have written together, may be historical fiction, but through it we have collectively tried to achieve the historian’s goal of reanimating our ancestors, connecting their stories to our own, and pointing to the unfinished nature of our inheritance. In her speech delivered at the dedication of the theatre built in her honor, Annie Russell described acting as “one soul shouting across space to another soul.”81 She might just as well have been speaking of the historian’s quest to reach into the past to hear the voices of the dead asking to be heard and remembered. In writing our (hi)story of Annie Russell we have come to believe that a historiography of informed imagination may open the door to a more dynamic connection between theatre practitioners and their ancestry. It may also invigorate historical narratives of the theatre when scholars are no longer asked to distrust their own theatricality. Perhaps by releasing our claim to historical objectivity we can openly acknowledge, even celebrate, the mythopoetic nature of history itself.
Notes 1.
2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.
10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.
Winthrop Carty to Steve Neilson, March 20, 1981, Annie Russell Faculty and Alumni Files, Department of Archives and Special Collections, Olin Library, Rollins College, Winter Park, Florida. “Faith Baldwin, Author of 85 Books and Many Stories, Is Dead at 84,” New York Times, March 19, 1978; quote in “Amazing Faith,” Time Magazine, May 1, 1950. F. Thomas Trotter, “Imagination and History,” http://www.religion-online.org/ showarticle.asp?title=523. Ibid. Peter Burke, New Perspectives on Historical Writing, 2nd ed. (University Park: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 21. Ibid. Robert A. Rosenstone, Rethinking History, “Editor’s Preface,” vol. 1, http://www.tandf. co.uk/journals/titles/13642529.asp. Ibid. Faith Baldwin to Annie Russell, January 11, 1929, Annie Russell Papers, Manuscripts and Archives Division, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations, The New York Public Library [hereafter cited as Russell Papers]. Faith Baldwin to Annie Russell, April 21, 1907, Russell Papers. Faith Baldwin to Annie Russell, October 28, 1906, Russell Papers. Gustov Kobbé, Famous Actors and Actresses and Their Homes (Boston: Little, Brown, 1903), 205. Amy Leslie, Some Players: Personal Sketches (Chicago: H. S. Stone, 1909), 424–27. William Young, ed., Famous Actors: Actresses on the American Stage (New York: R. R. Bowler, 1975), 990. Who Was Who in the Theatre, 16th ed., vol. 4, s.v. “Russell, Annie.”
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22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.
28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.
“Astor Theatre Opens with Lovely Spectacle,” New York Times, September 22, 1906, 7. Annie Russell to Faith Baldwin, October 25, 1906, Russell Papers. “Annie Russell,” http://www.ibdb.com/person.php?id=5867. Annie Russell to Faith Baldwin, October 25, 1906, and Faith Baldwin to Annie Russell, n.d., Russell Papers. “Astor Theatre,” http://www.ibdb.com/venue.php?id=1049. Agnes Hill was Annie’s nurse and companion while she was in Europe (1889–93). The women remained friends until there seemed to be a break in their relationship sometime in 1908. Annie Russell to Agnes Hill, March 15, 1908, Russell Papers. Idah McGlone Gibson, “In My Portrait Gallery: Annie Russell,” December 1909, Annie Russell Faculty and Alumni Files. Annie Russell Diary Entry, 1920–1924, Annie Russell Faculty and Alumni Files. “Astor Theatre Opens with Lovely Spectacle.” Leslie, Some Players, 424. “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” http://www.ibdb.com/production.php?id=5722. William E. Sage, “Miss Russell Loves Humor,” n.d., Cleveland Leader, Annie Russell Faculty and Alumni Files; Charles Frohman to Annie Russell, August 2, 1909, Russell Papers. Annie Russell quoted in untitled article, Washington Post, February 26, 1899, Annie Russell Faculty and Alumni Files. Gibson, “In My Portrait Gallery,” 3. Annie Russell, “The Player’s View of the Playgoer” (1912), Annie Russell Faculty and Alumni Files. Annie Russell, draft for “What It Really Means to Be an Actress,” p. 9, written for Ladies Home Journal, January 1909 (vol. 26, no. 2), Russell Papers. Annie Russell to Faith Baldwin, November 1, 1906, Russell Papers. Annie’s husband, British actor Oswald Yorke, played Lysander in this production. Faith Baldwin to Annie Russell, February 3, 1930, Russell Papers. Faith Baldwin to Annie Russell, May 17, 1925, Russell Papers. Authors Faith wrote she admired. Faith Baldwin to Annie Russell, June 21, 1907, Russell Papers. “Brooklyn Best Seller,” Time Magazine, July 8, 1935. Faith Baldwin to Annie Russell, October 5, 1910, Russell Papers. Annie Russell to Faith Baldwin, September 28, 1910, Russell Papers. Oswald always referred to Annie as Beloved in his letters. Oswald York to Annie Russell, September 20, 1911, Russell Papers. Who Was Who in the Theatre, s.v. “Russell, Annie.” Annie Russell to Faith Baldwin, July 14, 1912, Russell Papers. “A Reply to Annie Russell,” Brooklyn Eagle, March 30, 1913, Annie Russell Faculty and Alumni Files. Annie Russell, “The Stage and Its People: A Chronicle of the Passing Show,” Philadelphia Telegraph, February 27, 1907. Annie Russell quoted in “What Actors Think of Audiences,” Pittsburg Gazette, March 9, 1913. Walter Prichard Eaton, At the New Theatre (Boston: Small, Maynard, 1910), 10. “Oswald Yorke,” http://www.ibdb.com/person.php?id=69127.
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JOS EPH BROM F I E L D A N D J E N N I F E R JON ES C AV EN AUGH 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74.
75.
76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81.
Russell, “The Player’s View of the Playgoer,” 5. Ibid. Gibson, “In My Portrait Gallery,” 3. Implied by Faith’s response to an unavailable letter from Oswald. Faith Baldwin to Annie Russell, January 14, 1917, Russell Papers. More than 70 percent of Faith’s letters begin with this salutation. Faith Baldwin to Annie Russell, October 5, 1910, Russell Papers. Russell, “What It Really Means,” 9. Ibid. Faith Baldwin to Annie Russell, October 9, 1930, Russell Papers. There is a gap in the correspondence between 1927 and 1929. Faith Baldwin to Annie Russell, January 11, 1929, Russell Papers. Faith Baldwin to Annie Russell, January 3, 1927, Russell Papers. Faith Baldwin to Annie Russell, January 11, 1929, Russell Papers. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Annie Russell to John Carty, December 16, 1927, Russell Papers. Annie Russell to Faith Baldwin, March 28, 1920, Russell Papers. Ibid. Faith Baldwin to Mrs. Smith, March 25, [year unknown], Russell Papers. Annie Russell Diary Entry, 1920–1924, Annie Russell Faculty and Alumni Files. Faith Baldwin to Annie Russell, January 24, 1929, Russell Papers. Faith Baldwin to Annie Russell, January 11, 1929, Russell Papers. Faith Baldwin published a book titled Men Are Such Fools in 1936, the year Annie died. Faith Baldwin to Annie Russell, March 31, 1929, Russell Papers. In this letter she talks about how the theatre has degenerated since World War I. Annie Russell quoted by H. L. Kleinield in biographical entry on Annie Russell in a photocopy of a book whose title is unknown (p. 210), Annie Russell Faculty and Alumni Files. Mary Curtis Bok donated $100,000 to Rollins College in 1930 to build a theatre in honor of her lifelong friend Annie Russell. She stipulated that Annie was to be the theatre’s director, and the college agreed. The theatre was completed in 1932, and Russell ran it until her death in 1936. The Annie Russell Old English Comedy Company occupied the Princess Theater in New York and produced plays from the fall of 1912 until it ran out of money in 1913. Telegraph from Mary Curtis Bok to Annie Russell, January 9, 1932, Russell Papers. Lee Gutkind, “What Is Creative Nonfiction?” www.creativenonfiction.org/thejournal/ whatiscnf.htm. Myrna Kostash interviewed by Gordon Morash, http://library.athabascau.ca/drr/ mais617/MAIS_617-Kostash_interview.pdf. We do not have a copy of this letter, but we do have a letter from Faith to Annie in which she references being hurt by Oswald’s last letter. Annie Russell, speech at the dedication of the Annie Russell Theater, 1932, Russell Papers.
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\ The Miseries of History Shakespearian Extremity as Cautionary Tale on the Restoration Stage — ROBE RT SHI M KO
After the return of the Stuarts to the English throne in the person of Charles II, the producers of theatre in London treaded carefully around anything associated with the body of republican values (and their results in praxis during the Civil War) euphemistically referred to by both republicans and royalists as the Good Old Cause. Coined by Sir Henry Vane in his republican pamphlet A Healing Question Propounded and Resolved, the term rapidly gained currency as a shorthand way of denoting “whatever it was that motivated whatever it was that happened in England between 1640, when the Long Parliament came into existence, and 1660, when the Stuart monarchy was restored.”1 Due in no small part to the theatre managers Davenant and Killigrew owing their patents to Charles II—coupled with the king’s personal watchfulness over their two theatres—evocations of the Good Old Cause, and by extension representations of interregnum upheavals as a whole, were understood as taboo. But as the political situation circa 1678–79 came more and more to resemble 1641–42, memories of open rebellion as well as the persecution of the theatre seemed more likely to repeat themselves in the present. Widespread suspicions of a Catholic coup d’etat, which culminated in the public hysteria of the so-called Popish Plot, as well as the subsequent showdown between the king and the predominantly Whig parliament over whether or not Charles’s overtly Catholic brother James could be excluded from royal succession made it seem not only possible but pressing for royalist playwrights to thrust visceral memories of the Civil War back into the popular imagination as a warn{ 81 }
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ing about where a similar road had led in the past. As John Miller has noted, the Whigs sought to gain political advantage in their attempt to exclude James from succession by exploiting anti-Catholic sentiment and popular fears of a secret plot. But they pursued this tactic so “ferociously and unscrupulously” that they aroused a serious backlash.2 The increased political divisiveness led royalists to dredge up imagery of civil strife—which had up to that point generally been repressed in the interest of quietism—as a visceral reminder to the populace of what might happen if the opposition insisted on a new face-off with the crown. The Restoration theatre’s position as both public forum and courtly bastion offers an avenue of investigation into the ways in which royalist plays of this time reflected royalist political discourse in refusing to let the contemporary Whig opposition distance themselves from the previous generation of antimonarchical rebels by reenacting again and again extreme images of revolt, repression, and regicide. Of particular concern to playwrights and other theatre professionals was the precipitous drop in theatre attendance exacerbated by an increase in play censorship and fears of possible Puritan attempts to place further restrictions on the theatre. These worries encouraged some playwrights to revisit bitter memories of the Puritans’ attempts to stamp out the theatre during the interregnum. In particular, the royalist-aligned playwright John Crowne broke from the tacit moratorium on representing the vicissitudes of civil war. Crowne’s plays from this period not only sent a cautionary message to potential rebels or sympathizers but also reflected the anxieties of the Duke’s and King’s Companies as they saw their audiences diminish due to fears of violence (particularly the king and his courtiers’ fear of assassination) during the civil unrest of the Popish Plot and the rise in the number of plays banned during the political polarization and increased sensitivities of the subsequent Exclusion Crisis. It was in this context that Crowne elected to write two plays based on the second and third plays in Shakespeare’s Henry VI trilogy—the earlier one performed by the Duke’s Company at their theatre in Dorset Garden in late 1679 or early 1680 near the end of the public frenzy over of the Popish Plot and the latter performed in the same venue in early 1681 as the Exclusion Crisis had become the dominant political concern—reflecting shifts in England’s political and social climate from the promiscuous public violence which attended the fictional and thus incorporeal external threat of a Catholic plot to the more legitimate and concrete internal threat of Whig verses Tory warfare over the issue of exclusion. Both plays demonstrate Crowne’s royalism and his inclination to blame the nation’s troubles, whatever they may be, on the opposition: { 82 }
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Whig or Catholic or both. Nonetheless, there is a marked difference in the images of civil war evoked by each play. The first play, titled The Misery of Civil War, presents a chaotic hell on Earth, with royal power threatened as much by pervasive public disorder and the breakdown of deference to long-standing social hierarchies as by specific usurpers. In Henry the Sixth the conflict becomes a more straightforward historical melodrama of opposed ideologies and claims to power. The move from a Hobbesian state of confused anarchy to a more intelligible political conflict is evident in changes of imagery and dramatic structure in Crowne’s two plays. It bears noting that while the play’s title is given as The Misery of Civil War on the title page of the 1680 edition, the plural title The Miseries of Civil War appears as the running head throughout the body of the text.3 A quirk of the printer perhaps, but the shift from singular to plural miseries opens an intriguing way of reading Crowne’s play. “Misery” denotes a condition, a miserable state of being. “Miseries,” on the other hand, suggests a multiplicity of miserable happenings. Thus, while the title page prepares us to encounter a state of “misery,” the body of the play presents a parade of individual atrocities— murders, rapes, beatings, and lynchings—which characterize that condition, giving it a terrible specificity. The dual titles work together to convey the general state of misery of a nation at war with itself while also recalling to memory a catalog of particular incidents associated with civil war, ostensibly those of the Wars of the Roses, but much more immediately for Crowne’s audience, the miseries of 1642–49. Crowne opens The Misery of Civil War with a tart prologue that seems to scold not just the hysterical anti-papists or the Whig opposition but also the nation as a whole for recent sorry attendance at the public theatres: “Religious Broyles to such a height are grown, / All the sweet sound of Poetry they drown.” While the conventions of Restoration prologues allowed for a certain amount of humorous invective directed toward the audience, Crowne seems unable to moderate his displeasure, exclaiming: “Good Heaven! Sirs! Are there no other ways / To damn the Pope, but damning all our Plays?” In addition to his evident exasperation with the general state of affairs, Crowne’s prologue conveys a more subtle second message. Coded within his call for civility and political moderation is a specific stab at the opposition. On the surface of it, when Crowne poses his rhetorical question he is simply encouraging a more sensible solution to the present turmoil which has kept spectators away from the theatres. But in the phrase “damning all our plays” one can also recognize an evocation of the repressive puritanical attitude toward the theatre that led to the closing of playhouses during the interregnum. Crowne is thus able to { 83 }
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hurl blame for the current civil strife on the Whigs by placing them within a continuum of anti-Catholic, anti-monarchy, anti-theatre radicals. Indeed, the next lines in the prologue continue this tactic of explicitly promoting religious and political centrism while implicitly dredging up memories of the last time a group of anti-royalists with an overzealous and hypocritical religious agenda used the theatre as its scapegoat: To our Religion ’tis no praise at all, That, if our wit must stand, our faith must fall. All parties in a playhouse may agree, The Stage is priviledg’d from Piety. ’Tis pleasant, Sirs, to see you fight and brawl About Religion, but have none at all.4
Crowne is thus able to undercut the religious high ground typically claimed by the Whigs while alluding to the potential dangers that historically attended similar antitheatrical bias. The royalism encoded in Crowne’s prologue was certainly not out of place on the boards of the Duke’s Company at that time. Indeed, as Susan J. Owen has observed, prologues of this sort were designed to prod a predominantly royalist audience into paying attention while stopping short of alienating them: “If the majority of the audience were sympathetic to the opposition, these royalist prologues and epilogues would not work, would simply create hostility and drive away custom. One can only imagine them having worked by appealing to the majority and forcing an embarrassed minority into uneasy laughter.”5 Crowne’s unusually severe prologue, when spoken in early 1680, can be read as an illustration of the momentarily expanded boundaries of just how much a Restoration playwright could excoriate his audience. The widespread breakdown of social order, along with a lapse in the Licensing Act, which had gone unrenewed in June 1679, combined to allow a moment of unfettered, at times hysterical, public speech. This state of frenzy not only allowed but prompted the public enunciation of Crowne’s most discomforting image: “The English Nation, like a Ruffian Wife, / Is to a Gentle Husband always curst, / And loves him best, who uses her the worst.” The characterization of England as a masochistic wife in love not only with her abuser but with abuse itself strikes a truly ominous chord. It feminizes the English populace in an especially ugly way and suggests the possibility that England’s “husband,” Charles II, may be forced to give up his (in Crowne’s eyes) usually gentle demeanor in order to punish the nation for its insubordination. The theme of corporal punishment is introduced a few lines { 84 }
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earlier in the prologue, as Crowne expresses hope that “this Tragedy a Rod will prove, / To whip us for a Fault, we too much Love, / And have for ages liv’d, call’d Civil Strife.”6 Crowne offers up his play then as a clear and necessary history lesson that could be learned far less painfully in the theatre than on the battlefield. As noted by Barbara A. Murray,7 Crowne recognized that poetry alone would doubtless fail to convey this lesson, for not even Orpheus could “charm our Beasts, / Our Mastifs, not our Rabble, or our Priests.” Therefore Crowne proposes to “paint” the pleasures that “Fools take in pelting out each others brains: / A joy, for which this Nation oft takes pains.”8 With The Misery of Civil War Crowne sought to press the limits of the presentable on the stage to include intense images of revolt well outside the strictures of neoclassical decorum commonly associated with Restoration tragedy. The Misery of Civil War adapts some of the more bloodthirsty material found in Shakespeare’s account of the Wars of the Roses, from Henry VI, Part 2 4.2 to Henry VI, Part 3 5.6. Crowne’s revision of Shakespearian dramaturgy and his amplification of Shakespeare’s violent imagery reflect the royalist program of selective historiography and scare tactics meant to deter the Whigs from renewing their challenge to royal authority. Following the prologue, the action begins suddenly with “A Noise of Fighting” followed by “a Shout for Victory.” Crowne’s version of the rebel Jack Cade then takes the stage, instructing his men to “Fling all my dead Subjects into the Thames.”9 The line is taken word for word from one of Cade’s later scenes in the source play. The difference lies in the fact that Shakespeare, unlike Crowne, takes great pains to prepare his audience for Cade. The Duke of York delivers a lengthy monologue in 3.1 of Shakespeare’s play describing how he has enlisted the physically powerful but mentally unstable Cade, a tradesman and sometime soldier, to stir up trouble for the king’s forces, thereby giving York time and excuse to raise his own rival army. Cade’s rebellion itself, which begins in 4.2 of the source play, is introduced by two new recruits to Cade’s uprising who provide exposition about Cade and his lieutenants before they appear and discuss their own rationale for joining. Crowne, however, chooses to offer no contextualization whatsoever for Cade and his men—they simply show up, armed and shouting. It is perhaps the most abrupt and intense beginning of dramatic action to be found in any Restoration-era play. Phyllis Rackin sees Shakespeare’s original Jack Cade and his accompanying mob as a dangerous bridge between the audience and “actual rebels in Shakespeare’s England”: “The eruption of Jack Cade’s rebellious followers on Shakespeare’s stage constitutes a . . . moment of danger. Rupturing the conceptual barriers that insulated the represented world of the play from the actual world { 85 }
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of the audience, it opened a breach for the licensed disorder of fictional theatrical representation to invade the actual world of the audience, where it was clearly illicit.”10 In Crowne’s play, however, Cade and his followers do not erupt within the main action but precede it, making violent chaos the initial dramatic stasis. The placement of Cade’s rebellion at the opening of the play establishes the state of disruption it represents as the rule rather than the exception. If Shakespeare’s Cade opens a “breach” for “disorder” to slip into an already established theatrical universe, Crowne positions his entire play within that breach. The effect is a more terrifying reflection of the mad world outside the doors of Dorset Garden circa spring 1680. Crowne chops up and condenses Shakespeare’s subplot in a way that emphasizes the arbitrariness of Cade’s actions. In the first dozen lines Cade plants himself on London Stone and declares himself “Lord of this City”; he orders that “the Conduits all Piss Claret”; he proclaims it treason “for any man to call me other than Lord Mortimer” (an ancestral delusion fostered by the Duke of York in Shakespeare’s play but left unexplained by Crowne); and he has an unlucky soldier knocked dead for calling him Jack Cade one second after making the decree.11 All of these actions are to be found in Shakespeare’s play, but they are spread throughout different scenes that unfold in a far less frenetic and disjointed manner. Hazelton Spencer deemed Crowne’s treatment of the Cade material “a not unskillful blending,” but “in the process of telescoping we lose the climactic and ominous effect of the original.”12 Perhaps, but if we view Crowne’s play as a simultaneous representation of a state of misery and a multiplicity of individual miseries prompted by a concrete political situation, a traditional climax starts to seem like a misleading structural feature to seek. What Crowne presents is not simply Shakespeare abridged or sped up; rather, he collapses traditional dramatic causality into a cacophonous play of nearsimultaneity. In concluding his discussion of The Misery of Civil War, Spencer says of Crowne: “As for the critical canons and conventions, he has paid them no heed, and we need not discuss their application to his work.”13 By this he means that Crowne has made no attempt to conform his play to the strictures of neoclassicism which dominated critical debates about drama during the Restoration. Again, Spencer is essentially correct in his observation but at the same time too quickly dismissive of Crowne’s play to see how it actually functions. Crowne’s play does not simply fail to obey neoclassical rules; it strains quite markedly against them. In particular, the chaos of Crowne’s presentation of Cade’s rebellion flies in the face of ideas expressed in John Dryden’s essay “The Grounds
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of Criticism in Tragedy,” which summarized Dryden’s interpretation of neoclassical doctrine. The essay appeared as a preface to Dryden’s adaptation of Troilus and Cressida in 1679, just one year before The Misery of Civil War. Cautioning against the representation of excessive and undifferentiated passions in tragedies, Dryden argues that “no man can be distinguished from another by his discourse, when every man is ranting, swaggering, and exclaiming with the same excess: as if it were the only business of all the Characters to contend with each other for a prize at Billingsgate; or that the Scene of the Tragedy lay in Bet’lem [Bedlam].”14 But while Dryden rejects this sort of characterization on aesthetic grounds, it is entirely amenable to Crowne in his chosen position as dispenser of warnings and admonitions. In the epilogue to The Misery of Civil War Crowne directly links the delirium that attended the Popish Plot with the madness of the Civil War years. Oh! We are sick, at least our brains are bad, England is ne’re devout till it is mad. Our fathers to their cost did find it so, And small things will make mad men fight, you know. Oh! What a Bedlam once was this sweet place, When graceless Rogues did Fight about free-grace?15
He goes on to contend that the ostensible subject of his play, the Wars of the Roses, were England’s least shameful example of “Civil broyles” because at least at that time princes fought for royal prerogatives and citizens became involved out of loyalty. This claim sets off his treatment of Cade’s rebellion as deliberately anachronistic within his own historical scheme. Ultimately, Crowne sees civil strife in the early 1640s and the late 1670s much as Thomas Hobbes presented it in Leviathan (which was written as a reaction to the Civil War while Hobbes was self-exiled in France), and this is what conditions the compressed anarchy of his take on Cade’s rebellion. For Hobbes, the breakdown of civil societies results in a state that he calls “war”—not a war between armies but “of every man, against every man.”16 Interestingly, the state of war depends on a common characteristic among men that leads them all to imagine the possibility of asserting themselves over others, even those who may be stronger than themselves, because such differences in strength are not by nature insurmountable. Crowne employs this idea by making his Cade less the unambiguous leader of an organized rebellion than the most prominent inmate of an open-air madhouse, first among equals by force of will. For instance, in Shakespeare’s play, when a group of his follow-
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ers bring in a clerk to be punished for literacy, Cade presides over the trial with impunity. However, in Crowne’s play it is a lone cobbler who brings in the prisoner, and he argues with Cade about how to proceed: C A DE. . . . He shall not dye unless I find him Guilty. C OB. He shall die, Guilty or not Guilty; I brought him
to be Hang’d, and I will not lose my labour. I love hanging, there’s Never any hanging, but I leave my Stall to go see it. Hanging-day is my holy-day, and I will keep Coblers holy-day. C A DE. We’ll hang him, but we’ll examine him first. C O [B]. No hang him first, for now no man will confess, Till after he’s hang’d.17 Cade does finally examine the prisoner, and the scene ends essentially as it does in Shakespeare, with the man being taken off to be hanged. But this early dispute establishes a pattern of Cade arguing with his men and them fighting with one another, each pursuing his own agenda and advantage. Crowne chooses to preserve the crude metahistorical sense that Cade displays in Shakespeare’s play when he warns the squabbling butcher and cobbler not to partake in “Civil Wars Among our selves.”18 Despite this glimmer of awareness, Cade prompts the group to obliterate history by destroying any link to the past—not just written records, but ancient monuments and anyone educated enough to speak Latin or write more than a scratch for his name. Were they to achieve their goal, the world would resemble that described by Hobbes under the state of war: “no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”19 Crowne uses Cade’s plan to destroy history as a way of underlining the necessity of not forgetting the follies of the past at a moment when they appeared so likely to repeat themselves. Crowne uses this theme as a powerful memento of the cataclysm brought about by overzealous iconoclasts in the previous generation, carrying the moral that those who forget, ignore, or blot out the past are doomed to repeat it. Crowne’s play embodies the historical irony that the efforts of the previous twenty years to forget the miseries of the interregnum have led to a point where another civil war seems possible precisely because the Whigs and Tories appear to have lost touch with the lessons of the past. In his version of Cade, the monstrous buffoon, Crowne is able to link a fanatical antihistorical agenda with an equally ridiculous attempt to hijack aristocratic inheritance. When he arrives to put down the revolt, the Duke of Clar-
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ence rebuffs Cade’s claim to the English throne, which is based on an elaborate tale of how as a baby Cade’s father was stolen by a “stinking Beggar-woman” from his aristocratic parents: The Princely Infant was bred-up a bricklayer, And I’m the Princely Off-spring of that Infant. OLD C L [ A R ENC E ] . Plantagenet invented this fine story. C A DE. You lye, for I invented it myself.20 C A DE.
Crowne thus uses one of the better jokes from Shakespeare’s play to mock the notion of a commoner (or a House of Commons) imposing himself in the business of royal succession. Cade is subsequently dispatched by Young Clarence, who expresses disgust at the notion that “The King must barter for his crown with rascals.” This scene reflects what the historian David Underdown has described as one of the “more important development[s] arising from the civil wars: the gentry’s growing distrust of the common people.”21 Underdown observes that before the Civil War the gentry could assume that “the rabble” shared most of their basic political assumptions, including respect for royal succession and the ancient constitution. During the interregnum, however, many among the royalist-aligned gentry had lost their county commissions to parliamentarians of distinctly lower standing, and by 1660 they had become far more suspicious of the middle levels of society. Thus Crowne could use Cade’s uprising of urban tradespeople to agitate deep-seated social anxieties. However, after raising this specter Crowne eventually redresses it, thereby reasserting royal power and his own royalist bias. In a drastic departure from his fate in Shakespeare (killed by a landowner while trying to steal food), Cade is one of the few speaking characters in Crowne’s play to be killed offstage; though Crowne makes up for the missed scene of violence when young Clarence presents Cade’s severed head to King Henry in the next scene. The blood-soaked play that follows Cade’s rebellion contains at least one onstage death in every act and numerous depictions of carnage. A scene of utter horror perpetrated by the queen’s forces serves as a warning against sedition but also demonstrates the slipperiness of blame in Crowne’s theatrical universe: The Scene is drawn, and there appears Houses and Towns burning, Men and Women hang’d upon trees, and Children on the tops of Pikes. 1 & 2 C OUN[TRY G IR L S ] . Oh Heaven! Have mercy on us! Have mercy on us! 1 S OUL[DIER]. Now Rogues, how do you like Rebellion? 2 S OUL[DIER]. Come hang ’em whilst there is a Tree to spare, They are almost all bespoke.22
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Cade’s rebellion can be interpreted unambiguously as a warning to the Whigs that the common man cannot be trusted not to turn against the instigators of rebellion themselves. But when the victims shift from educated landowners to common country folk, Crowne’s relationship to royal authority becomes more problematic. The murderous soldiers are royalists in the sense that they serve a queen, but they are rebels in the sense that by this point in the play the Plantagenets have asserted the strongest claim to the throne. Nevertheless, it is the common people who suffer most, stained by the mere appearance of disloyalty. It is important to remember that while the Popish Plot prompted many horrors, for the average Protestant Englishman the violence was directed outward, toward a nonspecific Catholic other. The gruesomeness Crowne depicts is designed to unnerve the audience with the possible reoccurrence of a more inward-directed violence that they should know from the experience of the 1640s will accompany a breakdown in the rule of (royal) law. Through the spring and summer of 1680, the hysteria of the Popish Plot finally began to die down. By October the once-feared Catholic conspiracy was essentially a nonissue, revealed to be the product of a few fevered imaginations. When the Whig majority elected in the wake of the plot met in the Commons in October 1680 they once more rallied around the seemingly now more achievable goal of excluding from succession the king’s avowedly Catholic brother James, the Duke of York, in favor of Charles II’s eldest illegitimate son, the Duke of Monmouth. Charles II and the Tories adamantly refused the act of exclusion, for to accept it would mean accepting parliamentary veto power in determining matters of princely succession. In the autumn of 1680 and the spring of 1681, the Whigs, who had won by a landslide in the recent election due to their hardline anti-Catholic stance, seemingly held the upper hand. It was in the context of this complex series of political negotiations that Crowne chose to write the second of his adaptations from Shakespeare’s Henry VI trilogy. The London Stage lists April 1681 as the likely date of the first performance of Henry the Sixth, The First Part.23 Compared to The Misery of Civil War, the dramatic structure of this play is more linear and the allusions are more concentrated on the theme of antagonisms between loyalists to the king and scheming usurpers, reflecting the greater clarity of the political debate. The Popish Plot is a year further in the past and exclusion is a clearer, less paranoid issue. It is also an issue on which Crowne has reconsidered his stance. Crowne’s fears of a new civil war seemed closer to realization than ever, but now the Tories seemed far less likely to win. Crowne, finding it no longer wise to denigrate the Whigs, goes after a seemingly safer target: popery. This maneuver put Crowne more in line with Whig religious sentiment without being { 90 }
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explicitly anti-royalist in a political sense. The new play, however, seems to have misfired. Gerard Langbaine, in his Account of the English Dramatick Poets, notes that the play “was oppos’d by the Popish Faction, who by their power at Court got it supprest: however it was well receiv’d by the Rest of the Audience.”24 The “Popish Faction” quite likely included the future James II himself, the locus of the exclusion controversy and the eponymous duke of the Duke’s Company who presented the play. Evidently, Crowne was finding it increasingly difficult to balance his royalist feelings with a strong anti-Catholic bias. The growing belief that the Whigs were about to triumph prompted a shift in his political commentary from the recklessness of rebellion to straight pope-baiting peppered with lamentations about his own difficult position. The banning of the play by the power of the court incensed Crowne. At first he refused to provide a prologue to the printed edition. What appears instead is a message delivered in the third person by R. Bentley and M. Magnes, the publishers, based on a prologue they obtained from the author “With much Ado.” It is difficult to determine which, if any, of the words are Crowne’s, but the sentiment is undeniable: Poor slighted Wit is flung among the Swine Like Grapes in France, now you forbid their Wine. Play-Houses like forsaken Barns are grown, The lusty Threshers of both ends of Town.25
The hard times faced by London’s two theatres during the preceding year had worsened. While the Duke’s Company fared slightly better than their competition, Barbara A. Murray observes that “the alacrity with which Crowne’s new adaptation was dropped suggests that neither company could afford to resist official pressure.”26 The play itself is almost as grim in tone as its predecessor, but now the concern for preserving divine-right monarchy in the face of Hobbesian lawlessness is replaced by the display of a pervasive, cynical mania for power that overwhelms a feckless king. Crowne is still interested in theatricalizing the notion of hell on Earth, but now malignancy flows from the top of the social hierarchy downward instead of bubbling up from the populace. The spy Humes (Hume in Shakespeare), who doubles his pay by playing aristocrats against one another, establishes the ethos of the play when he reflects: So, the Gold tumbles in On every side of me, but ’tis no wonder. I serve the Master of the Mines of the Devil,
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The first act does little but establish a wide-ranging conspiracy against Humphrey, the Duke of Glocester (sic), who as Lord Protector to the now adult Henry VI stands as an obstacle to the ambitions of a number of would-be usurpers at court (Cardinal Beauford, the Duke of York, the Duke of Suffolk, and his lover Queen Margaret). Even Humphrey’s wife, Elianor (sic), becomes something of an enemy to him as Crowne magnifies the ambition she shows in Shakespeare’s play to a level near that of Lady Macbeth. In both plays she seeks to advance her husband’s fortunes by arranging the conjuration of spirits to tell the future. But the ceremony, though successful, ultimately proves to be a setup facilitated by Humes. After she is arrested and ultimately banished by the king, Crowne drastically revises and expands Humphrey’s brief, tearful reaction in Shakespeare. In Crowne’s play Humphrey attests to the righteousness of the king’s sentence and harshly scolds Elianor for her ambition, concluding: “Now hast thou brought dishonor on my age, / And shame and grief will sink me to my Grave.”28 He does not abandon his wife, but he is willing to put the welfare of the state before her. Susan J. Owen has pointed out that Crowne’s version of Humphrey embodies the traits of dignity, masculinity, and loyalty (his allegiance to the king is balanced with a concern for the welfare of private citizens), all of which associate him with the Whigs’ image of themselves.29 This valorization of Humphrey, portrayed along lines in keeping with the thenascendant political faction, allows Crowne to exaggerate the villainy of the conspirators, particularly the Cardinal, who scorns the “foolish common people” for their loyalty to the duke.30 A major distinction between The Misery of Civil War and Henry VI, The First Part is that the show of violence is more premeditated, as opposed to the chaos of mob rule. In comparison to the many public brutalities of the earlier play, the latter play relocates the dramatic conflict almost entirely within the halls of court. The centerpiece of the play is the murder of Humphrey (in fact, the play’s subtitle for publication was “With the Murder of Humphrey, Duke of Glocester”). Crowne makes much of this scene in his dedicatory letter to Charles Sidley (a courtier who aligned himself with the Whigs on the issue of exclusion), criticizing Shakespeare for having “hudled up the Murder of Duke Humphrey, as if he had been guilty of [it] himself, and was afraid to shew how it was done.”31 After a long series of invented exchanges between the three hired murderers and their master the Cardinal, which allows Crowne to show how the clergy preys on the poverty and ignorance of the people, the three men finally { 92 }
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strangle Humphrey to death onstage. The Cardinal falls sick with an ill conscience, as in Shakespeare, but Crowne presents him as defiant rather than delirious. The Cardinal takes great pains to defy the very idea that his conscience should afflict him since he is remorseless about Humphrey’s murder, which makes his sickness unto death puzzling. Crowne sorts out this odd tension by having Humphrey’s ghost appear to him. Thus, Crowne transforms the inner guilt of Shakespeare’s scene into an exteriorized force of moral judgment. Having introduced this conceit, Crowne has his Cardinal play out a hallucinatory mad scene in which he foams at the mouth and curses the ghost before finally expiring. One last variation from his earlier treatment of Shakespeare’s Wars of the Roses material in The Misery of Civil War is that Crowne completely reverses his expressed opinion that kingship is sanctioned by God and thus unquestionable. Crowne later explained this shift in the dedication to The English Friar (1690), depicting it as the result of a crisis of conscience: “My aversions to some things I saw acted by great men, carried me against my Interest, to expose Popery and Popish Courts in a Tragedy of mine call’d The Murder of Humphry, Duke of Gloucester, which pleased the best men in England, but displeas’d the worst; for e’re it liv’d long, it was stifled by command.”32 Yet if we consider Crowne’s next play, the anti-Whig satire City Politiques (1683), written after Charles’s victory in the Exclusion Crisis, it seems that Crowne’s shift in targets from dissenters to Catholics cannot be attributed entirely to religious feeling but must be tempered with basic political pragmatism. In the end, what can be said based on the writings discussed is that as a dramatist Crowne had stood on firmer footing during the chaos of the Popish Plot than he did in its aftermath. He succeeded in invoking imagery of civil war in order to convey a pro-royalist message demonizing the act of rebellion. Yet when the political struggle shifted to a debate over succession, Crowne’s attempt to paint the evils of Catholicism in broad strokes, while not totally alienating royalists in the audience, failed in its delicate maneuver. Indeed, it provoked royalist audience members to the point that the play was immediately banned. Crowne’s decision to side, however ambiguously, against the Tories left him outside any acceptable boundaries just as those boundaries began to clarify.
Notes 1.
Annabel Patterson, Reading between the Lines (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), 213.
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ROBE RT SH I M KO 2. 3.
4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.
John Miller, Popery and Politics in England, 1660–1688 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 155. The dual title is evident in the Cornmarket facsimile edition of the play printed in 1969. And while it is not replicated in Barbara A. Murray’s Shakespeare Adaptations from the Restoration (Madison, N.J.: Farleigh Dickinson, 2005), where “The Misery of Civil War” is used as the running head, the original discrepancy is mentioned in Murray’s notes on page 473. John Crowne, The Misery of Civil War (London: R. Bentley & M. Magnes, 1680), prologue (no page number). Susan J. Owen, Restoration Theatre and Crisis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 14. Crowne, The Misery of Civil War, prologue. Murray, Shakespeare Adaptations from the Restoration, xliii. Crowne, The Misery of Civil War, prologue. Ibid., 1. Phyllis Rackin, Stages of History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 207–8. Crowne, The Misery of Civil War, 1. Hazelton Spencer, Shakespeare Improved (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1927), 300. Ibid., 308. John Dryden, The Works of John Dryden, vol. 13, ed. Alan Roper (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 242. Crowne, The Misery of Civil War, 72. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. J. C. A. Gaskin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 84. Crowne, The Misery of Civil War, 2. Ibid., 6. Hobbes, Leviathan, 84. Crowne, The Misery of Civil War, 8. David Underdown, A Freeborn People (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 130. Crowne, The Misery of Civil War, 36. Cited in Murray, Shakespeare Adaptations from the Restoration, lix. Gerard Langbaine, An Account of the English Dramatick Poets (Oxford: George West and Henry Clements, 1691), 96. John Crowne, Henry the Sixth, The First Part, with the Murder of Humphrey Duke of Glocester (London: R. Bentley & M. Magnes, 1681), prologue (no page number). Barbara A. Murray, Restoration Shakespeare (Madison, N.J.: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2001), 169. Crowne, Henry the Sixth, 11. Ibid., 29. Owen, Restoration Theatre and Crisis, 89–92. Crowne, Henry the Sixth, 3. Ibid., epistle dedicatory (no page number). B. J. McMullin, ed., The Comedies of John Crowne (New York: Garland Publishing, 1984), 494.
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\ The Final Straw Producing James Purdy at the Trinity Square Rep — VA L L E R I J . HOHM AN
In an address at the National Educational Theatre Conference in 1986, Oscar Brockett stated, “Few artistic directors have shown the nerve that Adrian Hall did in 1976 at the Trinity Repertory Theatre in Providence when, following an extremely controversial season, his board sought to fire him. Responding that it wits [was] him who had founded and built the company, Hall dismissed the board and replaced it with one more sympathetic to his work.”1 That same year, an article about Hall’s career featured in Time magazine also commented on his “showdown with the Trinity board, which had grown impatient with his explicitly erotic work, especially an adaptation of the James Purdy novel Eustace Chisholm and the Works.”2 The author also noted that Hall was able to replace the board with “backers of his vision.”3 The event solidified Hall’s status as a renegade theatre director and served for some theatre artists and historians as a great example of art, especially revolutionary and controversial art, in triumph over the establishment. Although the event has been mentioned sporadically, its role in strengthening Hall’s position at the Trinity Rep and solidifying the theatre as part of the Providence community has not been fully explored. While claim of triumph was true, it was a complicated success that required Hall’s own form of adaptation and collaboration with members of the so-called establishment. Through this event, Hall’s project of staging unique American voices and his devotion to this theatre company become clear, although, in the aftermath, the notion that Hall found “backers for his vision” is less clear. The event was necessary for the theatre to become a vital aspect of the community, as it enabled Hall to part with a board of directors with which he was in constant conflict, and to stabilize his company. { 95 }
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It certainly was not the best time to produce Eustace Chisholm and the Works, but Hall did it anyway. The financial situation was bleak. The board of directors had grown nervous and was frustrated with the artistic director, both for his lack of financial skill and for his unconventional approaches to production and sometimes shocking choice of material. The board had already tried to remove him in 1970 after his controversial production about Charles Manson.4 Hall knew the board viewed him as uncompromising and reckless;5 nevertheless, he staged the adaptation of Purdy’s novel to end the 1975–76 season. Hall knew that controversy had always surrounded the work of James Purdy, whose earliest attempts at publication in the 1950s were met with acerbic rejection. Although his works have been praised by Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Dorothy Parker, and others, Purdy’s subjects as well as his portrayals of them have often been the targets of hostility. His surreal, allegorical novels depict fratricide, crucifixions, and the most repellent kinds of violence with vivid detail. To be sure, Purdy wants to horrify and repel people, to upset and disturb our anesthetized lives, but never for simple shock value, for the most extreme disturbances serve multiple narrative and symbolic purposes, often meant to critique the fact of violence in American life and history. The violence arises inevitably from the desperate actions of characters near the brink of total destruction in a land of bloody beginnings, fierce interracial tensions, and expansionist longings. The strong reactions to the adaptation centered on the display of male nudity and homosexuality, the graphic depiction of an abortion, and the violent acts of a sadistic army captain. As one radio reporter stated, “The ingredients that go into this . . . if just stated here . . . would probably convince many of you [that] the people at Trinity have finally flipped.”6 In spite of this introduction, the reporter concluded, “Eustace Chisholm and the Works is, in many ways, one of the best things Trinity has done.”7 Another reviewer called it Hall’s masterpiece.8 Eustace Chisholm and the Works centers on a group of transients whose lives intersect with that of the struggling poet Eustace Chisholm.9 Set in Depressionera Chicago, the novel focuses on the impossible love of Amos Ratcliffe, a young intellectual transplanted from a small town in southern Illinois, and his rough landlord, Daniel Haws, a former West Virginia coal miner of Native American and Anglo-American ancestry.10 Daniel, who has up to this time only been involved in heterosexual relationships, including one with the artist-prostitute Maureen O’Dell, cannot accept his love for Amos. Daniel sleepwalks naked to Amos in the night, but in the daylight he “scrubs himself clean as only a man
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who hates himself can” and communicates his self-hatred and disgust through violent gestures and speech.11 Daniel’s was not the only nudity onstage, but it had a different character and purpose than subsequent moments. While others often appeared nude in relation to sexual acts (though there were no simulated sex scenes), Daniel’s nudity is viewed as more spiritual than sexual. Other instances of nudity involved sexual encounters meant to provide contrast with Daniel and Amos’s spiritual relationship. While most reviewers simply made note of the nudity, which was not unusual at the Providence theatre, others were indignant, most often because the nudity was related to the open discussion of non-heteronormative sexual practices. Reviewer Arline Aissis proclaimed, “With all the finesse of a backstreet porno house and the trite dramatics of an afternoon soap opera, Trinity took what seems to be a dime-store novel and attempted to turn it into theatre.”12 She later refers to the piece as “an underground skin flick.”13 Elliot Norton called one moment “more than slightly disgusting.”14 But the nudity was only a small part of the objection to the piece. Audiences, even those who celebrated the production, felt they had undergone a devastating experience. The most striking and horrific moment of the piece was presented in a scene in which Amos accompanies Maureen to get an abortion. It is a harrowing depiction of a back-alley abortion that serves to complicate the narrative and work symbolically on multiple levels. In the production, Hall staged a grotesque nightmare exaggerating the horror of this unsafe, though necessary, operation through the comic actions of the abortionist and the oversized instruments for the procedure. The critics wrote more about this scene than any other moment of the play. Samuel Coale wrote, “Maureen . . . undergoes a vivid, screaming, shocking abortion, a scene that stuns the audience, staggers the senses.”15 Elliot Norton noted that some audience members “fought off nausea and wondered what the good Trinity Square Repertory Company, which has done so many good things, is trying to prove.”16 This scene, more than any other, generated the most passionate reactions. It occurred before the intermission, after which many did not return. Reviewers wrote much less about the physical violence in the play, though the progressive abuse of Daniel by an army captain constitutes a major portion of the second act. One of the few reviewers to discuss it explicitly wrote: “The Indian landlord flees to the Army as protector and is savaged by the crazed, power-struck Captain who abuses him, violates what self hood he has left, and murders him one thunder-rumbling, lightning flashing evening in the swamps of Mississippi in a ritualistic act of sacrificial murder and revenge. Love has
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turned to hate, wit to violence, the dance to stunned sleepwalking staggering.”17 What is clear is that the production attacked the sensibilities of the audience, stunned and horrified them. The same critic warned, “You may be repulsed but you will not remain unaffected.”18 The adaptation and production of the novel reveal a great deal about Hall’s project of creating “an American theatre dominated by American authors.”19 Just as Chisholm was trying to learn what it meant to be a writer in America, Hall was, as he put it, “finding himself ” and his distinctive voice as an artist, and he, too, was drawn to the lives of those living in the margins of American society.20 Hall was especially drawn to intersections of violence, extreme attitudes about sex and sexuality, and powerlessness. In 1970 he created a work about Charles Manson and the Manson family, which led to community protests and attempts to censor the work. In 1973 he presented an adaptation of Robert Penn Warren’s poem Brother to Dragons, based on the brutal murder of a slave by the nephew of Thomas Jefferson. In 1983 Hall adapted and staged In the Belly of the Beast, based on the letters between the convicted murderer John Henry Abbott and Norman Mailer. The play was an indictment of the American prison system and the violent behavior it breeds. Clearly, part of his program of giving a voice to Americans was a depiction of violence and suffering as a continuous element of the American experience. His theatre could be a place where American nightmares, as well as American dreams, might be explored. Unfortunately, the board of directors did not share Hall’s vision of the theatre, especially if it meant exploring the dark side of human behavior in explicit or shocking terms. For them the theatre was a civic institution meant to bring prosperity and recognition to the city. Providence was a city in transition. Mass suburban migration, the collapse of several major industries, and the failure of many businesses in the 1950s and 1960s had created a desolate downtown. According to the city’s Web site, “In the census of 1950 the city had a population of 248,674; by 1970 that figure had dwindled to 179,116—the largest proportionate out-migration (28 percent) of any major city in the United States.”21 In the early 1970s the city had a predominantly lower-income population. In the 1970s, city leaders had begun to implement plans to revive the city, and a rich, cultural life was part of that revitalization plan. Between 1975 and 1982, $606 million of community development money along with millions in private donations and federal and state funds would be applied toward the city’s regeneration.22 An established, prestigious regional theatre would signify that the city was healthy and growing. It would help attract elite business leaders to the area so that the city would thrive. But two things were needed for the Trinity Square Rep to help establish Providence: financial stability and a reputa{ 98 }
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tion for respectable, high-quality art. A focus on marginalized American populations, recurrent depictions of non-heteronormative sexuality, and critiques of America’s violent nature would hardly serve to bolster either goal. While Hall was certainly not opposed to creating an institution that would help the city thrive, he was interested in developing theatre that seemed necessary and vital to the city that was, not the city that could be.23 Another complication in the conflict between the board and Hall centered around a program known as Project Discovery, which was initially funded by the U.S. Office of Education and the National Endowment for the Arts. Under this program, the Trinity Square Repertory Company presented several of its productions each season to high school groups from around the state. Initially, the project was meant to help high school students connect to classic dramatic literature, but Hall had noticed that the students were bored and restless during the productions.24 Hall switched gears: “We couldn’t hang back and do what had been done, do polite productions of Shaw. I had to get in there and find out, go further. And it had to be full of hostility; full of pain and anguish and beauty. It had to be flung out there in ways that surprised them, shocked them, and scared them.”25 This approach eventually led to controversy. When the company presented the piece on Charles Manson, several high schools withdrew their participation in the project, and, as noted earlier, the board tried to oust Hall. While Eustace Chisholm was not offered for student audiences, and the advertising strongly advised that the production was “for mature audiences,” it must have been difficult for educators, administrators, and community leaders to reconcile support for a theatre with a growing reputation for shocking its audiences with sex, violence, and politically charged material. Additionally, Trinity had been struggling financially for some time. According to Hall, he was “constantly in hot water with the Board, mostly because of money things,” which was probably the major cause of anxiety for the board.26 So, when Eustace Chisholm stirred up controversy among the community, the board saw its opportunity to part with Hall. When the board announced its decision to dismiss Hall, the actors and many of the staff walked out of the theatre, refusing to work unless Hall was reinstated. Taking advice from Joseph Papp, Hall asserted his own authority to fire the board.27 An arrangement was later made that enabled Hall to keep his position and to rent the theatre building from the board. Even with support from actors, members of the academic community, and theatre artists from around the country, Hall had to deal with a significant financial problem that would likely have halted the operations of the theatre re{ 99 }
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gardless of the other factors. Hall hoped to raise the money by creating a new board of directors with strong connections to the business community. Apparently, the immediate issue was that the theatre owed $65,000 to the federal government for worker’s compensation taxes.28 When Hall went to Bruce Sundlun, a prominent lawyer and former prosecutor in Providence (who would later become governor of Rhode Island), he was informed that this financial problem was not simply a tax issue but a criminal one with legal ramifications. This revealed the degree of financial negligence and fiscal irresponsibility that must have made the previous board so nervous. This must also have clarified for Hall the relationship between financing and artistic freedom. A brief anecdote of the first encounter between Hall and Sundlun challenges the usual interpretation of Hall’s revolutionary defeat of the establishment. According to Sundlun, he initially refused to help.29 He had heard about a play Hall directed that had featured masturbation, but this was not the primary deterrent. He simply was not impressed with the young man who had arrived in a T-shirt and khakis to discuss business. “He looked like he was dressed for bed, not for business,” Sundlun recalled.30 He sent Hall away, then left for lunch. Upon his return, he was startled to see, standing in his office, Adrian Hall dressed in a double-breasted suit, polished shoes, hair combed back. Hall addressed him, “You want me to play the part of the businessman? I can do that. Role-playing is my business.” Stunned, Sundlun agreed to chair the board and help the company out of its financial crisis. This story indicates that Hall, who was often considered anti-establishment and uncompromising, was neither. He was aware that the theatre could not survive without the involvement of prominent leaders of the community. He was willing to adapt in order for his company, a close-knit group of remarkable talent, to continue to thrive. It also became clear that Sundlun was impressed with Hall as an artist. He had little respect for Hall as a businessman, but he revered him as an artist and soon helped make it possible for Hall to focus his energies exclusively on the artistic side of the theatre.31 The notion that Hall created a board more sympathetic to his mission is suspect. Under Sundlun’s leadership, the board supported Hall’s artistic leadership and viewed him as a world-class director, though it would not likely have supported a production like Eustace Chisholm and the Works any more than the previous board did. Sundlun had little to say about what plays Trinity staged, though he did mention that he did not want it doing overtly sexual plays, and he must have had some influence.32 It was also clear that Sundlun saw the Trinity Square Repertory Theatre as an attraction meant to strengthen the prominence
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and cultural life of the city; therefore he, too, would prefer less-controversial material. The primary difference between the new and the old board, ultimately, is that the new board could significantly contribute to fund-raising, and therefore worry a little less about the artistic programming. With the serious legal and financial issues worked out, the board had less fear and need to control the artistic director’s decisions. In 1976, the company proceeded with a large endowment, and soon, with Sundlun’s leadership and Hall’s ability to focus on the artistic rather than financial aspects of the theatre, the company was firmly established as a worldclass cultural institution. The 1976–77 season featured more popular comedies and fewer scathing American voices, though a provocative King Lear helped continue Hall’s exploration of individuals in a world that promotes extreme hatred and violence, albeit in a less-controversial form. Hall continued to experiment with these themes, to stage the underprivileged, unheard voices in America, though without the shock created by his adaptation of Eustace Chisholm and the Works. Now, he had the support of a board that respected his artistic leadership, worried less about the company’s financial future, and worked with him rather than against him to promote the theatre as a civic and cultural institution.
Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.
10.
Oscar G. Brockett, “Special Reprint from Vol. 7: The American Theatre, 1961–1986,” Theatre History Studies 20 (2000): 17–33, quote on 20. William A. Henry, “A Man for Parallel Seasons,” Time, March 17, 1986, http://www.time. com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,960896,00.html. Ibid. Jeannie Marlin Woods, Theatre to Change Men’s Souls (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1993), 62. Adrian Hall, interview by the author, January 9, 2008. All News WEAN, “The Final Play,” Trinity Square Repertory Theatre Archive. Ibid. Tony Angevine, “Farthest Out Yet for Adrian Hall,” Bristol Phoenix Times, April 15, 1976, Trinity Square Repertory Theatre Archive. James Purdy, Eustace Chisholm and the Works (1967; reprint, New York: Carroll and Graf, 2005); Adrian Hall and Richard Cumming, Eustace Chisholm and the Works, unpublished adaptation. Several characters suggest this by asking Daniel about his “Indian blood,” which he denies, but in an interview with Christopher Lane, Purdy clears up any confusion when he calls Daniel “a young man who is really an Indian chief.” Christopher Lane, “Out with
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11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.
32.
James Purdy: An Interview,” Critique 40, no. 1 (1998): 75. Purdy has stated that his own maternal great-grandmother “was said to be part Indian.” “Purdy, James,” http://vnweb. hwwilsonweb.com/hww/jumpstart.jhtml?r. Purdy, Eustace Chisholm and the Works, 66. Arline Aissis, “Eustace Chisholm: A Trinity Clunker,” Narragansett Times, April 8, 1976, Trinity Square Repertory Theatre Archive. Ibid. Elliot Norton, “Eustace Is Ugly at Trinity Square,” Boston Herald American, April 16, 1976. Samuel Coale, “Eustace Chisholm: Surrender to the Nightmare,” The East Side, April 8, 1976, Trinity Square Repertory Theatre Archive. Norton, “Eustace Is Ugly at Trinity Square.” Coale, “Eustace Chisholm: Surrender to the Nightmare.” Ibid. Quoted in William P. Hutchinson, “Trinity Square Repertory Theatre, 1976–1977 Season,” Educational Theatre Journal, March 1978, 122–24. Hall interview. “Three and One-half Centuries at a Glance,” http://www.providenceri.com/history/ centuries2.html. Ibid. See Woods, Theatre to Change Men’s Souls, 33. Ibid., 33–41. Quoted in ibid., 38. Hall interview. Ibid. Governor Bruce Sundlun, interview by the author, January 15, 2008. Ibid. Ibid. Sundlun said in an interview that he “made” Hall put Tim Langham, who had impressed Sundlun, in charge of the business management. It must have helped that Langham, who had accompanied Hall to this meeting, supported Hall’s artistic leadership and may have helped alleviate the friction between Hall and previous general managers. Ibid. Sundlun objected to “masturbation” plays. Ibid.
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\ Disappearing Frontiers and the National Stage Placing the Portland Federal Theatre Project — E L I Z A BE TH OSB OR NE
While in New York we were always moving heaven and earth to get shows open, in the West we urged restraint.
HALLIE F L ANAGAN ,
Arena
Much is made of the controversies surrounding the short-lived and ill-fated Federal Theatre Project (FTP, 1935–39). Scholars often illuminate the failures and controversies of this, the only national theatre in the history of the United States. National Director Hallie Flanagan’s original vision for the FTP was a decentralized national theatre that would create quality, locally relevant theatre. When called to testify before Representative Martin Dies and the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1938–39, Flanagan stated that her dual goals were to “Give employment to needy theatre professionals in socially useful projects which will rehabilitate them, conserve their skills, and at the same time, bring to thousands of American citizens not hitherto able to afford theatre going, a planned theatrical program, national in scope, regional in emphasis, and American in democratic attitude.”1 These goals, highlighting both the local and national aspects of the program, were not confined to the urban centers. Yet much of the available FTP scholarship focuses on big-city productions such as The Swing Mikado, It Can’t Happen Here, and The Cradle Will Rock. While FTP units in New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago were certainly fascinating and important examples of national theatre activities, the work of the rural units was equally worthwhile. In fact, the smaller, rural units { 103 }
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that populated towns throughout the country were far more than an afterthought in the organization of the FTP; they were vital components of a flexible national theatre and serve as useful examples of the successful integration of an American national theatre as defined by the communities of which it was a part. Without the explication of the rural units, the scholar is left with a skewed perception of the impact and realized potential of the FTP, and this vitally important piece of American theatre history goes misunderstood. The FTP units in Portland, Oregon, serve as a useful case study for addressing how the FTP successfully realized Flanagan’s goals on a local level. Productions spanned a spectrum of topics and themes, focusing on national, regional, and local issues in a style that not only was drawn from the skills of local actors and directors but also spoke to local audiences. Moreover, the administration associated with the Portland unit matured, and by the time the FTP closed in 1939, state and local officials collaborated well; Flanagan repeatedly cited Portland as an ideal FTP partnership between the administrative and artistic sides of the project. Although Flanagan regularly highlighted its strengths, scholarship dedicated to the Portland FTP is all but nonexistent. I suggest that there are two major reasons for this. First, there is the challenge of the relative scarcity of archival documents. Records are scattered, missing, and incomplete in the major FTP collections at the National Archives and the Library of Congress.2 Correspondence, employee records, many production records, and some of the general administration records are simply gone in spite of specific listings in the finding aids. This is unusual in the FTP collections, even given the small size and level of productivity in Portland. The second reason for the lack of scholarship is the privileging of highbrow forms from urban centers; productions with local resonance, particularly those from the proverbial boondocks, are often ignored in favor of Broadway-style shows and the splashy controversies that persistently shadowed high-profile urban productions. In order to exhume the Portland FTP, I place it within the Western Region (Region V), document the administration and production activities that are available (particularly the role Timberline Lodge and the Paul Bunyan festival were to have played in the establishment of the FTP as a Portland institution), and finally discuss the limitations and challenges of conducting archival research in the absence of a rich archive.
Squelching Squabbles: Portland and the Wild West According to Flanagan, the Western Region of the FTP was different from other parts of the country; it was “flamboyant,” “free and easy,” and “exuberant and { 104 }
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gusty.” FTP units peppered the West Coast from Seattle, through Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Diego, and even into Denver and Portland.3 In the East, workers on the project saw themselves as diametrically opposed to the administration, while disagreements over production issues in the West seemed more like “family squabbles.” The western FTP also seemed uncharacteristically optimistic about its chances for success and about the venture in general. “Perhaps the western attitude may be symbolized by a Christmas scroll six feet long containing the individually inscribed names of every member of a company of over five-hundred people,” Flanagan explained. “I unrolled this from the bottom up, and so inured had I become, at that point in project history, to the slings and arrows of attack, that it was a surprise when I reached the top and saw, instead of a demand for my instant resignation, the Star of Bethlehem and the hope that it would guide my destiny and that of Federal Theatre.”4 Flanagan’s description of the West connotes a far different feel than that of the comparatively cutthroat regions in the East, Midwest, South, and New York City. Her description of the Portland unit specifically was, if anything, even more complimentary. Unlike the popular urban units in the East and Midwest, which generated controversy continuously, the Portland unit seldom required FTP officials to mediate or intervene in its activities. Although there were certainly challenges, Flanagan repeatedly referred to the arrangement between the FTP and the Oregon state Works Progress Administration (WPA) as ideal: “Of all the states in the country Federal Theatre had its most perfect working conditions in Oregon, under Mr. Griffith. He ran the business and administration end completely but he left program and artistic personnel entirely to us. Under this arrangement it is noticeable that there was no censorship in Oregon in spite of the fact that we did a strong program, including three living newspapers.”5 While this may ultimately have been an example of the epitome of cooperation between the FTP and the WPA, it did not begin that way. An exploration of the unit’s initial difficulties in Oregon may suggest how other regions might have addressed similar issues and how the Portland unit ultimately triumphed over the problems it encountered. One of the smallest FTP units, Portland employed just over fifty people at its height. Yet it was one of a handful of units—nearly all in rural areas—that grew during the nationwide cutbacks exacted by Congress in 1937, while major urban centers dropped drastically in size, often losing in excess of 50 percent of the workforce. This growth among the regional units suggests that Flanagan’s goal of creating a decentralized national theatre had the potential to come to fruition.6 In spite of the conservative leanings of the Oregon WPA and FTP administration, the Portland FTP gained momentum and strength even as the { 105 }
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national FTP faltered under political attack. It capitalized on local themes and regional styles to create theatre that worked for the people of Portland, thus realizing Flanagan’s nationwide goals. When the FTP ended in 1939, approximately two hundred thousand people had seen the productions of the Portland FTP for an average admissions price of about two and a half cents. In Oregon: End of the Trail, Federal Writers’ Program authors described a friendly, uncontroversial FTP that staged a few living newspapers and the popular children’s theatre of Yasha Frank. They emphasized the regional appeal of the Oregon FTP: “dance skits given at Timberline Lodge in 1937, depicting flax culture, Indian life, and other regional folk activities, were followed in 1938 by Timberline Tintypes, sketches portraying Oregon logger life.”7 This description was repeated in Arena and in Jane de Hart Mathews’s The Federal Theatre: Plays, Relief, and Politics; even today, those who know the FTP existed in Portland at all note little more than lackluster acting and pieces of local color. The Portland FTP maintained a low profile for much of its existence. Part of this was likely due to the political leanings of the director of the Oregon FTP. Bess Whitcomb, former director of the Portland Civic Theatre, directed many of the Portland productions. Nick Chaivoe, an actor and stage manager on the Portland FTP, described her as “a small woman . . . with grey hair, very meticulously dressed and groomed, very precise in her speech, and a little skeptical of people, domineering, very conservative in her outlook.”8 Whitcomb’s approach to theatre was generally unadventurous, and she had little patience for unions or worker causes. Like its fellow big-city units, the Portland FTP experienced a number of early setbacks. Initially, the Northwest had difficulty procuring funds to begin a FTP program because of a lack of theatre professionals on the relief rolls, difficulty obtaining a local sponsor, and other bureaucratic challenges.9 Ultimately, the local and regional leadership decided on a proposal that featured two separate units operating out of Portland. One unit would produce two original plays by Oregon native and Broadway playwright Frederick Schlick; the other would tour Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) camps throughout the state with vaudeville shows.10 Although the CCC tours would prove logistically difficult, WPA officials and the national FTP administration supported the idea wholeheartedly. The CCC tours also became one of the unsung successes of the FTP on a national level, playing to audiences at CCC camps throughout the country, engineering a playwriting contest, and earning consistent accolades from both the officers charged with upholding order in the camps and the young men who populated them. Like the traveling unit, the Portland FTP struggled to find local support. In { 106 }
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one of the few pieces of surviving correspondence from 1937, Bess Whitcomb explained that the production of Pinocchio had run into problems because a local theatrical group, the Junior League–Civic Theatre, already planned to produce it over the same time period. Whitcomb offered generous terms in her negotiations, proposing that the FTP supply costumes, scenery, and props, use all the actors the Civic Theatre provided, and give them the proceeds from the first performance.11 The Civic Theatre rejected this arrangement and lodged a formal protest with the Junior League, the Parent Teacher Association, and the University of Oregon. Under pressure from the Civic Theatre and the Oregon state WPA director, E. J. Griffith, Whitcomb capitulated and delayed the FTP production; though this decision served as a point of contention between Whitcomb and FTP regional administration, she later explained that “the action [grew] entirely out of public relations.”12 Even as the Portland FTP grew in popularity, many audience members and central FTP officials noted the amateurish quality of the acting in the productions. Mathews referred to the “one-time vaudeville, stock, and circus people” who participated in the “woefully bad rehearsal of The Taming of the Shrew.” 13 Griffith explained: “The project here was originally principally dumb-acts, and while legitimate personnel has been added in the last year we have to face the fact that only a small percentage of our acting group has educational background. While they have showmanship, they lack artistic background. We have found that they seem to be once removed from [a] folky [sic] environment in their own lives, and consequently they bloom in a folk type of script. . . . This is not to belittle the project but to make it clear that folk drama is the thing that they do with authority.”14 In spite of Griffith’s assertion that his assessment was not intended to belittle the project, it is hard to interpret this quote as anything but a pejorative comment on the Oregon FTP. Interestingly, even though the project’s larger goal was to develop organic theatre productions within communities, regardless of their level of education and culture, Griffith clearly sees education and formal actor training as prerequisites for artistic success and aesthetic merit. His obvious disdain for the “folky” may help explain why it was so hard for the FTP to establish itself in regions with less access to or interest in Broadway-derived theatre. Even so, the acting improved markedly in relatively little time. Flanagan complimented the progress in an early 1939 note to Whitcomb: “I have just written to Mr. Griffith, telling him how impressed I am by the great improvement of the Theatre Project under your direction and under Mr. Griffith’s administrative control.”15 In fact, the Portland FTP overcame many of the obstacles that { 107 }
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threatened other regional units: conflicts with directors, lack of initial support, and uneven acting quality. Paperwork eventually progressed through the WPA bureaucracy, and the actors received enough training and rehearsals that audiences and critics applauded their efforts. Local administrators identified and addressed most of the political and civic issues that would arise before they could cause serious problems and negotiated solutions when those pressures endangered the project. Yet FTP unit leaders chafed under Griffith’s close supervision. J. Howard Miller, a close friend of Flanagan’s and deputy director of the FTP, complained: “The director of professional projects, who is also state director of art projects, is an older man, very congenial but quite dictatorial. His authority includes censorship of all mail to or from the project. The State Administrator also reads all project correspondence. I am glad that we have a small and not a large program there or I would fear the consequences.”16 It is worth noting that Miller specifically mentions Griffith’s tendency to censor correspondence, since it may suggest why many of the records of the Oregon FTP have disappeared. If Griffith were interested in controlling the image of the Oregon unit, he would certainly have taken pains to censor or eliminate any evidence that reflected badly on his tenure as regional leader. Despite his autocratic approach, Griffith’s interest ultimately saved the FTP in Oregon, as he found ways to negotiate the many difficulties that plagued units elsewhere. He paved the way for the exchange of resources and was instrumental in securing administrative space for the FTP.17 However, Griffith’s support came at a certain cost. He felt justified in calling upon “his” performers with little notice and, regardless of their production schedule, requesting performances at various special events. For Griffith, the FTP was a part of a personal domain that he could call on at will. The FTP dealt with the problem by preparing a few versatile pageants that could be easily adapted and would fit many of Griffith’s requests. And unlike the directors of FTP units in Boston or Chicago, who often had difficulty in identifying and cultivating audiences, Whitcomb, Williams, and Griffith also thought of a plan to bring the FTP to larger audiences in Oregon.
Timberline Lodge, the “Theatre upon Olympus,” and Paul Bunyan In facing the east and its white mountain wedged into the roseate sky, [visitors] gaze toward Timberline Lodge, a recreational project which is a concrete manifestation of faith and of the triumph of intelligence over economic distress. Workers of the Writers’ Program of the Works Projects Administration, The Builders of Timberline Lodge
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Widespread interest in recreational winter sports emerged in Oregon around 1930, and the southern slopes of Mount Hood, located about an hour outside Portland, became a prime tourist attraction for the state. For years, Griffith and a number of other Portland businessmen had eyed the slopes above a tiny village called Government Camp. The site was ideally positioned to avoid the worst of the winter storms while still maintaining a dozen feet or so of snow during the tourist season. When the WPA appeared, Griffith saw an opportunity. He identified local business support and petitioned the U.S. Forest Service for permission to build a commercial hotel on federal land. In late 1935, the Forest Service formally requested WPA funds for a hotel on the slopes of Mount Hood. Griffith completed the project application, which had an estimated cost to the WPA of $246,893. Timberline Lodge eventually cost nearly one million dollars.18 The first mention of FTP involvement with the opening of Timberline Lodge arrived in a request for initial project funding in January 1936. At this point, the lodge was slated to open on May 15, 1936. Guy Williams, assistant regional director of the FTP, wrote that the Portland unit should create a “Pioneer Life Pageant to be staged on Mt. Hood” and that “The pageant will celebrate the opening of a huge new Mountain Lodge Hotel by the Forestry Service; that the site of this pageant will be alongside the old Pioneer route of the Oregon Trail; that Portland civic leaders are naturally keen on having it put on; that it would probably play to as many as seventy-five thousand people; that vital script employing the Paul Bunyan theme is being prepared by Mr. Schlick; and finally that the first period of WPA theatricals with the other projects [be] gauged so that the full FTP personnel will be assigned to the Mt. Hood pageant.”19 Practical and politically savvy, Williams’s advice would put the Portland FTP in the enviable position of having already prepared the show Griffith would require when the lodge finally opened in late 1937. While seventy-five thousand audience members traveling the six thousand feet up the mountain to Timberline Lodge in the middle of an Oregon winter seemed optimistic at best, Williams’s perception of audience interest in local pageants and his insight into pleasing Portland’s civic leaders was noteworthy. Once established, this spirit of cooperation and engagement with local interests would characterize the Portland FTP’s relationship with political and civic leaders. Outdoor pageants proved popular in Oregon and also satisfied the goals of the FTP laid down by Flanagan. Celebrated outdoors before large local audiences admitted for free, pageants employed large numbers of people, located new and underserved audiences, and performed local and American history. When Griffith requested a pageant about the flax industry for the opening of { 109 }
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Figure 1: Timberline Lodge, not long after its completion in 1937. National Archives and Records Administration, Record Group 69, Work Projects Administration, 1922–1944, RG-69-PR, Oregon, Box 9, “Oregon.”
a new flax plant in Mount Angel, the FTP created Yellow Harvest, a pageant/ living newspaper written by one of the men in the CCC camps.20 President Franklin Roosevelt dedicated Timberline Lodge as a part of a trip to the West Coast in September 1937. As a part of the celebration, the FTP produced a series of dances that reflected regional themes and ideas, including The Indian Celebration Dance, Dance of the Flax Scutching Machine, American Negro Interlude, and Dance of the W.P.A. Workers. Little record remains of these dance pieces. The Oregonian printed an editorial that described the FTP as “a WPA by-product.” The description of the Dance of the W.P.A. Workers further conveyed the attitude of the writer toward the FTP: “There on the balcony, about where the president was to speak a little later, appeared the shameless men-about-town and girls with low-necked evening gowns who quite obviously were supposed to represent outworn bourgeois and capitalist civilization. . . . Then the sophisticates withdrew and onto the balcony came the WPA dancers, with the boys in regulation Heil-Hitler brown shirts. All intelligent { 110 }
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viewers were supposed, of course, to draw the obvious moral of the bankrupt bourgeois age which is passing and the sterling WPA paradise to come.”21 The FTP also produced Bonneville Dam, a piece described as a dance-drama, pageant, dance, musical, and living newspaper. Unfortunately, the script is now lost. Griffith and Flanagan were both optimistic about a long-term relationship between Timberline Lodge and the FTP. Returning from a trip to New York during which he saw several FTP plays, Griffith wrote for Flanagan a poem describing the amphitheatre at Timberline Lodge: I built a theatre upon Olympus Domed to the very heavens Colored azure rose and silver Figured with beams of sun and moon I built a theatre of magnificence Where buskined giants might declaim Before a back drop of lofty Atlas Majestic in its glistening mantle I built a theatre for Apollo Walled with Alpine fir and hemlock A rainbow for proscenium arch Ringed with bright stars for footlights I built a theatre fashioned from mountain peaks With foyer fountained with glacial cataracts And stage where man might dare to tread And feel the inspiration of the gods22
Perhaps what is most interesting and touching about Griffith’s poem is his use of the word “I,” which implies a deep sense of personal investment. His references to Apollo also suggest that he imagined the theatre could play a unique role in ennobling and uplifting its audience. While his vision may have differed from Flanagan’s, Griffith also clearly envisioned theatre as central to American spiritual and cultural life. Griffith wanted a theatre company to be performing in the amphitheatre, which he likened to one of the huge outdoor theatres created in ancient Greece. This comparison surely appealed to Flanagan in her quest for large audiences and a democratic theatre that catered to no one specific social class. Pleased with Griffith’s new image of the Oregon FTP, Flanagan wrote, “Today when Mr. Griffith who once didn’t even want a project, said ‘Expand!—we’d like a whole new F.T. company so that one could tour and one could play’—I felt that you can change human nature.”23 Buoyed by Griffith’s excitement, Flanagan raised her expectations for the project. She told Griffith { 111 }
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Figure 2: Amphitheatre at Timberline Lodge, as seen from the audience’s perspective. Timberline Lodge is visible in the far left side. After the amphitheatre opened, Griffith sent a poem to Flanagan, describing it as inspired by the Greek gods—“fashioned from mountain peaks” with “stars for footlights” and “a rainbow for proscenium arch.” National Archives and Records Administration, Record Group 69, Work Projects Administration, 1922–1944, RG-69-PR, Oregon, Box 9, “Oregon.”
that she would pursue an additional company and encouraged Whitcomb to locate plays of local relevance and to capitalize on the skills of the actors in the project. Flanagan’s aspirations for the expanded FTP specifically included Timberline Lodge. In her 1938 “Design for the Federal Theatre’s Season,” printed in the New York Times, Flanagan used Timberline as an example of the FTP’s success in creating locally relevant theatre: This study of the local and regional aspects of American history and contemporary life as material for drama has reached the point where we are setting up in each region one large dramatic festival center. For the Northwest this center will be Timberline Lodge, built by the Works Progress Administration, part way up Mount Hood in Oregon. Here our Oregon project has already produced two plays dealing with regional material, a living newspaper on “Flax,” and a dance drama “Bonneville Dam.” Now we
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From all appearances, Timberline continued to be a success story for the FTP. In June 1939, less than three weeks before Congress suspended FTP funding, Flanagan again cited Timberline as an FTP triumph in a New York Times article. The Paul Bunyan festival remained on the schedule for the summer, and the article described Timberline Lodge as the “center for the Northwest.”25 Arrangements for the festival occupied the attention of many FTP members for months before its anticipated summer performance. On March 1, Flanagan joined the Paul Bunyan Celebration Committee for an extended discussion; also present at the meeting were Bess Whitcomb, Guy Williams, Thomas Laman (executive assistant, Federal Art Project), F. W. Goodrich (state director, Federal Music Project), T. J. Edmonds (state director, Federal Writers’ Project), Aline Howell (assistant director, Women’s and Professional Projects), and W. H. Marsh (administrative assistant in charge of public relations). Clearly, by this time the festival planning was sufficiently advanced to warrant the presence of the state directors of all four of the arts projects in the state of Oregon as well as Flanagan herself. The meeting determined the feasibility of the festival and delineated responsibilities among the various projects. A single festival would occur, taking “the form of a rededication of the American tradition,” and would run on weekends at Timberline Lodge for four to six weeks, depending on both the length of the season and the interest of the audience.26 The theatrical portion of the celebration would consist of two plays, Prologue to Glory and Paul Bunyan, as well as the Myra Kinch dancers in American Exodus. Federal Music Project concerts would supplement the theatrical program. Flanagan later explained that Whitcomb and Williams, “both ardent westerners,” planned to supplement the festival at Timberline Lodge with wrestling matches, horseshoe throwings, and other special events throughout the state.27 Both Flanagan and Griffith had high expectations for the Paul Bunyan festival that summer: “I want it to be a production that will say for the West dramatically what Timberline says for the West architecturally,” [Flanagan] told Mr. Griffith, and he said: “The Federal Theatre can do it. To tell you the truth I thought the company was hopeless at first, but now I go to everything they put on; I take all my friends, I’m amazed at the whole thing. After the Paul Bunyan festival we’re going ahead building
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This festival was to be the crowning glory of the Portland FTP. It would use the talents of the FTP actors, engage with an extensive FTP audience, and capitalize on local themes. Unfortunately, the Paul Bunyan festival never opened; the Federal Theatre Project ended on June 30, 1939, before the festival was scheduled to take place.
A Paucity of Paperwork: Negative Space in the Archives One of the challenges the archival researcher faces in approaching the rural units of the FTP is the lack of archival materials. The major FTP collections at National Archives and the Library of Congress contain well over a million documents related to the production and administration of various projects throughout the country, and many local archives, historical societies, and public libraries also contain FTP ephemera related to specific projects. However, while it is common to find entire boxes devoted to specific productions and urban centers, it is rare to find extensive portions of an archive dedicated to the smaller units. Instead, the scholar must pick through the archives and the finding aids with a specific idea of people and productions relevant to the unit in question. This is difficult when there are hundreds of thousands of documents, little secondary information available, and the search is for the primary documents that will begin to tell the story. Like the proverbial catch-22, one doesn’t know what one is seeking until one has already found it. In this situation, there is no substitute for knowledge of the available secondary information and the archive itself, particularly the underlying organization. Flanagan’s Arena and Mathews’s The Federal Theatre provide useful inroads with names of a few productions and some of the regional leadership. The most helpful secondary source was written by Karen Wickre, one of the staff members involved in the organization of what is now the Library of Congress’s collection when it was on loan to George Mason University; “An Informal History of Oregon’s WPA Federal Theatre Project” is an unpublished document describing some of Portland’s productions. Local newspapers further chronicled the activities of the Portland units, though these were microfilmed at the Oregon Historical Society and the University of Oregon and are difficult to obtain from a distance. I also contacted the Friends of Timberline, { 114 }
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an organization dedicated to the preservation and documentation of the historical Timberline Lodge; they graciously provided copies of three films featuring Timberline Lodge: The Builders of Timberline, Vintage Timberline, and Doorways to the Past: Timberline Lodge, Legacy of the Thirties.29 At the National Archives, regional and district reports named further productions and people, providing additional clues to follow. I created a list of people named in any document related to Portland and the regional administration in the West and slowly expanded this list into a web of potential subject matter, noting tensions between the local and regional authorities. The narrative regional reports ignored Portland entirely for almost a year—a significant gap, since the FTP only survived for four years. Once the reports observed the existence of the Portland unit, a paragraph or a page would briefly synopsize Portland activities; in contrast, descriptions of the California projects would often stretch out for a dozen pages or more.30 After the first tidbits regarding the Oregon units, the reports began to cite complaints about their lack of knowledge, implying that the Portland administration intentionally refrained from detailing its activities. Although the volume of the National Archives and Library of Congress collections is sometimes daunting, this project required additional expansion. In the search for photographic evidence of the Portland FTP and Timberline Lodge, I increased my search parameters to include the entire WPA collection. This resulted in my locating hundreds of photos of FTP productions, as well as theatre buildings and the most extensive collection of audience records and Caravan Theatre images I have seen. These images included prints of hundreds of FTP slides.31 This collection also provided an excellent view of the conditions that led to the creation of the WPA and inspired some of the FTP’s most famous living newspapers, including One-Third of a Nation, Power, and Triple-A Plowed Under. One of the most interesting hurdles arose when I attempted to access a WPA oral history housed in the Special Collections and Archives at George Mason University. In the 1970s Lorraine Brown supervised an extensive oral history project through the Institute on Federal Theatre Project and New Deal Culture. Over a number of years, project personnel interviewed nearly four hundred people associated with the FTP; most of these interviews were recorded and transcribed for research purposes. Many of these individuals also donated various bits of FTP ephemera to George Mason University. This valuable collection complements the administrative and production records at the National Archives and the Library of Congress. For the purposes of my project, George Mason University’s collection con{ 115 }
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tained one oral history related to FTP activities in Portland. The finding aid listed Nick Chaivoe as an actor and stage manager with the Portland FTP but stated that the records were closed during his lifetime. George Mason University required an obituary before granting access to the records but could provide no additional information. Census records from 1930 showed no evidence of Nick Chaivoe in the United States, though he may have been transient at that time. LexisNexis and ProQuest Historical Newspaper databases also returned no information, though the geographical area in question was not likely to produce results in those databases. Internet searches turned up information on a criminal defense attorney who had argued several high-profile cases, even appearing before the Oregon Supreme Court. Moving to local newspapers, I searched for mention of Nick Chaivoe in the Oregonian, the Oregon Journal, and the Portland Tribune. An obituary appeared in the Oregonian in September 2000 and briefly outlined Chaivoe’s early life in New York City, his service during World War II, and his career as a lawyer. It also noted that he “rode the rails to California as a youth and moved to Portland in 1935.”32 The timeline matched what I knew of the Portland FTP, but as the obituary failed to note anything about a life in the theatre, I was unconvinced. I sought corroboration by trying to locate a relative to confirm that the Portland defense attorney was the same Nick Chaivoe who worked on the FTP in the late 1930s. I called every Chaivoe in the state of Oregon, briefly explained who I was and what I sought, and asked that they call me back if they knew of any illuminating information. One person responded to my query—Nick Chaivoe’s daughter. Ms. Chaivoe confirmed the obituary and generously talked about her father’s background, but she said that her father had refused to talk about the 1930s and was unaware that he had agreed to an interview with the Institute on the Federal Theatre Project and New Deal Culture in 1978. I put her in touch with the curator at George Mason University, and, through the more than seventy pages of interview transcripts, she learned about the period her father would never discuss. Nick Chaivoe’s oral history—unseen by any researcher after it was transcribed in the late 1970s—provided insight into the workings of the Portland FTP, vividly describing the tensions between the workers and administration on the local level and confirming the imagined distance between the Portland unit and the regional and national FTP administration. This incident highlights one of the challenges of working with oral histories and archival documents. When limitations restrict access to the records— particularly when those limitations depend on the death of the speaker—the proverbial waters quickly muddy. It is foolishly optimistic to expect an archive to maintain current records for every individual included in the collections, and { 116 }
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equally unrealistic to hope that individuals who seal their records will leave a posthumous message directing their heirs to send an obituary to the archive in question. It then becomes the researcher’s responsibility to ascertain whether the conditions have been met and to provide appropriate documentation. In this case the individual’s name happened to be unique. Generally, though, it is only ethics that require a researcher to provide an accurate obituary; even the best of intentions can be foiled by a simple lack of verifying information. This could quickly lead to a case of mistaken identity within the archive itself, which would point future scholars in the wrong direction and reduce the integrity of the archive. In the case of the FTP, the restrictions on these records also removed one more clue from the already limited documentation about this important example of the integration of the United States’ only national theatre into the community of Portland. Because scholarship on many of the small, rural units of the FTP is scarce, their history is inevitably less able to fit into a precise model, does not necessarily flow as a smooth, coherent story, and resists preconceived agendas; the documents dictate the direction the scholarship can take. Moreover, the production activities often defy analysis because they are so based in physicality; few pictures remain, and scripts and assorted ephemera do not paint a clear picture of the event. The gaps in documentation—negative spaces in the archives— force the scholar to make extrapolations and suppositions about events, personalities, and motivations. Unfortunately, regardless of their successes, these difficulties effectively omit the activities of the smaller, rural units from the scholarly discussion.
Conclusions The Portland FTP was an example of a decentralized yet cooperative unit. While it worked with companies in California and Washington, it retained its individual character and remained essentially clear from any of the political debate that infected many other FTP units. Although descriptions of some of the pageants presented at the Timberline Lodge dedication hint at an indictment of capitalism, the Oregon unit did not arouse the same controversy as other regional units. Perhaps the populations it played to were less politically sensitive, or perhaps the unit seemed so organic to the state that whatever politics it espoused seemed like part of a local discussion rather than an external agenda being foisted on an unwelcoming population. Whatever the reasons for its local appeal, it is unlikely that many Oregonians linked their FTP with the national { 117 }
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FTP that was targeted by Congress and the Dies Committee as an organization of Communists requiring eradication. Even Burns Mantle, New York theatre critic and FTP supporter, noted the separation between the national FTP and the Portland project. He wrote, “You appear to be completely detached,” a comment interpreted as a response to the unique, local nature of the Portland FTP program.33 Even Nick Chaivoe, an alert, socially conscious FTP employee in Portland, had no idea that the FTP was under investigation or that other units were closed because of controversy: “We were in the hinterlands, after all. . . . We were completely insulated from what was going on in any other state. We just didn’t hear about things in other states.”34 These statements clearly show the tension between the local and the national in the FTP. This insulation appears to have worked both for and against the Portland FTP. The company was able to conduct its business with little interference from both the FTP national administration and the WPA. Because of this, the leaders of the city, state, and region were able to create a theatre that was locally relevant and appealed to large numbers of audience members. They integrated themselves into the community, playing original productions at festivals, uniting efforts with the other arts projects and government organizations, and codifying relationships with civic organizations. However, the insular nature of the Portland FTP also left it vulnerable to interference of state and local agencies that were often neutralized by the national FTP. Many of the disagreements and difficulties took place within the local unit and the state. Interference by the national administration was not necessary in a system that worked well independently. Much of the FTP correspondence that remains in the archives revolves around specific, large-scale situations like the Timberline Lodge dedication and the Paul Bunyan festival; these events would require external efforts, either on a regional or national level. The day-to-day running of the Oregon units seems to have been handled “in house,” and thus it lacks the kind of rigorous documentation that some of the other units received. In a government system that was organized to track all activity of each project and that required forms often in triplicate or more, what happened to these records? Were they generated at all, or did the Portland FTP manage to elude the often invasive oversight of the central FTP authorities and use its comparative freedom to establish a more genuinely local and relevant theatre? On those occasions when the national administration was involved, they realized the importance of the events in Portland. As I have suggested, Flanagan repeatedly referred to the Oregon FTP’s events as national success stories. The role of Timberline Lodge and the hopes surrounding the unrealized Paul Bun{ 118 }
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yan festival illustrate the vibrancy of the Portland FTP. Yet I suspect that the very success of the Portland FTP may be the reason why it is difficult to study today. When its administration worked well, it worked invisibly; fortunately, its importance in understanding the reach and promise of the FTP is now discernible.
Notes 1.
2.
3. 4. 5. 6.
Hallie Flanagan, “Excerpts from National Director’s Report, January, 1939,” Federal Theatre, p. 1, “The Prompter,” Box 357, Entry 920, Regional Publications Describing Federal Theatre Activities, 1936–39, Record Group 69.5.4, Federal Theatre Project, National Archives and Records Administration [hereafter RG 69.5.4, NARA], College Park, Maryland. The National Archives contains correspondence regarding project proposals and early funding problems between late 1935 and early 1936, a few documents from late 1937 centering on a local political conflict, some information from the spring of 1939 on a proposed radio show and the Paul Bunyan festival, one Audience Survey Report, and a few regional reports that mention the Portland FTP. The Library of Congress houses several production books with varying degrees of information, including some reviews, directors’ reports, programs, and production photos, as well as scraps of publicity information, playreader reports, and a script of E. P. Conkle’s Paul Bunyan and the Blue Ox (the script proposed for the Paul Bunyan festival). George Mason University possesses one oral history and brief notes from another untaped interview. Many of the Portland FTP productions centered around dance and movement, a characteristic that makes these scripts less telling than dramas or musicals. While it is possible that more information regarding the Portland FTP is available, it is not easily located in the archival collections connected to the FTP, nor do contemporary histories cite other personal or private archives where additional sources might be located. See Barry Witham’s The Federal Theatre Project: A Case Study (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003) for an in-depth study of FTP activities in Seattle. Hallie Flanagan, Arena (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1940), 271, 272, 273. Ibid., 301. According to Flanagan’s summary of FTP activities, the Oregon FTP was one of the smallest in terms of total output, budget, and staff. Yet of the thirty-three states included in the FTP, only five grew in size from the May 1936 figures (designating the high point of FTP employment numbers) to those of June 1939, when the project ended. Units in Maine grew by approximately 28 percent (36 to 46), Colorado and Oregon by more than 55 percent (26 to 44 and 34 to 53, respectively), and Louisiana by more than 100 percent (50 to 114). The figures for the fifth state, Georgia (0 to 13), are misleading because the FTP did not begin in Georgia until January 1937; the beginning of the Georgia FTP coincided with the ending of the Birmingham FTP and the transfer of Altars of Steel (and all personnel) to Atlanta. Flanagan, Arena, 434–35. For more information on the fateful Altars of Steel production see Elizabeth A. Osborne, “Yankee Consternation in the
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7. 8.
9.
10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.
17.
18.
Deep South: Worshipping at the Altars of Steel,” Theatre Symposium: Tours of the South 13 (2005): 51–67. Workers of the Writers’ Program of the Works Projects Administration, Oregon: End of the Trail (1940; reprint, Portland: Binfords & Mort, 1972), 122–23. Nick Chaivoe, interview by Shirley Tanzer, January 18, 1978, Portland, Oregon, transcript, p. 43, WPA Oral Histories Collection, Special Collections and Archives, George Mason University. When WPA project director R. G. Dieck asked for FTP support in Portland, Glenn Hughes (FTP director of the Western Region) replied that the relief rolls did not appear to support such a request. Many of the actors in Portland generally hailed from vaudeville, tab show, and circus but had not worked professionally for years because so much of the Portland theatre had disappeared; the remnants were almost exclusively amateur and community theatre. Thus, the majority of the actors registering for relief in Portland were not considered “professionals” by WPA standards and did not qualify for skilled wages. Guy Williams to R. G. Dieck, January 6, 1936, “OR—Project Proposals #1,” Box 69, Entry 850, Correspondence with Regional Offices I–V, 1935–1939, RG 69.5.4, NARA; Flanagan, Arena, 297; Glenn Hughes to R. G. Dieck, December 9, 1935, “OR— Project Proposals #1,” Box 69, Entry 850, Correspondence with Regional Offices I–V, 1935–1939, RG 69.5.4, NARA. Guy Williams to Hallie Flanagan, January 15, 1936, “OR—Project Proposals #1,” Box 69, Entry 850, Correspondence with Regional Offices I–V, 1935–1939, RG 69.5.4, NARA. Bess Whitcomb to Hallie Flanagan, November 17, 1937, “Western Region #1,” Box 29, Entry 839, General Correspondence of the National Office, 1935–1939, RG 69.5.4, NARA. Bess Whitcomb to Ole Ness, December 1, 1937, ibid. Jane de Hart Mathews, The Federal Theatre Project: Plays, Relief, and Politics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976), 155. E. J. Griffith to Evan Roberts, April 20, 1939, “Oregon,” Box 17, Entry 839, General Correspondence of the National Office, 1935–1939, RG 69.5.4, NARA. Hallie Flanagan to Bess Whitcomb, March 6, 1939, “Western Region #1,” Box 29, Entry 839, General Correspondence of the National Office, 1935–1939, RG 69.5.4, NARA. Miller sent his letter to Mary McFarland initially. She sent an extended quotation from the letter to the named recipients; that letter is the source of this quote. Mary McFarland to Mr. O’Brien and Mr. Krimont, May 21, 1936, “OR—Project Proposals,” Box 69, Entry 850, Correspondence with Regional Offices I–V, 1935–1939, RG 69.5.4, NARA. Normally, the WPA administrators blocked the transfer of personnel because curious and distressing things happened to the government payroll when employees requisitioned for a specific state traveled outside of that state. Personnel paychecks were regularly confused once workers traveled outside state lines, travel reimbursement was complex at best, and requisitioning equipment often led to one state paying for items that they never saw again. The administrative records at the National Archives contain one particularly amusing exchange regarding a missing wig and the headaches it caused throughout the Midwestern Region. Griffith’s report estimated local contributions of $28,620, placing the total cost of the project at $275,513. The final cost of Timberline Lodge is unavailable. When President Franklin Roosevelt decided to dedicate the building in 1937, last-minute funding poured in: apparently there is no record of exactly how much money arrived and how it was
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19. 20. 21. 22.
23.
24. 25.
26.
27. 28. 29. 30.
31. 32. 33. 34.
spent. Although an investigation was launched, no determination was made. Jean Burwell Weir, “Timberline Lodge: A WPA Experiment in Architecture and Crafts, Volume One” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1977), 37, 68–71, 292. Guy Williams to Hallie Flanagan, January 15, 1936, “OR—Project Proposals #1,” Box 69, Entry 850, Correspondence with Regional Offices I–V, 1935–1939, RG 69.5.4, NARA. During the Depression, flax was one of Oregon’s primary crops and vital to the economy. The opening of a new plant was cause for celebration. “Dance of the Sophisticates,” Oregonian, October 4, 1937, 10. Poem attached to letter from E. J. Griffith to Hallie Flanagan, December 4, 1937, “Western Region #2,” Box 29, Entry 839, General Correspondence of the National Office, 1935– 1939, RG 69.5.4, NARA. Hallie Flanagan to Philip Davis, [probably February 1939], “Excerpts from Flanagan’s letters (1935–39),” Box 4, Series I: General Files, Sub-Series 2, Personal Papers, Hallie Flanagan Papers, *T-Mss 1964-002, Billy Rose Theatre Collection, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Hallie Flanagan, “Design for the Federal Theatre’s Season,” New York Times, September 4, 1938, 99. This article subdivided the Western Region into north and south; Los Angeles was the center for the Southwest. “Summer Plans Set for WPA Theatre,” New York Times, June 11, 1939, 47. “Minutes of Meeting of Paul Bunyan Celebration Committee,” recorded by Bernadine Whitfield, March 1, 1939, “Oregon,” Box 17, Entry 839, General Correspondence of the National Office, 1935–1939, RG 69.5.4, NARA. Flanagan, Arena, 302. Ibid. Jim Swenson, The Builders of Timberline, and George M. Henderson, Vintage Timberline. Timberline Lodge: Collectors Edition, DVD (Friends of Timberline, 2005). “June 15 Report,” p. 4, “Region V—February–July 1936,” Box 100, Entry 857, Narrative Progress Reports for Region V, 1935–1936, RG 69.5.4, NARA. George Gerwing, acting assistant to the federal director in Los Angeles, wrote the letter introducing the majority of the Region V narrative regional reports to Flanagan, but the reports themselves do not list a specific author. I suspect these prints are from the Library of Congress collection of slides that disappeared in the process of being transferred to a more accessible digital format. “Nick Chaivoe,” Oregonian, September 27, 2000, D12. Burns Mantle, Oregon Journal, March 16, 1939, 21. After the WPA ended, Chaivoe earned a law degree from Northwestern University. He practiced law in Portland into the 1990s. Chaivoe interview, p. 61.
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\ “Can’t Someone Find Him a Stimulant?” The Treatment of Prohibition on the American Stage, 1920–1933 —L AR RY D. C L ARK
The Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, known as the Prohibition amendment, went into effect on January 16, 1920, banning “the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within . . . the United States.”1 It had been approved in 1919, but enforcement was postponed to give liquor dealers time to get rid of their stock. In 1919 Congress also passed the Volstead Act, which was crafted to put enforcement teeth in the Eighteenth Amendment. For instance, it defined “intoxicating,” set the punishment bounds for those who broke the law, and gave law enforcement agencies the authority to padlock the doors of any establishment that failed to follow the constraints of the amendment. The brash scheme to obliterate drinking and drunkenness was a fait accompli. The “bold experiment” was under way. With the Volstead Act the federal government ushered in an unprecedented and relentless attempt to produce social change. This essay seeks to determine how the theatre, as represented by plays performed in New York City from 1920 to 1933, perceived and treated the concept and reality of Prohibition. Historian Frederick Lewis Allen contends that one way to produce insightful social history is to scrutinize at a particular historical moment all characteristics of something; he finds “no better way of understanding [changes in] you and me and the environment in which we live.”2 The historical moment of interest begins with the passage of the Volstead Act in 1919 and ends with the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment in 1933. The evidence will come from words spoken { 122 }
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and actions performed on the New York stage during these years as recorded in published play scripts and reviews of their production. How would one describe Prohibition if all one knew about it were confined to information gleaned from lines of dialogue spoken on the New York stage? Might one expect Prohibition to be an important, recurring topic in the drama of the period? Absolutely. Prohibition often dominated the real-life political and social conversation, and as theatre historian Tice Miller asserts, one of the tasks of the playwright and actor is to “digest the news and make history come alive” for an audience.3 Miller also laments, “Historians seldom turn to the stage in assessing how people and events are perceived in the culture at large.”4 I hope to show such oversight is a mistake and that the drama is a rich source of evidence for writing social, cultural, and political history. My final goal is to add to our understanding of the unique American experiment designed to control the commerce and consumption of alcoholic beverages—especially how it affected the way people lived. The concept of Prohibition was not new, but prior to 1920 the legality of liquor sales in the United States had been a matter of states’ rights.5 Passing the Eighteenth Amendment made liquor a national problem and answered the prayers of the “drys” that traffic in evil drink be halted. At first playwrights who wrote for the New York stage were slow to take up the topic of Prohibition: only one play in 1920 and three in 1921 made reference to it.6 The first to do so was a potboiler called The Cave Girl, written by George Middleton and Guy Bolton, which opened in August 1920. In the play, Bates, an industrialist, prepares to take his household on a camping trip in order to bring his son in contact with a woman he would like him to marry. Before departing for the escapade in the wilderness, Rogers, the butler, informs Bates that someone robbed the storehouse the previous evening: B AT ES: What’s missing? ROGER S: [Slow] Six cans
of baked beans—a side of bacon—condensed milk— B AT ES: [Interrupting] Yes, but what liquor? ROGER S: None at all, sir— B AT ES: Thank Heaven. ROGER S: The thief is quite evidently a prohibitionist. B AT ES: And they try to tell you that it’s alcohol that causes crime.7 Neither essential to the plot nor crucial to understanding the play, this banter simply illustrates that, within a few months of the advent of Prohibition in the United States, the playwrights could hazard a joke about it. The gratuitous { 123 }
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swipe at the prohibitionists’ core contention that alcohol is a major cause of crime suggests that Middleton and Bolton were not ready to bow out of the dispute over the necessity for the Eighteenth Amendment. Future Broadway plays would engage the argument more vigorously. By the next year, 1921, Prohibition had steadily modified the way of life for the American consumer of alcohol by squeezing dry the nation’s legal supply of intoxicating beverages. Advocates believed eliminating the supply would squelch the craving for liquor, but they were mistaken. Instead, the occupation of bootlegging—finding illegal booze and distributing it sub rosa to the yet thirsty American consumer—blossomed seemingly overnight.8 Whenever drinkers and would-be drinkers congregated, they exchanged tips on how to ferret out reliable bootleggers and compared notes on the modus operandi of the scofflaws they patronized. Brief references to Prohibition were sprinkled through such 1921 Broadway offerings as Roi Cooper Megrue’s sappy and talky Honors Are Even and Harry Wagstaff Gribbles’s March Hares, the latter of which contained the first specific reference in the published American drama to the evolving occupation of bootlegging. Mrs. Rodney, an elocution teacher and the major female role in the play, casually remarks: “Today the most refined bootlegger called. He was collecting for charity, and incidentally selling a high grade of gin. The gin was hidden in the heart of that charity more subtly than perfume in a rose.”9 Several plays of the 1920s recorded clever subterfuges bootleggers used to sell and deliver their product. Based on descriptions in its reviews, Bottled (1928), by Anne Collins and Alice Timony, serves as a defining example. In this play, the young grandchildren of a Kentucky matriarch inherit a distillery. Since Prohibition rules, the children conclude that the only way they can profit from their inheritance is to sell their product to bootleggers. The customers routinely ask for ingenious packaging, leading to a lively scene, according to reviewer J. Brooks Atkinson, in which the performers are “rushing hundreds of neatly labeled bottles across the stage in golf bags, hat boxes and suitcases.”10 Predictably, it was not long before some writers of successful, popular Broadway plays provided prominent references to Prohibition in their work. Take Rachel Crothers’s 1921 hit, Nice People, as an example. In the opening act, the playwright carefully details her vision of the disquieting social conditions of the flapper age. The controlling image of the entire act is the generous, omnipresent supply of liquor that the savvy young people in her play overtly and endlessly consume. The upper-class home that serves as the first-act setting for Nice People is well stocked with alcohol, and everyone indulges. It is common knowledge that the law forbids the sale of liquor, so the audience need not be told that someone has obtained the product from a clandestine { 124 }
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supplier. The wealthy young men and women of the play treat the free-flowing liquor nonchalantly while they talk almost exclusively of clothes, parties, and drinking—the three staples of the flapper generation. Crothers’s point of view is unmistakable: laws passed to enforce the Eighteenth Amendment are easy to subvert. Alcohol—at least for the privileged—is as available as it was prior to Prohibition. Most direct references to Prohibition in Nice People are comedic. For instance, one of the young people urges the group not to stop by a particular friend’s house: “There’s nothing to drink there now—not a drop. She’s taken Prohibition seriously.”11 On another occasion, a maiden aunt admonishes her brother-in-law (who is capable of imbibing to excess himself ) to crack down on his daughter, Teddy, and her dissolute friends. “And the drinking,” she says. “Your house is a bar. It pours out—at all hours.” The reply: “That’s Prohibition. It only amuses them to have it about when they can’t get it other places.”12 Prohibition closed the taverns; people countered by keeping an abundant stash of smuggled liquor in their homes. The ensuing convenient availability of booze, the “wets” argued, led to increased, excessive consumption. In the preProhibition days, going to a public tavern for a drink required at least a smidgen of planning and thought; drinking at home could happen on the spur of the moment in one’s underwear. Unfortunately, the bootlegged moonshine, whether consumed at home or elsewhere, was often mediocre in quality and taste. Buyers knew there was little or no product control: one paid one’s money and took one’s chances. Voilà! The cocktail! Adding various mixers to the brew masked the taste of bad booze and made it palatable to drink. Soon, mixing drinks became the sort of routine stage business that smoking cigarettes, cigars, and pipes had been for years. Rarely were dramas written during the 1920s that did not call for one or both of these activities. January 1922 saw the opening of J. Hartley Manners’s The National Anthem, a serious drama that took a dark, disparaging view of American youth. Manners, English born but thoroughly Americanized, crafted most of his plays to fit the talents of his wife, the splendid actress Laurette Taylor. His best-known play was Peg o’ My Heart, a warm comedy/drama that held the Broadway stage for more than six hundred performances from late 1912 into 1914. The National Anthem, a gloomy, depressing screed, argued that American youth was going to hell in a handbasket, dancing all the way to the tempting pulsations of jazz, the “national anthem” of the title. Manners’s reckless youth of the moneyed class possess few redeeming qualities. Daily during the warm months of the year they go to the country club for golf and tennis, followed by binge drink{ 125 }
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ing and seemingly endless dancing to jazz music. Jazz pervades their lives, and they succumb to its beat even when they are not on the dance floor. Manners’s opening stage directions provide a striking vision of the impact he attributes to jazz. For some time prior to the opening curtain, the audience hears music from an orchestra playing “a series of stirring jazz tunes popular during the year 1920.”13 Sitting at a table is John K. Carlton, father of the chief tragic figure of the play, Arthur Carlton. “He listens to the spirited jazz music and unconsciously keeps time to its infectious gaiety with his head, his fingers and his feet.”14 The curtain rises on a scene of typical country-club activity: A sunburnt ground attendant, in shirt-sleeves, the shirt rolled up and held by elastic bands, tools in hand, crosses from behind the club-house. As he hears the music his steps quicken and he disappears jigging awkwardly and humming the tune. Two small caddies appear . . . chatting and laughing. They also hear the music; one . . . [takes] the other by the shoulders [and] they jazz clumsily off. A waiter [approaches] with a tray on which is a tall glass of lemonade with straws. He goes to the table at which Carlton is seated, puts glass down and hands Carlton a check to sign. Whilst he is signing it the waiter jazzes unconsciously to the music.15
And so it goes for all characters in the play. When they hear jazz, its Svengalilike beat gets inside their psyche and rules the rhythm of their lives. Jazz may control the action of the play, but consuming liquor is a constant counterpart to the music. The stage business of drinking liquor dominates nearly every scene, giving the characters ample opportunity to talk about Prohibition, bootlegging, and harrowing scrapes with the law. Once again it is clear that Prohibition is having little effect on the commercial flow of alcohol. Everyone carries a handy pocket flask. The country-club clubhouse is uniquely arranged with different areas devoted to “wets” and “drys,” which Marian Hale’s father explains to Arthur Carlton’s father after they have greeted each other and exchanged pleasantries.16 Mr. Carlton sadly confirms his fear that his son has been drinking too much and learns that Arthur often gets belligerent when inebriated. He vows to take the young man away from the “drinking, jazzing set” and advises Hale to do the same with Marian. Hale laughs and replies: “There’s no harm in it. Young people will have their fun all the world over. It happens to be the kind they like this generation. It will pass and something else will take its place. Worse, maybe. . . . It’s always the way with restrictions. Ye don’t form character by ‘Don’ts’! I’ve never believed in them. Make blue-laws and it’s fun to break ’em.”17 { 126 }
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Later in the scene, the dance music erupts into a wild conglomerate of wailing horns supported by pulsing tom-toms, and the men find it difficult to talk over the noise. When it subsides, the young people enter from the dance floor. They produce flasks and mix cocktails; when they dance, they drink. The ambience of the moment generates an exchange of dialogue that provides a glimpse at Prohibition-era alcohol shopping and home brewing: NED: Good stuff. JIM: Fine. NED: How much? JIM: A hundred and fifty. NED: Good enough. Got some “five-star” last
week. Right off the boat.18
This is the first reference in the published American drama of the 1920s to rum-running—transporting liquor, sometimes brewed legally in another country, to sell illegally in the United States.19 Such contraband usually came by boat from overseas or by truck from Canada or Mexico. Often the rumrunners kept their ships anchored outside the three-mile limit of United States jurisdiction, thus forcing the customer to assume the entire risk for the illegal purchase. In 1926, rum-running was vital to the scenario of Sidney Howard’s Ned McCobb’s Daughter, which was also the first play to use as a key element of the plot the bootleggers’ and rumrunners’ quest for respectable storage places to secrete their goods. It was not the last. Later playwrights of the 1920s frequently spiced up their plots with melodramatic action stemming from bootleggers’ attempts to conceal and protect their merchandise. Sometimes they borrowed the shenanigans of actual rumrunners and bootleggers as reported in the press. Evidently, Manners believed his audience would understand the reference to rum-running without elaboration, since Ned does not pursue the subject. Relaxing with their drinks, the young people extol the country-club life: a round of golf followed by the joy of a highball; a set of tennis followed by the pick-me-up of a gin and seltzer; a bath, then a stimulating aperitif or a cocktail. Ned confesses that he now makes his own gin. When one of the young females turns up her nose at such “amateur stuff,” Ned bristles: “Nix on the ‘amateur stuff.’ You couldn’t tell it from ‘Gordon.’ Honest you couldn’t. [Arthur’s] crazy about it. He got the prescription from me and starts making it tomorrow.”20 Jim then lauds the taste of homemade beer. He reports that his chauffeur runs off a batch of brew on a regular schedule and sells a portion of it to Jim’s family. Jim quips, “He drives for me as an amusement, I think. To prove an alibi. I bet he makes enough on the side to buy a ‘Rolls-Royce.’ ”21 Jim has the floor, so he regales his friends with an anecdote about the ex{ 127 }
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citing and risky venture he endured while lugging home the five-star whiskey purchased at the rumrunner’s vessel. Preparing to board the train, Jim spotted a shadowy chap paying particular attention to the grip containing the dozen bottles of expensive booze and inferred straightaway that the fellow was a liquor agent. When he saw the man fall in behind him and nod knowingly to the gatekeeper as he slipped through without a ticket, Jim was more certain than ever that his hunch was right: A dozen at one hundred and fifty dollars rattling in the bag and the sleuth following, see? We got to the train. The porter stopped to ask me the number of my seat. I didn’t take the slightest notice of him. Just walked on ahead. Got on the platform of the car and looked back as though waiting for someone. Porter came up, “Leave it there,” I murmured, without looking at him, indicating the train-platform outside the parlor-car. Slipped some change into his hand just in time. Up came the sleuth. I went in and took my seat. He followed. Sat just across from me. NED: The dirty dog. JIM: I just sat and sat. Never even looked at him. Just felt he was there. When we got near Northchester I sauntered out on the platform. . . . I stood near the bag without moving or touching it. . . . When the train stopped I got down on the platform. NED: Without the ‘grip’!!!!??? JIM: Of course! The sleuth had followed and was standing in the doorway. . . . The signal was given. The train began to move. I jumped on the platform, grabbed the grip . . . Jumped off and stood panting, the precious bag grasped firmly in my fingers. NED: And the sleuth? JIM: Walked back into the car as the train disappeared.22 JIM:
Jim’s yarn verifies that, when purchasing liquor during Prohibition, customers seeking good whiskey must be prepared not only to cough up the spondulicks to pay inflated prices but also to take evasive action in order to transport the intoxicants without arousing suspicion. In order to avoid dealing with either scofflaw importers or clandestine still operators, more than a few hearty souls took up home brewing—mainly producing what passed for beer, wine, and gin from prescriptions traded around like recipes for zucchini casserole. The prospect of being arrested for purchasing, or just possessing, alcoholic beverages loomed constantly over the young, wealthy crowd with significant time to waste and a craving for alcohol to help them waste it. Procuring and drinking liquor figure prominently throughout The National Anthem. Manners takes no overt stand on the Prohibition question, but no doubt many drinkers in the world he creates wish for a speedy repeal of the { 128 }
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Volstead Act. It was almost incredulous to them that drinking a beer, sipping a glass of wine, or enjoying a cocktail—actions people had always associated with “having a good time”—had been criminalized by the United States government. Ironically, the laws passed to enforce the Eighteenth Amendment had not come close to eliminating the liquor trade. The National Anthem was produced scarcely two years after Prohibition laws went into effect, but Manners shows a thriving business in the trafficking of smuggled or home-brewed booze already firmly in place. The thirsty public’s demand for contraband liquor had quickly spawned a covert service industry whose dealers could readily amass huge sums of untaxable profit. Frances Nordstrom’s 1922 flop, Lady Bug, can serve as an example of a recurring treatment of Prohibition in the drama of the decade. The time of the story is 1922, and the characters drink liquor throughout the play, but the playwright makes no mention of Eighteenth Amendment restrictions.23 Booze happens. Dozens of other plays written between 1922 and the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment in 1933 followed a similar pattern. They were loud on the business of consuming alcohol but silent on the subject of Prohibition. The silence is so persistent that it becomes a powerful image of what a great many American dramatists of the period thought about the organized attempt to demonize liquor. To them Prohibition was a feckless, impudent, galling effort to legislate a particular brand of morality, so in the world they created for the stage they got their revenge—it simply did not exist. Still, a goodly number of dramatists at least commented on liquor control in their dramas, and others penned plays in which Prohibition was central to the plot. The number of plays that touched on the subject, in fact, increased in 1922 over the previous year. Most were comedies, and some were among the biggest hits of the period. For instance, May 1922 saw the opening of a nonsensical piece called Kempy, authored by veteran vaudeville headliner J. C. Nugent and his actor-son Elliott. The script had made the rounds of potential producers for several months without enticing action, because most who read it thought it was too dim-witted and provincial for the Broadway audience. The elder Nugent believed in it, however, so he coproduced it, cast his son and daughter in it, and played a role himself to cut down on costs. Kempy, with references to Prohibition scattered throughout, turned out to be one of the top successes of the season. Talk about Prohibition flowed easily and naturally in Kempy, which suggests that by 1924 society had accepted the reality of liquor control as routine— nothing special at all. People talk about bootlegging and other trappings of Prohibition in the same way they might talk about returning a book to the library. { 129 }
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For example, Ma, the matriarch of the central family of this play, her husband, Pa, and her married daughter, Jane (wife of Ben), are chatting: JA NE: Let’s go into the dining room Mother. I want a drink of something. M A : There’s some near-beer in there, Jane. JA NE: I don’t want beer if I can’t have the real. DA D: That’s some of Ben’s notions you’ve got. I hear lately you go to Mon-
roe’s Road House, both of you. JA NE: Well, I hope we do. DA D: [Yelling after her] I hope
Monroe gets hauled up for bootleggin’.24
Predating Prohibition, a roadhouse was an establishment located outside the city limits that served meals, had a bar for dispensing hard liquor and beer, and provided music suitable for dancing. Roadhouses that remained after Prohibition usually kept the same services except, of course, the sale of whiskey and beer had to be clandestine.25 Ben ignores Pa’s slur about the roadhouse and tells his father-in-law that he intends to make his “pile” so that he and Jane can live the high life in the small New Jersey town where the action of the play takes place. Evidently, living the high life there consists of having a bottle of beer and going to the picture shows—“and you have to scheme some to get the beer.”26 Folks who drank were forced to negotiate Prohibition roadblocks that had become a part of everyday life. Later, Kempy—a would-be architect who currently makes his living as a plumber—arrives to fix a leaky pipe just as the oldest daughter, Kate, is undergoing a crisis with her beau, a wealthy lawyer everyone wants her to marry. In a whirlwind of events, the lady and the plumber are on their way to be married within a half hour of his arrival. Later, reacting to this weird development, Duke (the spurned lawyer) and Ben are imbibing freely: BEN: Beauty of good stuff is—hic—you don’t feel it. DUK E: ’S all in being moderate. My first drink in two
years . . . but a quart don’t hurt anyone. BEN: Idea is to have it in your own home. I’m against the open saloon.27 Against it or not, word gets back to the family that Ben and Duke are at the roadhouse and inebriated: I knew that roadhouse would get ’em into trouble. Revenue officers will get ’em yet! JA NE: One of the officers is over there now! DA D:
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Officers who were supposed to enforce the laws of the Volstead Act were often shown to have the same desires, problems, and foibles as civilians. A long line of cops, detectives, inspectors, sheriffs, and G-men march through the plays; most are fond of illicit spirits and very frequently “on the take.” In Oh, Kay!, the popular 1926 musical by Guy Bolton and P. G. Wodehouse with music by George Gershwin, one character declares, “The difference between a boot legger and a Federal Inspector is that one of them wears a badge.”29 In early August during the 1922–23 season a well-known humorous journalist, Don Marquis, delighted Broadway audiences with his character comedy, The Old Soak. It was an engaging script that allowed Marquis to share his vision of how Prohibition and its enforcement laws affected people’s lives. His play was a character comedy, but his understanding of Prohibition was grounded in reality. Surely the “drunk with a heart of gold” cannot be far behind the “tart with a heart of gold” as a favorite character in American drama. Based on an imaginary being that first appeared in his newspaper column, Marquis’s hero was a winsome example of that stereotype, and the New York audience happily supported his play for a 423-performance run. The main character is Clem Hawley— known to everyone in his Long Island community as the Old Soak—who is now struggling to sustain his love-fest with alcohol. Prohibition has made liquor hard to find and caused its price to surge upward. Knowing that Clem is desperate for money, his wife unjustly accuses him of stealing stock certificates she has inherited. The real culprit is their spoiled, ne’er-do-well son, who needs the money to cover a shortfall in his accounts at the bank where he works. Hopeless and frantic, he sells the stock at a steep discount to their cousin Webster, a banker with a reputation in the community as a snobbish, prissy teetotaler. So far the plays discussed have shown characters from the wealthier classes dealing with Prohibition. The Old Soak is about another group of people— lower- to middle-class working folks who find it difficult to afford the inflated price the bootleggers demand for booze. Early in the play, Cousin Webster asks Matilda if Clem has been misbehaving again: M AT ILDA : [Sighing; COUSIN W EBST ER:
shrugging her shoulders] You know Clem, Webster. I had hopes that Prohibition would steady him down a
little. It’s made him worse, if anything. Clem used to work at times. Since Prohibition he’s been too busy hunting liquor.30
M AT ILDA :
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Unlike the wealthy young crowd in Nice People and The National Anthem, these characters have limited leisure time. Only by quitting work can Clem gain the extra hours he needs to find an affordable supply of liquor. That action, of course, would leave him without any source of income to pay for it—a classic dilemma. Clem comes home singing a religious song, and his wife leaps at the opportunity to criticize: M AT ILDA : I’d think you’d be ashamed to sing that song! OLD SOA K: Why so, Ma? I never had nothing against the
old-time religion. Three things I always held by—the old-time religion and calomel and straight whiskey.31
Clem is an expert at quoting the Bible, ad-libbing doctrine to bolster his position as he bickers playfully with Cousin Webster and Matilda. He chides Matilda for allowing her Prohibition friends to characterize him as a “mammal of iniquity.”32 During the ensuing raillery, Matilda’s and Webster’s lines echo the litany on the evils of strong drink the “drys” preached endlessly during the national discussion that led to ratifying the Eighteenth Amendment. Clem easily responds in kind. Whether intended or not, this exchange, and similar scenes from other dramas of the time, helped keep the conversation about Prohibition alive, continuing the public debate until the “wets” succeeded in getting the amendment repealed. Later, Clem is left alone. He retrieves a bottle of booze from its hiding place in the fireplace and pours a slug into a glass. He “puts [his] foot on [the] brass fender as if it were [a] rail of [a] bar, [and] drinks.”33 As he does so, he speaks as if to several cronies gathered around the bar, answering himself when appropriate. As Marquis says in his stage directions, Clem “yearns for old-time barroom sympathy and association” as he “peoples the room with the ghosts of old companions.”34 This sentimental scene suggests what such gathering places might have been like before Prohibition. To Clem and his ilk, the speakeasies simply did not provide the chummy camaraderie that was found in the preProhibition neighborhood tavern. Clearly, in the mind of this playwright, closing the taverns and banning the sale of bottled spirits also dampened the spirits of the soul. Conversely, taverns were the chief targets of the wrath of temperance organizations, and well before the advent of Prohibition, many states and cities passed laws banning them, though these laws were frequently not enforced. The Hawleys’ hired girl announces to Clem that Al, his bootlegger, has arrived. Samuel Leiter, an important scholar of New York theatrical productions, { 132 }
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remarks that the expression “Al’s here,” referring to the arrival of the bootlegger in The Old Soak, became au courant and that some speakeasies used it as a password.35 Al is a freelancer, dealing in whatever moonshine he can locate or make himself. With some trepidation, Clem asks to sample Al’s latest batch of “unrighteousness.” His friend produces a flask; Clem sniffs its contents and chokes. Both men are keenly aware that bad homebrew can blind or even kill an innocent tippler, so each refuses to take the first drink. Finally they solve the dilemma by sending the hired girl, flask in hand, to the kitchen to engage the family’s pet parrot, Peter, as the royal taster. While she is gone, Clem returns to his cache in the fireplace and begins to share the remainder of his precious bourbon with Al. Reprising the mood of Clem’s earlier soliloquy, the two friends drink and reminisce about the old tavern days: I kind o’ miss the old time bar room with all them pictures on the walls and brass cuspidors to cuspidate in—and fixin’s like Solomon in all his glory. AL: What I miss is the genteel company. It was an education to a bartender just listenin’ to some of the discussions. [A tipsy but happy parrot can be heard squawking “It’s always fair weather” over and over in the kitchen.] OLD SOA K: Peter certainly likes that hooch. But I can’t understand an old time bartender like you makin’ it. AL: I always got hope the next batch will turn out right.36 OLD SOA K:
The hired girl returns to tell them that, after two drinks of the home brew, Peter the parrot laid an egg. Clem pours a shot of whiskey for their female companion, and she also gets emotional, recollecting the “old times” when she was a chambermaid in a roadhouse. Al replies, gloomily, “We’ve all come down in the world since Prohibition.”37 They pass the bottle and finish it off. Tipsy, the three of them start to sing old songs, leading Clem to lament, “These here Prohibitionists is trying to abolish all the songs and beautiful poetry plumb out of the world.”38 Having now settled in to the constant reality of Prohibition, people began to understand the social changes it could engender. Clem and his drinking buds articulated the sentiments of a growing number of the American imbibing public. As the plot of The Old Soak unfolds, Marquis introduces another character from the bootlegging world—the silent partner. Often a pillar of the community, this weasel is eager to profit from selling outlawed whiskey while pretending to be a dyed-in-the-wool Prohibitionist. In this case the culprit is Clem’s cousin Webster, who is first seen in this secret role when he summons { 133 }
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Al to his office, after banking hours, to tempt him with a new approach to his business. No more rotgut home brew: Webster will provide the financial backing so Al and Jake Smith can purchase good whiskey and expand their tiny venture into a first-rate bootlegging operation. Webster tries to explain to Al what it means to be a silent partner: C OUSIN W EBST ER: After this, you will deal entirely with Jake Smith. A L: All right, Boss. I can see you might not want me comin’ here during
bankin’ hours. Nor any other time. I only let you come here this evening so that I could impress that on you. A L: We’re sort o’ partners, ain’t we? In this business? C OUSIN W EBST ER: You will take your orders from Jake Smith. I know nothing about the business he’s engaged in. A L: Jake and me calls you our silent partner. All three of us in the bootleggin’ game together. C OUSIN W EBST ER: Bootlegging? I don’t understand you at all. I am lending Jake Smith money to extend his trucking business. What he hauls in his trucks is no concern of mine.39 C OUSIN W EBST ER:
Al bristles at his new partner’s attitude, insisting that Webster needs him as much as he needs Webster. He explains: “You got the money and the political connections, and Jake’s got the trucks, but me, I got the experience. I know practically every drinking man in Nassau County.”40 Al goes on to give Webster a bit of business advice—he needs to “fix” the town constable, Johnnie Peters. “Johnnie drinks like a fish, but that wouldn’t keep him from making a pinch for the glory and credit of it,” Al declares.41 He pointedly explains to Webster that he will always stick by him as long as Webster reciprocates. With all the cards on the table, Al suggests they have a drink to seal the bargain. Webster adamantly refuses. Al is surprised and a bit disappointed: “You’re just turning bootlegger for the money and not on account of a friendly feelin’ for liquor? Well, I’ll be jiggered.”42 Unfortunately for Webster, Clem enters while Al is still present and instantly deduces the new business arrangement. He threatens to expose Webster to the community, thus coercing him into paying Matilda the true value of her stock. Clem’s world is back to normal, and no one is hurt by the solution. Alexander Woollcott called the play a “thoroughly routine, old-fashioned comedy of sentiment”; however, he found it contained an “abundant and delightful overlay of humor and charm and whimsicality that makes the plot and its gimcracks a mere prop for a genuine and hearty entertainment.”43 Burns
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Mantle selected The Old Soak as one of the year’s ten best plays despite its obvious rehashing of familiar material. Filled with sentiment and hokum, The Old Soak still paints a picture of bootlegging commensurate with the historical record. Associated with nearly every bootlegger was a rumrunner. Behind the two of them was often someone who provided capital for the enterprise. Like Cousin Webster, this person might be a respected citizen of the community who operated in secret. Later, organized crime infiltrated bootlegging and rum-running, muscling aside or simply taking over community-based operations and frequently eliminating the need for a silent partner. The involvement of gangsters assured that bootlegged booze would become more and more expensive. Those willing to assume the risks attached to selling it were making a ton of money. In October 1922, Abby Merchant’s comedy The Ever Green Lady opened in New York, lasting a mere fortnight. Evidently, the few people who saw it were only mildly entertained, but it gave its audience another “reason” to dislike Prohibition. The story concerned an Irish washerwoman in her seventies who is made to retire. Not ready to give up work, she crafts a still out of an idle washboiler and runs off a batch of the poteen she learned to make when she lived among the Irish peat bogs before immigrating to America. Simultaneously, a fatal epidemic of influenza is sweeping through her tenement, and the illegal joy juice turns out to be the very medicine needed to cure it. An ambitious district attorney is prepared to raid the still and run everyone in when he himself comes down with the flu. The Ever Green Lady gives him a liberal dose of the hooch and he survives. In this comic treatment, moonshine is depicted as a harmless, curative substance, yet the Volstead Act would blindly punish those who make it, withholding it from ill folks desperate for its healing powers (the deadly influenza pandemic of 1918 would have still been in the minds of the audience). Baaad Prohibition—for shame!44 Back in the real world, bootlegging had become an increasingly attractive, if extralegal, cash cow that was bound to motivate the professional criminals and major crime families who had moved in on these operations to strengthen their stranglehold on the business. Coming from the gangster world, they relentlessly took over operation after operation, bringing with them the tools of their trade: guns of all kinds and organized hoodlums ready to use them. The outcome of the conflict between them and the amateur entrepreneurs who had initially developed the business was inevitable. An early treatment of this change in the business of subverting Prohibi-
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tion came in November 1922 with the opening of The Bootleggers, a play by William A. Page that stayed on the boards about twice as long as The Ever Green Lady. It told the tale of a booze war between the King of the Bootleggers on the West Side and his chief rival from the East Side. They seize and reseize each other’s consignments of merchandise, usually while it is still beyond the threemile limit in international waters and not subject to national, state, or municipal laws. They then fight crooked enforcement officers and double-crossing policemen while trying to deliver the hooch to clandestine storage sites. The entire system appears to be corrupt in this treatment, but all ends happily when the bootleggers agree to give over to the Anti-Saloon League what is left of the disputed shipment of scotch that started the fight. Of course they keep the cool million they have already turned in profit. Violent conflicts like this one were becoming familiar in the plots of plays of the period, and similar clashes between rivals were all too regularly reported in newspapers throughout the land. Still, with few exceptions, playwrights who wrote about Prohibition continued to treat it comically. Prolific playwright Owen Davis’s play The Haunted House (1924) found room for a Prohibition sight gag. In one scene, after a police officer has fainted for the umpteenth time, a woman says she needs some whiskey to revive him and complains that Prohibition has limited one’s ability to cope with fainting. “Can’t someone find him a stimulant?” she asks, whereupon four men simultaneously produce a flask from their pockets.45 A pocket flask was carried proudly as a symbol of an individual’s flouting the Prohibition laws. Prohibition brought about changes that sometimes served as an important part of either the backstory or the plot of a drama. Such is the case in Sidney Howard’s fine offering They Knew What They Wanted, which opened in November 1924. The chief character in the play, an aging Italian immigrant who has settled in the Napa Valley of California, has become a wealthy man because of Prohibition. He raises grapes, and they have soared in value since the advent of the amendment.46 The next year Howard was back with a drama called Lucky Sam McCarver, which dipped and turned through so many unmotivated plot devices that confused audiences failed to support it. One story lurking in the mishmash is of interest to this investigation. It concerns the problems of a self-made speakeasy owner who is obliged to grease the palms of a federal agent and a local cop so they will overlook his trafficking in outlawed liquor.47 The cop on the take became a familiar and recurring character in plays about Prohibition. For another example, one of the sons in Lewis Beach’s The Goose Hangs High (also 1924) brings his father a bottle of booze for Christmas. Father is wary of breaking the law, but his son assures him that a policeman { 136 }
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accompanied the bootlegger from whom he made the purchase.48 To judge by the drama, bribing the representatives of the law-and-order community assigned to enforce Prohibition was standard operating procedure. If officers remain “clean” and are shown as being eager to arrest perpetrators, they usually come to a bad or comic end. The 1925–26 season provided Still Waters, a play that bucked the overwhelming trend toward comic treatment of Prohibition. Although a sixteenperformance flop, this wordy drama by the venerable Augustus Thomas seemed to support those who advocated rekindling the debate about the Volstead Act. Thomas, a Missouri-born playwright, had been popular around the turn of the century but had not been seen in New York for several years. He was obviously opposed to Prohibition, and he spared no effort in exposing the hypocrisy of those who paid lip service to it when it did them political good, then stopped on their way home to buy booze from their bootleggers. The play is about a United States senator who, struggling to get renominated, must defend his record of firm opposition to Prohibition. During the course of the play he cites many reasons for his position, but a member of his staff summarizes the gist of the senator’s argument in a press release. The staffer is dictating: “Five years in which we have had millions wasted on impossible enforcement. [Pause.] A yearly loss of revenues equaling a third of the national expenses—[Pause.] Growing disrespect for all law—[Pause.] Increased crime—[Pause.] A demoralization of our young people of both sexes—all convince me—[Pause.]—that Thomas Jefferson was right in saying ‘the use of good wines by any people tends to their sobriety—their morality and their contentment.’ I want to change the Volstead Act.”49 In these few lines, Thomas has neatly put forward some of the most compelling arguments against Prohibition. Unfortunately, he takes what seems like several hours of turgid dialogue to turn these arguments into a play. When he finishes, everything is so convoluted that, as Arthur Hornblow put it, “Even trained politicians in the audience were puzzled to explain it.”50 Atkinson called the play a “protracted jeremiad at prohibition” set on a “somewhat rickety framework of American politics.”51 Nevertheless, the script remains the sole drama of the period that treats the debate seriously. In doing so, it provides a record of the clashing philosophies and ingrained assertions that led to the enactment of the Eighteenth Amendment. The same talking points were resurfacing in a struggle that would lead to its repeal. Most people—except for the hard-line “drys”—considered drinking liquor to be a social act that accompanied such good times as getting together with friends, listening to music, and dancing. Little wonder, then, that unlawful { 137 }
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places to purchase and drink prohibited intoxicants, eat, dance, and have fun soon dotted the landscape. These “speakeasies” thrived as long as Prohibition was the law of the land, and playwrights began to use them as a recurring topic of conversation in their dramas—and sometimes for their settings. Of all the plays in which the speakeasy was pertinent to their plot, theme, or action, Broadway (1926), by Philip Dunning and George Abbott, was by far the most successful. If it were not for the amazing, tireless run of Abie’s Irish Rose, Dunning and Abbott’s production, with its solid record of 603 performances, would have been the box-office success of the 1920s. The big hit spawned several spin-offs that tried to capitalize on its popularity, such as Willard Mack’s The Noose (1926) and Dunning’s own The Night Hostess (1928). The Noose was so much like Broadway that on opening night its author delivered a second-act curtain speech in which he laid out a timeline for writing the play that proved his concept predated the mega-hit.52 The accoutrements and habitués of the sleazy world of speakeasies provide the environment and the characters for this imaginative melodrama. Broadway was set in a multipurpose space that served as a combination greenroom and rehearsal room of a New York City speakeasy called the Paradise Club. The space also provided access to a private party room, and one corner of the stage was devoted to the club owner’s office. The stage was furnished with a piano, a poker machine, a wall phone, and a number of red chairs.53 Since the environment was important to the action of the play, the playwrights described it in some detail: “There is a carpeted stairway at right, a heavy oak door with a grated slide peek-hole in it, just below the stairs; at the back double doors, now closed, lead to a private party room; on the left, double doors open into a hallway running at right angles—the hall is three feet wide and across it swinging doors lead to the cabaret proper.”54 The swinging doors and the two sets of double doors allow for quick and interesting exits and entrances, and the peephole supports the mysterious nature of the setting. Abbott, the director as well as the coauthor, demanded precise execution of the snappy movement and photographically accurate business for which the production was praised. Having a private party room as a part of the main setting allowed Abbott great flexibility in the number of characters he could have onstage for any particular scene. The public area allowed space for a large ensemble and permitted the director to mingle characters from the show-business world and the gangster world. The dramatis personae range from showgirls to bootleggers to cops to hoofers. In other plays of the period, speakeasies and the people who kept them
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going primarily served as incidental background material. Broadway, however, was about these personages, so it introduced audiences to a panoply of welldeveloped characters not previously seen in the drama. Even familiar Prohibition character types came to life in a different way because the play was written from their point of view. The Paradise Club’s owner, a mercenary Greek named Nick Vernis, wants folks to consider his place a cut above the sleazy speakeasies of the city (Nick prefers to call it a nightclub), but he is too close with his money to hire the firstline dancers and to purchase the grade of booze necessary to elevate the reputation of his business. As a result, the chorus girls and entertainers we meet in his establishment are either young talent waiting for a break or fading performers on the way down. Much of the interest and excitement of this play stems from its backstage view of how these people work and pass the time. For example, the play begins with a rehearsal of the chorus line: [As they dance] Hey, straighten your line—you—[To Ann who gets in line]—straighten it up—Now listen, don’t forget to smile, Pearl—some pep. [Girls continue to dance in a straightened line.] [Nick sings] Shake it, shake it. [Shouts at first step of kangaroo step] No, no! Stop! [They all stop guiltily.] Pearl, watch what you’re doing. PE AR L: Go fry an egg.55 NIC K:
A bit later, Joe the bartender brings Lil, one of the chorus girls, a drink from the bar, apologizing for taking so long to do it. “That’s all right,” says Lil, “the longer it stands, the better it is. It was only made this afternoon.”56 Evidently, Nick has been purchasing his liquor supply from a local, incompetent brewer. This observation is soon reinforced when one of Nick’s bootleggers, Steve Crandall, accompanied by his gunsels Dolph and Porky, stops by to sell Nick a portion of a truckload of first-rate liquor he has acquired: NIC K: Didn’t know you had any boat coming. PORK Y: We didn’t. DOLPH: But Scar Edwards did. [They laugh.] NIC K: This high-jacking is no good. . . . Some day PORK Y: Let Steve do the worrying about that.57
you get in trouble.
Steve pressures Nick to upgrade his stock of liquor. Nick is reluctant: “If I take booze you hijacked off Scar Edwards, he’ll come down here and raise hell.”58 Steve assures Nick that he will “take care” of Scar. Nick doesn’t like the sound of that veiled threat, but he needs to stay in Steve’s good graces. He whines:
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here talking to you if I thought you wasn’t? NIC K: But the Edwards’ gang might shoot things up. ST E V E: They ain’t got a monopoly on it, have they?59 Nick is nervous and scared at that kind of talk, but he acquiesces, telling Steve to count him in. Later the same evening, Scar himself appears at the Paradise, pushing for a showdown with Steve. In a speech that gives insight into various aspects of the gang’s approach to business, he tells Steve in no uncertain terms to stay away from the territory above 125th Street: “We stocked that territory and we got a right to it. My mob worked for four years to get things the way we got ’em—and nobody—get that—nobody is goin’ to cut in from down here and spoil a nickel’s worth of it. You hi-jacked another truck—[Steve rises]—load last night. Yes, and you been spillin’ more jack round for protection than we can afford. We ain’t never come down here to horn in on your Broadway trade, but you’re ruinin’ our game up there and I’m here to tell you that you can’t get away with it.”60 Scar also smirks that he knows Steve “knocked off ” O’Connell, another rival bootlegger, and threatens to squeal to the cops if Steve’s trucks don’t stay in their own territory. As tension mounts, Dolph grabs Scar, who turns to him and demands, “Take your hands off me or I’ll bust your god-damn face. You guys can’t put me out of business.”61 The playwrights’ description of the activity that follows is pithy but chilling: “[Scar is facing Dolph. Steve is in back of Scar. Steve quickly pulls out his gun, presses it against Scar’s back and fires once. Scar pitches forward. Dolph catches him in his arms. Scar’s hat falls off.]”62 They put his hat back on his head and “walk” the dead man out of the building. These brief samples of dialogue and business from early in the play illustrate the chief contributions of Broadway to our knowledge of how Prohibition was pictured on the New York stage. By approaching the subject from the point of view of characters actively involved in distributing and selling booze, the playwrights show another side of the impact of the Eighteenth Amendment on this aspect of our social history. Enormous profits had lured seasoned criminal gangs and old-line crime families to the business. These elements tended to operate openly, ignoring or “owning” the law and brazenly turning to extortion and murder whenever necessary to hold their precious “territory.” After bumping off Scar, rising crime boss Steve Crandall spends the remainder of the play attempting to outwit the cops who are trying to solve the murder. Although they are pictured in this play as more or less competent public servants, during the hours the gumshoes spend in the Paradise Club working { 140 }
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the Edwards case they never pose a threat to the brisk trade in contraband whiskey that continues all around them. From the above brief excerpts, one can easily discern that the characters in Broadway speak dialogue laced with vivid slang that rings true for these people in these circumstances. The play exudes the fecund social history of the underbelly of the period. Audiences at Broadway were treated to a fast-moving, detailed picture of the inner workings of a 1920s speakeasy and the people who made it tick. Most critics saw Broadway as a gangster melodrama, and a good one. Its success catapulted both Dunning and Abbott into prominence. The relentless pace of the show, attributed to Abbott’s directing, set the standard for the genre for years to come.63 As mentioned earlier, several plays, including Dunning’s Sweet Land of Liberty (1929), tried to copy the successful formula of Broadway, but none found a way to repeat the magic. Preston Sturges’s Strictly Dishonorable (1929) came close. Like Broadway, it took place in a New York speakeasy (on Forty-ninth Street), but the setting for this play, rather than being an environment for all things evil, provides a warm circle of support for the characters. Its aura is similar to that of the recent television show Cheers, which was set in a bar where “everybody knows your name.” Broadway and other realistic dramas using the speakeasy as a background tended to expose the dark side of the joint. Time and again, dramatists assert that the most popular places for distributing unlawful booze double as dens of crime, vice, and corruption. In Strictly Dishonorable, however, all regular customers of the speakeasy and its owner appear to be nice, reputable people. Indeed, the two men who will be of greatest interest to the plot of this sophisticated comedy are a sitting judge and a tenor from the Metropolitan Opera. They befriend an innocent southern girl abandoned in the speakeasy by her brutish boyfriend, who is evidently searching for someone with whom he can pick a fight. The plot swirls around their attempts to take care of the girl and a growing romance between her and the tenor. Atkinson called Strictly Dishonorable “a well nigh perfect comedy.”64 He went on to praise the playwright’s “deft, amusing lines” as well as his ability to create “characters with much understanding.”65 The play ran for a whopping 563 performances and was selected by Mantle as a Best Play. It was a clever concoction and deserved its reputation. The title of the play was perhaps more titillating than accurate. Sturges, who was to become a famous film writer/director, said he took it from his reply to a nubile young lady he was courting who asked him to declare his intentions.66 In crafting the play he also concocted an image of the speakeasy { 141 }
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that was out of tune with the prevailing picture. Nevertheless, Sturges’s speakeasy is the perfect place for the action of his play to take place. By this time in the life of the Eighteenth Amendment—to judge by the plays of the 1920s— law enforcement agencies rarely attempt to close the unlawful clubs. Without this constant worry, some undoubtedly reverted to the personality of the old neighborhood tavern. The production of Frank McGrath’s Carry Nation in 1932 served as a sort of summary of the decade-long struggle against intoxicating beverages. Of course, Nation’s steady and unrelenting campaign against saloons and liquor predated Prohibition (she died in 1911), but McGrath’s theatrical examination of her life came at a time when the debate over its efficacy was returning to the public view. Structuring his play episodically, McGrath creates dramatic snapshots of various stages of Nation’s life, beginning with the time, at a Kansas prayer meeting, when she received divine instructions to help rid the world of alcoholic spirits. God called her, and she devoted her adult life—and her axe—to the task of destroying taverns and smashing up stocks of liquor wherever she found it. (One should recall that saloons were illegal in Kansas at that time, but city officials often disregarded their existence, making it awkward and embarrassing for them to prosecute Nation.)67 She stoically also suffered indignities such as being tossed into jail and losing the affection of her husband, but she never wavered from her appointed task. Finally she is shown as a pathetic figure, a mad old woman shouting defiantly at hecklers, a metaphor, perhaps, of the troubled life of Prohibition itself.68 As the decade of the 1920s passed into history, it became apparent to the astute observer that Prohibition was a practical failure and had been for several years. More and more politicians were boldly joining the forces with the “wets.” Shortly after his first inauguration as president of the United States, Franklin Roosevelt asked Congress to modify the Volstead Act to allow the manufacture and sale of 3.2 beer. Congress quickly did so, and many speakeasies, happy to quit their dealings with the underworld, changed overnight from illegitimate liquor bars to legal beer taverns. The involvement of organized crime in the illicit sale of liquor to the public was certainly one of the primary reasons Prohibition failed. The violence associated with such involvement constantly made the headlines of the newspapers and furnished ready-made stories for novelists and playwrights. For instance, the public had been totally shocked by the excesses of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in Chicago, where henchmen from Al Capone’s gang gunned down a half dozen members of “Bugs” Moran’s gang plus an innocent bystander. It
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became clear, according to Herbert Asbury, that Prohibition could be enforced “only if all of the forty-eight states cooperated without stint and regardless of expense.”69 The cost of such enforcement was beyond the capacity of the country. At one time the Justice Department tried to add up the cost of the colossal failure. Thomas M. Coffey says: “[They] discovered that the federal government alone had spent $129 million in the attempt to enforce it. Ninety-two federal agents and 178 civilians had been killed in acts of violence against each other. More than a half-million people had been convicted in federal courts for offenses against the liquor laws. In addition, millions of others had repeatedly broken these laws, thereby encouraging in themselves and the people around them a diminution of respect for all law.”70 Happy to see these numbers, the “wets” then tied them to the Depression, which struck the final death knell for Prohibition. As Asbury noted, “Their trained economists shouted that [the depression] was altogether due to prohibition, and who was to prove it wasn’t?”71 The end came quickly. President Roosevelt signed the Twenty-first Amendment to the Constitution into law, making the Eighteenth the only constitutional amendment ever repealed. It is interesting to note that when Roosevelt proclaimed to the country that the amendment to repeal had been ratified, he simultaneously asked that states not authorize the return of the saloon.72 During his four terms in office he was extremely successful in persuading the country to his point of view—witness his famous “fireside chats.” He failed this time; however, several states banned the sale of liquor-by-the-drink well into the 1960s. Once again, the drama proves to be a reliable purveyor of social and intellectual history, though certainly not the only one. All the popular arts—novels, songs from Tin Pan Alley, movies—contributed creations that dealt with Prohibition in one way or another. Prohibition ranked high among the topics of interest treated most often in the drama and the other arts during the 1920s, but a tempting panoply of subjects tantalizes the social historian, including alcoholism, business and advertising, crime and criminals, the developing drug problem, the place of the press in society, mental illness and the treatment of the mentally ill, the military and antiwar sentiment, religion and spiritualism, and the image of women in the post-suffrage era.73 Using “Prohibition” from Leiter’s list of topics,74 and adding “bootlegger” and “speakeasy,” produces a total of fifty-eight plays performed on Broadway from 1920 to 1933 that touched on this subject matter. The majority were performed from 1926 through 1928, by which time it began to appear inevitable
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that the Eighteenth Amendment would be repealed. A character in Dunning’s play The Night Hostess (1928) allows that Prohibition must still be enforced somewhere, but he doesn’t know for sure where. Constraints of time and space have limited the number of plays that can be selected as evidence for this essay. The plays I discuss are representative of the list Leiter gleaned from all dramas produced on Broadway during the decade. In popularity they range from near “oysters” (plays that open and close the same night) to productions that mustered prodigious runs (Broadway, for example). Although few were written with the purpose of mounting a polemic against Prohibition, playwrights of the 1920s kept the argument alive by dramatizing its major disputed contentions and by peopling their plays with recognizable characters from the Prohibition era, including bootleggers, rumrunners, cops (both crooked and straight), silent partners, big crime bosses and their assorted henchmen, speakeasy owners and operators, moonshiners, dance hall floozies, and on and on. I also attempted to select plays in which references to Prohibition were a significant aspect of the work or those that added important detail to the developing picture of the Volstead years. The drama was overwhelmingly anti-Prohibition. Early references to the amendment noted how easily the drinking public circumvented the attempts of Prohibition to banish alcohol from existence and focused on the rising entrepreneurship of the bootlegger. As the dramatists saw it, the hurdles posed by Prohibition were never insurmountable, and if punishment were to be meted out, they generally handed it to the bootleggers without condemning liquor. To them, Prohibition had turned the commerce of liquor, not its consumption, into a vice. Taken as a body of evidence, the plays undergird a well-rounded and intriguing picture of Prohibition and its era. The playwrights united with a majority of Americans in a rebellion that eventually dismantled this attempt to legislate an official morality for the country. As Norman H. Clark said, they refused “to honor a law held almost universally in contempt.”75 The “bold experiment” breathed its last.
Notes 1. 2.
United States Constitution, amend. XVIII, sec. 1. Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s (New York: Harper and Row, 1931), 1.
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7. 8.
9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.
Tice L. Miller, Entertaining the Nation: American Drama in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2007), xv. Ibid. See Norman H. Clark, Deliver Us from Evil: An Interpretation of American Prohibition (New York: Norton, 1976), 140. Usually, but not always, the word Prohibition is capitalized when used to refer to the laws, programs, and activities that surrounded the implementation of the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. When quoting, I follow the choice of the source. George Middleton and Guy Bolton, The Cave Girl (New York: Samuel French, 1925), 14. The term bootlegger, meaning “one who traffics illicitly in (liquor),” had been around since 1889, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. Originally referring to one who literally hides contraband in one’s boot, the term became widely used in the 1920s. Harry Wagstaff Gribble, March Hares (Cincinnati: Stewart Kidd Company, 1923), 38. J. Brooks Atkinson, New York Times, April 11, 1928, 25. Rachel Crothers, Expressing Willie; Nice People; 39 East: Three Plays (New York: Brentano’s, 1924), 86. Ibid., 101. J. Hartley Manners, The National Anthem (New York: George H. Dora, 1922), 15. Ibid. Ibid., 16. Ibid., 19–20. Ibid., 26–27. Ibid., 30. This word had been around for years and was very much in use during colonial days when the rum trade flourished in the colonies. Manners, The National Anthem, 31. Ibid., 32. Ibid., 37–39. Frances Nordstrom, Lady Bug (New York: Samuel French, 1935). J. C. Nugent and Elliott Nugent, Kempy (New York: Samuel French, 1924), 16. Of course, the roadhouse was kin to the “juke joint” and the “honky-tonk.” Nugent and Nugent, Kempy, 17. Ibid., 67. Ibid., 98. Quoted by Brooks Atkinson, “The Play,” New York Times, November 9, 1926, 31. Don Marquis, The Old Soak (New York: Samuel French, 1926), 8. Ibid., 12. Ibid., 13. Ibid., 16. Ibid. Samuel L. Leiter, ed., The Encyclopedia of the New York Stage, 1920–1930, N–Z (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985), 666–67. Marquis, The Old Soak, 32–33. Ibid., 33. Ibid., 35.
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L A R RY D. C L A RK 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.
45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.
63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69.
Ibid., 77. Ibid., 78. Ibid. Ibid., 79. Alexander Woollcott, “The Play,” New York Times, August 23, 1922, 14. The Ever Green Lady was not published. This description was gleaned from the newspaper reviews, especially John Corbin, “The Play,” New York Times, October 12, 1922, 25. The same pattern holds for all unpublished plays. Owen Davis, The Haunted House (New York: Samuel French, 1948), 61. Sidney Howard, They Knew What They Wanted (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page, 1925). Sidney Howard, Lucky Sam McCarver (New York: Scribner, 1926). Lewis Beach, The Goose Hangs High (Boston: Little, Brown, 1924), 67. Augustus Thomas, Still Waters (New York: S. French, 1926), 32. Hornblow quoted in Leiter, Encyclopedia of the New York Stage, 866. Brooks Atkinson, New York Times, March 2, 1926, 26. Unsigned review, New York Times, October 21, 1926, 23. Philip Dunning and George Abbott, Broadway (New York: Samuel French, 1929), 5. Ibid. Ibid., 6. Ibid., 14. Ibid., 21. Ibid. Ibid., 22. Ibid., 26. Ibid., 28. Some scholars attribute Abbott’s Broadway directing style to the insistent and dynamic demands of powerful producer Jed Harris. At any rate, Abbott used versions of this style, which featured breakneck pace, controlled but speedy tempo, and complex, realistic detail in business and characterization, in countless plays he directed during his centenarian lifespan. For an interesting view of Harris’s contribution to the final product of Broadway see E. James Zeiger, “Broadway, the Elements of Success: Jed Harris’s 1926 Production,” in Art, Glitter, and Glitz: Mainstream Playwrights and Popular Theatre in 1920s America, ed. Arthur Gewirtz and James J. Kolb (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2004), 95–106. Some sources also credit Dunning, but the production bore the marks that came to identify Abbott’s directing. Brooks Atkinson, New York Times, September 19, 1929, 37. Ibid. Leiter, Encyclopedia of the New York Stage, 873. Clark, Deliver Us from Evil, 81. Based on descriptions in a review of Carry Nation by B. C., New York Times, October 31, 1932, 18. Herbert Asbury, The Great Illusion: An Informal History of Prohibition (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1950), 318.
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PROH I BI T ION ON TH E A M E R IC A N STAGE 70. Thomas M. Coffey, The Big Thirst: Prohibition in America, 1920–1933 (New York: Norton, 1975), 316. 71. Asbury, The Great Illusion, 328. 72. Ibid., 330. 73. Leiter, Encyclopedia of the New York Stage, 1119–46. 74. Ibid., 1139. 75. Clark, Deliver Us from Evil, 209.
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\ The Tricks of Lun Mimesis and Mimicry in John Rich’s Performance and Conception of Pantomimes —M ARC M ART INE Z
The sharp rivalry between the two patent theatres of Lincoln’s Inn Fields and Drury Lane and the influence of that rivalry on the rise of the pantomime in the early eighteenth century has been thoroughly investigated by theatre historians who focused on the commercial function of these entertainments in the managerial system of the 1720s.1 In their desire to account for John Rich’s superiority at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, critics have mainly concentrated on the two Faustus afterpieces, which started the craze for pantomimes: they probed the reasons for the tremendous success of Rich’s version, The Necromancer (December 20, 1723), which outshone Thurmond’s Harlequin Doctor Faustus (November 26, 1723) at Drury Lane.2 But theatre scholars have highlighted, almost exclusively, the commercial reasons that prompted the manager of Lincoln’s Inn Fields to promote illegitimate drama in his shaping of the repertory. From this strongly biased perspective, they have been tempted to regard Rich as the representative of a fresh breed of professional entrepreneurs at the head of a new rising leisure industry who could not but pander to the uneducated tastes of his patrons. From an examination of the performance records over the whole period of Rich’s tenure as manager of Lincoln’s Inn Fields (1714–32) and Covent Garden (1732–61), a distinctive pattern seems to emerge. Between the creation of the two Faustus afterpieces and 1750, Rich produced eight new pantomimes, as opposed to twenty at Drury Lane.3 Five were devised in the 1720s;4 The Royal Chace (January 23, 1736) and Orpheus and Eurydice (December 12, 1739) were staged in the 1730s; and his last piece, The Fair, opened on February 7, 1750. Lin{ 148 }
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coln’s Inn Fields and Covent Garden, unlike Drury Lane, relied on a restricted stock of pantomimes that were constantly revived and revised, sometimes with extensive alterations. The managerial pattern that dominated the 1720s was renewed between 1750 and 1757, a time of intensified competition between the rival companies. At Drury Lane, Henry Woodward mounted seven new pantomimes while Rich capitalized on five surefire draws repeated from earlier seasons: The Necromancer, which had been performed regularly but was dropped after the 1752–53 season; Perseus and Andromeda, Apollo and Daphne, The Royal Chace, and Harlequin Sorcerer, the last of which, after twenty years, was magnificently revamped on February 11, 1752.5 Furthermore, Rich’s pantomimes, which had the longest opening runs, totaled more performances between 1723 and 1760: they played 777 nights at Lincoln’s Inn Fields and Covent Garden, compared to 508 at Drury Lane.6 These differing policies prove that the audience was content to see the same pieces over and over again at Rich’s theatres while Drury Lane tried desperately to produce new shows whose popularity never reached the phenomenal records at the rival house. Rich’s undeniable business acumen, however, did not preclude aesthetic motivations. In actual fact, Rich straddled the roles of entrepreneur and performer, and his double capacity is symbolized by his dual identity, assuming the function of theatre manager under his patronymic name of Rich and featuring as Harlequin under the pseudonym of Lun.7 I argue that Rich’s theatrical flair and Lun’s performing talent as a mime combined to devise a specific type of entertainment: the dynamics and aesthetics of his spectacular afterpieces, which brought together an operatic, mythological plot and a dumb harlequinade, provided the perfect vehicle for his acting style and the ideal format for his conception of the theatrical show. In a gesture of irreverence, Rich hoisted Harlequin onto the legitimate stage and gave him a prominent place in the dramatic repertory of the period. The ambivalence of Harlequin, an offspring of the fairs fostered by the manager of a patent theatre, is duplicated in the ambivalent response generated by Rich, both lambasted for the absurdity of his shows and praised for the excellence of his acting.8 The promotion of an acting style that was grounded in popular entertainment could not be achieved without upsetting the dramatic and theatrical codes that had long been established on the London stage. The questioning of these traditional paradigms is subsumed in the burlesque impulse that animates Rich’s theatrical practice. He had completed the best part of his acting career when David Garrick, craving social and artistic recognition, brought about a sea change in the conception of stage performance and the public image of the actor. Rich’s theatrical profession together with his eccentric personality placed him at the periphery of social re{ 149 }
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spectability while his aesthetic choices positioned him at the margin of dramatic decorum and cultural legitimacy. Recapturing the general flavor of an actor’s style is a delicate and speculative venture. The attempt to reconstruct an ephemeral performance is doubly complicated in the case of dumb shows. On the one hand, the absence of scripted dialogue and the conciseness of the few extant scenarios make it difficult to work out the true nature of this motley type of performance, which required special dancing, acrobatic, and miming skills. On the other hand, since these entertainments were held in low critical esteem, they received, at best, cursory treatment in the theatrical publications of the time: as the century progressed, the performing style of serious actors was extensively documented, while no detailed description of pantomime acting is available. Theatre historians have suggested that Rich turned to dumb shows after his failure at serious acting.9 This assumption reinforces contemporary cultural prejudices against pantomimes, since it implies that, far from making a deliberate aesthetic choice, Rich considered comic mime as second best to tragic acting. And yet, although the supporters of legitimate drama scourged these popular afterpieces, they acknowledged the vitality of the performance at a time when serious stage practice had solidified into immutable stereotypes. As early as 1724, at the peak of the pantomimic craze, a reviewer notes: “all Taste and Relish for the manly and sublime Pleasures of the Stage are as absolutely lost and forgotten, as though such Things had never been . . . the Audience languishes through the whole Representation, and discovers the utmost Impatience till Harlequin enters, to relieve them from the Fatigue of Sense, Reason, and Method, by his most incomprehensible Dexterities.”10 The phrase “incomprehensible Dexterities” compounds the ambivalence of these pieces, which, albeit meaningless and nonsensical, required a specific talent which never failed to win acclaim from the audience. In a letter dated November 6, 1733, Aaron Hill attributes the increase in pantomime productions to the “dull, dry, drawling monotony of declamatory stiffness”: “Hence, all these light dumb insults upon common sense, the Pantomimes and Entertainments, which are become so shamefully necessary . . . when these mountebank managers have physic’d us into a lethargy, they clap Vinegar to our noses, in hope to twinge us into a recovery of our senses.”11 The reference to the “mountebank managers” clearly suggests a direct debt to the rough-and-tumble style of the low comedian. The foreign origin of the English pantomime, which was stigmatized in the nationalistic discourse of its detractors, should not eclipse the vernacular traditions of the London fair performers and of Restoration farceurs, through whom the
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Italian and French performing techniques had been filtered. The influence of the latter, which has been largely played down, affords tantalizing glimpses into what Rich’s performances must have been like. With his Scaramouche a Philosopher, Harlequin a Schoolboy, Bravo and Magician (1677), Edward Ravenscroft has been given credit for contributing to the introduction of commedia dell’arte characters and their specific acting style into English drama. A few years later, a number of indigenous farces show that English performers had, by that time, absorbed into their stage playing the materials and strategies of foreign actors, including mime, dance, and improvisation. These plays, for the most part devised by comedians, were acting pieces designed to capitalize on the low-comedy performing talents of their authors and emphasized physical action, disguise, and trickery. Ravenscroft’s Dame Dobson; or the Cunning Woman (1683) contains a scene that prefigures stage effects in the Faustus pantomimes: a conjuring woman dismembers a carcass that is then joined together and walks about the stage. Thomas Jevon, a performer of Harlequin,12 who had started as a dancing master, staged an extremely popular farce, The Devil of a Wife; or, a Comical Transformation (1686); magic, which was to be the mainspring of Harlequin’s actions in Rich’s pantomimes, already played an important part.13 In 1701 a character in John Corey’s comedy A Cure for Jealousie anticipates the recurrent complaints leveled a few years later against Rich’s shows: “Farce, Song, and Dance have got the Soveraign Sway. Farce writers and Songsters are now the most fam’d for Wit, and Jack Puddings for Acting.”14 The proficiency of these low-comedy performers appealed to a wide variety of spectators: even Richard Steele is willing to admit, if reluctantly, the delight he takes in William Bullock and William Pinkethman’s slapstick comedy: “those excellent Players . . . please me more, but with a different Sort of Delight, than that which I receive from those Grave Scenes of Brutus and Cassius, or Antony and Ventidius.”15 Rich exploited the raw materials of these stage farces and adapted all the performing techniques of this popular tradition to fit his talents for low comedy and mime. The tripping, beating, and gross physical indignities pertaining to farce composed the main action of the harlequinade, in which the chase involving Harlequin, Columbine, Pantaloon, and his clown was the crude center of comic horseplay, constantly vilified by the fiercest critics of the pantomime. In an anonymous pamphlet, the author who compares Rich’s disgraceful treatment of his actors to the casual slighting of the clown in his pantomimes recalls one of his comic pranks in his knockabout performance: Harlequin gave his clown “a Stroke on the Shoulder with his Harlequin-sword, made him turn
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about to him, and then with a Grin slap’d the Door in his Face.”16 This incidental, flitting evocation of the comedian’s stage business manages to recapture the vitality of Rich’s style. But his best lazzi do not so much conjure up his vis comica in performance as the sense of wonder and the aesthetic pleasure that the mime could arouse in his most famous routines, such as his chasing and catching a butterfly, his imitation of a statue coming to life, or his dog impersonation in which he managed to scratch his ear with his foot. The Gray’s Inn Journal reports one of his most striking corporeal feats, the three hundred steps he was able to make on the stage: “the Movement of each Leg was so finall and quick, that in going the Length of one Foot, he minced it so as to make three hundred Steps.”17 A French visitor, César de Saussure, in a letter dated February 23, 1728, eulogizes Rich for his performance of Harlequin in The Rape of Proserpine, which he mistakenly calls The Rape of Europa. This is the only firsthand account of the celebrated birth of Harlequin, being hatched from an egg. “This egg, owing to the heat of the sun, grows gradually larger and larger; when it is of a very large size, it cracks open, and a little Harlequin comes out of it. He is of the size of a child of three or four years old, and little by little attains a natural height.”18 This amazing lazzo was later memorialized by a much-quoted historian of the stage, John Jackson, who saw Rich practice the routine for Miles, his successor in the part of Harlequin: “From the first chipping of the egg, his receiving motion, his feeling the ground, his standing upright, to his quick Harlequin trip around the empty Shell, through the whole progression, every limb had its tongue, and every motion a voice, which ‘spoke with most miraculous organ’ to the understandings and sensations of the observers.”19 In these two descriptions of the same lazzo, the French witness underscores the sensational effect Rich produced on the audience, whereas Jackson foregrounds the expressiveness of the mime, a feature of Rich’s talent that was made the best of in romantic scenes: a contemporary described “his taking leave of Columbine as most graceful and affecting.”20 In The Gentleman’s Magazine, a correspondent records the reaction of a foreign visitor to a pantomime production, which could have been Rich’s Perseus and Andromeda. The naive observer is dismayed at the unaccountable burst of applause raised by Harlequin’s mute performance: “Has he said anything? No; but he kicks his Petticoat over his Shoulders, waggles his head, and discovers the prettiest specked Limbs! Then he vaults thro’ a window, vanishes down a Trap-door, becomes a Man, a Woman, a Dog, in an instant, and is the oddest, newest, friskingst, nimblest, divertingst creature in the Universe.”21 Even allowing for the satiric intent of the reporter, this description, which lays emphasis { 152 }
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on the futility of the action and the absurdity of the transformations, also recaptures the brisk tempo of the show, the agility of the performer, and the fascinating and titillating appeal for the audience. And yet ironically the expressive and mimetic excellence of Rich’s performance is precisely what Rich’s style was stigmatized for. This paradox underpins the critique that the Gray’s Inn Journal levels at the authors of this type of entertainment. One of the issues ridicules a pantomime poet who intends to write “The Art of Pantomime” in imitation of Aristotle’s Art of Poetry: “His first Chapter is to set out with an Account of the imitative Arts, in which Pantomime will be proved to be superior to all the rest, having the greatest Variety of Gesticulation, and the most expressive Significance in all its Attitudes and Actions.”22 The type of mimesis characteristic of pantomimic afterpieces is derided for its attempt at perfect mimicry. The ironic barb at these performances is underwritten by aesthetic principles defining representational decorum in the art of acting. As theatre historians have amply documented, the just delineation of the passions, which was the cornerstone of stage practice in the eighteenth century, required from the actor the ability to discriminate between the various emotions he or she was to enact. In order to render them artfully, the actor’s corporeal instrument was subjected to a rigid ordering of its constituent parts, which gave precedence to the voice and the face over the rest of the body. The traditional declamatory method of delivery of the Cibber school and the more innovative style of modulation advocated by Garrick gave pride of place to the vocal virtuosity of the performer.23 Facial expressiveness came second as a most necessary adjunct to stage presentation. Finally, the careful attention to grace in posture and gesture marked out the strict bounds of decorum.24 These basic precepts converged to create static images, specially framed moments designated as “points,” which the actor isolated as striking expressions of a tragic passion.25 Nevertheless, the fluidity of comedy precluded such momentary effects: for the comedian who could not strictly conform to the priorities regulating tragic acting, facial expression became the prime vehicle. As reported by l’Abbé Le Blanc, describing a London performance, the comedian was primarily a face actor who expressed humor “more by the grimaces of his face, than the proper modulation of his voice.”26 Although any unmotivated grimace was vehemently criticized, the exaggerated facial display of emotions, a popular lazzo in farce, was highly commended when it proceeded naturally from the character being portrayed and therefore contributed to the construction of comic humors. Garrick’s farcical interpretation of Abel Drugger dropping his urinal in Jonson’s The Alchemist was unanimously praised for this finesse: “His look { 153 }
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of terror . . . drew as much applause from the audience as his Lear had done.”27 In small theatres where most of the action was performed on the apron stage, where the actors were placed in the midst of the spectators, and where the footlights, the “floats,” cast the light upward from the edge onto the actor’s face, the comic mobility of features was not only perfectly visible, it was expressly required. Rich’s dumb shows, however, called into question tragic and comic stage presentation. First, by depriving Harlequin of speech, Rich negated the primacy of words over bodily enactment. He disrupted the powerful logocentric ideology underlying theories for tragic and comic actors alike by substituting the nonverbal expressive means of the theatre for the discursive medium of the drama. Second, by hiding his face under the traditional mask of Harlequin, he further displaced the focus of serious acting from the face to the body. Because comic performance was founded in large measure on the natural flexibility of the comedian’s features, his face could not be hampered by a mask. An anecdote concerning the low comedian William Pinkethman illustrates the significance and implications of Rich’s controversial practice. In his memoirs, Colley Cibber recalls Pinkethman’s decision to perform the part of Harlequin without the traditional mask in Aphra Behn’s Emperor of the Moon on September 18, 1702, at Drury Lane. This innovation was encouraged by several gentlemen, who “fancy’d that a great deal of the Drollery, and Spirit of his Grimace was lost, by his wearing that useless, unmeaning Masque of a black Cat.” Cibber, who corroborates the centrality of facial expression in low comedy, also perceives another crucial aspect of masked acting. For this actor, who was a comic performer of legitimate drama, the mask is useless insofar as it cannot contribute to the individualization of the role. By extension, it is devoid of meaning, since “that unchanging Face” neutralizes the actor’s features and forces the performer to shift the locus of the passions to the body. Furthermore, Cibber gives his personal interpretation of Pinkethman’s failure in his attempt to present Harlequin unmasked: the shame of performing all “the bold Strokes, that were necessary to get the better of common Sense” could not be countenanced by a bare-faced, serious comedian. Yet, at the same time, Cibber intuits another potentiality persistently exploited by Rich. The mask, “resembling no Part of the human Species,” affords the possibility of undergoing onstage all manners of gender permutations and physical transformations.28 By suppressing his facial identity, Lun could not only impersonate women but, under the “Masque of the black Cat,” also embody animals of all descriptions, from a dog to an ostrich. What Cibber does not realize, however, is that the “unmeaning Masque,” the “unchanging Face,” is the essence of Harlequin’s acting. What Cibber failed { 154 }
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or refused to appreciate, Pinkethman did understand, since he never again attempted to perform this part unmasked. What this anecdote reveals is that Rich, by specializing in this particular line of business, questioned the psychological conception of text-driven drama and at the same time the fundamental tenets of stage presentation, which demanded that proper gestures and restrained movement should be subordinated to voice, which in turn was subservient to the text. The juxtaposition of the dumb show and the operatic, mythological plot highlighted Rich’s destabilizing practice by playing two antithetical styles of performance against each other—one focused on low art and the corporeality of the actor’s practice, the other on high art and the vocal feats of the performer. The mythological part strove to represent, through dance, music, and recitative, the immateriality of high art. Yet, ironically, although it multiplied stage effects to arouse the sense of wonder required by high art, it rested greatly on purely mechanical prowess, such as perfect timing and the expertise of stagehands managing the shifts of scenery. Besides, the lyrics of the mythological part conformed to the classical ethos of stage practice, since they were designed to render the abrupt transitions between the theatrical passions. The same effect seems to have been produced by the music, as testified by a correspondent reporting on a production of Perseus and Andromeda: “the Overture that leads to the Scene of Andromeda’s being chain’d to a Rock, is so charmingly diversify’d, and interspers’d with such a graceful Confusion of Harmony, that it steals into the very Soul of an Audience, and works up the different Passions of Joy and Grief, Pity and Hatred, Hope and Despair, to Admiration.”29 The vocal pyrotechnics of the operatic singers were ironically echoed and prolonged in the physical acrobatics of Harlequin. Rich’s violation of representational decorum in the mute part of his entertainments could account for the diatribes of outraged critics and the ridicule leveled at the pantomime, which, according to the ironical statements in the Gray’s Inn Journal already quoted, was superior to all “imitative Arts” for its “Variety of Gesticulation” and its “expressive Significance.” Since the rules prescribing theatrical practice aimed at elevating the body on which the actor inscribed the passions, the commendable, serious art of acting had to be sharply differentiated from the contemptible act of mimicry. Consequently, the low histrionic imitation of Rich challenged the high mimesis of legitimate drama. This style of stage presentation, which revived the ancient distrust in mimicry analyzed by Jonas Barish, was mainly located in the protean body of Rich, who flaunted the physical limitations of the human performer.30 While comparing Rich to the high-art actor Garrick, Arthur Murphy both underlines and exposes { 155 }
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the unsettling performance of the pantomimist, who manages to cross the ultimate boundaries of categorial divisions by impersonating animals or even objects: “they may say what they will of the Hero of Drury Lane; he only imitates Men, whereas the Covent-garden chief converts himself into a wild Beast, a Bird, or a Serpent with a long Tail, and what not.”31 The basic codes of neoclassical mimesis are further contested by a performer who not only denies the centrality of the text and erases the crucial distinctions between man and beast but also defies the laws of gravity by multiplying prodigious acrobatic stunts. In the grotesque part of Perseus and Andromeda; or the Tricks of Harlequin, Rich was catapulted out of a cannon and landed on Columbine’s balcony.32 While he succeeded in breaking down the boundaries of theatrical representation, he also managed to blur the line between seemingly distinct categories of stage entertainment: theatre scholars are hard put to decide whether the few extant descriptions of Lun’s art, in which the body takes center stage, refer to miming, dancing, acrobatics, or all three together, so wide is the range of practices it encompassed. It is hardly coincidental that the transgression of the dominant theatrical paradigms should be reflected in the composition of the afterpieces devised to showcase Lun’s specific style of acting. The degree to which Rich contributed to the contriving of these motley entertainments remains debatable. For some time it was argued that his illiteracy and his low intellectual faculties must have precluded him from having a hand in the mythological, operatic part, and that, at best, he must have been responsible for the fast-paced romp of the harlequinade. And yet, as the authors of the Biographical Dictionary of Actors suggest, “he was clearly not illiterate, and one must wonder if his display of ignorance was a conscious act.”33 While Rich shifted the theatre’s center of gravity from words to gestures in his performance, he eschewed linear narrative and temporal development in favor of movement and space in the conception of his afterpieces. He accordingly disrupted the principles of traditional mimesis based on characterization, dramatic causality, or even stylistic consistency among the various parts of a play. In his entertainments, the plots are split into the mythological masque and the dumb harlequinade, which presents a loosely connected succession of knockabout episodes. These space-oriented farces, which give prevalence to the theatrical over the dramatic, illustrate one of the basic principles of popular mimesis that David Mayer has formulated: “it is axiomatic of popular drama that much of it is sequential rather than consequential: the sequences follow in order, but the order is not always dependent upon a coherent or dramatically plausible plot.”34 { 156 }
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The displacement of priorities, which informs both the performing style and the conception of Rich’s hybrid afterpieces, reveals the burlesque impulse on which his whole theatrical practice is founded. This particular drive has been attributed to the commercially competitive environment that forced the two rival playhouses to encroach upon one another’s preserves and compelled Rich to outdo his rivals in some sort of one-upmanship. As imitator rather than instigator, he seems to give credence to the assumption that his flair for competition was the main incentive for the creation of his dumb shows. And yet this mimetic tendency is so systematic and the procedure so consistently deflationary that the meanings of his derivative strategies need to be probed. What has often been construed as managerial tactics could be interpreted equally as the ironic manipulation of the stage material. Although Rich tended to lag behind the rival house in devising new entertainments, he is credited with being the first to strike on the idea of combining the mythological, operatic part with the grotesque, mute harlequinade in his Amadis; or the Loves of Harlequin and Columbine (January 24, 1717).35 The deliberate juxtaposition of two plots rooted in two distinct traditions substantiates Rich’s essential burlesque impulse: the metamorphoses of the deities inspired by classical poetry are ironically mimicked in the grotesque transformations of the low characters and trivial objects inherited from the commedia dell’arte. Along with Harlequin, Rich borrowed this burlesque propensity from the Italian improvisational comedy: the Italian farceurs mimicked fashionable court dances to ridicule the grand style and incorporated acrobatics, tumbling, or steps from folk dances in order to deflate the seriousness of high art.36 The same debunking intent motivated one of Rich’s earliest attempts at dumb shows, The Jealous Doctor; or the Intriguing Dame (April 27, 1717), in which the grotesque characters crossed over into the traditional comic plot, with Harlequin doubling as the aptly named Underplot.37 In the Faustus pantomime, the protagonist wore Harlequin’s costume under his scholar’s gown, thereby assuming two contrastive identities and signaling the ambivalent nature of Marlowe’s drama, which was more often associated with the low art of puppetry than with the high art of legitimate drama. A contemporary noted: “There is something in the Legend of Dr. Faustus too mean for the Stage. The Theatre should not descend to borrow its Entertainment from the Puppet Shew.”38 More pointedly, the burlesque reworking of John Weaver’s show, The Loves of Mars and Venus (March 2, 1717), provides insight into Rich’s attitude to the serious pantomime ballets staged at the rival house. Weaver, who asserted that pantomime could operate a return to “natural” expression, tried to revive the dignity and expressiveness of the Greek art. With a view to regulating and ultimately legitimat{ 157 }
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ing the art of gesture and the dumb show for ballet, he emphasized the importance of symmetry in movements and the need to represent the passions, rehashing the same precepts that were expounded in acting textbooks.39 He accordingly condemned grotesque dancing “so intermixed with Trick, and Tumbling, that the Design is quite lost in ridiculous Grimace, and odd and unnatural Actions.”40 In Mars and Venus; or, The Mouse Trap (November 22, 1717), his first attempt at countering a rival production, Rich radically deviates from Weaver’s mimetic effort at rendering natural movements and instead focuses on the fantastic transformations of the dramatis personae. The actual content of this burlesque of Weaver’s ballet can only be conjectural. The cast lists for the first season and the revival on April 27, 1723, feature Lun as Vulcan, the role performed by Weaver in the original entertainment, but fail to mention the grotesque part he took on. On April 17 and 21, 1725, however, Rich played Vulcan/Punch and Louis Dupré played Mars/Harlequin, thus confirming that the Lincoln’s Inn Fields production conflated the high parts of the gods with the low parts of the commedia. But more significantly, Rich cast Dupré, who had created the role of Mars in Weaver’s pantomime and had recently moved to Lincoln’s Inn Fields, in the double part of Mars/Harlequin: this casting choice reinforced the ironic resonance of the burlesque version, which could hardly be lost on an audience who probably still remembered the original serious ballet. In The Royal Chace; or, Merlin’s Cave, all the grotesque characters, with the exception of Columbine, doubled in mythological roles: Harlequin as Jupiter, Scaramouch as Pan, and Punch as Apollo.41 The Royal Chace, which opened on January 23, 1736, was an extensively revised version of Jupiter and Europa; or, the Intrigues of Harlequin, which, after a few successful runs, had been dropped from the repertoire in 1728.42 Through the doubling of the gods in the roles of the commedia dell’arte, The Royal Chace manages to merge the statuesque deportment of high characters with the grotesque antics of low comedians, cuts across the aesthetic divides of high and low, and thereby sublimates the low acting style of the comedians.43 This blurring of clear-cut generic distinctions, which makes the dichotomized plots occasionally coalesce, is the hallmark of Rich’s elusive and controversial pantomimes. In Theophilus Cibber’s pantomime The Harlot’s Progress, which opened at Drury Lane on March 31, 1733, with John Weaver’s serious Judgement of Paris appended to the grotesque part, the performers who featured in the harlequinade reappeared in the grand finale of the masque. But although they crossed the barrier between the two modes of representation, they maintained their grotesque identities. At Drury Lane, however, the experiment was not repeated beyond the first season. That Rich’s eclectic theatrical enterprise fused elements of elite and popu{ 158 }
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lar culture is more subtly exemplified in his box-office success Harlequin Sorcerer. In this pantomime, the three operatic scenes that frame the harlequinade are quite consistently patterned on Macbeth, which provides an implicit intertext. Harlequin, instead of remaining confined to the dumb show, trespasses into the realm of the heathen deities in the opening and closing mythological scenes. The overture strives to outdo Shakespeare’s witches’ scene by adding one witch and having Harlequin hailed four times before being granted his magic power. The next scene is modeled on the third scene of the Scottish play, where the weird sisters, designated as such in the pantomime, list the evil tricks they played on mortals. Then, the harlequinade revolves around the comic pranks that Harlequin can perform by virtue of his newly gained conjuring skills: he is turned into an old woman, an ostrich, and a washerwoman. In the grand finale, order is restored with the abduction of Harlequin to hell, where his arrival is announced by Ascalax. Just like Macbeth, his dignified alter ego, Harlequin is greeted as “the late Impostor, who with Zeal / Has reign’d the Minister of Hell” and whose authority had been granted by the legitimate sovereign, Pluto, Duncan’s counterpart. Not only does Harlequin, a stock type of popular theatre, challenge the authority of Pluto, a figure of classical literature, but he also mimics Macbeth, an iconic figure of the national bard. The amazing success of the show, which has been accounted for by the magnificence of the scenery, could be arguably put down to the piquant delight reaped from the intertextual echoes and the fairly innocuous satisfaction of having a well-known play of the repertory facetiously pilfered. Quite appropriately, just like the Faustus story and the other mythological tales dramatized in pantomimes, The Sorcerer, which playfully mimics the aesthetic codes of legitimate drama, deploys a narrative of contested authority. Yet, far from debasing the original model, the burlesquing of Shakespeare’s tragedy provides an exhilarating, spectacular alternative to the textual orientation of the tragic play. Just as Lun promoted an acting style that broke with the formal fixities of contemporary acting, he also opted for a mode of representation that mocked the dominant dramatic norms. In an article on pantomimes, John O’Brien argues: “By foregrounding its medium and the genres that it mimics to the point of parody, pantomimes achieve a species of metatheatricality; they condense many of the salient features of the Augustan theatre so as to serve at times as a form of critique upon them.”44 If, as O’Brien argues, this much-reviled form provides an ironic compendium of the whole dramatic repertoire of the eighteenth century, this is not symptomatic of pantomimes but of popular theatre in general, which tends both to mimic and to undermine legitimate drama. Rich’s burlesquing of theatrical and dramatic paradigms, however, bespeaks { 159 }
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his propensity to go beyond the limits of mimetic art and hence to foreground the essential theatricality of his shows. This distinguishing feature of Rich’s entertainments is dramatically embodied by magic, which motivates all the actions in the farce. It has been claimed that magic served as a dramatic justification for the lavish display of stage tricks and visual wonders and therefore as a commercial ploy to cater to the taste of a spectacle-loving public. In the preface to Merlin; or the Devil of Stonehenge, the author asserts: “Custom, in Pantomimes, has made it a sort of necessity, in order to give Tricks some Air of Probability, that Harlequin should be a Piece of a Magician.”45 More pointedly, the conjuring power of Harlequin, which Rich is thought to have introduced in the part, encapsulates his compelling drive for the burlesque and his persistent predilection for theatricality. As a matter of fact, Rich borrowed the idea of Harlequin’s magic bat from the French fairground plays that had been staged at Lincoln’s Inn Fields as early as 1718.46 It is therefore quite significant that he should be credited with its invention, as if magic were integral to his style of performance. Unlike the Drury Lane Harlequins, who were granted their magic power by a sorcerer in an introductory scene, Lun, in The Necromancer and in most of the following pantomimes, was a magician from the start and was therefore cast as a creature of make-believe who was essentially theatre-minded. Magic in Rich’s dumb shows strikes at the roots of theatricality. In spoken drama, language that acts performatively generates the world of illusion. As in the famous “This is Illyria,” dramatic discourse, by its mere utterance, transforms the empty space of the stage into the exotic shores of a distant country and shares this characteristic with the magic word, which can equally perform material effects. Consequently, magic on the stage reduplicates and foregrounds the illusion inherent in the theatrical process. As a man of the theatre, Rich sensed the potentialities of magic to enhance the medium he was working with. In his dumb shows, Harlequin’s wooden sword that performs wonders on the stage replaces the linguistic medium of the actors that is essential for the magic of theatrical illusion to operate. Rich literally objectifies the speech act of legitimate drama in a piece of wood, a blatantly theatrical prop, and the gesture that goes with it. Whereas in spoken drama the word becomes action, in Rich’s dumb shows the physical gesture is legitimately reinstated in its original performative function. Therefore, since Rich manages to dramatize the interplay between the physical and the artificial, the mundane and the wonderful, which is the quintessence of the theatre, Lun’s Harlequin becomes the embodiment of theatricality and of the theatre itself. The proximity of magic and the theatre is illustrated in one particular epi{ 160 }
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sode of The Necromancer. The last sleight of hand that Harlequin/Faustus performs before being swallowed by the dragon in the final scene is the staging of a theatrical show. This performance serves as a gloss for the whole entertainment and all those to come. In order to exhibit his magical powers to the scholars, Faustus conjures up a spectacle, a miniature burlesque opera, “The Loves of Hero and Leander,” inset within the afterpiece. The show lumps together the high style of the eponymous couple and the low style of Charon, who mocks the operatic diction of “this whining, pining Pair.” To Leander’s remark, “Charon, thy rigorous Humour rule,” the ferryman retorts by debunking the clichés of lovesickness: “And stand to hear a Love-sick Fool, Talk o’er the Cant of Flames—and Darts—And streaming Eyes,—and bleeding Hearts.” With this show within the show, Rich dramatizes the double impulse that underlies his theatrical practice: his spectacular inclination and his burlesque compulsion. Harlequin/Faustus’s last trick before disappearing into the dragon’s mouth foreshadows Lun’s parting shot before retiring from the stage some thirty years later.47 In The Fair, his final irreverent snook at legitimate drama, Rich brings the marketplace onto the stage again and pits the acrobatics of Anthony Maddox against the gestural and postural stereotypes of his rival, the Drury Lane Harlequin, Henry Woodward. Rich’s brazen defiance serves as a strategic epilogue to his career as performer and contriver of entertainments. This pantomime was premiered on February 7, 1750, and had an astounding run of twenty-four performances. It was so successful that on the third night the receipts wiped out the deficit of the house.48 It was revived on November 2, 1752, and played twenty-eight nights before the season closed.49 For the occasion, Rich had decided to hire Maddox, a dancer, equilibrist, and instrumentalist, who had been greatly acclaimed at the popular venue of Sadler’s Wells. This was the production that caused a heated controversy with the Theatre Royal. In 1751, when James Lacy had considered enrolling Maddox at Drury Lane, David Garrick wrote to Draper (August 17, 1751): “I cannot possibly agree to such a prostitution upon any account; and nothing but downright starving would induce me to bring such defilement and abomination into the house of William Shakespeare.” 50 This sort of recruitment was not new, and the house of William Shakespeare did not have such qualms in January 1734, when a giant named Cajanus was added to the cast of Cupid and Psyche and, according to The Gentleman’s Magazine, drew crowds to the playhouse.51 But Garrick’s outrage is symptomatic of the development of the London stage under his ascendancy, and was repeated two years later by Rich’s actors when Maddox was introduced at Covent Garden: James Quin and Peg Woffington conceived it a { 161 }
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degradation to act alongside a fairground entertainer. The actress’s refusal to act was bitterly criticized by Mrs. Bellamy, who, in her memoirs, recalls that, as a child, Woffington had been “what is usually termed a make-weight to Madam Violante, the first wire-dancer that ever appeared in Ireland.”52 This taunt at an actress of legitimate drama points out the disturbing proximity of all actors to the fairground and at the same time their wish to forcibly assert their difference. But Rich, who had to face the discontent of his company, was also the mockery of the rival house. On November 6, four days after the revival, Woodward inserted in his popular Harlequin Ranger a burlesque scene described by Cross: “A new Scene was introduc’d of Beasts . . . as an Ostrich a Lyon, Dog, Monkey, 2 small Ostrichs & A Figure like Maddox upon ye Wire.”53 A comment in The Gentleman’s Magazine praises Garrick’s managerial policy and alludes to his sanitary move against Rich’s pantomime: “It appears that Mr Garrick . . . has . . . made a vigorous attempt to exclude folly but the friends of folly appeared to be so numerous, that he could not effect his purpose.”54 Supporters of Rich tried to damn the Drury Lane skit and caused great disturbance in the house until November 18.55 The dispute between Covent Garden and Drury Lane crystallizes two diametrically opposed conceptions of theatrical performance: one centered on the corporeal virtuosity of the performer, the other centered on the accommodation of low entertainments with the legitimate repertoire. Rich, who had ceased to be the regular Harlequin at Covent Garden since 1741, did nevertheless make a point of featuring in an entertainment that would obviously cause great disruption in the theatres. By the 1750s, the acting style of pantomime performers and the format of the afterpieces seem to have taken a different turn at the theatre royal of Drury Lane. Garrick had favored a more balletic kind of pantomime and looked for graceful dancers for his cast, trying to recruit them on his trips to Paris. His choice of Woodward as his main performer of Harlequin betrays this aesthetic preference. This is how Thomas Davies describes Woodward: “His person was so regularly formed, and his look so serious and composed, that an indifferent observer would have supposed that his talents were adapted to characters of the serious cast; to the real fine gentleman, to the man of graceful deportment and elegant demeanour.”56 Thomas Wilkes, too, emphasizes this comedian’s respectability, which conveys “a vivacity, joined to a genteel well-made figure, that never fails to make a proper impression, and bias his auditors in his favour.”57 Regularity, grace, elegance, and gentility are the attributes of a performer of legitimate drama and seem to run counter to the lowcomedy style that characterized Rich’s stage practice. Woodward, who came { 162 }
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to be known as “attitude Harlequin,” would model his movements on a posture master’s poses to represent emotions instead of miming passions. These attitudes were fully described as early as 1729 in A Chacoon for a Harlequin, an engraved description of the dance, by L. Rousseau. This is an early attempt at codifying Harlequin’s gestures and postures, using the Feuillet-Beauchamp system of notation. In a dedicatory letter to Louis Dupré, Rousseau praises his proficiency as a Harlequin dancer but laments the carelessness of other performers: “Though the motions of ye arms are fully described in ye first collection of Mr Feuillet, I have observ’d that few dancers minded them though they are very necessary for this sort of character.” He then proceeds to note the movements of the head, of the arms, and the three ways of taking off and putting on his hat, the aim being to systematize “the attitude or full posture the Harlequin must be in when he begins each part.”58 As evidenced by this kind of regulatory attempt, the standardized attitudes of the legitimate actor were being progressively assimilated by the performer of pantomimes, and Woodward’s style stood in stark contrast to Rich’s miming practice. A reporter sums up this difference in an article of the Gray’s Inn Journal dated October 13, 1753. Shocked that Drury Lane should be the first house that season to introduce a pantomime, Harlequin Ranger, he complains: “as Mr Woodward is an excellent comedian, it would be more eligible in him if he chuses to wear the motley dress any more to appear in the character of a speaking Harlequin, after the manner of the Italian Comedy; and indeed it is not a little surprising that nothing of this kind has yet been admitted upon our stage.” By emphasizing Woodward’s more legitimate style of acting and encouraging the recovery of voice for a type of theatrical performance that had gone mute, the journalist advocates a return to the classical ethos of dramatic presentation that Rich had relinquished.59 Just as Woodward’s performing techniques seem to have been more genteel and refined than Rich’s, so were his afterpieces more attuned to traditional dramatic codes. There is no detailed description of The Fair apart from a short review on a later revival in January 1760 in The Weekly Magazine; or, Gentleman and Lady’s Polite Conversation: “The Fair has scarce even pantomime probability . . . for instance Harlequin should never exercise his magical power without reason and should never make escapes without being pursued, but here he conjures, leaps, runs and waggles without any apparent design; and the whole seems destitute of plot, as if contrived by a dancing master.”60 The critique leveled at Rich’s piece betrays the dramatic prejudices held against this space-oriented type of entertainment, which dispenses with plot and probability. On the other hand, a reporter in the London Chronicle rates Woodward’s pantomimes above Rich’s: “they are generally nearer meaning something, are { 163 }
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more concise, and not so full of running about, knocking down, tumbling over head and heels, all those strange works which we see so much of in Orpheus and the Sorcerer.” 61 What this reviewer condemns is the spatial conception of performance, and what he praises is the traditional mimesis that informs Woodward’s afterpieces. Dramatic actors such as Woodward managed to domesticate Harlequin by codifying and sanitizing his stage presentation, whereas, to the end, Lun kept returning him to his marginalized status as a low, fairground creature oscillating between the two poles of physicality and make-believe. This blurring of the boundary between illusion and reality is emphasized in an article of the Gray’s Inn Journal. A theatrical projector, who ironically bemoans the newfangled style of Garrick’s acting, wistfully evokes the splendor of Rich’s performance. He recalls that, in one of his pantomimes, Harlequin escaped into the box above the stage door and “when he was closely pursued by his enemies, it must have been delightful to perceive him dart, as quick as an Arrow to its destined Mark, or with the Celerity of a Bird in the Air, from the Place, where the whole house imagined him destitute of the means of an Escape, into the opposite Box, and there stand laughing at his Pursuers.”62 Harlequin, who transgresses the limits of the acting space and strays into the social world of reality, seems to incarnate the histrionic nature of Rich, who multiplied his identities on- and offstage. After removing the fictional mask of Harlequin, the pantomimist assumed the artistic persona of Lun: Lun, the pseudonymous performer of make-believe, walked a fine theatrical line between the stage and the world, since he positioned himself at one remove from the social reality of John Rich, the hardheaded businessman. Woodward too assumed a dual identity in his early career, being billed as Lun Junior when he donned the costume of Harlequin and as Woodward when he performed roles in spoken drama. But the split between these two personae betrays a deep-seated aspiration to respectability and articulates a distinction between legitimate drama and popular theatre rather than a division between commercial reality and theatrical illusion. Owing to his unerring instinct for showmanship, Rich, who tailored his pantomimes to his specific needs as entrepreneur and performer, successfully reconciled the economic demands of the theatrical market and his own histrionic talent. His popular performance, which displaced the priorities of stage presentation, and his burlesque impulse, which mimicked and challenged the fundamental tenets regulating serious drama, resisted the critical values and cultural assumptions that informed theatrical practice. On October 14, 1769, Garrick produced the stage version of the Stratford Shakespeare Jubilee, an event that has been deemed the founding moment of institutionalized bardolatry. A { 164 }
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few weeks later, on January 27, 1770, Covent Garden put on Harlequin’s Jubilee, a burlesque of the Drury Lane extravaganza, contrived by Woodward. Garrick’s afterpiece, which totaled ninety performances in one season, consisted of nineteen pageants presenting the choicest scenes from Shakespeare plays. Woodward, imitating Rich’s burlesque procedure, culled the highest points in Rich’s entertainments and devised a mock procession. A reporter describes: “The walking of a windmill, a sack of flour, the sun, the egg in the Rape of Proserpine, the skeleton and box, &c. &c. have a very risible effect upon the audience, and cast a proper ridicule upon such processions.”63 In a burlesque reenactment of Shakespeare’s sanctification as a national icon, the grand finale of Harlequin’s Jubilee showed the statue of Rich descending upon the stage and concluded with a song and chorus: Songs grotesque, and jocund raise, To Lun, who merited our praise! Who ransack’d Heav’n, Sea, Earth and Den, For Monsters, Deities and Men; Who, Proteus like, cou’d vary shape, And change to Spaniel, Dwarf and Ape: Whose fancy, Nature’s self outrun; Then songs of triumph raise to LUN.64
This last tribute operates a distillation of Rich’s theatrical practice: the generic blend of high and low, his histrionic malleability and his transgression of categorial divisions. With this pantomime, Rich caps Harlequin/Faustus’s last theatrical trick performed before he disappeared into hell. The apotheosis of Rich/ Lun, engineered by his former rival Woodward on the stage of Covent Garden, is the prodigious tour de force and the ultimate culmination of a culturally objectionable performer who manages, with his last trick, to rival, albeit mockingly and posthumously, the champion of legitimate drama.
Notes 1.
2.
The pattern of production induced by the competition between the two houses in the 1720s is described by Leo Hughes in The Drama’s Patrons: Study of the 18th-Century London Audience (Arlington: Texas University Press, 1971), 97–103. In “John Rich’s Art of Pantomime as Seen in The Necromancer or Harlequin Doctor Faustus: A Comparison of the Two Faustus Pantomimes at Lincoln’s-Inn-Fields and Drury Lane,” Restoration and 18th Century Theatre Research 4 (1965): 47–60, Elvena M. Green analyzed the formal organization of The Necromancer from a traditionally dramatic
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3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9. 10.
perspective, striving to bring to the surface some close-knit structure and coherent progression. Her conclusions were qualified and the merit of the afterpiece reappraised in the 1990s. In “ ‘The Subject of Almost All Companies’: A New Look at The Necromancer,” Theatre Notebook 45 (1991): 55–70, John McVeagh attributed the preeminence of The Necromancer over its rival to the importance of music and dancing in Rich’s spectacle. In “The Eclectic Comic Genius of John Rich in The Necromancer,” Theatre Notebook 49 (1995): 165–172, Phyllis T. Dircks focused on the overall sense of fun that pervades the whole piece. These figures do not include the odd pantomime that was staged on the occasion of a benefit night. All the statistical information on performances is derived from the production calendars in William Van Lennep et al., eds., The London Stage, 1660–1800: A Calendar of Plays, Entertainments, and Afterpieces, 5 vols. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1960–68); and William Burling, A Checklist of New Plays and Entertainments on the London Stage, 1700–1737 (London: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1993). Harlequin Sorcerer with the Loves of Pluto and Proserpine (January 21, 1725), Apollo and Daphne; or the Burgomaster Trick’d (January 14, 1726), The Rape of Proserpine with the Birth of Harlequin (February 13, 1727), Harlequin Anna Bullen (December 11, 1727), and Perseus and Andromeda; or the Spaniard Outwitted (January 2, 1730). This revival was advertised as early as February 1, 1752: “The Sorcerer, a Pantomime Entertainment, originally performed at the Theatre in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, is preparing, with alterations, at Covent Garden (The scenes painted by Mr Lambert) and will be performed one day next week” (Van Lennep et al., The London Stage, February 1, 1752). My statistics slightly disagree with Paul Sawyer’s in “The Popularity of Various Types of Entertainment at Lincoln’s Inn Fields and Covent Garden Theatres, 1720–1733,” Theatre Notebook 24 (1970): 54–63. Rich appears for the first time as Lun on April 22, 1717, in The Cheats; or the Tavern Bilkers. Lun was probably the name of the famous French farceur Francisque Moylin (Molin), who played Harlequin. Tate Wilkinson states that “Lun had been the name of the famous man who represented Harlequin at Paris” without naming him; Memoirs of His Own Life (York, 1790), 4:153. C. A. C. Davis identifies him, “John Rich as ‘Lun,’ ” Notes and Queries, May 31, 1947, 222–24. Francisque had managed a French company at Lincoln’s Inn Fields between November 1718 and February 1719 because of the oppression of the Théâtres de la Foire in Paris and was occasionally performing at Lincoln’s Inn Fields the next season. Sybil Rosenfeld, Foreign Theatrical Companies in Great Britain in the 17th and 18th Centuries (London: Society for Theatre Research, 1955), 6–8; and Pierre Danchin, “ ‘Italian’ Performers on the English Stage in the Early Eighteenth Century (1701–1727),” in Il passaggiere italiano, ed. Renzo S. Crivelli and Luigi Sampietro (Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 1994), 343–67. For a few examples of the type of criticism against pantomimes, see in particular Emmett L. Avery, “The Defence and Criticism of Pantomimic Entertainments in the Early 18th Century,” English Literary History 5 (1938): 127–45. He attempted the role of Essex in John Banks’s The Unhappy Favourite twice, on October 22 and November 10, 1715. Pasquin (February 4, 1724) quoted in Van Lennep et al., The London Stage, 1700–1729, 1:clxxv.
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T H E T R IC K S OF LU N 11. 12. 13.
14. 15.
16. 17. 18.
19.
20. 21.
22. 23. 24.
25.
26. 27. 28.
The Works of the Late Aaron Hill, 2nd ed. (London, 1753), 1:233. Jevon created the part of Harlequin William Mountfort in The Life and Death of Doctor Faustus (c. 1686) and in Aphra Behn’s Emperor of the Moon (1687). The wife of a cobbler magically changes places with a lady. It was later adapted by Charles Coffey as The Devil to Pay and was performed frequently in the eighteenth century. John Corey, A Cure for Jealousie (London, 1701), 21. Sir Richard Steele, The Tatler, April 26, 1709, ed. D. F. Bond (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 1:68–69. On Restoration farces see Leo Hughes, A Century of English Farce (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956); and Peter Holland, “Farce,” in The Cambridge Companion to English Restoration Theatre, ed. Deborah Payne Fisk (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 107–26. The Case between the Managers of Two Theatres, and their Principal Actors (London, 1743), 23. Gray’s Inn Journal 46 (September 1, 1753 [London, 1756]), 1:291. César de Saussure, A Foreign View of England in the Reigns of George I and George II, trans. Mme Van Muyden (London, J. Murray, 1902), 274. He also gives an account of another of Rich’s famous tricks, the clockwork serpent in Orpheus and Eurydice, which he refers to as Orpheus in the Lower Regions. “The serpent is of enormous size, and is covered all over with gold and green scales and with red spots; his eyes shine like fire, and he wriggles about the theatre with head upraised, making an awful but very natural hissing noise” (275). John Jackson, The History of the Scottish Stage (Edinburgh, 1793), 368. Incidentally, “his quick Harlequin trip around the empty Shell” might refer to the three hundred steps already mentioned. Ibid., 369. The Gentleman’s Magazine, April 1735, 5:253. The scene of Harlequin disguised as a dog is represented in the frontispiece to the first edition of James Miller’s poem Harlequin Horace: or, the Art of Modern Poetry (1731). It is entitled Serpentes Avibus Geminentur, Tigribus Agni; see F. G. Stephens and M. D. George, Catalogue of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum, 11 vols. (London: Printed for the Trustees, 1870–1954), BM 1834. Gray’s Inn Journal 77 (April 6, 1754, [London, 1756]), 2:141. Alan S. Downer, “Nature to Advantage Dressed: Eighteenth Century Acting,” PMLA 43 (1958) 1002–37. For a comprehensive and seminal study of the acting techniques used in eighteenthcentury tragedy and serious opera, see Dene Barnett, The Art of Gesture: The Practices and Principles of 18th Century Acting (Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag, 1987). See Bertram L. Joseph, The Tragic Actor (London: Theatre Art Books, 1959), 113; and Joseph Roach, The Player’s Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1985), 111. Jean Bernard Le Blanc, Letters on the English and French Nations (London, 1747), 2:43. O’Keefe, Recollections of the Life of John O’Keefe (1826; reprint, New York: B. Blom, 1969), 1:42. Colley Cibber, An Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber, ed. B. R. S. Fone (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1968), 88, 87.
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M A RC M A RT I N EZ 29. London Evening Post, November 23, 1728. 30. Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 80–190, 221–55, 277–82. 31. Gray’s Inn Journal 46 (September 1, 1753 [London, 1756]), 1:291. 32. The most dangerous acrobatics were performed by a stuntman. According to John Genest, Nat Clark was one of them. Some Account of the English Stage from the Restoration in 1660 to 1830 (London, 1832), 3:553. 33. See entry for John Rich in Philip Highfill et al., A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers and other Stage Personnel in London, 1660–1800 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973–93), 12:351. 34. David Mayer, “Towards a Definition of Popular Theatre,” in Western Popular Theatre, ed. David Mayer and Kenneth Richards (London: Methuen, 1977), 276. 35. Amadis was performed forty-nine times for eight seasons with decreasing frequency until it was dropped from the repertoire after the 1724–25 season. There existed two other types of structural organization: the serious type with only mythological characters (The Love of Mars and Venus, Drury Lane, March 2, 1717), a type that became scarce as the century progressed; and the grotesque type centering on commedia dell’arte characters (the Faustus pantomimes among others). A highly volatile genre, the pantomime could present other occasional combinations and forms, especially in the second half of the century. 36. Joan Lawson, A History of Ballets and Its Makers (London: Pitman, 1964), 25. 37. This was a popular play that was performed sixty-one times in nine seasons. 38. Weekly Journal, or Saturday’s Post, December 7, 1723. 39. For a study of John Weaver’s works, see Richard Ralph, The Life and Works of John Weaver (London: Dance Books, 1985). 40. A History of Dancing, reprinted in ibid., 168. 41. Rich had turned down Theobald and Galliard’s pantomime Merlin; or the Devil of Stonehenge (December 12, 1734), which was accepted at Drury Lane but did poorly, having a run of just six nights and never being revived. A year later, at a revival of King Arthur at Goodman’s Fields on December 17, 1735, the scenographer John Devoto had introduced painted scenes of two follies, Merlin’s Cave and the Hermitage, erected in Queen Caroline’s garden at Richmond. The cave contained the effigies of Merlin and other characters in niches. Rich decided to counterattack a month later with his version of Merlin’s Cave. The inside and outside of Merlin’s Cave along with the Hermitage are mentioned in Rich’s inventory transcribed by Philip H. Highfill in Restoration and 18th Century Theatre Research 5 (May 1966): 7–17; 5 (November 1966): 12–26; 6 (May 1967): 28–35. 42. Jupiter and Europa premiered on March 23, 1723, and was performed forty-six times for six seasons. This pantomime had an amazing scene of transformation of Jupiter into a bull “in sight of the Audience” (Weekly Journal, or Saturday’s Post, April 6, 1723). 43. It had a run of 161 nights for nine seasons and then was advertised as The Royal Chace; or, Harlequin’s Skeleton from December 26, 1746: under this title it was regularly performed 191 times for fourteen seasons until the death of John Rich. This extremely successful pantomime therefore totaled 352 performances in twenty-three seasons and was occasionally revived after Rich’s death. It was sometimes called Merlin’s Cave; or, Harlequin’s Skeleton, or simply Harlequin’s Skeleton. 44. John O’Brien, “Harlequin Britain: Eighteenth-Century Pantomime and the Cultural Lo-
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45. 46.
47.
48. 49.
50. 51.
52. 53. 54.
55.
56. 57. 58.
cation of Entertainment(s),” Theatre Journal 50 (1998): 497. This article was developed into a full-length study on pantomime, Harlequin Britain: Pantomime and Entertainment, 1690–1760 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004). Merlin; or the Devil of Stonehenge (London, 1734). Virginia P. Scott shows that magic is already present in many French plays and more particularly in La Baguette de Vulcain, which had been performed on December 12, 1718, and repeated a few times. “The Infancy of English Pantomime: 1716–1723” Educational Theatre Journal 24 (1972): 133. An Exact Description of the Two Fam’d Entertainments of Harlequin Doctor Faustus (London), 33–34. Rich did not appear on the stage after November 8, 1752, when he performed in The Fair: he was replaced by Miles for the rest of the season. The house pocketed £213 15s. 6d. as against £87 4s. on the previous night with a double bill of two theatrical hits The Suspicious Husband and Perseus and Andromeda. It was then occasionally revived: it played forty-eight nights in the 1759–60 season, twenty-three in the 1761–62 season, and five times (with alterations) in the 1773–74 season. David M. Little and George M. Kahrl, eds., The Letters of David Garrick (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, and London: Oxford University Press, 1963), 1:172. “The Town have flocked to that Theatre they just before deserted and with wonder beheld Mynheer Cajanus stalk around the stage with a becoming dignity.” The Gentleman’s Magazine, January 1734, 4:92. George Anne Bellamy, An Apology for the Life of George Anne Bellamy, 2nd ed. (London, 1785), 6:51. London Stage, Covent Garden entry for November 6, 1752. The Gentleman’s Magazine, November 1752, 535. But, as a pamphleteer remarks, the publicity was not totally detrimental to the Covent Garden manager: “those who had seen the burlesqued would not have missed the Burlesque; the Spectators would reap Advantage from Disputes of this Sort, as they cause an Emulation in each House, which must considerably contribute to the Increase of their Pleasure.” The Present State of the Stage in Great Britain and Ireland (London, 1753), 24. On November 10 one Thadeusz Fitzpatrick at the head of a party intending to damn the pantomime hit Woodward with an apple. The scandal-mongering John Hill took up the quarrel in the Inspector 524 in a letter “to Woodward, comedian, the meanest of all characters.” Woodward responded with a Letter to the Public in the General Advertiser on November 18, 1752. The dispute eventually sputtered out in mid-November, although it was briefly revived in 1753 with An Answer. Even Henry Fielding took part in the fray. The Covent-Garden Journal 71 (November 18, 1752), ed. Bertrand A. Goldgar (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 374–79. See also James Fullarton Arnott, John William Robinson, and Robert William Lowe, English Theatrical Literature, 1559–1900 (London: Society for Theatre Research, 1970), 352–53. Thomas Davies, Memoirs of the Life of David Garrick, 3rd ed. (London, 1781), 1:274. Thomas Wilkes, A General View of the Stage (London, 1759), 263. “A Chacoon for a Harlequin with all the postures, attitudes, motions of the head and arms, and other gestures proper to this character” was reprinted in Cyril William Beaumont, The History of Harlequin (London: Beaumont, 1926), 123. The quotations are from this edition.
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M A RC M A RT I N EZ 59.
60. 61. 62. 63. 64.
The reporter’s wish was to be fulfilled a few years later. Garrick introduced a speaking Harlequin in his Harlequin’s Invasion on December 31, 1756, but this was really a burlesque farce rather than a proper pantomime. However, the sanitization of the form took an important step further on January 4, 1779, at Covent Garden with the first speaking pantomime, The Touchstone; or, Harlequin Traveller. Quoted in Van Lennep et al., The London Stage (January 1, 1760). London Chronicle, November 9–11, 1758. Gray’s Inn Journal 46 (September 1, 1753 [London, 1756]), 1:291. The Town and Country Magazine, January 1770, 2:43. Songs, Chorusses, &c . . . in the New Entertainment of Harlequin’s Jubilee (London, 1770), 13.
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\ Sensational with the Greeks and Daring with Shakespeare but Not So Sure about Shaw Performance of George Bernard Shaw at Terence Gray’s Festival Theatre, Cambridge, England, 1926–1935 — PAU L COR N W E LL
In the Art of the Theatre . . . the spoken word is but one element among others, of which the most important are Movement (dancing, expression by gesture, crowd-movement), Lighting (colour, expression by atmosphere, scenic and decorative projection), Painting (pictorial and decorative . . . ), Architecture (form, emotional expression . . . ), Sculpture (expression . . . through masks and lay figures), Sound (music . . . natural and artificial noise), and the as yet barely attempted use of the sense of Smell.
T ER ENC E GR AY, “The Art Theatre Movement” (1928) To open with the Oresteia was a magnificent gesture—a kind of nailing of the colours to the mast. Artistically, there can be no two minds about its success, and the sustained applause which lasted for more than five minutes after the curtain had been drawn suggests that its success is not only artistic . . . The lighting and scenic effects were amazing. The use of the cyclorama . . . moved the audience to a spontaneous round of applause. . . . It is certain that no scenic effects approaching it have ever been seen in Cambridge before.
J. E. S E W E LL
(1926)
Probably the best of the experiments, not at all typical of the hundred plays produced by the most representative of Gray’s ideals, was the production earlier this year of Henry VIII. . . . The costume and facial make-up were of playing cards; characters like Norfolk, Abergavenny . . . were treated as unimportant puppets,
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ALI STA I R CO OK E , “Ten Seasons of Dramatic Experiment” (1931)
Terence Gray’s dedication to the new “Art of the Theatre,” as promoted by Gordon Craig in the early part of the twentieth century, can be traced back to Gray’s own early books, all published by Heffer of Cambridge: Hatshepsut, A Pageant of Old Egypt, A History in Dramatic Form (1920); And in a Tomb Were Found, Plays and Portraits of Old Egypt (1923); Cuchulainn, An Epic Drama of the Gael (1925) (which included photographs of Gray’s models of theatre sets in his new modernist style); and Dance-Drama: Experiments in the Art of the Theatre (1926). There it is: pageants, history in dramatic form, plays of ancient Egypt, Irish epics, and modernist settings. In Dance-Drama Gray had three chapters with the heading “The Tyranny of Words” and further chapters on “Dancing” and “Environment” (including the use of luminous screens designed by Craig). This was sufficient to indicate the direction Gray wished to take when he opened his own theatre in Cambridge, not many weeks after DanceDrama was in the bookshops. Interestingly, Thomas MacGreevy, the reviewer of Dance-Drama in the Times Literary Supplement of April 8, 1926, noted the apparent influence of George Bernard Shaw on Terence Gray’s style of writing. In Dance-Drama, Gray wrote: “Now the revived art of the theatre, evolved theoretically by Englishmen such as Gordon Craig, and both evolved and put in to practice on the Continent by innumerable artists of the theatre, has developed rapidly, and appears to be approaching a renaissance, but in its development it has found that it is necessary fundamentally to alter the form of the stage.”1 Thus it was that workers were soon active restructuring the stage area of an old Regency theatre of 1814 that had been built on Newmarket Road on the outskirts of the town of Cambridge. When the theatre eventually opened, Gray felt the necessity to provide a motor bus to get his audience there from the colleges across the town, although today the site (now used as a Buddhist Center) is considered to be located in the city center. By demolishing the stage boxes, the old proscenium opening was extended so that the stage became as wide as the theatre, with steps leading down into the audience. Part of the roof was raised ten meters to accommodate a curved brick cyclorama, which was built at the rear of the stage, and a revolving stage was constructed in the middle. In
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addition, and very important for the new “Art of the Theatre,” new, powerful Schwabe electric lighting from Germany was installed to provide directed light and colored light for emotional effect. The theatre, now set for Gray’s modernist stage, was notably England’s “first permanent indoor performing space to be based on the design of a Greek open-air theatre.”2 In its simplicity it was also a unique stage for revivals of Shakespeare. Gray renamed the old Theatre Royal the Festival Theatre—a meaningless title, claimed several local people who were unaware that Gray intended to promote summer festivals of visiting theatre companies, one of his aims which never in fact happened. Gray’s ambitious opening production of a set of three Greek plays, the Oresteia of Aeschylus, was given a new translation by the poet R. C. Trevelyan, a graduate of King’s College, Cambridge. The production had most of the elements of the new “Art of the Theatre,” with specially composed music by Donald Tovey and Gordon Jacob, specially designed masks for the actors, and movement and dance choreographed by Ninette de Valois (Gray’s cousin, later to create the Royal Ballet). There were modernist settings using screens and boxes with an emphasis on levels, and there was a new quality of electric lighting that was to provide sensational headlines for the reports by critics throughout Britain and beyond. The actors included Miriam Lewes, a leading London actress at the time, and the supporting cast included two young unknown actors with a potential for Hollywood and the New York stage, Torin Thatcher and Maurice Evans.3 Although on paper the play was produced by Gray’s new resident producer, Herbert Prentice from the Sheffield Repertory Theatre, the whole performance belonged, as was apparent to many in the audience, to Terence Gray himself, the writer of Egyptian plays and the devotee of minimalist sets, masks, new lighting, music, and movement and dance. As Dr. Fiona Macintosh wrote: “Gray should be remembered as the first director to show the English-speaking theatre how masks and highly stylised sets and costumes could be combined with formal patterns of movement to intensify the effect of Greek tragedy in performance.”4 At the end of the performance, the company received a prolonged ovation, claimed to be anything from five to ten minutes. John Sheppard of King’s College, who had produced the same Greek play for students in Cambridge three years earlier, was at the opening night, and the conclusion in his review of the play was, in three words, “everything was perfect.”5 Following the sensational opening night, which had provided an indication of what was to follow, the Festival Theatre continued with a range of experimental productions for which Prentice was the main producer but worked
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under Gray’s overall direction and management. There were occasional productions by Gray and Norman Marshall. Terence Gray’s own productions during 1927 were limited to three: a private production of Miss Julie by Strindberg (which had been banned for public showing), Oedipus Tyrannus by Sophocles, and A Florentine Irony by L. Stanley Jast. With Gray in command (and his family providing all the extra money to run the theatre) there were several Irish plays and plays with Irish connections during the first year, but, strangely for that time in the English theatre, there was only one play by perhaps the greatest Irish playwright of the century, George Bernard Shaw. The early plays at the Festival Theatre were in the main poetic plays and plays by established European playwrights. For example, there were productions of Gordon Bottomley (King Lear’s Wife), Maeterlinck (The Miracle of St. Anthony), Strindberg (The Stronger), Yeats (On Baile’s Strand), Rice (The Adding Machine), and the Capek brothers (The Insect Play), all the type of play to be expected on Gray’s new open stage using Craig-type screens and Gray’s own “hollow-boxes,” which were rostra of varying sizes, built in the theatre, and lit by the best of the new European lighting. There were also three evenings of short “dance cameos” presented with the plays, with music ranging from Glière to Ravel, reflecting de Valois’s experience with the Diaghilev Ballets Russe, and including modern English composers such as Bliss (his ballet Rout) and Alwyn. De Valois was also responsible as choreographic director for the movement and dance in certain plays, beginning with the Oresteia and followed by On Baile’s Strand and Congreve’s Love for Love, which had music composed by ex-Cambridge student Patrick Hughes, later known as the musician and writer Spike Hughes, who later claimed to be Gray’s first resident music director. The plays of Shakespeare, which were to have fourteen productions at the Festival Theatre in the seven years between 1928 and 1935, had only one brief scene from Twelfth Night before 1928, performed in what Gray claimed to be “Elizabethan pronunciation.” The experiment was devised by F. G. Blandford of the university. The only play by Shaw during this period up to the end of 1927 was his one-act Androcles and the Lion, produced by Prentice and performed with another one-act, The Lost Silk Hat by Lord Dunsany. Gray’s new theatre was undoubtedly an international theatre, centered on established European and world playwrights. It was possible that Gray was considering all his options for future productions of Shaw, even though in 1926 he had indicated some of the problems with Shaw’s plays. As Phyllis Hartnoll has written: “thought, not action, was the mainspring of the Shavian play . . . thought seasoned by wit and enlivened by eloquence.”6 It was not until the be-
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ginning of the second full year, and fifteen months after the opening of the Festival Theatre, that Gray decided to mount his first three-act play by Shaw. Caesar and Cleopatra was undoubtedly the choice to be expected, considering Gray’s background as an Egyptologist and a writer of Egyptian plays. It was unfortunate that the production coincided with the departure to Northampton of Herbert Prentice, who would have been Gray’s first choice as producer. Later, when he was at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre, Prentice produced over nine hundred plays, including Saint Joan for Malvern in honor of Shaw’s eightieth birthday. The 1928 production of Caesar and Cleopatra in Cambridge was not taken by Gray, who seemed still not ready for a Shaw production (it would have only been his fourth production), but was handed to T. G. Saville, a well-regarded leading actor in the company but totally inexperienced as a producer. This is not entirely to be questioned, for Gray had already provided several opportunities for his stage manager Norman Marshall to learn the skills of production.7 Four years later, in 1932, when there was a second production of Caesar and Cleopatra, it was taken by Gray in his first direct involvement in a Shaw play. Shaw was known to have been greatly influenced in his early years by Ibsen and admired his plays. It is significant that Gray experienced much criticism when he attempted to produce Ibsen at the Festival Theatre without Ibsen’s usual realistic scenery but instead in Gray’s modernist style on a platform built in the middle of the stage.8 The story of what seemed like Gray’s lack of interest in Shaw’s plays should, therefore, be examined against the background of the young Gray’s intentions and dedication to the new “Art of the Theatre” at the time when the seventytwo-year-old Shaw was beginning to slow down at the end of his long career in writing for the theatre. In 1928, it must be remembered, Shaw was considered the “Grand Old Man” of English letters—the winner of the Nobel Prize in 1925, an acclaimed veteran of Anglo-Irish theatre, the author of the highly successful Saint Joan, often said to be one of the most popular men in England, and still writing. Many literary and theatrical critics could see much more in Shaw than a flood of clever words, as indeed Gray must have done with his own direct interest in poetic drama and historical theatre. Allardyce Nicoll, for example, a literary critic who gave several lectures at the Festival Theatre, claimed that Back to Methuselah “trembles with an imaginative passion” and Androcles and the Lion contains “a new note of poetry,” both of which, the passion and the poetry, would have directly appealed to Gray, and both plays were produced by him at the Festival Theatre. To complete the parallel, Nicoll added, “Only in the Cambridge Festival Theatre under Mr Terence Gray was there to be discov-
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ered a conscious endeavour to exploit such dramatic forms” (poetic).9 In many ways the future in Cambridge for George Bernard Shaw, after its hesitant beginning, seemed to be promising.
Androcles and the Lion, Produced by Herbert Prentice (April 20, 1927) Although the first words written by Shaw to be heard in the Festival Theatre (spoken by Peggy Calthop in the part of Magaera) were “I wont go another step,” the performance could at least be said to have been a beginning, for both Gray and Shaw. In Prentice’s production, the young actor/dancer Hedley Briggs played Androcles, Norman Marshall was the lion, Maurice Evans (shortly to continue his career to the Old Vic Theatre before leaving for New York and films) was the Captain, T. G. Saville was Caesar, Torin Thatcher was Ferrovius, and Doria Paston was Lavinia, the part played in the premiere production by Lilah McCarthy (the wife of Harley Granville Barker). The Cambridge Review thought that Hedley Briggs “could not be bettered” and that Marshall was “a glorious lion.” Maurice Evans was thought to be “not very suitably cast . . . but he did his best to make up for what he lacks in strength and brutal presence.” Guy Naylor, the writer and one of the few Cambridge critics who held Gray’s respect, thought that Torin Thatcher had “a splendid figure” and his “heavy voice was heard to advantage.” The conclusion reached by Naylor was that it was “a hilarious evening.”10 Shaw’s one-act was performed with The Lost Silk Hat (Dunsany) and The Adding Machine (Rice), all three produced by Prentice. Shaw came to see this first production of Androcles and the Lion at the Festival Theatre: a photograph shows him walking out of the front of the theatre accompanied by his friend Sir Sydney Cockerell and his wife. Cockerell was at the time the director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, and he later obtained the Augustus John portrait of Shaw (1915) for the museum. Norman Marshall, who must have been introduced to the famous playwright, was not only playing the lion but also busy preparing for his coming productions of The Player Queen by Yeats and The Insect Play by the Capek brothers. Marshall later made comments on Shaw’s relationship with producers, suggesting that Shaw “distrusted most of the producers who directed his plays because they tended to try to produce them too subtly for [Shaw’s] taste.” Marshall related how Shaw had arrived at a final rehearsal for the premiere of Androcles and the Lion produced by Harley Granville Barker and, after saying that he had simply come to watch, { 176 }
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made a “complete re-direction of the scenes he had been watching.” Marshall expressed the opinion that “All Shaw’s later plays would have been improved if he had placed any reliance on the judgment and critical faculties of his producers. These plays are stuffed with unnecessary lines and speeches which go on reiterating the same point long after it has been made plain to the audience.”11 One wonders where Marshall had heard that. In 1928 Shaw wrote that he found Gray’s article reviewing Elizabeth Scott’s proposed design for a new Shakespeare Memorial Theatre at Stratford after the fire of 1926 “most interesting,” a view also supported by the editor of The Bookman’s Journal. Gray’s critical comments included that the design “embodies, exclusively, all the unfortunate characteristics of the traditional stage which has descended upon us from Georgian times . . . on which no form of modern stage craft can adequately be practised.”12 The 2007 redesign of the Stratford theatre may well prove Gray to be right.
Caesar and Cleopatra Produced by T. G. Saville (January 16, 1928) Writing in 1940, ten years before Shaw’s death, Desmond MacCarthy revealed that he had “watched for years the evolution of Mr Shaw’s thought and genius” and described Caesar and Cleopatra (first performed in 1913) as “this most imaginative play . . . the very best of modern historical plays.”13 MacCarthy had possibly placed his finger on what could have been one of Gray’s fundamental reservations: that Shaw’s play, set in Gray’s beloved Egypt, was not actually history but in MacCarthy’s words “imaginative” and “modern historical.” Historical, as Gray might have stressed, but not history in the way that Gray had written his own plays using actual documents and inscriptions taken from Egyptian monuments (as in And in the Tomb Were Found, published in 1923). The character of Julius Caesar was Shaw’s own creation in the same way that Shakespeare’s Caesar had been Shakespeare’s; that was obvious to historians of the theatre but a real problem for Gray. Reviewing a performance of Saint Joan, another of Shaw’s “historical plays,” MacCarthy agreed that Shaw had “a very powerful and dramatic imagination, but the historical side of it is not the strongest.”14 During the Cambridge performances of Caesar and Cleopatra produced by Saville, Gray was elsewhere busy rehearsing a production of The Carthaginian by Frank Taylor, a poetic/historical drama set in Roman times about the soldier and statesman Hannibal, a piece of theatre art nearer to Gray’s ideals { 177 }
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(at that time). Many other historical plays were produced at the Festival Theatre over the seven years by various producers, and especially by Gray. One was Warren Hastings by Feuchtwanger, produced in October 1930 by Tyrone Guthrie as part of the Anmer Hall season. In the cast there was a young actor called Hesketh Pearson who twelve years later wrote his own biography of George Bernard Shaw, which he claimed was written with the cooperation of the playwright.15 As well as producing Caesar and Cleopatra, Saville played the leading part of Caesar, a common practice at the Festival Theatre, perhaps a legacy from the days of Victorian theatrical management in England. Curigwen Lewis (a young actress who later became the wife of the actor Andrew Cruikshank) played Cleopatra, and Doria Paston designed some spectacular “Egyptian” scenery and also took the part of Ra. Lewis and three other actors in the cast of Caesar and Cleopatra were later to spend seasons at the Old Vic Theatre in London. There were to be two further productions of Shaw during 1928, but neither of them was produced by Terence Gray.
The Devil’s Disciple Produced by T. G. Saville (April 30, 1928) The third Shaw play at the Festival Theatre was the second production by actor/ novice producer Saville and again with sets by Doria Paston. It must have indicated that in Gray’s eyes Saville had been successful with Caesar and Cleopatra, although Gray’s production of the play in 1932 was given a very different interpretation. The Devil’s Disciple was filmed in 1959 and given full Hollywood treatment with a cast that included three huge stars of the period: Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, and Laurence Olivier. In the Festival Review, the new production was introduced with some enthusiasm as “one of the raciest and most enjoyable [of Shaw’s plays], delivering its message wrapped up with humour.” The unnamed writer (probably Gray) proclaimed that at the Festival Theatre “in the course of time we may hope to perform all of Mr. Shaw’s plays,” and added that “those we have done hitherto have been the more difficult ones which are least often performed” (Androcles and the Lion and Caesar and Cleopatra).16 Saville again took the leading part, that of Richard Dudgeon (played by Douglas in the 1959 film). Walter Meyjes, a recent graduate of Cambridge University, was Anthony (Lancaster’s part), and Peter Creswell was General Burgoyne (Olivier). Gray was in the theatre preoccupied this time with his productions of two one-acts for the { 178 }
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following week: a poetic drama by Gordon Bottomley, The Riding to Lithend, which had movement choreographed by de Valois, and his own Egyptian play A Royal Audience.17 One could guess which producer, in Gray’s opinion, had drawn the short straw. At Easter 1928 Gray addressed the Conference of the National Union of Teachers in Cambridge. His lecture included the extract, quoted at the head of this article, which was a part of his speech called “The Art Theatre Movement.” It was printed in a Cambridge Souvenir published by the University Press. In his address Gray mentioned Shaw in part of his section on the “Origin of the New Drama” which had started with Ibsen: “In the course of time, through the channels of literature, the movement spread to this country, and men of genius arose, such as Mr Shaw, who wrote plays that could rank with the best work of Ibsen, Strindberg, and the continental dramatists.”18
Heartbreak House Produced by Cyril Wood (October 10, 1928) A third Shaw play followed five months later in a production by guest producer Cyril Wood, who in February 1928 had produced The Passion Flower by Benavente at the Festival Theatre. In the Festival Review, Gray pleaded that it was difficult to mount a Shaw play in any part of the country where the touring company of Charles Macdona was active.19 Macdona made annual visits to the New Theatre in Cambridge, about a mile from the Festival Theatre. It could have been that the scarcity of Shaw at the Festival Theatre was due simply to the problem of obtaining performing rights, and not at all concerned with Gray’s personal difficulties with Shaw’s history plays or even his hesitation to cope with Shaw’s long, word-centered plays or, indeed, even the imagined inappropriateness of Shaw’s plays performed on the modernist open stage. As Saville had done before him, Wood produced and also took the leading part, that of Captain Shotover. The cast included Gray regulars: Esme Vernon as Lady Utterword, Peggy Calthrop as Mrs. Hushabye, Stephen Gillam as Mazzini, George Coulouris as Margan, Roy Newlands as Hector, and Alan Wheatley as Randal. Gray much admired Gillam and in 1932 chose him to play Caesar in his own production of Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra, a choice that alone could have indicated Gray’s immense regret that he had not chosen to produce the play earlier. Many Festival Theatre actors and producers performed in or produced Shaw in London and elsewhere in subsequent years. Just one example from the present company was George Coulouris, who had parts in The Apple { 179 }
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Cart (1930) and Saint Joan (1936) on Broadway at the Martin Beck Theatre before beginning his long career in films.
Saint Joan Produced by Peter Godfrey (January 14, 1929) Assessed by many as Shaw’s greatest play, Saint Joan followed three months later at the Festival Theatre in January 1929. It was almost a new play, having been premiered only six years earlier in New York and five years earlier in London. Again Gray wanted to be excused, this time because he was working on a Greek play, the Prometheus of Aeschylus (which was performed with a program of two short ballets, both world premieres with choreography by de Valois). It could be argued that this had been an error in planning, for surely Gray would have wanted to try his hand at Shaw’s highly rated historical play. But whatever the circumstances, there was one man alone whom Gray would have trusted with the production, namely, his respected friend and business colleague Peter Godfrey of the London Gate Theatre. Godfrey left for New York in 1937 and later opened a second Gate Theatre in Hollywood. Gray and Godfrey had been discussing exchange performances and the distant prospect of forming a permanent cartel of three theatres with performances in Cambridge and London. It is possible that Gray or Godfrey or both had seen Pitoeff ’s production of Saint Joan in Paris, where both Gray and Godfrey were frequent visitors. The French production had stressed the mystic side of Joan but, according to Norman Marshall, was overall “the opposite of what Shaw intended.”20 The cast for Godfrey’s production was an interesting development. Doria Paston, who was making a considerable name for herself as Gray’s chosen scenic designer with a series of designs built on the central revolving stage, played Joan. Two years later, in May 1931, she was to take the leading parts in the Lysistrata of Aristophanes and Antigone of Sophocles on one evening, an ambitious and brave undertaking, possibly never attempted before or since. For Saint Joan, Gillam was the Dauphin, Harold Ridge (who had been Gray’s cofounder and specialist of lighting for the Festival Theatre) returned to play the Earl of Warwick, and Walter Fitzgerald (later in many British films) was Peter Cauchon. Leonora Corbett, also a popular actress on Broadway, was the Duchess de la Tremouille, and George Coulouris played two parts, Captain La Hire and the executioner. The review of the production in the Cambridge Review was signed by T. W. These were the initials of T. H. White, then a young graduate of the university. { 180 }
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White later earned much fame and many dollars for the film versions of his novels of the King Arthur stories, including The Sword in the Stone (1938). He had recently taken offense at the comment in the Festival Review that the dramatic critic was “only secondarily a human being.” White discussed at length in the Cambridge Review the validity of Shaw’s epilogue showing the Dauphin as King Charles the Victorious. By the end of the epilogue, White wrote, the play becomes a tragedy of innocence: “By means of the epilogue, which employs poetry to affect its ends . . . the case is quite changed. The forces now become ‘innocent’ not ‘right,’ and the problem is one of tolerance, not stupidity. It rises to a higher plane. Shaw should mean this by his ‘glorious ending.’ ” But with particular reference to the acting and the sets, White suggested that somebody, presumably the producer (Godfrey), should have understood that Shaw has a sense of humor and “common sense, or practice as opposed to poetics.”21 The Festival Theatre was taken over by Anmer Hall in Gray’s absence between October 1929 and December 1930. There was a varied and ambitious program of plays, beginning with Six Characters in Search of an Author (Pirandello) and ending with Tyrone Guthrie’s last three productions in Cambridge: A Doll’s House, the world premiere of Bridie’s Tobias and the Angel, and The Merry Wives of Windsor. The company included Robert Donat and Flora Robson, both at the beginning of their careers, as Guthrie was. But for fifteen months there were no performances of Shaw. The nearest the audiences got to Shaw was The Apple Cart presented at the New Theatre in Cambridge in May 1930 by Sir Barry Jackson, touring from Malvern, with a cast headed by Julian d’Albie and Rita John. In April and May 1932 John returned to the town to produce her own short season at the Festival Theatre.
Androcles and the Lion Produced by J. B. Fagan (June 1, 1931) This was a second production of Shaw’s one-act at the Festival Theatre, now with a new producer, J. B. Fagan, late of the Oxford Playhouse. Fagan, like Godfrey, was a close friend and supporter of Gray. The new lion was none other than Mr. Terence Gray himself in one of his two stage appearances. He had appeared briefly as the Owner of the Theatre in Pirandello’s Each in His Own Way in June 1927. Lavinia in the Shaw play was played by Fagan’s wife, Mary Grey, who ten years previously, in 1921, had played Hesione in the world premiere of Heartbreak House at the Court Theatre in London. Despite the double attraction of having an Irish producer (Fagan) and an Irish lion (Gray), the Irish playwright { 181 }
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(Shaw) failed to arrive at any of the performances, although the encouraging suggestion had been made in the Festival Review, probably written by Gray, that “Bernard Shaw has had no greater interpreter than Mr. Fagan, who has been responsible for many of his plays.”22 Fagan had managed the Court Theatre in London and then ran the Oxford Repertory Theatre from 1923 to 1929, the year he was appointed by Gray as a director on the board of the Festival Theatre. Fagan had chosen Heartbreak House to open his Oxford theatre.23 A paragraph from Only by Failure, my biography of Gray, underlines the appropriateness of the part of Shaw’s lion for a man who loved to hide and never wanted to take the limelight even when he was disguised as a theatrical lion: The small non-speaking part of the lion was an appropriate part for Gray, with his (often) acute stutter. Conceived entirely in terms of mime and movement, Gray’s interest in dance must surely have qualified him for the part. As his critics would have agreed, there was no-one better to roar, shake his paw, sigh, snore, groan, moan and wag his own tail (all in Shaw’s stage instructions). The lion appears only twice, at the beginning and the end of the short play. It could even be suggested that Gray’s emotional response to local criticism in Cambridge was predicted by his fellow Irish playwright: “The lion gathers himself for a spring, swishing his tail to and fro through the dust in an ecstasy of anticipation.” Then at the conclusion, when the lion realises that Androcles is the one who took out his thorn, Shaw indicated that “they embrace rapturously, finally waltz round the arena amid a sudden burst of deafening applause.”24
Gray would have enjoyed the audience’s reaction. The other two plays performed with Androcles were Strindberg’s The Stronger (mainly a monologue) and Pirandello’s The Man with the Flower in His Mouth, which Fagan had already produced with great acclaim in Oxford and elsewhere. In Cambridge at the end of June there was a production of Shaw’s Captain Brassbound’s Conversion by the Amateur Dramatic Club in which Michael Redgrave, a recent graduate of Magdalene College, took the leading part. In his autobiography In My Mind’s Eye, Redgrave explained: “It was the first and, as it turned out, the last time I ever acted in Shaw in the theatre. Shaw claimed, correctly, that his characters are ‘actor-proof.’ I think that is why I have always resisted playing them.”25 Gray undertook the next four productions of plays by Shaw at the Festival Theatre, surprisingly, following his earlier reticence, in a space of just six months. They were a new production (a revival after Saville’s earlier production), in
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October 1932, of Caesar and Cleopatra; two new productions of one-acts, The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet and The Admirable Bashville, on one evening; and a mammoth performance of the five plays that make up the complete Back to Methuselah, performed over three evenings during April 1933. Grouped together these Shaw productions must have been one of the peaks in Gray’s theatrical career and an exciting period for the Cambridge enthusiasts of Shavian theatre, even if it was obvious that Gray knew by now that he was in his final year at the Festival Theatre and that his ambitious plans to produce a complete cycle of Shaw plays would never be realized. But at least Gray had woken up to the theatrical value of the plays of George Bernard Shaw, possibly seeing the light after watching the productions by his two close friends and experienced men of the theatre: Godfrey’s production of Saint Joan and Fagan’s production of Androcles and the Lion, both plays demanding an intense emotional response from the actors and the audience. It is of interest that in 1939, six years after Gray’s departure, his prodigy Norman Marshall (who had started with Gray in 1926) took over the Gate Theatre in London which Peter Godfrey had founded in 1925, the year before the Festival Theatre opened.
Caesar and Cleopatra Produced by Quetzalcoatl (Gray) (October 24, 1932) The first production of Caesar and Cleopatra at the Festival Theatre had been by Saville when it was given the author’s subtitle “A History” in the Festival Review. The play was introduced by Doria Paston in the specially composed role of Ra, the Egyptian sun god (probably using an extract from Shaw’s own prologue to the play). In a surviving photograph, Paston can be seen standing on a platform between six decorated pillars. Gray’s own production came at the beginning of his final year, in the autumn of 1932, when he was well established as a producer, rejuvenated using his new pseudonym of Quetzalcoatl, and working closely in the theatrical cartel with Peter Godfrey of the London Gate Theatre. Other productions at the time included Ibsen’s Peer Gynt (produced by Godfrey), Chekhov’s The Three Sisters (Frank Birch), The Merchant of Venice and Lenormand’s The Eater of Dreams (Gray/Quetzalcoatl), Rupke’s London Docks, and O’Neill’s rarity The Rope (Godfrey, who also produced the final play of the term, Maya by Simon Gantillon). In January 1933 there were two more plays by O’Neill, both revivals of previous Festival Theatre productions, and also more Shaw produced by
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Gray, with three productions including the five-play Back to Methuselah. Amazingly, no less than sixteen of the last twenty-eight plays (including Back to Methuselah as three plays) in the final twelve months were produced by Gray, the man who had begun his short theatrical life in 1926 as an amateur producer. Now, in 1932–33, he was speaking and working as a highly professional producer with many successful experimental productions behind him, using his skills to make an “independent work of theatre art using the playwright’s contribution as material towards that end.”26 The program book also included a small line drawing of Cleopatra by Elizabeth Montgomery, who had designed the costumes (probably her first professional designs) for Gray’s imaginative production of Romeo and Juliet in February 1929. Montgomery later became part of the three-woman design team called Motley. The leading parts in Gray’s production of Caesar and Cleopatra were taken by Dorothy Dunkels, who had played in Matriarch on Broadway in 1930, and Stephen Gillam. Also in the cast were Joseph Gordon Macleod, who was to succeed Gray in 1933, and Vera Birch, the wife of Frank Birch. A Cambridge academic at King’s College, Frank Birch was a producer of student productions who in the early 1920s had been an inspiration and father figure for Gray. Birch’s productions for the Amateur Dramatic Club had included two memorable theatrical rarities, Pirandello’s Henry IV (produced in 1920) and Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida (1922). The two productions had undoubtedly been directly responsible for Gray’s decision to have a theatre of his own.27 The unidentified critic in the Cambridge Review for Gray’s production of Caesar and Cleopatra opened with: “Shaw is primarily and fundamentally a politician, and the more politics there is in his drama, the better it will be.” He went on to describe the struggle between the old and new Rome, between the old “duty and honour” and the new politics of Julius Caesar. There was also, hidden, the struggle (between the wars) of “Toryism and Whiggery.” The writer continued that the play is “peculiarly successful because it is so completely Shavian; not only the matter, but the manner is Whig—on a lack of understanding of the history . . . much of the play depends—the element of burlesque, of anachronism, of 1066 and all that.” The greatest merit of the play, the writer went on, was the development of the character of Cleopatra: “admirably done by Miss Dorothy Dunkels, her acting has a kind of verve and professionalism about it which was very pleasing to watch. . . . Stephen Gillam’s Caesar was excellent too.”28 A sad announcement of the talented Gillam’s death three months later was made by Gray (exceptionally writing under his own name in the Festival Re-
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view): Gillam’s “was a nature so rare as to appear out of place in the theatre, yet such sensitiveness, such simplicity, such charm of manner and of mind, became an actor well. . . . I have seen (the part of Caesar in Shaw’s play) four times in England . . . in France and in Czechoslovakia; but his was incomparably the best performance save that of the man who is probably the first actor on the English stage—Cedric Hardwicke.”29 Gray, now hiding behind the mask of Quetzalcoatl, had not been attracted to the “wordy” plays of Shaw and generally did all he could to avoid producing them. Now it seems that Gray was on a winner, even if neither his own name nor his pseudonym would appear in the Festival Review. There was no mention also, of course, that Gray—ex-Egyptologist, historian, and experienced writer of “historical” Egyptian plays and thus ideally suited to this particular play— was producing a Shaw play that was a complete recreation of an imagined, theatrical, cardboard Egypt. The scenic design for Caesar and Cleopatra was credited not to Gray or even to his experienced prodigy Doria Paston, who was having tremendous success with her designs for Gray at this time, but to a young Cambridge graduate born, like Gray, in Suffolk. Ex-Perse School and Pembroke College, both in Cambridge, he had excelled with his designs for university productions, including Honegger’s King David and John Sheppard’s production of The Bacchae. Following some fifteen months at the Festival Theatre (with Gray and then his successor) he later became a highly rated producer of poetic documentary films made during the war years. He died after an accident on a Greek island at the age of forty-three. His name was Humphrey Jennings. Set up to be one of Gray’s final experiments in staging, on alternate nights the production was given in Egyptian costume or Edwardian dress. The audience was asked to vote for their choice. Surprisingly, the majority voted for modern (Edwardian) dress and, according to Kenneth Adam in the Manchester Guardian, “Cambridge audiences entered enthusiastically into the spirit of the thing.” The production was also seen at the London Gate Theatre and, in December, at the Little Theatre in Halifax in Yorkshire, where they had problems pronouncing “Quetzalcoatl.” Adam, also in Halifax, wrote of Shaw’s “text so rich and so resonant with the implication that it soars to fill the stage.” The lesson to be learned from the play, he continued, is “design [by Jennings], décor, call it what you will can never perform the function of a poet but if their exponents . . . enter into the theatre with the poet and are rigidly controlled, they become his indispensable collaborators in the creation of a new scale of dramatic values.”30 This would have pleased Gray.
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The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet and The Admirable Bashville Produced by Quetzalcoatl (Gray) (January 23, 1933) Less than three months later, Gray presented a rare double bill of two of Shaw’s early plays: The Admirable Bashville and The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet. The Admirable Bashville (1901) was the stage version of his own novel, Cashel Byron’s Profession. There was a revival of the same play at the Old Vic Theatre in London in 1932, just months before Gray’s production, with the title role played by Roger Livesey.31 The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet (1909), which was the first of the two plays at the Festival Theatre, had the subtitle “A Sermon in Crude Melodrama” and had been first performed at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. Gray wrote in the Festival Review that he found the neglect of The Admirable Bashville difficult to understand, and added: “Nowadays, the theatre does not take itself so seriously and such a burlesque as Bashville comes into its own. Bashville is a tonic such as the theatre has badly needed, and we do not think it comes too late.”32 Despite the controversial nature of The Admirable Bashville, being considered blasphemous and banned, there was no comment about this in the Festival Review. Shaw’s preface was more than twice the length of the play and contained a long explanation of the 1909 Select Committee on Stage Censorship, which had been asked to approve the play. As the example of someone else’s battle with the Lord Chamberlain, the play and its production problems must have provided particular interest for Gray, who had himself entered into many similar feuds with the censor of plays. It was the entertainment or the theatrical value of Shaw’s plays that Gray now placed first, before any outspoken language, slant on history, or other controversial content. Gray was essentially, like Shaw, a man with a sense of humor, a producer who liked burlesque, and a man who enjoyed a good fight when angered by what he thought of as archaic behavior. Gray was, it could be said, as full of Irish whimsy as Shaw and knew, the more he worked on Shaw’s plays, that of all living writers Shaw had been able to make the best and the most intelligent fun in the twentieth-century theatre. Doria Paston provided the scenic designs for both short plays, and the two casts used the same actors, including Roy Newlands as Blanco Posnet/ Cashel Byron, Vivienne Bennett as Feemy/Lydia Carew, and Joseph Macleod as Bashville/Sheriff Kemp. The choreography for The Admirable Bashville was by Sara Patrick, now Gray’s chosen new director of choreography, an actress and dancer who later went, like Ninette de Valois and Vivienne Bennett before her, to the Abbey Theatre in Dublin to work with Yeats. { 186 }
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The critic for the Cambridge Review signed herself K. J. R. They were the initials of a young student of natural sciences with a deep love of poetry and a passion for the theatre. Her name was Kathleen Raine, later to be known as a poet and specialist on William Blake. She was one of the few students in Cambridge to have been there throughout the seven years of Gray’s Festival Theatre, and she later recalled (speaking of the early years at the theatre): “My imagination was at that time sustained more than by any other influence . . . by the Festival Theatre.”33 She had recently written enthusiastic reviews for the Cambridge Review for two Eugene O’Neill plays that Gray had produced in the previous week (Emperor Jones and Dreamy Kid), but her mood seems to have suddenly changed. This was surprising, because she had always been so excited by Gray’s earlier modernist presentations. She opened her review of the Shaw plays with an attack on Gray’s philosophy of staging, one in which “a garden seat must look like a rose-bush, a clock like the leaning tower of Pisa.” Now, she continued, “the secret is out, Quetzalcoatl has been a Victorian all the time. Perhaps that is his joke, and we have only just seen it.” After this long preamble, she eventually came to the matter of the present Shaw plays and to the inevitable positive end that most Raine reviews had to have at this time: “The two short Shaw plays will interest two classes of audience: the inevitable Shavian will be glad to avail himself of the opportunity for an amusing production of two rare specimens of that playwright’s art. And those interested in witty productions will pass a pleasant, even an instructive evening.” So, it could be asked, what was the problem? Well, according to Raine, Blanco Posnet “has rather threadbare wit,” and also the acting in Gray’s production was “satisfactory if not outstanding.” She thought that Bashville was “a much ‘worse’ play but proved the more entertaining,” but said the “blank verse is horrible and could not be less witty.” The young graduate concluded: the production was “thoroughly spirited,” Vivienne Bennett as Lydia was “at her best,” and she liked, particularly, the creation of a boxing ring on the stage using just strips of white paper.34
Back to Methuselah Produced by Quetzalcoatl (Gray) (April 19, 1933) Shaw’s epic set of plays was performed over three evenings: parts 1 and 2 (five performances of In the Beginning and The Gospel of the Brothers Barnabas produced solely by Gray), parts 3 and 4 (seven performances of The Thing Happens and The Tragedy of an Elderly Gentleman, produced by Gray assisted by Noel Iliff ), and part 5 (six performances of As Far as Thought Can Reach, also pro{ 187 }
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duced by Gray assisted by Iliff ). Part 5 was performed with Pointe au porc-epic (Porcupine Point), a play by Gabriel St. Ours presented partly in simple French and produced by Gray with the scenic design shared between a new trio of Gray, Paston, and Jennings. Just two years later, Jennings began his work on the first of his documentaries for the General Post Office Film Unit.35 Gray introduced Back to Methuselah in the Festival Review for the first evening (April 19, 1933) in the name of Rory O’Balderdash, yet another of his many mysterious pseudonyms, and Gray/Balderdash began with a long explanation: Theatrically there is no excuse for performing Back to Methuselah; intellectually it needs no excuse. Intellectually it has not a dull passage; theatrically it has only a few that are anything else. Yet Mr Shaw is a master in the theatre and when he has chosen to write for the theatre he has produced works that never falter theatrically from the first moment to the last. But in Back to Methuselah he has deliberately given the theatre a kick in the pants every time he felt inclined to develop a thesis. In treating of the mentality of the tri-centenarian who has outgrown interest in infantile satisfactions such as Art, he appears to have identified himself with the most venerable of his protagonists, and has left the nursery of artists in order to climb the windy tower of untrammelled thought; only occasionally does he slither down the banisters and somewhat grudgingly execute a brief pas seul that is purely theatrical for the benefit of the infants who still lisp in the baby-language of art.36
As far as Gray was concerned, in this mammoth play “Shaw combines Humour, i.e. entertainment, and pure intelligence to a degree that is unique in dramatic literature.” This seems to be high praise, but Gray added mischievously (and mysteriously), “a work such as Back to Methuselah has no more connection with the theatre than has a surgical operation.”37 It seems to have been Gray’s own sense of humor, as in the expression “given the theatre a kick in the pants,” that finally united the two Irishmen in their attitude to twentieth-century theatre, for that sense of fun was exactly what Gray had wanted for his own plays and for his early productions. Now as an experienced producer, he was beginning to see that the differences between the reproduction of real history in the way that his own experimental plays had done and using the Shaw approach with added humor were theatrically almost immaterial. In Dance-Drama, back in 1926, Gray had praised Shaw’s Back to Methuselah for being a play on a “vast canvas” to compare with the Oresteia and Shakespeare’s history plays. This had been regardless of all Gray’s extended talk of the “tyranny of words.”38 The Cambridge Review thought that “Mr Gray” must have great personal faith in the morale of his company: “Beginning the season with Back to Methuselah is to be compared with the introduction of tactics of infiltration on
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the Western Front by Hindenburg and Ludendorff in 1917.”39 The unnamed critic felt that the company had not let Shaw down in parts 1 and 2. The performances by Margaret Rawlings, Walter Horsbrugh, Edie Palfrey, and Gabriel Toyne were liked, but the critic concluded that “if the rest of this interminable work is as well performed, we shall not have much to complain of.” Then, adding salt to the injury, the young critic described the play that Shaw thought was his masterpiece: “It really is rather a waste of time.”40 Margaret Rawlings was a highly respected actress in Shaw plays. She started her career in 1927 with the Macdona Shaw Repertory Company in The Doctor’s Dilemma and in 1930 toured the United States with several Shaw plays. In 1933 she acted Salome in the production of the Oscar Wilde play at Godfrey’s Gate Theatre in London, a part taken by Beatrix Lehmann in Gray’s production in Cambridge. In 1935 Rawlings was again acting in Shaw plays for the Macdona Company. It is no wonder that Gray chose to retire from the theatre after his last production of Rostand’s Chantecler in June 1933. He excused himself by writing in eleven simple words, “I have done all the work that I wish to do.” Life for Terence Gray, it seems, was never so uncomplicated, although there were undoubtedly many other hidden reasons for his hasty departure from Cambridge, not the least being that of utter exhaustion. Gray’s desire to expand the Festival Theatre influence into Oxford and London was just one of his many grand ideas that never came to fruition.41 After Cambridge, the peace that Gray desired was to be found on the family vineyard in southern France, at Tain in the Rhone Valley. Meanwhile the Festival Theatre, without him, was given a new “lease” (of life) under Joseph Gordon Macleod, a Scottish barrister, writer, and poet as well as an actor in Gray’s company. Macleod was a parliamentary candidate for the Labour Party and after his time in Cambridge wrote three significant books on Russian theatre and became a British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) radio announcer. Notably, in 1949 he was listed by George Orwell as a “crypto-communist sympathiser” in a report that was reprinted in the Guardian on June 21, 2003. The list included Charles Chaplin and J. B. Priestley, and Michael Redgrave and three other Cambridge graduates of 1925–26. As the new director of the Festival Theatre, Macleod endeavored to continue the classic style of Gray’s productions, with revivals and experiments and some new plays, but without the extremes of Gray’s ideas. Macleod enjoyed (at first) the support of nearly three hundred people, most connected with the university, who acted as financial guarantors. The list included many heads of col-
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leges and several lecturers of English, including famous academics and writers such as E. M. W. Tillyard, A. Quiller-Couch, Basil Willey, L. J. Potts, and F. L. Lucas. Alistair Cooke, who had supported Gray warmly in his articles in the Theatre Arts Monthly, added his own name to the list of generous guarantors, as did Frank Birch and, surprisingly, the members of the Cambridge University Rugby Club.42
Arms and the Man Produced by Noel Iliff (January 22, 1934) Iliff, who had been associated with Gray’s production of Back to Methuselah, was asked by Macleod to produce Arms and the Man. This was the first of two productions of Shaw plays that Iliff would produce without Gray looking over his shoulder. Iliff had taken part in the Shakespeare birthday celebrations at Stratford in 1930 and, after Cambridge, produced at the Westminster Theatre and acted in radio plays for the BBC. During 1939–40, the final year of the Festival Theatre, Iliff returned to Cambridge and bravely tried to resurrect Gray’s “Art of the Theatre”; but he was not successful, and the Festival Theatre sadly closed as the war began. Arms and the Man was the second production of Macleod’s second term, which had opened with Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland adapted by Gray’s first resident producer, Herbert Prentice. Playgoers were informed in the Festival Review that the Shaw play “bubbles with fantasy in a delicious vein of humour which is difficult to resist.”43 Arms and the Man was followed by an ambitious production of Othello in which Iliff played Iago and Macleod (the co-producer with John Izon) played Othello. The Cambridge Review thought that most of the audience in 1934 would have little idea about the political implications of the “Balkan squabbling” that was the background of the play, although the writer thought that the complications of “Russian fighting in the Bulgarian army and Austrians in the Serbian” could be easily ignored and the play left to stand on the merits (or otherwise) of human beings. Peter Hoar, busy rehearsing the part of Cassio, played Bluntschli, David Raven was Major Saranoff, and Sanchia Robertson took the part of Raina while rehearsing Desdemona. The critic H. G. of the Cambridge Review summed up the production as “a good play worth seeing.”44 The scenic design was shared between Nicholas Harris and Humphrey Jennings, a duo now busy working on the sets for the following week’s Othello.
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Captain Brassbound’s Conversion Produced by Noel Iliff (April 18, 1934) A long essay on Shaw’s play was provided in the Festival Review by Dr. R. F. Rattray, who at the time was a minister of the Unitarian Church in Cambridge and had just published a book on Shaw. In his article in the Festival Review he explained how Ellen Terry, the actress and mother of Gordon Craig, had longed for a new play by Shaw following the success of Candida. Shaw pictured Terry this time in the setting of Morocco surrounded by “sheiks and he-men” and “European toughs and wastrels.” Shaw had at first called the play The Witch of Atlas. Rattray quoted a story of how Terry’s maid had said to her, “She’s so like you. She gets her way in everything—just like you!”45 The large cast was headed by Cicely Nicks as Lady Cicely (the part written for Ellen Terry), Don Gemmell as Drinkwater, John Izon as Captain Brassbound, Clephan Bell as Sir Howard Hallam, and David Raven as Captain Kearney. The critic G. P. in the Cambridge Review felt that the production improved as the evening went on: “We laughed at all the wit . . . we applauded Cicely Nicks . . . we enjoyed the suspense and melodrama in the Moorish castle.” Of the actors, David Marsh was described as “impressive” as the Rev. Leslie Rankin, a Scottish missionary. The scenic designer Clement Davenport, as Rattray had been keen to point out, “had opportunities for the lover of colour and lighting.”46 As for the previous Shaw play, the actors were playing the Irish playwright while they rehearsed Shakespeare, this time Cymbeline.
Candida Produced by Robert Powell (November 20, 1934) Powell’s production of Candida was described by the critic R. G. in the Cambridge Review as “an admirable example of the best Festival production.” R. G. were the initials of Robert Gittings, who had taken his BA degree in 1933 and was researching for his two-part biography of Thomas Hardy. Gittings had several plays performed in the 1950s, and his books on Hardy appeared in the 1970s. Macleod, who had not been happy with some of Gittings’s reviews, eventually took the drastic step of withdrawing permission to attend performances. As far as Candida was concerned, Gittings thought it was written “in the old days when Shaw was a playwright . . . and will probably be considered his best play.” But the play’s main fault was “due to [Shaw’s] desire to be entertain-
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ing,” the great quality that Gray had admired. The production and the acting were considered “admirable,” and Gittings particularly liked Don Gemmell as Marchbanks, who was said to have been “brilliant in the extreme,” and Oliver Burt as Burgess. Jean Anderson as Candida acted “well and bravely, although obviously unsuited to the part.”47 Anderson later became well loved on the London stage and on television, notably for the series Tenko set in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp.
On the Rocks Produced by Joseph Gordon Macleod (June 1935) By this time, nearly at the end of his two years, Macleod, like Gray before him, was beginning to feel that he was just about “on the rocks” himself. There were five more weekly productions after On the Rocks before Macleod’s eventful two years came to an abrupt end. But like his predecessor, Macleod had been brave and ambitious at the end, offering the first performances of two new plays, Son of Judea by Michael Walsh and Yahoo by the Earl of Longford (of the Dublin Gate Theatre), as well as See Naples and Die by Elmer Rice, Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, and, as Macleod’s final production, Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This was a remarkable farewell run of plays almost equaling the superhuman final term of Gray’s seven years. On the Rocks was a new Shaw play, having had its first London performance only two years before in 1933 (and published privately in 1934). It was a political fantasy or comedy, described in the Festival Review as “a compendium of contemporary politics in two acts.”48 Clive Barker in 2000 described the play as one in which Shaw discussed genocide, poverty, and unemployment “without any emotion . . . no more than academic problems.”49 Shaw followed On the Rocks with another political extravaganza called Geneva, which had its first performance in America on Broadway at the Daly’s Theatre in 1938. Macleod produced and designed the sets with Eric Adeney, who also appeared as Sir Dexter. A rare photograph shows one minimalist setting with political slogans (almost in the manner of Brecht).50 Jean Anderson was Lady Chavender, Peter Powell (the producer of Candida) was Viscount Barking, and also in the cast were Frank Harvey Jr. and Alfred Huxley, the pair who attempted to run the Festival Theatre after Macleod’s departure. After the final night of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in June 1935, Macleod gave his farewell speech, in which he described his two difficult but ambitious
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years trying to follow Gray with limited support at the box office. Like a judge, the barrister Macleod gave his verdict: “I have not failed. My company has not failed . . . Cambridge has failed.” With these words, Macleod—actor, producer, poet, writer, and prospective politician—led the company and the audience in a rendition of Jerusalem, the popular hymn sung at the closing of Labour Party conferences.
Conclusion So it was that after the gradual near-death of the Festival Theatre and Gray’s own departure in 1933, the two-year period when Macleod made continuous attempts at a similar quality with several experiments and more new plays than Gray managed, another brave period of leadership came to an abrupt end. The theatre then continued with several managements and decreasing support until 1940. Gray had gained an international reputation for the provincial theatre set in an university town, mainly through his undoubted enthusiasm for the performance of Greek plays, a passion for Shakespeare on the open stage, his dedication to Irish theatre and poetic drama, and his contemporary interest in the plays of the twentieth-century European dramatists and, especially, the new powerful theatre of Eugene O’Neill. Yet the forty-two plays Gray chose to produce himself over his seven years included just four plays by Shaw (four out of the ten productions of Shaw at the Festival Theatre). Gray’s four almost redeemed his earlier neglect and suggested that, had he gone on, there would have been the chance of a complete performance of the Shaw canon, as Gray had hoped. However, it is the Shaw productions at the Festival Theatre that Gray did not produce that are difficult to understand and of direct interest here, for there is no doubt that Gray admired and valued the great Irish playwright even if Gray had initial problems in balancing the historical content of Shaw’s drama with the Irish humor. Gray’s only possible excuse for his diffidence was his preoccupation (and success) with other forms of experimental theatre, the ones more suited to the Festival Theatre stage. Gray had earlier described Shaw as a “man of genius,” and the Irish playwright certainly visited the Festival Theatre at least once. Actor and playwright Robert Morley acted at the Festival Theatre, notably as Herod in Gray’s outstanding production of the first public performance of Wilde’s Salome in England and, in total contrast, as a pirate chief in
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the Red Rover. It is significant here that Morley wrote, and this makes us pause for thought, that “besides Bernard Shaw,” Gray was “the only genius I have ever met in the theatre.”51 It is difficult to account for Gray’s lack of interest in Shaw during the first half of his seven years at the Festival Theatre. The generous offering of Shaw’s plays to other producers (plays selected by Gray, that is) may have something to do with Gray’s continuing obsession with what he had described in 1926 as the “tyranny of words,” although his own play Cuchulainn was certainly that and much more. Also, it cannot be denied that Gray had a personal fascination with Shaw’s mammoth Back to Methuselah. The truth remains that Gray had increasingly become preoccupied with the composite nature of theatre, in which the spoken word was considered only one part of the total production (scripts of plays at the Festival Theatre were often cut). As important as the words were the other elements of staging: the movement, lighting, scenic design (especially the stage architecture), body sculpture, and not least the music and sound. Gray was a pioneer in the finding of opportunities for the full artistic life of the theatre, employing his own specialists for choreography, scenic design, wardrobe, and music. He had certainly made an extreme nonverbal statement against the typical staging of early-twentiethcentury productions, especially on the commercial London stage, when he physically stripped away the proscenium boxes and raised the roof to widen the stage of the Festival Theatre in order to build his cyclorama and revolving stage, thereby removing the footlights and changing to a new powerful form of German electric lighting projected from all directions and providing controlled highlights, shadow, and color. Photographs show that shadow in particular was used to great effect at the Festival Theatre. For Shaw’s plays there were also, undoubtedly, problems concerning the stage rights and the permission for performance from the censor; every play needed to be submitted. This was a very demanding use of Gray’s precious time in a theatre where he was working a weekly repertory, rehearsing and performing six days a week and often seven. It is well known that Shaw had strong reservations about which theatres should be given the initial staging rights. Barry Jackson of the Birmingham Repertory Theatre, who was finally in favor with Shaw when he opened the Malvern Festival primarily for Shaw’s plays, was known to have had severe difficulties earlier in getting permissions for Birmingham.52 It should be remembered that Gray was totally unknown in the theatre when he opened the Festival Theatre (his reputation as a writer had been very small) and, worse still, his theatre was provincial (i.e., outside London) even if it was at one of the two major British universities. For most { 194 }
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critics and commentators, and most actors too, theatre did not exist outside London. Back in 1920, when Gray was still beginning to sort out his thoughts for the theatre, the forces of realism, particularly in the plays of Ibsen and Shaw, had, according to Allardyce Nicoll in British Drama, “spent themselves.”53 The serious experimental producers of two or three smaller London studios, like Gray’s friend Peter Godfrey of the Gate Theatre, slowly started to wake up to what was going on in Europe and America and began to produce unknown plays of, for example, Toller, Kaiser, O’Neill, Rice, Pirandello, Capek, Munro, and Yeats. All these playwrights were produced at the Festival Theatre between 1926 and 1933. Significantly, there were nine productions of Greek tragedies and eleven of Shakespeare’s plays and eight Shaw plays (an amazing total when you compare Gray’s theatre with modern theatres and their facilities and rehearsal patterns and their resources and support). There were also five plays each by Ibsen, O’Neill, Pirandello, and Strindberg. From Greek plays to Strindberg, it could be said that these were the core of Gray’s program at the Festival Theatre, all presented as weekly repertory. The apparent neglect in the 1920s of Shaw, who had become a wellestablished popular playwright at the beginning of the century, was not only by Gray. (It could be claimed that under the Gray-Macleod managements, with eight new productions plus two revivals, the Festival Theatre did well for Shaw, even if there were, for example, no Pygmalion, Major Barbara, Man and Superman, or Mrs. Warren’s Profession.) It was not until 1930 that the Old Vic Theatre, the leading London theatre of classical plays at the time, produced Shaw (the one-act Androcles and the Lion), and from then on there seemed to be an unwritten limit of only one Shaw play a year. Tyrone Guthrie, who had spent fifteen months in weekly repertory at the Festival Theatre learning his craft as a producer with the Anmer Hall Company, became the main producer at the Old Vic in 1933 and produced no plays by Shaw, despite the fact that choosing a Shaw play would have been considered a new move after the total domination of Shakespeare at the Old Vic.54 The years 1933–35 at the Festival Theatre—the last six months under Gray and the two years under Macleod—certainly made up for the earlier neglect. It could also be argued that several other important twentieth-century classic British playwrights were not seen at the Festival Theatre; for example, there was only one Galsworthy and no Maugham, Pinero, Granville Barker, or Arnold Bennett, all major British playwrights at the start of the century. The years 1926 to 1933, the period of Terence Gray at the Festival Theatre, were difficult ones in Cambridge with the radical changes taking place in the { 195 }
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teaching of English studies at a time when the black cloud of the political situation in Europe was in everybody’s mind. The mounting conflict in Spain and the rise to power of Hitler were creating intense emotions in the students, promoting both a restlessness and a creative energy living, as they did, at a crisis time between the two world wars. It is relevant that a large proportion of the audience at the Festival Theatre came from the university. Perhaps Gray’s finest achievement was the way he involved others, particularly these young students, in the thrust and excitement of his own ambitions. He gave opportunities to so many young unknown actors, new producers and designers, dancers and choreographers, and composers, including new talent emerging out of the university. The list is endless. Many famous theatrical giants of twentieth-century theatre must be grateful to him for their early opportunities, including devoted professionals such as Ninette de Valois, Tyrone Guthrie, Maurice Evans, Robert Morley, Rupert Doone (who founded the London Group Theatre), Anthony Quayle, Jessica Tandy, Robert Donat, and Flora Robson, all of whom came from outside Cambridge.55 November 2006 was the eightieth birthday of the Festival Theatre, and it passed unmarked in Cambridge and elsewhere, which is surprising as the theatre building is still virtually in structure as it was in Gray’s day and standing full of resting energy and exciting memories. As Iain Macintosh wrote in 1993, “The Festival remains tantalising recoverable, having slept for over fifty years but remaining still largely intact.”56 But, in truth, the building has been rescued by the Buddhists of Cambridge, and thankfully it is now looked after by caring hands. The building is safe, repainted, well lit, and warm. The stage, Terence Gray’s wide stage with its glorious cyclorama, is still there, often brightly floodlit with light, although now the spotlights fall on a large golden Buddha.
Notes 1. 2. 3.
Terence Gray, Dance-Drama: Experiments in the Art of the Theatre (Cambridge: W. Heffer & Sons, 1926), 10. Fiona Macintosh, Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy, ed. P. E. Easterling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 305. Miriam Lewes acted in premiere performances of three Shaw plays: Misalliance, Great Catherine, and Overruled. Her acting as Clytemnestra in the Oresteia in the Festival Theatre’s opening production was described by the Daily Mail as a “great personal triumph.” (This quote was found in a scrapbook, probably made by Norman Marshall and held in Cambridge Arts Theatre archive, which was undated. It was from November 1926, probably a day or two after the performance of the Oreisteia on the twenty-
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S H AW AT G R AY ’ S F E ST I VA L TH E ATR E fourth.) Maurice Evans was in sixteen plays at the Festival Theatre, including Orestes in the Oresteia, the Captain in Androcles, Mr. Four in The Adding Machine, Don Juan in Don Juan by Flecker, Second Engineer in Insect Play, Kamose in Gray’s And in the Tomb Were Found, and Don Palegari in Pirandello’s Each in His Own Way; he left in the summer of 1927. Torin Thatcher had eighteen parts, including Aigisthos in the Oresteia, Conchubar in On Baile’s Strand, Colonel Jeffery in Sweeney Todd, Sermatieff in Red Nights of the Tcheka, Ahmose in And in the Tomb Were Found (Gray), and the Business Manager in Each in His Own Way; he also left in the summer of 1927. 4. Macintosh, Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy, 305. 5. John Sheppard, Cambridge Review, November 1926. 6. Phyllis Hartnoll, Concise Oxford Companion to the Theatre (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 500. 7. On Baile’s Strand by Yeats was Marshall’s debut production in January 1927. Marshall became known for his well-rehearsed productions of English classics at the Festival Theatre, such as The Knight of the Burning Pestle by Beaumont and Fletcher and The Shoemaker’s Holiday by Dekker. Gray invited Marshall to present his own season in January–March 1932, when Marshall produced seven plays in eight weeks, including Love for Love by Congreve and Marco Millions by O’Neill. Gray had ambitious plans for a cartel of three theatres with Frank Birch, Marshall, and himself as the producers. Marshall wrote a long chapter on the Festival Theatre in The Other Theatre (London: Lehmann, 1947), 53–71. 8. Paul Cornwell, Only by Failure: The Many Faces of the Impossible Life of Terence Gray (Cambridge: Salt Publishing, 2004), has detailed descriptions of Gray’s productions of Ibsen, including The Wild Duck, 205–8. The book records the transformation of Gray from theatre producer into mystic for his second career as a Buddhist writer using the pseudonym of Wei Wu Wei. 9. Allardyce Nicoll, “Relics of Realism and Signs of Change,” in British Drama (London: Harrap, 1925), 457, 480. 10. Guy Naylor, Cambridge Review, April 23, 1927. 11. Norman Marshall, The Producer and the Play (London: Macdonald, 1957), 247. 12. Terence Gray, The Bookman’s Journal 16, no. 6 (1928), reprinted in Festival Review, April 28, 1928. 13. Desmond MacCarthy, Drama (London: Putnam, 1940), 266, 273. 14. Ibid., 276. 15. Hesketh Pearson, Bernard Shaw, His Life and Personality (London: Collins, 1942). 16. Festival Review, April 21, 1928. 17. Terence Gray, And in the Tomb Were Found (Cambridge: Heffer, 1923), 95–122. 18. Terence Gray, “Origin of the New Drama,” in Cambridge Souvenir (Cambridge: University Press, 1928), 101–2. 19. Festival Review, October 10, 1928. 20. Marshall, The Producer and the Play, 77. 21. T. H. White, Cambridge Review, January 15, 1929. 22. Festival Review, June 1, 1931. 23. Norman Marshall, “J. B. Fagan and the Oxford Playhouse,” in The Other Theatre (London: John Lehmann, 1947), 19–27. 24. Cornwell, Only by Failure, 212.
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PAU L C OR N W E L L 25. Michael Redgrave, In My Mind’s Eye (London: Wiedenfeld and Nicolson, 1983), 90. 26. Gordon Craig’s words quoted by Elizabeth Heaton in the renamed Festival/Gate Review (October 24, 1932) under the title “Stage Revaluations.” 27. Frank Birch was a teaching don at King’s College before taking up the theatre and film full-time. He produced sixteen plays at the Festival Theatre, including Aladdin, a pantomime in which he also played Widow Twankey. Birch worked in Naval Intelligence at Bletchley Park during World War II and then returned to writing and broadcasting. 28. Cambridge Review, October 24, 1932. 29. Terence Gray, Festival Review, January 16, 1933. Hardwicke served in the army during World War I and then joined the Birmingham Repertory Theatre, where he played in several Shaw plays. He was knighted in 1934 and appointed as the Rede lecturer in Cambridge in 1936, the same year he moved to New York. He worked in Hollywood from 1939 to 1945, including the part of Livingstone in Stanley and Livingstone. 30. Kenneth Adam, Manchester Guardian, October 26, 1932 (in Cambridge) and December 8, 1932 (in Halifax). 31. Livesey’s films included A Matter of Life and Death, the Powell and Pressburger film of 1946. 32. Terence Gray, Festival Review, January 16, 1933. 33. Kathleen Raine, The Land Unknown: Autobiographies of Kathleen Raine (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1975; reprint, London: Skoob, 1991), 33. 34. Kathleen Raine, Cambridge Review, January 27, 1933. 35. Films made by Jennings included Post Haste (as director), Pett and Pott (the design), Listen to Britain (as co-director), Fires Were Started (director and scriptwriter), and A Diary for Timothy (director and scriptwriter). A recent biography of Jennings by Kevin Jackson, Humphrey Jennings (London: Picador, 2004), gave very little reference to his time at the Festival Theatre. 36. Terence Gray as Rory O’Balderdash, Festival Review, April 19, 1933. 37. Ibid. 38. Gray, Dance-Drama, 4. 39. Hindenburg was president of the Weimar Republic and appointed Hitler as chancellor. Ludendorff had been Hindenburg’s chief of staff during World War I. 40. Cambridge Review, April 21, 1933. 41. An undated five-page document titled “Proposal for the Formation of a Cartel” and signed by Gray is held by the Dartington Hall Trust Archive. Gray outlined a proposal for three theatres with himself, Frank Birch, and Norman Marshall as the three resident producers. 42. A full list of the guarantors can be found in each copy of the Festival Theatre program during Macleod’s two years. Sets of Festival Theatre programs are held in the Cambridge University Library, the Cambridge City Library, and the Cambridge Arts Theatre archive. 43. Festival Review, January 22, 1934. 44. H. G., Cambridge Review, January 26, 1934. 45. R. F. Rattray, Bernard Shaw, A Chronicle and Introduction (London: Duckworth, 1934). Quotations are from Festival Review, April 18, 1934. 46. G. P., Cambridge Review, April 22, 1934. 47. Robert Gittings, Cambridge Review, November 24, 1934.
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S H AW AT G R AY ’ S F E ST I VA L TH E ATR E 48. Festival Review, June 1935. 49. Clive Barker and Maggie B. Gale, eds., British Theatre between the Wars (Cambridge: University Press, 2000), 238. 50. Photograph by Leslie Steen, Gray’s reliable electrician, held by the Joseph Macleod Papers at the National Library of Scotland, but in poor condition. 51. Robert Morley and Sewell Stokes, Responsible Gentleman (London: Heinemann, 1966), 65. Morley had enormous success as Oscar Wilde in London and in New York and on film (1960). He made ninety-three films, his first major success being in Shaw’s Major Barbara with Rex Harrison and Wendy Hiller. In 1953 he played the part of Gilbert with Maurice Evans as Sullivan. They probably talked at length about their memories of the Festival Theatre. 52. The two opening seasons at the Malvern Festival in 1929 and 1930 were complete Shaw programs, with four Shaw plays in 1929 and eight in 1930. In 1929 The Apple Cart and Heartbreak House were also presented at the Birmingham Repertory. 53. Nicoll, “Relics of Realism and Signs of Change.” 54. Guthrie, like Gray, was Irish. He acted with the Scottish National Players in Ireland before joining the Anmer Hall Company at the Festival Theatre. Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author (with Flora Robson) was Guthrie’s first production in Cambridge, and Iphigenia in Tauris by Euripides was his first production with the company’s two stars, Flora Robson and Robert Donat. 55. There are many others not mentioned in the text. Some examples are Sir Basil Bartlett (actor and author), Ann Casson (actor, daughter of Sybil Thorndike), Sir Hugh Casson (architect, painted scenery at Festival Theatre), V. C. Clinton-Baddeley (actor, author), Alistair Cooke (journalist, critic), Arnold Cooke (composer), Hugh Sykes Davies (critic, writer, teacher), Ronald Duncan (Britten librettist), Betty Dyson (actor, costume designer at Old Vic), Robert Eddison (actor), Gemma Fagan (actor, daughter of J. B. Fagan), Hermione Gingold (actor), Spike Hughes (composer, writer), P. D. James (crime writer, worked in box office), Evan John (actor, writer), Constant Lambert (composer, conductor), Beatrix Lehmann (actor), Walter Leigh (composer, conductor), Malcolm Lowry (novelist, supporter), James Mason (at Cambridge University, active supporter), Ursula Morton (dancer), Ian Parsons (critic, Chatto & Windus director), C. B. Purdom (producer, writer), Anthony Quayle (actor, director of Royal Shakespeare Company), Michael Redgrave (actor, supporter), Peter Slade (educationist, supporter), and Richard Southern (designer, writer). 56. Iain Macintosh, Architecture, Actor and Audience (London: Routledge, 1993), 48. Macintosh described Gray’s alterations to the old Theatre Royal (renamed the Festival Theatre) as “magical . . . possibly the most successful open stage ever created in England.”
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Angels in the American Theater: Patrons, Patronage, and Philanthropy. Edited and with an introduction by Robert A. Schanke. Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, 2007. xiv + 314 pp. $35.00 paper.
As Robert Schanke points out early in his introduction to this engaging collection of essays, “research and writing on the history of arts philanthropy is meager and of fairly recent practice” (1). Angels in the American Theater serves as a corrective, or at least the strong foundation of a corrective, to this gap in theatre history scholarship. The sixteen artfully edited essays provide a panoramic view of American arts philanthropy from the turn of the century up to the current landscape of contemporary, corporatized Broadway. The mix of biographical, statistical, and historical “business” data provides a context for examining American theatre from a fresh and fascinating perspective that underscores the complex relationship of art and commerce in this country. Schanke opens with an introduction that provides a quick overview of theatre patronage in America as well as the bedrock information that provides context for the essays to follow. Many of us rarely stop to consider, for example, how the establishment of the federal income tax changed American theatre in unfathomable ways, as the wealthy sought to lower their tax burden, or how the Rockefellers saw, in the mid-1960s, how business and art benefited each other, establishing the Business Committee for the Arts. Because of size limitations of the volume, Schanke explains his decision to exclude essays that cover more familiar aspects of American theatre patronage, such as the Federal Theatre Project and the National Endowment for the Arts, and to include those that “reflect a wide range of styles of philanthropy” (11). To provide order to this “wide range,” he divides the selected essays into two sections of “angels”: those that examine individuals and those that center on institutions. { 201 }
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The range of individuals covered in part 1, the larger section of the book with nine essays, is quite remarkable. Opening the section is Teresa Collins’s essay on Otto Kahn, followed by Melanie Blood’s essay on the Lewisohn sisters, the copper heiresses indelibly connected with the Neighborhood Playhouse. Providing a contemporary bookend against those historical essays is Barry Witham’s look at Seattle arts advocate and fund-raiser Peter Donnelly, who “created a conduit between wealth and the arts” (153). Between those seeming extremes are essays covering a fascinating array of angels. We learn that many of these angels centered their prodigious support on individual artists, such as Richard B. and Jeanne Donovan Fisher’s support of playwright Charles Mee (Jennifer Schlueter), Alice De Lamar and Mary Curtis Bok’s patronage of Eva Le Gallienne (Robert A. Schanke), and Grant Goodman’s support of Paul Stephen Lim and his English Alternative Theatre at the University of Kansas (David A. Crespy). Other essays focus on better-known and commercially influential angels, such as Alexis Greene’s essay on the titular “Queen of Off-Broadway,” Lucille Lortel, and John R. Poole’s look at David Geffen and the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles, which Poole identifies as a “model for regional theatres” (148) based upon its diversity of programming and community outreach. Finally, Dan Friedman reflects upon a different permutation of patronage as well as the blurred boundaries between art and political advocacy in his essay on the unique, grassroots fund-raising of the Castillo Theatre. What is interesting to note is the tangled tapestry woven from these life stories as old-world altruism and modern capitalism collide with personal ego and selfless generosity in a historical web of the Great Depression, the New Frontier, and the complications of rapid-growth technology and competing media. Part 2 includes six essays centered on significant institutions in American theatre, beginning with Sheila McNerney Anderson’s essay on W. McNeil Lowry and the behemoth Ford Foundation. The names of most of the institutions or corporations covered in this section are familiar to readers, such as the Rockefeller Foundation, discussed in Stephen D. Berwind’s essay, but the essays themselves have more organizational variation than those in part 1. This is not to suggest a weakness in the collection; it seems primarily due to the more complex nature of foundations and corporations, which are run by families or boards that have a greater diversity of mission and financial reach than most individuals. In this section, for example, we have Bruce Kirle’s essay on the MacArthur Foundation and its specific relationship with Ellen Stewart and the La MaMa Experimental Theatre followed by a reversal of that approach with Jeffrey Ullom’s essay on the Actors Theatre of Louisville and their several institutional benefactors, such as the Humana Foundation, Brown-Forman Cor{ 202 }
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poration, and the Bingham family. Jeffrey Eric Jenkins provides an appreciative look at conventional patronage with his essay on the Harold and Mimi Steinberg Charitable Trust, described as representing “the age of quiet and dignified philanthropy” (254). Juxtaposed against quiet dignity are two essays that tackle the more thorny issues of corporate giants, such as Anthony Vickery’s look at Clear Channel Communications and initial fears of a return to a syndicate-like monopoly. Vickery is not the only author to examine parallels between past and present. Kathy Privatt equates Disney’s Broadway involvement with Renaissance patronage and draws a clear template that overlays the Disney Corporation with the Medicis. What emerges from a reading of Angels in the American Theater is a deeper appreciation of and respect for the myriad individuals, organizations, institutions, and corporations that find a way to grease the wheels of theatres large and small, commercial and avant-garde. While the motives are many—from an abiding, selfless love of art to a desire for tax relief—these are the angels who come through, sometimes in the final moments, to save programs, employ artists, protect the past, and inspire the future. This readable and elegant collection is a welcome addition to the ongoing story of American theatre as it (mostly) survives and (sometimes) even thrives into the twenty-first century—for as Robert Schanke reminds us, “angels make it so” (13). — CY NTHIA L . A L L A N Pittsburg State University
\ Susan Glaspell and Sophie Treadwell. By Barbara Ozieblo and Jerry Dickey. London: Routledge, 2008. xi + 228 pp. $48.00 paperback.
Barbara Ozieblo and Jerry Dickey’s critical introductions to the work of Susan Glaspell and Sophie Treadwell, respectively, part of Routledge’s Modern and Contemporary Dramatists series, offer an excellent overview of two powerful presences in early-twentieth-century American theatre. After reading this pithy volume, one is struck by the impact these playwrights had on their contemporary audiences and their seemingly immediate erasure afterward. Glaspell’s resurgence has been of relatively long standing, as Ozieblo, cofounder and now president of the Susan Glaspell Society, affirms, but only after a silence of about twenty years. Treadwell’s theatrical recovery, Dickey writes, began in the late 1980s when actress Jodie Markel read Machinal in Judith Barlow’s Plays by { 203 }
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American Women, 1900–1930 (a volume that includes Glaspell’s Trifles) and, in a manner Treadwell would have admired, produced it herself off-off-Broadway with Michael Greif directing and Markel in the lead. This venture eventually culminated in a high-profile production by Joe Papp at the Public Theatre in 1990. Despite Machinal’s success, fifteen years elapsed before the premiere of Treadwell’s Intimations for Saxophone, directed by Anne Bogart in association with her Saratoga International Theatre Institute company and dramaturged by Michael Kinghorn, at the Arena Stage; all of which is part of the ongoing rediscovery of Sophie Treadwell and her writing. In their brief introduction the authors describe the early-twentieth-century American theatre, which the two playwrights each in her own way helped transform, and then hit their main theme: that both Glaspell and Treadwell securely belong to the development of a feminist aesthetic in theatre and drama. According to the authors, each went beyond the call of theatre critic Florence Kiper, who in 1914 summoned women to write for the stage, predicting that when they did appear they would “reveal myster[ies]” and “probably not sentimentalize femininity” (8). Ozieblo and Dickey trace the paths that led each of the playwrights to create plays that veered from a palatable, digestible realism to experiment with expressionistic elements newly imported from European drama. These plays, including Glaspell’s The Verge and Treadwell’s Machinal and Intimations for Saxophone, still astonish audiences and challenge artists willing to produce them. The volume is divided between the two playwrights; in the first chapter for each playwright, titled “Life and Ideas,” Ozieblo and Dickey cover their subjects’ biography, introducing some of the major themes each playwright explored. Each author then devotes two chapters to plot synopses, critical reception of the first productions, and perceptive analyses of all but two of the playwrights’ oeuvre. Ozieblo separates Glaspell’s plays into the one-acts and full-lengths; Dickey organizes the Treadwell chapters chronologically. The final two chapters for each playwright, titled “Key Plays I” and “Key Plays II,” offer in-depth analyses and detailed production histories of select plays—Glaspell’s Trifles and The Verge and Treadwell’s Machinal and Intimations for Saxophone— a feature making the book a standout. Included are production photographs of all four plays showing a variety of theatrical interpretations. The reader gets the full force of the women’s daring dramaturgy and the equally exciting production work (especially by innovative scene designers) the writers have inspired. Certainly this volume will be an immeasurable aid to theatre practitioners and scholars as the authors conclude the book with a chronology for each playwright, notes, and separate bibliographies for Glaspell and Treadwell. { 204 }
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The “key plays” of Glaspell, which Ozieblo discusses in depth, were written during her almost seven years with the Provincetown Players (1915–22). Although her career extended to Broadway and a Pulitzer Prize with Alison’s House, Ozieblo rightly targets two high points of Glaspell’s playwriting career, Trifles and The Verge, and the conditions that surrounded their writing. From her first solo-authored one-act, Trifles, to her last play written for the Players, The Verge, Glaspell found a sensitive audience, attuned to feminist perspectives, many of whom were members of the Greenwich Village Heterodoxy group. For those “she had come to know intimately,” Ozieblo maintains, Glaspell wrote The Verge and was finally able to “break through the despised ‘patterns’ of Broadway plays” (71). Unlike Glaspell, Treadwell opted for Broadway venues, which, as Dickey argues, often worked against her (107). Never pliant or willing to compromise with male producers, agents, and the entrenched system—or to seek more sympathetic little theatre venues—Treadwell produced two shows on Broadway herself, including her critically acclaimed Machinal. According to Dickey, Treadwell experimented with form in her pursuit of an audience for her plays and in her attempt to sway them to her feminist themes; in Machinal, for example, Treadwell adjusted expressionistic techniques to “creat[e] a new aesthetic, one that might have particular appeal for the female spectator” (150). Treadwell’s stage directions in Machinal, some of which Dickey includes from her earliest manuscript, speak to her objective, Dickey notes, of provoking the consciousness of an audience, “especially . . . women” (149). The volume contributes to the authors’ desire that Glaspell and Treadwell, narrative innovators in drama, are now finally to be recognized alongside American women fiction writers as “melding feminist ideals with experimental form” (2). With their careful scholarship and lively writing, this book goes beyond an introduction and serves as an invitation to revisit and revive the plays. — A NNE BEC K Eastern New Mexico University
\ Theatre in Theory, 1900–2000: An Anthology. Edited by David Krasner. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2008. xviii + 577 pp. $47.95 paper.
David Krasner’s new reader, Theatre in Theory 1900–2000, is certain to be a valuable resource for any theatre scholar or instructor whose beat includes the { 205 }
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twentieth century. But for those of us who mourn the out-of-print demise of such classic compendia as Bernard Dukore’s Dramatic Theory and Criticism and Daniel Seltzer’s The Modern Theatre, who supplement Eric Bentley’s Theory of the Modern Stage or Daniel Gerould’s Theatre/Theory/Theatre with course packs of our own devising, and who feel Michael Huxley and Noel Witt’s Twentieth Century Performance Reader is wonderful but thirty chapters too short, Theatre in Theory is manna from heaven, quite simply the most ambitious collection of twentieth-century writing on dramatic theory ever published in one volume. The eighty-two chapters in Theatre in Theory are organized chronologically, from Strindberg’s “Preface to Miss Julie” (1888) to Heisnam Kanhailal’s “Ritual Theatre (Theatre of Transition)” (2004). The chapters are further grouped into parts, each representing a twenty-year period (1900–1920, 1920– 40, etc.) and headed by a two- to three-page introductory note. Accompanying each essay, Krasner provides a brief biography of the author as well as some notes to contextualize the piece. The authors represented include playwrights (Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, Stanislaw Witkiewicz, Sean O’Casey, Ntozake Shange), directors (Vsevolod Meyerhold, Peter Brook, Robert Wilson), critics (John Gassner, Eric Bentley, Martin Esslin, Northrop Frye), semioticians (Karel Brušák, Jindrich Honzl, Roland Barthes), philosophers (Henri Bergson, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler), and public figures (Emma Goldman, Alain Locke, W. E. B. DuBois) as well as a host of major scholars from theatre and performance studies (Michael Kirby, Bert O. States, Jill Dolan, Peggy Phelan, Richard Schechner, Herbert Blau). Some of this material has been anthologized previously—all the essays in Theatre in Theory with the exception of the editor’s introduction are previously published—but the vast majority of Krasner’s selections are not readily available elsewhere, including many rare gems, such Aida Overton Walker’s “Colored Men and Women on the Stage” (1905) and Maxwell Anderson’s “The Essence of Tragedy” (1939). Although much of the material collected in Theatre in Theory will not be new to scholars, the juxtaposition of such a broad range of viewpoints creates new interest. The audacity of F. T. Marinetti’s manifesto “Futurism and the Theatre” (1913), for example, is all the more striking when read between Shaw’s comically acerbic “Against the Well-Made Play” (1911) and Georg Lukács’s earnest “The Sociology of Modern Drama” (1914). The delayed-action ripple effect of Brecht’s influence on the twentieth-century theatre is easily traced when looking at the various theorists who refer to or invoke his ideas, from Walter Benjamin in 1939 to Eric Bentley in 1956 to Augusto Boal in 1974. Chapters by Eugene O’Neill, Thornton Wilder, Arthur Miller, and Tennessee Williams { 206 }
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prompt the reader to wonder how it happened that writing about dramatic theory ceased to be fashionable for mainstream American playwrights (Suzan Lori Parks is a welcome exception in the latter chapters). The collection is therefore ideal for use in a survey course or as a comprehensive overview for readers looking to deepen their understanding of the “big picture” of dramatic theory. Toward the latter goal, the book begins with a thirty-one-page introduction that lays out the philosophical foundations on which most modern and postmodern dramatic theory is based (or, conversely, against which such theory reacts). For Krasner, mimesis and representation are the touchstones for most thinking about theatre in the twentieth century. “For theatre theory,” he writes, “the central question is: should theatre remain faithful to real-world representation or challenge the veracity of mimesis by cutting against the grain of realistic presentation?” (2). This twentieth-century dilemma has its origins, of course, in Plato’s critique of mimesis, and a tightly knit section of the introduction succinctly rehearses the salient points of Plato’s critique and Aristotle’s counterargument. The introduction moves from Aristotle to the rediscovery of the Poetics in the late fifteenth century; a section titled “Renaissance, Enlightenment, Romanticism” traces the thread of the argument from French neoclassicism through Dryden and Lessing to Kant’s philosophy of aesthetics. Kant, writes Krasner, “is largely overlooked in dramatic theory” despite the fact that “his ideas on aesthetics have had widespread influence over all the arts” (12). Specifically, Kant’s discussion of beauty and the sublime in The Critique of Judgment greatly influenced the romantics, while his conceptions of genius and aesthetic distance were central to the development of twentieth-century modernism. A third section of the introduction, “Realism and Anti-Realism: Hegel and Nietzsche,” delineates how the aforenamed philosophers reformulated these questions in terms that more closely mirrored the political upheavals of the modern era: “Hegel and Nietzsche’s opposing theories, among others, took root in the twentieth century, manifesting the debate over representation that Plato and Aristotle had initiated” (30). Theatre in Theory is not perfect. To fit the work of eighty-two theorists into a single volume of less than six hundred pages, many chapters are abridged significantly from their original form, and while Krasner has generally done an excellent job of selecting his excerpts, some of them are frustratingly short. In one or two cases the theoretical text is just a page or two, barely as long as the biographical note about its author. Similarly, while it is doubtful that any reader will feel the collection includes too few authors, some will undoubtedly focus on perceived omissions. Jan Kott, for example, is mentioned prominently in the { 207 }
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introduction to part 5 (1960–80) but is not represented by a chapter. The length and tone of the chapter introductions vary quirkily; several living authors are described in the past tense, for example, while several deceased authors are referred to in the present. In a rare substantive error, a birth year but no death year is listed for Michael Kirby (1931–97). Overall, however, Theatre in Theory represents a much-needed contribution to the field of dramatic theory and is likely to prove a valuable resource to theatre scholars in and out of the classroom for many years to come. — HENRY B IA L Associate Professor, University of Kansas
\ Racism on the Victorian Stage: Representations of Slavery and the Black Character. By Hazel Waters. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. viii + 243 pp. $96.00 cloth.
In Racism on the Victorian Stage: Representations of Slavery and the Black Character, Hazel Waters charts the development of black characters on the British stage during the early Victorian period and through the 1850s. She provides ample historical contextualization of Victorian plays, reaching back to the late seventeenth century to root the beginnings of such representations in Thomas Southerne’s Oroonoko, based on the novel by Aphra Behn and originally performed in 1695. Her aim in mapping the emergence of the black character in the Victorian theatre is “to trace how racial assumptions in Britain evolved from a certain flexibility at the end of the eighteenth century to a greater rigidity, elaboration and entrenchment by the second half of the nineteenth” (2). The result is a narrative historical timeline of plays and performers representing a particular brand of blackness that both reflected and influenced British audiences’ attitudes toward slavery. Waters’s thesis that “it was slavery, both its imposition and the decades-long struggle against it, that shaped the image of the black as presented for popular consumption” (5) does not break new ground. Yet her examination of how theatre, a cultural commodity consumed by members of every social class, was used as a tool for developing social attitudes regarding race in Britain during the first half of the nineteenth century begins to shed light on a less illuminated area of theatre history. Each of the book’s seven chapters provides a painstaking review of play
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scripts from the period, which Waters mines as an archive of popular culture. Detailed script analysis of these plays—some largely forgotten or unknown to today’s audiences, such as Obi and The Africans; or War, Love and Duty, and more familiar titles such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the classic Othello—along with readings of extant documentation on their productions, are called upon to demonstrate Waters’s argument that social attitudes toward blacks evolved throughout the Victorian period and are reflected in the material of the stage. Broadly speaking, Waters charts the shift in depictions from that of the revengeful Moor or noble savage African, to the comical servant or grotesque “darky” (as influenced by the influx of blackface minstrel performers from the United States), to a highly sentimental humanization of black characters in melodrama. These categories read as indicators of British sentiment not only toward blacks but also toward the institution of slavery, abolition, and what Waters proudly claims as the expression of “the Englishness of liberty, the peculiarly English nature of freedom” (190). The treatment of blacks and slavery in performance is additionally framed through an examination of the international careers of T. D. Rice, the father of Jim Crow mania, and the acclaimed African-American actor Ira Aldridge. These two contemporary yet antithetical American performers established dueling representations of “black” characters on the British stage, the former establishing and the latter challenging “the more degraded images of the black that were gaining currency” (59). By comparing the performances of these two men, Waters throws into high relief the racism inherent in not only the dramatic texts but also the embodied practices of the Victorian stage. Ultimately, Waters credits the shift in attitudes toward race, from demonization to comical representations of blackness, to “the influence from America . . . that altered the tendency of English racial attitudes and beliefs, channeling them in new ways” (89). While Racism on the Victorian Stage is to be commended as an effort toward understanding the development of black characters in the Victorian theatre, some areas of analysis are disappointingly truncated. Waters provides several images from the archives of the Senate House Library, University of London, and V&A Images/Theatre Museum that depict the theatregoing population, particular actors, and scenes from the texts she so thoroughly describes. Unfortunately, these visual aids and artistic interpretations of the very historical, cultural moment she purports to be examining are often left unacknowledged and completely untreated as iconographic resources and social commentaries in their own right. It is troubling that Waters recognizes their value by includ-
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ing them in the work yet ultimately diminishes their potential to illuminate her argument by failing to fully analyze their content within the context of her study. Throughout the book Waters also neglects to adequately examine the impact of the “image of the black, as presented on the stage, . . . in the structures of slavery” (187) on all segments of British society, disregarding its impact on poor and working-class theatregoers almost entirely. She begins her analysis in the introduction by framing racism as an issue “altered by material social, economic, and political circumstances” (5) and addressed in the theatre, “one venue open to large, cross-class sectors of the population” (2). In the afterword, however, she acknowledges that the vast majority of her critical sources are from “published commentary and analysis, in the journals and newspapers of the middle and upper classes,” a point that is inconsistent with her reemphasis of the fact that this theatrical form was witnessed and experienced by “all sectors of society” (188). The inclusion of a more diverse cross section of audience responses from personal correspondence, diaries, or other primary materials in addition to critical reviews of productions might have yielded a more representative analysis and understanding of how intersectional cultural pressures tied to slavery, such as international trade, politics, and economics, “distorted the tendency of much English popular culture” (188) toward a limited, racist understanding of Africans in the Victorian era and theatre. Despite these weaknesses, Racism on the Victorian Stage: Representations of Slavery and the Black Character is a rich resource for literary analysis of dramatic texts and the treatment of blackness and slavery in Victorian British theatre and is a valuable contribution to the history of race in performance. — JOCELY N L. B U C K N E R University of Kansas
\ The Theatre of Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio. By Romeo Castellucci, Joe Kelleher, Nicholas Ridout, Claudia Castellucci, and Chiara Guidi. London: Routledge, 2007. ix + 274 pp. $35.95 paper.
The Italian theatre collective Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio is one of the most significant European companies of the last twenty-five years. Not unlike France’s Théâtre du Soleil or New York’s The Wooster Group, they have created a sin-
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gular form of innovative performance that challenges the boundaries of what we consider theatre to be and have developed an art of the highest standard. The company formed in 1981 in Cesena, Italy, where they still maintain their theatre. Core company members include Claudia Castellucci, Romeo Castellucci, and Chiara Guidi. The major performance works of Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio include Julio Ceseare (1997), Genesei: From the Museum of Sleep (1999), and the performance cycle shown throughout Europe during the years of 2002–4, known as Tragedia Endogonodia. Under the direction and design of Romeo Castellucci, the company devises works of a highly imagistic nature using dense sound scores (often composed by Scott Gibbons) with narrative abstractions and fragmentations. The performances are frequently based on classic texts (e.g., Hamlet, The Oresteia, and The Divine Comedy). The use of “special” or unique performers, such as those with severe anorexia nervosa, obesity, postsurgical scars, or extremes of age and size, as well as animals and performing objects, creates a challenging mise-en-scène that unsettles traditional models of theatricality, illusion, and dramaturgy. The Theatre of Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio is a collection of textual fragments written by the artists themselves (R. Castellucci, C. Castellucci, C. Guidi, and S. Gibbons) in the form of program notes, letters, notebooks, recorded conversations, performance instructions (scripts), and theoretical propositions. Scholars Joseph Kelleher of Roehampton University, London, and Nicholas Ridout, of Queen Mary, University of London, supply critical analysis for the volume. Kelleher and Ridout offer an excellent introduction and commentaries on the performance works, which are by turns descriptive, analytic, and impressionistic. The primary focus of part 1 of the book is an exploration of each of the eleven episodes that make up the Tragedia Endogonodia cycle. Part 2 contains a series of conversations between the artists and scholars on the topics of composition, rehearsal, gesture, and the future. The work is rounded out with a brief sampling of Romeo Castellucci’s creative and production notebooks. Multiple passages throughout the book inspire and challenge, and much is to be gleaned regarding the processes and practices of Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio. The many discussions and ruminations on the nature of art, theatre, representations, tragedy, and the practicalities of performance practice are illuminating and sophisticated. However, for the scholar or student who wishes to know what took place onstage specifically there will be less to satisfy in this volume. The Theatre of Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio has the structure and feel of Jerzy Grotowski’s seminal Towards a Poor Theatre (1968), which is also constructed
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of fragments, previous writings, and random notations but precious little indications of what happened onstage. The Theatre of Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio is a brilliant companion to the Tragedia Endogonodia cycle if you were fortunate enough to have seen the performances, but it may leave some readers less familiar with the company or the performance cycle a bit mystified; however, this is no reason to avoid this valuable work, which contains many photographs of the performances with multiple color plates that give an excellent guide to the mise-en-scène and iconography of the company’s work. Additionally, there are selections of the performance scripts, which are often detailed and communicate clearly what was to take place onstage. Kelleher’s and Ridout’s descriptive commentaries carry on the artists’ sometimes obscurantist rhetoric so that performance analysis and documentation folds into impressionistic musings and personal reactions. The entire book is well written and fascinating to be sure, but, as mentioned before, is frustrating when you wish to understand what took place onstage. All that being said, the subjective and poetic retellings of the performances are thoughtful and astute, and I would imagine the style is something that the artists and writers of the book intentionally promoted. Not unlike the company it is documenting, the book remains both iconoclastic and seemingly indifferent (at times) to its audience. However, the work, like the company again, is brilliant, important, and essential. One of the book’s strongest and most original elements is the ongoing conversation among the authors addressing central questions on theatre practice and philosophy. Questions concerning composition, rehearsal, gesture, and the future are brilliantly argued and demonstrate the issues that drive the company and how the company goes about its practice. It is unfortunate that the book does not include an index in order to trace particular topics and themes throughout the texts and discussions. The Theatre of Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio is a useful and entertaining look into the creative processes and theoretical questioning of the outstanding performance work of Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio. In the end, what one might take away from this book is that the things in and of themselves, the performances, are often talked around or through rather than directly analyzed. What is confronted are the larger theoretical concerns and issues of theatre and cultural production. It may be that any attempt at documentation of a company as complex and accomplished as Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio will fail, and the impossibility of performance documentation is a topic discussed early on in the book. It is like trying to describe Picasso’s Guernica to someone who has not seen it; you probably need to experience it to get it. The book is not an attempt to cre{ 212 }
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ate an objective documentation, however, but instead presents another episode in the ongoing creative output of Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio. — M ATTHEW C A U S E Y Trinity College, Dublin
\ Entertaining the Nation: American Drama in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. By Tice L. Miller. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2007. xi + 229 pp. $37.50 paper.
Tice Miller likes to read old plays—plays that would have been performed in England and America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; good plays and bad plays; sprightly comedies and moving tragedies; passé-subject-bound farces and dreary, turgid, mind-chilling dramas that slog their way through five acts of first-rate fustian. Miller likes to read these plays, and Entertaining the Nation is the result of that strange urge. Thank goodness for favors, small and large, because Miller’s passion for these dramas renders it probable that anything we might someday need to know about them is in his book, relieving us from the need to read the plays ourselves. Before you breathe a big sigh of satisfaction be forewarned that Miller captures his enthusiasm for this body of dramatic literature in 188 pages of exceptionally lively discourse. The book will arouse your curiosity and may very likely send you trundling to the bowels of the library to seek firsthand the fragile folios, dusty anthologies, and eyenumbing microfiche where most of this work, imprisoned, does hard time. Miller’s chapter headings refer to generally accepted periods in American history—“Colonial America,” “The Age of Jackson,” for example. He describes plays representative of dramatists who wrote during each period; however, he abandons this organization for his last two chapters, maintaining chronology while sorting his reading under the labels of melodrama and realism. He clearly emphasizes American drama, but understanding that no account of stage entertainment during these centuries would be complete without examining several popular plays by European dramatists, Miller does so where appropriate. The book focuses on the drama of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but the chapter on realism justifiably spills over into the twentieth. The evidence Miller gleans from reading the plays produces a broadranging panorama of two centuries of theatrical performance, and he brings that picture to life by writing about the plays and their production in lively, de{ 213 }
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scriptive prose that kindles the reader’s imagination. The plays are the stars of his opus, and he displays them, more or less chronologically, on center stage. He is careful, however, to remind us of the production practices and theatrical styles pertinent to the historical moment. As a result, he brings the plays to life as theatre, not literature. Kudos for that accomplishment: failing to find such a balance has been the downfall of many a historian writing about the drama of past centuries. The strengths of the book are too numerous for the space allotted to this review, but here are a few. (1) He does a particularly fine job of sorting out the many contributions of William Dunlap in the early days of the American theatre, even devoting a page or so to “Dutch stuff ”—Dunlap’s epithet for his popular adaptations of potboilers written by August Friedrich Ferdinand von Kotzebue. Dunlap deplored Kotzebue’s popularity, but he managed to hold his nose and use the dramas to keep his theatre afloat. (2) He gives proper credit to the Jonathan character and the Yankee plays, showing the super-important role they played in the development of truly American drama. His description of the Yankee plays makes one want to see them in performance. (3) He rescues many writers from the dustheap of neglect—Richard Penn Smith, Epes Sargent, and Augustus Thomas, to name three—by his lively reading of their obscure plays. (4) His running commentary about “novelties” of the stage sharpens his picture of the theatre as an important purveyor of entertainment to the entire nation, not merely to the population centers. My quarrels with the book are few and decidedly nonfatal. (1) Miller is on thin ice when he gives several pages to plays that were never produced. He admits that nobody ever saw them and few people read them. It is difficult to entertain the nation from the closet. (2) Taking up the plays individually and chronologically tends to limit the scope of Miller’s conclusions and to perpetrate the false impression that all plays are equally important. The result is that we are given many fine insights into particular plays but only a sketchy synthesis of the slow progress toward a truly American drama. But these are quibbles of detail and probably matters of taste. One of the great strengths of this book is the author’s commitment to using the drama as evidence for fleshing out U.S. social and political history during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the introduction to the volume he accurately surmises: “historians seldom turn to the stage in assessing how people and events are perceived in the culture at large” (xv). One reason for that failure is that we have not been able to produce enough theatre historians who are knowledgeable of and sensitive to the demands and methods of social and political his-
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tory. Contrariwise, historians are typically unable to inform their studies with a sound knowledge of theatrical production. Happily, Miller bridges that gap. His book can proudly take its place on the library shelf with the monumental and revered works of Walter Meserve and the careful scholarship of Arthur Hobson Quinn. That is heady company, but well earned. Persons interested in the history of the American theatre should own a copy of Entertaining the Nation. Libraries that have not already purchased this title should be ashamed of themselves. — L A R RY D. C L A R K University of Missouri
\ Modernism, Drama, and the Audience for Irish Spectacle. By Paige Reynolds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. v + 257 pp. $95.00 cloth.
Deviating uniquely from the many Abbey-centric works of early-twentiethcentury Irish theatre scholarship, Paige Reynolds’s Modernism, Drama, and the Audience for Irish Spectacle casts a far wider net to challenge hegemonic readings of Irish audiences at the dawning of political independence. Reynolds’s overriding assertion—that the Irish audience’s agency in shaping artists, cultural trends, and the construction of national identity has been underestimated—is substantiated by five case studies: the 1924 Tailteann Games (a sporting and arts competition); Dublin Suffrage Week and its accompanying Irish premiere of Ibsen’s Rosmersholm in 1913; the public funeral for nationalist-martyr Terence MacSwiney in 1920; and two infamous theatre riots waged over J. M. Synge’s Playboy of the Western World and Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars in 1907 and 1926, respectively. Despite stumbling into some self-laid semantic traps, Reynolds offers compelling evidence that Irish citizens operated as creative forces, influencing the actions of those who commanded the cultural and political stages of early-twentieth-century Ireland. Before commencing with her case studies, Reynolds uses her first chapter to contest previous claims that Irish revivalism and international modernism were mutually exclusive movements. Although revivalists idealized ancient traditions, rural life, and authentic communities, while modernists emphasized the isolated artist, urban estrangement, and the disruption of social norms and aesthetic traditions, Reynolds attests that the ideas espoused by modern-
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ists “permeated revivalist thinking” and vice versa, creating the subgenre of Irish modernism (13). The author employs ample primary source material to demonstrate that “Irish modernists altered their literary production and institutional practices in response to their audiences” (20) and is particularly adept at highlighting the shifting opinions of key Irish modernists through comparative analyses of letters, speeches, and press accounts spanning several decades. The book’s first and final case studies are devoted to the Abbey Theatre premieres of J. M. Synge’s Playboy of the Western World and Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars. According to the author, both playwrights incorporated onstage communities that represented Irish citizenry with varying degrees of sympathy and antipathy. Most importantly for Reynolds’s purposes, Synge’s Mayo villagers and O’Casey’s tenement dwellers prove too susceptible to sensationalism and sentiment and consequently fail to comprehend the gravity of the political spectacles they witness. The behaviors of these fictional groups exposed concrete deficiencies of the national audience to the national audience, ultimately leading to riotous reactions. Both chapters profit from Reynolds’s close textual readings of the plays, and her contention that Synge deliberately antagonized Irish audiences with Playboy leads to an interesting discussion of popular theatre and the Catholic Church as “two dominant institutions that gathered and influenced Irish collectives” (57). While her theories provide fresh justifications for the riots, these two case studies tread on familiar scholarly territory. Her investigations into Dublin Suffrage Week, Terence MacSwiney’s political death and funeral, and the Tailteann Games, however, are far more pioneering; within these three chapters Reynolds’s book is at its most fascinating and paradoxical. Dublin Suffrage Week, held in 1913, was designed to inspire sympathy for the suffragist cause in those attending the week’s activities. Striving to combat gendered stereotypes that pitted the hysterical and overly emotional Irish woman against the logical and heroic Irish man, suffragists proved their worthiness to vote by relinquishing impassioned sentiment in favor of calm rationality. The dramatic centerpiece of Dublin Suffrage Week, however, was not a nationalist drama or a suffragist-penned play, but the Irish premiere of Ibsen’s Rosmersholm. While ostensibly an odd choice for the week’s major entertainment, Reynolds posits that Rosmersholm, with its juxtaposition of female and male self-sacrifice, “offered a critique of female experience in current social and political systems while simultaneously assuaging audience anxieties about possible alterations to those systems” (85). Although Dublin Suffrage Week failed to incite large-scale sympathy for suffrage in Ireland, it did present a “feminist
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model of citizenship” that could survive in a culture dominated by male-centric nationalism (85). The self-sacrifice of dramatist and political activist Terence MacSwiney by means of a hunger strike, the focus of Reynolds’s next chapter, united the authentic hero ideology of revivalism with nationalism’s insistence that every Irishman can contribute to the cause of freedom through dying. For those not directly involved in the Anglo-Irish War, honoring MacSwiney’s martyrdom by attending the funeral procession “offered the Irish and international public an alternative mode of revolutionary action” (154). In her fifth chapter, Reynolds maintains that the 1924 Tailteann Games endeavored to bring international attention to the newly formed Irish Free State. Eager to present a national identity that appealed to a global audience, those officiating the games promoted a modern, prosperous, and pro-pleasure view of Ireland, even as political unrest, economic suffering, and starvation across the free state threatened to shatter the illusion. Because of the “disjunction between the authentic and the performative” Irelands, argues Reynolds, the games’ reimagined Irish identity failed to supplant time-honored notions of the real Erin (194). In order to connect five such seemingly disparate events into a cohesive study of Irish “audiences,” Reynolds disposes with conventional boundaries that divide theatre from performance studies and playgoers from spectators of national spectacle. Although Modernism, Drama, and the Audience for Irish Spectacle benefits from the author’s purposeful conflation of these two pairings (indeed, the interdisciplinary nature of her study requires such fluidity), the book’s arguments are slightly hampered by her sweeping use of the terms “audience” and “performativity.” While attempting to assert larger claims about Irish spectatorship, Reynolds neglects the very significant differences between theatrical audiences and witnesses of “national spectacle.” Those who attended the Abbey, for example, were fully cognizant of the creative process in producing plays and their own roles as paying theatregoers; the public mourners for MacSwiney, however, possessed none of these qualities. Her use of the descriptor “performative” also proves problematic, as she applies it to MacSwiney’s martyrdom via his hunger strike, which took place behind prison walls and was conveyed to the masses only through the static text of newspapers. Despite these missteps, Irish theatre scholars will find Reynolds’s engaging and persuasive study complementary to more comprehensive histories of the period. — M ER EDITH C O NT I University of Pittsburgh
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\ Electric Salome: Loie Fuller’s Performance of Modernism. By Rhonda Garelick. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. 246 pp. $35.00 paper.
Rhonda Garelick’s purpose in writing this book is “to reweave Loie Fuller back into the fabric of performance history, to demonstrate how her work, beyond merely heralding a litany of ‘modernist’ cues, actually participated in and reinterpreted several theatrical modes of her era” (200). According to Garelick, Fuller “managed to create . . . art with an uncanny power to illuminate not the disjunctions between genres, but the fluid connections between them” (200). It is the “fluid connections” between the genres that Garelick’s text underscores and examines. From this point of view, Fuller is an interlocutor whose work helps the reader to identify and understand conceptual threads running between and among artistic forms. Chapter 1, “Fuller’s Performance Aesthetic,” reveals Fuller’s performance roots and her creation of a performance aesthetic based on “denial, displacement, and disavowal.” By disappearing under hundreds of yards of fabric, Fuller transformed herself into a highly mutable projection screen reflecting both light and the fantasies of her audience. The abstract, tightly framed, and highly augmented ephemeral shapes that emerged during her performances denied not just her bodily presence but also social, historical, and spatial boundaries, displacing the responsibility of interpretation onto her audience. Additionally, Fuller disavowed her own agency in her work by claiming her art was the result of artistic inspiration spontaneously channeled through her at the moment of performance. Garelick, however, reveals an artist who supported and directed her performances with meticulous preparation, closely guarded technological secrets, and her own physical strength. In chapter 2, “Electric Salome,” Garelick interrogates the relationship of Loie Fuller to the World’s Fair of 1900 in Paris. Garelick starts with the premise that Fuller’s performance aesthetic makes her work the ideal complement to the fair’s main themes: a celebration of technology and an exhibition of French imperialism. Fuller’s reputation as a scientist and inventor placed her at the leading edge of technological development for the stage. Additionally, her performance aesthetic, which invited a transgressive gaze, complemented the fair’s agenda of sanitizing and promoting French colonialism. Colonized women performing ethnically authentic dance forms were eroticized and placed on display. Garelick posits that Fuller’s aesthetic enabled her performances of similar content and theme to be “the PG version of an X-rated fantasy” (115), thereby { 218 }
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helping the fair’s organizers to disguise troubling and distasteful aspects of colonialism. In chapter 3, “Fuller and the Romantic Ballet,” Garelick begins a discussion of Fuller’s work as a dialogic bridge between the romantic ballet and modern dance. This chapter focuses on Fuller’s absorption and transformation of the underlying ideals, conventions, and themes of the romantic ballet in her early works. Garelick explicates Fuller’s process by exploring points of convergence between Fuller’s work and the romantic ballet. These points include the idealization of the feminine, a predilection for the supernatural, “magical” effects created with stage machinery, thematic resonances of confused identities and mecanomorphism, dependence on technique while creating an illusion of effortlessness, and use of a chorus. Garelick posits that Fuller unpacked the ballet’s infrastructure, stripping away narrative, character, context, and corporeality. She acted as an agent of transformation by uncovering the modernist potential in ballet, including the “human body’s relationship with gravity, physics, mechanicity, and light—the most crucial elements of twentieth-century modern dance” (150–51). From this perspective, Fuller is seen as a performer who occupied a liminal space in which she absorbed and abstracted iconic characteristics of classical dance distilling them into prima materia for development by modern dance. Chapter 4, “Scarring the Air,” continues the previous chapter’s discussion by considering the view from the other end of the dialogic bridge. In this chapter, Garelick considers how Fuller’s later work transformed the prima materia of classical dance into concepts governing modern dance. Her central thesis here seeks to frame Fuller’s work as a highly abstracted and augmented interaction with natural forces played out through a process of transference whereby Fuller’s ephemeral, mutable shapes supplant the corporeal dancer. The centerpiece of Garelick’s argument resides in a comparison of Fuller’s La Mer, a group work from late in her career (1925), with Lamentation, an early solo work by the quintessential artist of modern dance, Martha Graham. Garelick identifies four essential threads that tether the work of the women to each other and to early modern dance: the use of breath, interiority, moving in accordance with natural forces, and a formal treatment of universal themes. Garelick concludes that Graham’s work in Lamentation is the natural evolution of Fuller’s work in La Mer. In chapter 5, “Of Veils and Onion Skins: Fuller and Modern European Drama,” Garelick broadens her analytical lens to explore Fuller’s contributions to performance history beyond dance. She digs deep into Fuller’s connections with and contributions to the infrastructure of modern European drama and { 219 }
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the concept of character. Similar to the work of some modernist playwrights, her pieces resembled dreamlike meditations, episodic and collage-like with stage pictures dissolving one into the other. Garelick also examines Fuller’s influence on alternative views of character. Some modernist playwrights were intrigued with character as mutable and fluid. Fuller spent her career transfiguring multiple times during a performance, never mooring herself to one effigy or vision for too long. The book concludes with a few examples of contemporary artists whose work references Fuller’s and a bibliography organized by type of publication, providing readers with a rich and diverse array of resources to investigate. Garelick’s deep analysis of Fuller’s performance techniques reveals an alchemical artist whose performance aesthetic reduced the theatrical forms of her day to a state of prima materia. In the liminal space of her performative crucible, Fuller transfigured the ingredients of narrative, character, scenography, and language through technology, abstraction, and augmentation. Garelick’s text is a compelling argument for the centralization of Loie Fuller’s work in relation to understanding of modernist performance history. — PATR IC IA K . D O WN E Y University of South Dakota
\ Modernist Aesthetics and Consumer Culture in the Writings of Oscar Wilde. By Paul Fortunato. Studies in Major Literary Authors. New York: Routledge, 2007. 162 pp. $110.00 cloth.
Since belatedly acknowledging Oscar Wilde’s worth as a theorist and literary figure more than half a century after his death, critics have attempted—often in vain and sometimes in error—to place the poet and dramatist in the historical spectrum of modernist aesthetics and theory. In Modernist Aesthetics and Consumer Culture in the Writings of Oscar Wilde, Paul Fortunato suggests three possible stages to Wilde scholarship, the first being the sixty years after Wilde’s death, when he was “critically ignored in Anglo-American scholarship” (16). The second stage seems to have started in the 1980s and not only restored Wilde to literary significance but also established him as a prominent literary modernist. Fortunato points out that critics of this stage (e.g., Richard Ellman and Linda Dowling, leading rehabilitators of Wilde scholarship) have reconciled themselves to Wilde’s consumer associations and journalistic involvements by { 220 }
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considering them a means of supplemental income (17). In doing so, Fortunato argues, they discredit an essential component of Wilde’s aesthetic and the very type of modernist Wilde was, that is, a consumer modernist. Fortunato proposes a third stage—represented by recent scholars who have returned to Wilde’s mass-culture involvement in order to clarify his literary and aesthetic career—and presents himself as part of this third stage. In this study, Fortunato meticulously and creatively unravels his assertion that Wilde’s activity in the mass cultural realm was more than just a subset of “real” work; in fact, Wilde could neither create nor conceive of art that was not commodified. Drawing from the work of other third-stage critics such as Josephine Guy, Ian Small, and Edward Said, Fortunato illustrates how Wilde, beginning his literary career amid the burgeoning mega-institutions of press, fashion, and advertising, played the times, albeit in his customary style of bewildering paradox. Fortunato consistently outlines his argument in an organized, succinct style. After beginning with a colorful description of the society and culture in which Wilde operated, Fortunato engages in cultural study analyses of the lateVictorian mega-industries of journalism, fashion, and theatre. In the course of this analysis, Fortunato carefully traces the development of Wilde’s aesthetic theories—particularly the aesthetics of surface, image, and ritual—amid his work as a “journalist, magazine editor, commentator on dress and design, and popular playwright” (ix). In chapter 1, Fortunato summarizes Wilde’s artistic and personal relationships with key literary, artistic, and social persons of the time so as to better answer the question of how a “bohemian anarchist [found] himself writing West End comedies about elitist society” (1). With a liberal smattering of the Wildean anecdotes that are essential to a study of the quizzical poet and dramatist, Fortunato effectively re-creates the backdrop against which Wilde’s literary career spanned—a career the author spends the next two chapters summarizing, lending specific consideration to Wilde’s journalistic and editorial activities with The Pall Mall Gazette and Women’s World, respectively. Fortunato’s third chapter, on Wilde’s work with Woman’s World, contains the heart of his argument; in it, Fortunato deftly reveals Wilde’s place among the female aesthetes (as defined by Talia Schaffer in The Forgotten Female Aesthetes) and the development of Wilde’s aesthetic. The author also provides a fascinating exposition on the activities and aesthetics of Wilde’s female contemporaries, and ultimately a defense against critics who deemed women’s fashion and aestheticism “superficial” (57). To that end, Fortunato briefly outlines the work of leading female aesthetes such as Mary E. Haweis and the novelist Ouida { 221 }
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and mentions the criticism they received from the modernist giants, including Matthew Arnold and George Gissing (47). Fortunato illustrates how Wilde’s work for Women’s World was essentially a practical arena wherein Wilde proposed his ideas of self-cultivation and self-culture—themes he would later develop in his essays “The Soul of Man” and “The Artist as Critic” (48). It would benefit the reader for Fortunato to have defined, at the very onset, the concept and implications of what he refers to as “consumer modernism.” Instead, the reader is left to piece this idea together from a fleeting description in the preface and variously contextualized references of the term scattered throughout the first three chapters, until Fortunato states at the beginning of chapter 4: “Wilde’s very aesthetics make his immersion in commercial industries essential to his art. Those ideas, including an aesthetic of seductive surfaces, of the desire to shine, and of style as a worldview make up the heart of what [Fortunato has] been calling consumer modernism” (62). After clarifying his use of “consumer modernism” in this way, Fortunato uses chapter 4 to elucidate the theoretical bases behind Wilde’s conception of art, undertaking in this chapter the defense of Wilde’s fashion-heavy aesthetic as an “underrecognized philosophical achievement” (62). It is worthwhile to note that Fortunato himself is not entirely uncritical of Wilde’s aesthetic and, in a section entitled “Where Wilde goes wrong,” censures him for being “improperly detached from political and ethical concerns” (80). In his fifth chapter, Fortunato conducts a close reading of Lady Windermere’s Fan using the concept of consumer modernism developed in his earlier chapters. In chapter 6, “Mrs. Erlynne as Modernist: The Artist of Consumer Image and Ritual,” Fortunato addresses the question of how Wilde “fuses modernist aesthetics with fashionable melodrama,” resulting in a play that, contrary to traditional criticism, was more than conventional popular drama (113). Here Fortunato argues that Wilde used social ritual and fashion as primary material for art. Although his close reading of Lady Windermere’s Fan is a fine and original study, one gets the sense that Fortunato was perhaps over-ambitious in what he desired to achieve with his book. The final chapter itself is a mélange of arguments and analyses: Mrs. Erlynne’s re-creation of self, the genre of melodrama as suitable to Wilde’s style, the audience as “consumer-artists” who are to be inspired and educated, and a return to the surface aesthetics explicated earlier in the book. In the concluding pages, Fortunato finally returns to an argument he makes in the preface, “that [Wilde’s] conceptions . . . were foundational elements of what became twentieth-century modernism, a root and branch of modernism that was largely erased” (ix). In doing so, he points toward ideas { 222 }
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and arguments that are of such a magnitude that they cannot be satisfactorily covered in the conclusion. Paul Fortunato sets out to examine Oscar Wilde’s relationship to consumer culture, asking questions many critics shy away from: Why and how did Wilde fuse popular culture and modernist aesthetics, and what import could a six-year career in a commercial industry possibly have on the aesthetics of a writer (now) considered one of the great modernists? His study provides a comprehensive vista of the late-Victorian consumer culture: journalism, fashion, advertising pioneers, mass culture critics, and the forgotten female aesthetes. As such, any scholar of modernism or of Oscar Wilde will find much to appreciate in this book. — HEPHZ IBA H D. DU T T Bowling Green State University
\ American Drama in the Age of Film. By Zander Brietzke. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007. xix + 201 pp. $39.95 cloth.
Running throughout Zander Brietzke’s lively consideration of American plays and their subsequent screen adaptations is a provocative counter-Aristotelianism that, unlike Brecht’s, challenges not so much the concepts of empathy or catharsis as the low ranking that “spectacle” gets in the Poetics. Beginning from the common assumption that theatre was upstaged and perhaps fully eclipsed by movies and television during the twentieth century, Brietzke offers a passionate defense of theatre that runs against both the conventional celebration of its “liveness” and the primacy of the playwright, affirming instead its force as an essentially spatial art. Our ways of seeing, he argues, have been decisively changed by the electronic media that now dominate our lives, but for Brietzke that represents a challenge for theatre rather than its death warrant. Generally fudging the qualitative differences between television and cinema, Brietzke’s self-described “breezy” approach to his subject belies a solidly erudite grip of a full range of issues related to performance and media. He sticks to major American playwrights—O’Neill, Albee, Miller, Williams, Hellman, Kushner, and others—and significant film and television versions of their works, yet his analyses reflect the author’s own intersection of interests and values rather than any scholarly imperative to cover the subject systematically. Although fully conversant in film history and technique, Brietzke makes clear that the { 223 }
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screen adaptations he discusses are important to him as supplementary works, not as the main focus of his attention. His analyses of individual plays therefore do not pretend to be taut, point-by-point comparisons of stage and screen versions but instead follow a method that is compatible with his overall claim; that is, he takes up as much of a screen adaptation as he needs to dig into the source play’s inherent strengths on a spatially delimited stage. Along the way, Brietzke offers some caustic, often self-referential observations on the perennial death watch over theatre, along with insightful comments on current practices in the teaching of drama, the prevailing rhetoric of introductory drama textbooks, and how students are typically exposed to plays through screen versions because of their convenience for classroom use. He recalls as a fledgling academic hearing Richard Schechner, whom he describes as an avant-garde pioneer turned “highly paid professor at New York University,” pronouncing traditional theatre “an extremely limited genre” lingering on the margins of performance culture, and pondering his own choice of a career as a professor of this obsolete art (6). Brietzke accepts Schechner’s premise that in an age of electronic media theatre can no longer claim the primacy it once did, but he persistently tries to show that this poses a special challenge for stage performance, a new way of seeing its peculiar strengths in a mediated age. Nor does he buy into the mystical virtue of “liveness” claimed by some defenders of theatre against other media. Brietzke declares himself, a bit petulantly, “sick of the same old saws” about live performance and the special bond between actors and audience (1–2). He questions postmodern theorists such as Philip Auslander who argue that live and mediated performances are not essentially distinct but instead are determined by historical conditions; for his own part, Brietzke relies on some fairly traditional distinctions such as time and space, arguing that film is basically narrative and therefore temporal, whereas theatre is an art deployed in what he describes as an alienated yet “homogenous” space, separated from the real world outside and therefore, ideally, more “like a party, an evening with friends, and an event from which we emerge refreshed, capable of seeing the world with new clarity and energy” (34). This is as close as Brietzke comes to conceiving theatre in terms of transformational or resistant politics, but there is no doubt that in calling for American theatre to “get out from the shadows of film” and “have some fun again” (34) he is also striking a blow against the narcotizing effects of most movies and television and attempting to reclaim the visual aesthetic—Aristotle’s “spectacle”—for the arts of acting and stagecraft. One suspects he’s also trying to restore an idiom of common sense, gut feeling, and forthright passion into academic theatre criti-
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cism against the theorizing, politicizing tendencies of some of its current practitioners. Following a preface and two overview chapters, the book’s next ten chapters offer substantive analyses of individual plays and playwrights. Fittingly for the editor of the Eugene O’Neill Review, Brietzke starts off with John Ford’s excellent 1940 repackaging of O’Neill’s early sea plays in the film The Long Voyage Home. This chapter sustains the book’s richest application of the stage/ screen dichotomy, with a detailed discussion of key differences between stagecraft and cinematography. It also contains Brietzke’s most open scolding of “the academic world, preoccupied with theories and big ideas” instead of “dealing directly with human emotions” as he claims O’Neill himself did (49), though Brietzke also must know that O’Neill was himself notoriously a grappler with big ideas, especially in his plays of the 1920s and 1930s. Brietzke next examines Hellman’s 1934 play The Children’s Hour and its two film adaptations, These Three (1936) and the 1961 version that restores the play’s title, both directed by William Wyler but divided by a generation of rapid cultural change. Here is where Brietzke’s tendency to downplay the film versions in his analyses is most evident, as it is again in later chapters on Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and True West, the latter an especially odd choice of Sam Shepard’s works given Brietzke’s complete dismissal of the merit of the available screen version (with John Malkovich and Gary Sinise) and several better Shepard screen adaptations to choose from. More satisfying as explorations of what happens to a play when it is transposed to the screen are his discussions of Death of a Salesman, Glengarry Glen Ross, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Piano Lesson, all of which sharply illuminate the trade-offs of adaptation. In a fitting culmination, the final chapter on Angels in America not only affirms some key differences in stage and screen aesthetics but also helps Brietzke bring home his larger argument about American drama in the film age by offering Tony Kushner as an exemplary artist of a kind of spectacle that is clearly inspired by cinema but is fully reassimilated to the stage. In this sense, Kushner may be the prophet for a kind of play whose characters think cinematically but cohabit the closer—in Brietzke’s terminology, “homogenous”—space of the theatrical stage. Brietzke makes clear that he has nothing against movies; that like everyone else born in the past ninety years or so they have seeped into his own way of seeing the world. Yet in spite of his protestations against the uncritical celebration of “liveness” as the distinguishing essence of theatre, Brietzke’s brief concluding chapter portrays theatre as a deeply socializing ritual, with the director “like a good party host” (171) who in-
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vites all the elements of the production, including the audience, into one living space, drawn together by the power of spectacle. Part manifesto, part eulogy, American Drama in the Age of Film makes an impassioned case for the persistent significance of live, embodied performance that can never really be satisfied by cinema or fully captured on screen. — KURT E IS E N Tennessee Technological University
\ Interrogating America through Theatre and Performance. Edited by William W. Demastes and Iris Smith Fischer. New York: Palgrave-McMillan, 2006. 312 pp. $69.95 cloth.
In his introduction to Interrogating America through Theatre and Performance, William W. Demastes posits that historically America and the notion of American identity have been continually marked by a spirit of optimism as well as by a corresponding sense of disillusionment. With this proposition as a starting point, Demastes and the authors within this collection set to the challenge of considering how theatre and performance enter into this debate and inform our understanding of American identity. This book project grew out of a 2005 conference for the American Theatre and Drama Society and the University of Kansas titled “Writing, Teaching, Performing America.” Juxtaposing the work of performance scholars and theatre historians as well as senior Americanists and emerging junior voices, this book imagines American identity as not fixed, but made and remade over time. The editors structure the articles chronologically, moving from considerations of nineteenth-century texts and performances up to examinations of post-9/11 American theatre and performance. Critical to all seventeen essays is the notion that performance can be an affective and effective arena for negotiating and defining American identity. This study foregrounds the dynamic power of performance to inform and even have an impact on the historical constitution of America. Accordingly, the articles focus on the intersection of art and politics. Articles take on the canonical figures—Susan Glaspell, Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller, and Tennessee Williams—not in relation to their aesthetic achievement but in terms of how their dramaturgy reflects on the particular social context. Noelia Hernando-Real explores Glaspell’s feminism and challenge to a unifying vision of American identity. Jeffrey Eric Jenkins effectively argues that, when first produced on Broadway, O’Neill’s Beyond the Horizon spoke to and capitalized on a { 226 }
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specific cultural moment. Christopher Bigsby’s “Arthur Miller: In Memoriam” points to Miller’s belief in the ability of the theatre to effect change. Bigsby goes on to outline the interrelations among Miller’s personal convictions, his social circumstances, and his theatrical work. Eschewing established critical labels of Williams as solely a “southern” or “apolitical” playwright, Janet V. Haedicke examines how Williams and The Glass Menagerie negotiate the concept of the American dream. Haedicke argues that Williams attempts to critique the borders of race, class, and gender that disprove the idealism inherent in the mythic American dream. Rightly, race and ethnicity are important considerations throughout the anthology. The book opens with Rosemarie K. Bank’s careful consideration in “The Savage Other” of how cultural performances by and about Native Americans at the 1893 Columbian Exhibition in Chicago informed concepts of American civilization and nationalism at that time. Banks frames her argument by making the case for how American cultural historiography has been deeply invested in processes of identifying and repositioning the discourse of the “Other.” Amy E. Hughes, in “Defining Faith: Reactions to Pro-Slavery Christianity in Antebellum America,” maintains that the abolitionist drama of the antebellum period “Othered” supposedly Christian slaveholders by ridiculing the hypocrisy of their faith. Jacqueline O’Connor and Ladrica Menson-Furr examine significant contemporary Chicano and African-American authors, respectively. What makes both articles interesting is that the authors examine the ways in which form informs the content. For O’Connor in “Facts on Trial: Documentary and Zoot Suit” it is Luis Valdez, the founder of El Teatro Campesino, and his seminal play Zoot Suit, which considers the Zoot Suit riots and the Sleepy Lagoon murder trial in Los Angeles 1942. O’Connor explores and analyzes how the play shapes, condenses, and reimagines the facts within its plotline. As O’Connor maintains, Valdez uses the documentary form to serve his ends of validating and challenging the constitution of Chicano identity. Still, she might have gone further in pointing out how Valdez employs the Pachuco figure within the play to further his platform of indigeneity. Menson-Furr comparatively investigates the work of August Wilson and Ed Bullins. She finds that the cycle format serves the political as well as artistic ends of these playwrights. By chronicling the African-American histories, Menson-Furr persuasively maintains that these playwrights represent the distinctiveness of African-American experiences while at the same time demanding the inclusion of African Americans within the larger project of American identity and nationalism. Menson-Furr’s concern with African-American history in performance corresponds with Robert { 227 }
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Vorlicky’s essay “An American Echo: Suzan-Lori Parks’s The America Play and James Scruggs’s Disposable Men.” In this thoughtful and thought-provoking article, Vorlicky reads Scruggs’s solo performance piece through Parks’s concept of the “echo.” Vorlicky reveals how Scruggs’s piece interrogates the violence enacted on black bodies through history—a violence that still resonates today, as Vorlicky ends by referencing the damage done particularly to black Americans by Hurricane Katrina. Other articles within this collection also speak to how the exigencies of the social and cultural moment can impact reception. Andrea Nouryeh’s “Reflection in a Pool: Mary Zimmerman’s Metamorphosis and a Post-9/11 New York City” suggests that in the aftermath of 9/11, the atmosphere in New York City was particularly conducive to the catharsis, community, and communion offered by Metamorphosis; while Deborah R. Geis’s “Not ‘Very Steven Spielberg’: Angels in America on Film” argues that the decidedly darker televised filmic revision of the play reflected the chaos and bewilderment of a post-9/11 America. Of note also are the articles that expand the canvas of performance beyond the conventional consideration of theatrical texts. Anne Fletcher studies Mordecai Gorelik’s stage designs not for how they execute the director’s concept but for how they present an activist politics. Andrea Harris observes in the American ballet of the 1930s and 1940s a specific response to the culture of the time and an attempt to constitute a truly American classicism. As to be expected in an anthology of seventeen essays, the works are uneven and the editors could at times have taken a stronger hand in shaping certain pieces. Nonetheless, on the whole this collection pushes forward our sense of the relationship of theatre and performance to the formation and reformation of American identity. — HA R RY J. E LA M J R . Stanford University
\ Eugene O’Neill’s America: Desire under Democracy. By John Patrick Diggins. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. 305 pp. $29.00 cloth.
Eugene O’Neill, much like Shakespeare, Shaw, and other theatre giants, has generated a scholarly industry in and of himself. The last five years alone have seen scores of articles, books, and dissertations dedicated, in whole or in part, to de{ 228 }
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ciphering his influence upon American drama. This wealth of scholarship imposes a daunting task for any scholar endeavoring to search out some fresh perspective regarding one of America’s most vaunted playwrights. For John Patrick Diggins that fresh perspective consists of a move away from criticism focusing on the psychological/autobiographical aspects of O’Neill’s plays or on O’Neill’s aesthetic innovations. Diggins, who differs from most O’Neill scholars in that he is a political and cultural historian, identifies his study as “an attempt to appreciate O’Neill beyond the aesthetic criteria of dramaturgy or the neurotic symptoms of psychology” (5). He clarifies that his concern lies not so much with the plays as drama but rather with “their implications for social and political philosophy and intellectual history” (5). For Diggins, O’Neill’s scope stretches beyond that of an aesthetic innovator into the realm of cultural thinker, and it is his political and philosophical perspectives, rather than his dramaturgical skills, that most significantly set O’Neill apart from his peers. After a brief introduction outlining his purpose, Diggins delves fully into his analysis. The book includes eleven chapters exploring O’Neill’s work as it relates to and was influenced by a cornucopia of philosophical perspectives within a particular social context—early-twentieth-century America. In the course of his analysis, in which the author references nearly every produced play in O’Neill’s canon, Diggins attempts to illuminate O’Neill’s views on American society and culture by drawing upon a wide range of pre-twentieth-century philosophical and political thinkers, including Locke, Jefferson, Emerson, and Thoreau, with particular attention to Nietzsche (whose influence on O’Neill has long been recognized) and Schopenhauer. Diggins presents O’Neill’s characters and plots as driven by a desire for material possession, an all-encompassing hallmark of American culture that leads to the compromise of ideals, specifically those most often engendered by and inherent in idealized governmental systems (democracy) and religious morality (Christianity). Diggins views O’Neill as creating a drama of ideas in an effort to expose this contradiction and to indict the moral and intellectual hypocrisy it reveals. Through his dramas, Diggins argues, O’Neill offers critiques of the past as well as the status quo and asserts that genuine freedom rests within the individual rather than in any idealized system of government or religion. Although Diggins minimizes discussion of autobiographical aspects of O’Neill’s work, he cannot quite avoid it in the first chapter when examining Long Day’s Journey into Night, in which O’Neill’s personal history is inextricably and inevitably interwoven with the plot. Diggins suggests that the life story and heritage represented in this play represents the story of the United States as { 229 }
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a whole, specifically how America has perpetuated a contradiction between the idealism that informed its founding and the desire for material wealth that has led to a degeneration of its values. Diggins draws an interesting comparison between the early Spanish explorers, who “spoke of God while searching for gold” (The Fountain) and James O’Neill’s surrender of aesthetic idealism for the sake of material security (Long Day’s Journey) (15). Throughout the book Diggins identifies various desires, but most frequently he returns to possession, particularly the ownership of property, a desire linked in the American imagination, through the theories of Locke, to the attainment of personal freedom. Diggins illustrates how this desire has become an impetus for degeneration and destruction in O’Neill’s plays, most notably in Long Day’s Journey into Night, in which James Tyrone squanders his fortune and alienates his family in his obsession for land, and Desire under the Elms, in which a farm becomes the obsession leading to the destruction of a family. Personal freedom, Diggins affirms, was a central concern for O’Neill, but he rejected American ideals of democracy and capitalism as avenues toward it. Despite the fact that O’Neill’s plays often offered critiques of capitalism, Diggins emphasizes that O’Neill stood apart from other major writers of his era (e.g., Clifford Odets) in that his rejection of capitalism did not lead to an embrace of Communism. O’Neill manifested no faith in any sociopolitical system to cure humankind’s problems, specifically rejecting Communism, Diggins argues, because it refused to acknowledge the needs of the individual. As O’Neill’s favorite philosopher, Nietzsche, found freedom through personal responsibility, so too did O’Neill argue for personal responsibility in plays such as The Iceman Cometh, in which Hickey fights a relentless yet futile battle to get the barflies off their stools. Diggins returns to the barflies in The Iceman Cometh, who will themselves into the oblivion of the bar, taking comfort in foolish dreams, as exemplary manifestations of an O’Neillian concept of “will” that was sometimes “closer to Schopenhauer [than to Nietzsche] in seeing the will as preventing the rise to consciousness of emotions that, if fully felt, would arouse feelings of humiliation, confusion, and shame” (38). With this fascinating, persuasive, and lucidly written study, Diggins more than accomplishes his goal of deepening our appreciation of O’Neill’s contribution to America’s philosophical and intellectual as well as aesthetic history. This insightful analysis will be of interest not only to O’Neill scholars but to anyone interested in America’s intellectual and cultural heritage. — F ONZ IE D . G E A RY I I University of Missouri
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\ Robert E. Sherwood: The Playwright in Peace and War. By Harriet Hyman Alonso. Amherst: Massachusetts University Press, 2007. 414 pp. $28.95 paper.
In Robert E. Sherwood: The Playwright in Peace and War, Harriet Hyman Alonso argues anew that Robert Sherwood was “shaped by the larger world—by his involvement in international affairs, his passion for human rights, and his desire for world peace” (5). Moreover, Alonso insists that Sherwood—one of the first U.S. film critics, winner of four Pulitzer Prizes and an Oscar, cofounder of the Playwrights’ Producing Company, and creator of the Voice of America radio network—was a “unique voice that simultaneously echoed public opinion while challenging people to think about the world beyond the borders of the United States” (5). Given that it has been over thirty years since any book-length study of Sherwood has appeared, this interdisciplinary biography is a welcomed, and much needed, resource. Alonso cleverly divides her study into three segments: “Act One,” “Interlude,” and “Act Two.” “Act One” includes a prologue and five chapters, all of which pertain to Sherwood’s life from infancy to his return from World War I. “Interlude” handles the rather messy divorce from Mary Brandon and its influence on his writing. “Act Two,” comprising four chapters and an epilogue, tracks Sherwood’s shift from creative writer and producer to political operative and back again. There are fourteen images between “Act One” and “Interlude,” and the book concludes with a listing of chapter notes and bibliographic information. What makes Alonso’s work so compelling is the inclusion of previously unpublished diary material, first-person narratives, and other correspondence drawn largely from the Sherwood Papers at the Houghton Library. Chapter 1, “Being an Emmet and a Sherwood,” recounts how his lineage imbued in Sherwood the “values that had driven generations of Emmets and Sherwoods into politics and the arts” (7). To do so Alonso backtracks to the eighteenth century, explicating how both families were “literate and artistic and shared the values of patriotism and sympathy for the underdog” (13). In chapter 2, “Born to Be a Ham,” the focus narrows to Sherwood’s immediate family and their comfortable life, sustained by a Harvard-educated father. It is both the exposure to theatre (and circus) in New York and formative educational experiences at the Fay School and Milton Academy that nurture young Sherwood’s artistic talents. Ironically, because of poor grades, he did not graduate from Milton, due in large part to his obsession with writing, drawing, and performing. Chapter 3, “From Soldier to Pacifist,” tells of a youthful man “drawn to { 231 }
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the romance of military service” (36). Alonso links this to Sherwood’s “remembered glow” of “patriotic, nationalistic ancestors” (41). As with most, Sherwood was forever shaped by what he saw during war. “He entered a militarist,” notes Alonso, “and left it a pacifist” (62). Chapter 4, “Life after War,” narrates just that, encompassing Sherwood’s time at Vanity Fair and Life as well as his association with the Algonquin Round Table. “Act One” ends with “Writing Plays for Peace,” proposing that “Sherwood was one of the first clear post–World War I antiwar voices heard on the stage” (95). By way of support Alonso references several plays—both successful and unsuccessful—including The Road to Rome (1927), The Queen’s Husband (1928), and Reunion in Vienna (1931). Although Alonso’s prose can become somewhat dense in its treatment of genealogical information, what “Act One” does quite well is isolate major life moments that express themselves within Sherwood’s postwar creative writing and political activities. Chapter 6, “Marriage, Divorce, and The Petrified Forest,” serves as the “Interlude.” Sherwood and Mary Brandon exchanged vows October 29, 1922, had a child one year later, and were divorced in 1934. Ultimately, Sherwood found himself in love with and married to Madeline Connelly, the ex-wife of his best friend, playwright Marc Connelly. Amid this turbulence Sherwood continued to refine his playwriting, eventually drafting The Petrified Forest. This play was his “first attempt to write about the contemporary United States” (153). Within a tale of greed and unbridled national expansion (154), Sherwood could not resist incorporating his feelings about Mary through the characters of Gabby and Mrs. Chisholm (156–57). “Act Two” opens with “From Pacifist to Soldier.” This seventh chapter insists that Sherwood’s “particular mission was to investigate the causes of war and their effects on personal lives and civil liberties” (167). Using Idiot’s Delight (1936), Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1938), and There Shall Be No Night (1940), Alonso highlights Sherwood’s engagement with broader discussions regarding war, peace, and the preservation of democracy. With his devotion to the “Stop Hitler Now” campaign and involvement with groups like Union Now in the 1940s, he soon found himself “to be a soldier in this war” as a member of President Roosevelt’s team (217). Chapter 8, “Sherwood and Roosevelt,” describes the lengths to which Sherwood used his interventionist “pen and typewriter to send his message out to the world” (266). With the end of world conflict, Sherwood returned home and resumed writing for both theatre and film. However, according to Alonzo, “his sense of satisfaction at the end of World War II led to a decline in his productivity” (267). Chapter 9, “Changing the Message,” emphasizes Sherwood’s postwar frustration and creative failure in the form of The
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Rugged Path, The Twilight, and On the Beach. Although a veteran of two world wars, Sherwood found the cold war a “shocking and confusing development,” a “sad end to his hopes for a world of peace and freedom” (297). Chapter 10, “The Message Is Lost,” features both his transition to cold warrior and troubles at the Playwrights’ Producing Company, closing with his November 14, 1954, death. “Act Two” resolves with an epilogue wherein Alonso speculates what might have been if Sherwood had lived to see the 1960s. The strength of “Act Two” is its ability to mark ways in which deep conviction, government service, and creative writing persistently generated both thrill and turmoil within Sherwood’s personal and professional life. Carefully researched and cogently written as part of the University of Massachusetts Press’s American History series, Robert E. Sherwood: The Playwright in Peace and War is more than accessible to an eclectic readership beyond that of this publication. — SCOTT R . IR E L A N Augustana College
\ Performing Patriotism: National Identity in the Colonial and Revolutionary American Theatre. By Jason Shaffer. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. 228 pp. $45.00 cloth.
Performing Patriotism explores the patriotic function of drama, performed and printed during the formative years of America’s creation, that nation-building project that began with the run-up to the Revolutionary War. The work wisely embraces a wide range of performance engaged in the growing trade of patriotism: the professional theatre in America, the academic tradition of performance in the early colleges, the occasional street protest of the Sons of Liberty, and the published, circulated, but unproduced “closet dramas” of the Revolutionary period. Introduction aside, this sampling is undertaken in four stanzas: “Cato and Company,” “Free-Born Peoples,” “A School for Patriots,” and “Bellicose Letters.” Collectively, they range from the early to the close of the eighteenth century, in an America under construction. It is not the author’s intention to build a causal argument but rather to map the theatrical landscape, page and stage, amateur and professional, enacted and imagined, in its broadest context.
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The book hits its stride with chapter 2, “Cato and Company,” with an impressive genealogy of performance of Addison’s hymn to Republican virtues. It opens with a survey of some of the better-known cultural quotations of Cato: Nathan Hale on the gallows, Patrick Henry’s St. John’s Day speech, and the numerous collegiate productions of this singular play. The list of productions reminds us to what extent the revolutionary generation internalized the Catonic gambit of inspiring failed revolts. Chapter 3, “Free-Born Peoples,” samples the professional theatre in colonial America, from the Thomas Heady Company in New York, circa 1730s, to the departure of the American Company some forty years later. Working from such texts as The Recruiting Officer, Tamberlane, and Richard III, Shaffer constructs an argument of a radical American base politicizing a British repertory through a sea change into something uniquely topical to the colonial social landscape. In this, Shaffer only partly succeeds. The difficulty is that the argument advances as a sort of gentleman’s agreement without the kind of binding evidentiary support we have come to expect from a local reading (Jill Lepore’s work, e.g., or Jeffrey Richards’s, or Heather Nathans’s). There is but slight context for the productions—who is in power, who is in the house, indeed, even who is in the roles. They are advanced as topical performances but treated at best wholly as transhistorical texts, or at worst as speculations of topicality: “Tamberlane was omitted, possibly due to the sensitivities of Roman Catholic Marylanders” (82). The chapter concludes wonderfully, however: “Not the least of these [imperial] fictions was the British diaspora myth of an unbroken westward expansion of human freedom from classical antiquity to the Americas, a narrative commonly endorsed by the eighteenth-century theater and its champions in Britain and America” (104). This is the kind of writing one wishes had a larger presence in the text, and precisely where the disappointment enters. Often, too often, the chapters conclude where they rightfully ought to begin. The fourth chapter, “A School for Patriots,” samples the long tradition of college theatre, including in New England, where professional theatre struggled, and during the war, when all theatre was technically prohibited. Although occasionally lapsing into an academic roll call of student productions (Yale, Dartmouth, Harvard, and Princeton), it reminds us what an important role academic productions fulfilled in the imaging of theatre. Lastly, chapter 5, “Bellicose Letters,” undertakes a reading of the many dramatic envisionings of the revolution composed but not produced during the fervent decade of the Revolutionary War. Many of these texts have remained closeted yet speak still to a certain curious appetite for fashioning the events of the day into a dramatic structure.
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Less excavated is what drove this imagination: why so many of these pieces were composed in a New England that had little professional theatre, or how the imaging of the war as theatre in a theatrically challenged landscape shaped the texts of the times. For all its merits—and there are many—the study is bruised somewhat by several conflicting impulses: chiefly, its aspirations to topicality are accompanied with a chronic imprecision that prevents it from ultimately delivering the evidentiary demands of the argument and its somewhat flawed model of patriotism that serves as its premise. The latter is most vexing. The book’s opening overture is a prolonged evocation of a model of patriotism advanced by Mel Gibson’s movie of the American Revolution, The Patriot. For some reason, having acknowledged the film as a piece of “costume drama” and rank Hollywood mythmaking, Shaffer nonetheless presses the film into service for its similarities to the period and embraces with some enthusiasm its particularly muscular and morally unambiguous brand of patriotism. It hovers about the book long after the prologue, surfaces again in the gallows scene of Nathan Hale, the discussion of Addison’s Cato, and elsewhere, aspiring to inspire Homo americanus to take up the tomahawk for the love of liberty. One is at a loss as to what to make of this opening association: “the fondness of Charleston audiences for the theater, ties these eighteenth-century plays to Gibson’s film, both aesthetically and historically” (4). As a model, it is deeply seductive to view the plays of the eighteenth century (at least the political plays) as inspiring nation building, but ultimately such an ambition is based in no more of a historic reality than the film that settles the Revolution with a single-handed combat at Cowpens. Unfortunately, this myth looms a little larger than the period will actually confirm. This raises the second issue, its chronic imprecision. With a documented calendar of performances that can account for no more than perhaps 50 percent of the plays produced in America and next to nothing about their reception, including whole years of absent records, it is problematic to make claims of repertory and its efficacy. To cull out performances of Richard III or Cato, in a season of forty plays, and promote them to engines of citizen-making seems a little unfair to the remainder of the repertory (Romeo and Juliet and Beggar’s Opera enjoyed more productions). For example, one “patriotic” production, the last professional production of Addison’s Cato in the colonies prior to the war, occurred in Charleston on May 10, 1774. Boston Harbor is under a blockade; in two months’ time delegates will be selected for the first Continental Congress. Uncertain times, we would say in retrospect. But the actors of the American Company were optimistic enough
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to secure a fifteen-year lease on the building and send to London for more scenes and actors. The evening was the penultimate of their successful season in Charleston, in which they played Cato, followed by The Reprisal, or the Tars of Old England, as a civic benefit, with the permission of the British-appointed colonial governor. It was attended on that night by the lodge of Freemasons, who hissed their own grand master, the British-appointed attorney general of the colony, not for his politics, but because of an open affair he had conducted. Between the pieces a popular British military song was sung, “Hearts of Oak,” whose lyrics had been rewritten into an equally popular American anthem of consumer resistance. Whatever this evening meant, it was certainly far more complex than Shaffer’s conclusion allows: “The entire program suggests an assertion of colonial defiance” (101). What we see is that the politics inside the playhouse were as complex as the politics outside it, and both are more troubled than the premise that this study comes no closer to solving. Equally vexing are the lapses of scholarship in which the fine writing exceeds the research. These are small moments mostly, and uniformly concerning the chronology (when Douglass left America, when the American Company opened in Jamaica, who went to Barbados, how they fared [86, 87, 103, 104, and 166]). Who stayed and who left may be academic, but if one is constructing an argument documenting the influence of the professional companies, the whereabouts of the only major company at the time might be traced with a little more precision. There are moments of polished writing here—the close of “Free-Born Peoples,” or a passage in the epilogue that succinctly sums up the work. Speaking of Royal Tyler’s The Contrast, Shaffer writes: “Like Jonathan’s patchwork understanding of history, the cultural and physical landscapes of Tyler’s United States (and our own) are palimpsests of colonial and revolutionary history, scored with the markings of past performances” (176). Eloquently expressed, leaving the reviewer with the faint longing that the project might have been better served had it begun exactly there, excavating the ways in which the revolution of America was itself marked with past and imperfect imaginings of patriotism, of enacted fantasies of liberty that in the end helped shape the culture’s construction of what was ultimately achievable in those uncertain years when the actors left the continent and the real players commenced what John Adams called “The Theatre of Action.” — ODA I JO HN S O N University of Washington
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\ The Moscow Yiddish Theater: Art on Stage in the Time of Revolution. By Benjamin Harshav. Translated from Russian and Yiddish by Benjamin Harshav and Barbara Harshav. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. 248 pp. $45.00 cloth.
Benjamin Harshav’s The Moscow Yiddish Theater: Art on Stage in the Time of Revolution begs the question: Why hasn’t this subject been written about before? Although references to the Moscow Yiddish Theatre may be found in such works as Nahma Sandrow’s Vagabond Stars: A World History of Yiddish Theater and David S. Lifson’s Yiddish Theater in America, Harshav’s is the first fulllength study to be published. Harshav’s historical overview of a theatre that has been greatly overlooked adds an important element to the literature on the Yiddish theatre: the courage of the Jewish artists during a revolutionary period. Within the social and cultural upheaval that became the Soviet Union, the Moscow Yiddish Theatre was born. Harshav recounts with discernment how the company began in 1919 under the aegis of Alexei Granovsky, along with Solomon Mikhoels (director and actor, respectively), who believed that an avante-garde theatre by Jewish artists could survive within the Communist regime. They were able to bring together an extraordinarily talented group of theatre artists, with the significant help of the artistic genius Marc Chagall. Harshav’s narrative is organized into two sections: the first is an account of the company within the historical context in which the Moscow Yiddish Theatre developed; the second consists of a collection of firsthand accounts— translated by the author and his wife, Barbara—from the participants of the Moscow Yiddish Theatre, as well as theatre critics from around the world. Harshav’s discovery and inclusion of these invaluable sources is a great blessing, and he has also provided an added treat at the end of the book: two delightful Sholem Aleichem skits. The first section is itself divided into subsections that discuss such topics as “The Fame of the Yiddish Avant-Garde Theater,” “Yiddish Culture and Yiddish Theater,” and “Granovsky and Theater as Art.” Also, in this section Harshav relates the importance of the Moscow Yiddish Theatre (eventually known as GOSET [Gosudarstvenny Evreysky Teatr]) to the multinational audiences it played before. Granovsky hoped to touch the millions, instead of the few; although many in the audience understood only a few words of Yiddish, through multimedia and pantomime GOSET made itself a theatre for the masses.
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Of special interest is the second chapter of the first section, titled “Chagall’s Theater Murals,” a fascinating description of the contributions of Marc Chagall to the evolution of the Moscow Yiddish Theatre. Harshav provides a reproduction of the magnificent mural Chagall painted on the walls of the theatre lobby in Moscow (44–45) and a painstakingly detailed analysis of its various components, which represent in pastiche many events and individuals related to the opening of the theatre Chagall helped in so many ways to create. For example, Harshav reads a young goat in the mural as representing company cofounder Solomon Mikhoel—a “naïve ‘baby’ ” (46) curious about the new art. In another example, Harshav notes that Chagall has depicted Abram Efros, artistic director of the Yiddish Chamber Theater in Moscow, who brought Chagall to the director, Granovsky. Here he brings him literally, a realization of the metaphor. Efros strides determinedly, left foot forward, as in Mayakovsky’s topical poem “Left March.” Harshav relates Chagall’s relationship to the theatre with eloquence, presenting him as the true driving force behind the Moscow Yiddish Theatre, one who helped to accentuate the importance of a Jewish stage and who founded a dynasty of artist-designers. Unfortunately, Chagall did not believe in the conventional aspects of theatre, which included seating for the audience. So, once seats were installed, he picked up and left, never to work for the Yiddish theatre again, a circumstance Harshav views as a tremendous loss. The firsthand accounts and essays that make up the second section are written by such luminaries of the time as Chagall, Granovsky, and Mikhoels, and English theatre critic Huntley Carter, Dutch critic Niko Rost, and German critic Alfred Kerr. These accounts shared with the world the wonders that Granovsky and his troupe accomplished. The critics discuss some of the company’s most outstanding productions, including The Great Prize (1923), Trouhadec: An Eccentric Operetta (the first non-Jewish play produced by GOSET, in 1926), and The Travels of Benjamin the Third (a Yiddish interpretation of Don Quixote staged in 1927). The Moscow Yiddish Theatre was not political, and neither is Harshav’s book; when writing of the Moscow Yiddish Theatre, however, one cannot help but speak of the political turmoil that surrounded it. In the first section, Harshav writes of Stalin’s takeover and the way in which he institutionalized and censored all theatre, so that Granovsky, as well as many others—including Stanislavsky—were forced to toe the Communist Party line. Although Harshav’s work tends to be uplifting by trying to downplay the tragic events that eventually occurred, the shadow of future Communism (i.e., Stalin, his repressive censorship and harsh reprisals for those who challenged it) hangs { 238 }
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over every word. Chagall and Granovsky fled to the West, thereby saving their lives, while Mikhoels remained, steadfast in his endeavors to bring a new and freedom-loving culture to his people. Eventually, he was stripped of his artistic freedom and murdered by Stalin’s henchmen. It is gratifying to note that the Russian government has finally released the archival materials that made it possible for Harshav to thoroughly research a subject that had been long forgotten. The history of the Moscow Yiddish Theatre has been stored behind locked doors for far too long. — CA RY R . L E IT E R Wayne State University
\ Historical Dictionary of Russian Theater. By Laurence Senelick. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2007. li + 553 pp. $110.00 cloth.
In the rarified world of American scholarship on Russian drama and theatre, undoubtedly no researcher has published as prolifically as Laurence Senelick. The expertise arising from his dozen books—on subjects like Russian dramatic theory, serf theatre, cabaret, émigré theatre, and especially Chekhov— has served him well in the task of writing pithy entries on actors, directors, designers, playwrights, plays, companies, concepts, and more, corresponding to a chronology that extends from the skomorokhi in 1068 to highlights of the 2005 Moscow theatre season. Yes, this is a formulaic reference work with its requisite chronology, introductory essay, dictionary entries, bibliographic essay, and bibliographic entries grouped by category. And I must own up to having written, with James Fisher, a later volume in Scarecrow’s series of historical dictionaries of theatre. Thus it is with particular admiration for Senelick’s solo labor (knowing how the list of entries to be researched and written seemed endless, even when my task was shared) that I applaud his ability to transcend the mandated format and make the work his very own. This is not only a good solid collection of data but also a stylish and witty presentation of it. The virtues of this work are its utter reliability and the fact that it is a book worth reading for pleasure, not just for consulting randomly. Senelick seems to have dealt with the daunting prospect of condensing tons of material into brief, discrete entries by the same means as Félix Fénéon in his 1906 news snippets now published as Novels in Three Lines. Both authors pull the reader into { 239 }
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the hint of a larger story by providing just enough—with flair—to stimulate the imagination and to satisfy. Among the dozens I noted, here are a couple of examples: “His rivalry with fellow character actor Mikhail Ianshin, even vying for protracted applause, reached such a pitch that Minister of Culture Ekaterina Furtseva had to intervene” (Gribov 150). “While playing Aleksandr Ostrovskii’s Vasilisa Melent’eva, in despair at seeing her lover in the audience with another woman, she poisoned herself on stage” (Kadmina 171). “His technical mastery was such that he could produce exactly four tears in this last role, and he insisted that they be properly lit” (Pevtsov 293). The study of Soviet theatre always carries the fascination of the horrible. The revelation that comes through this book is how pervasive were the persecutions of artists and the censorship of plays and productions even before the Soviet era. According to my informal tally of all entries (making no distinction between Russian and Soviet), at least fifty-seven entries refer to artists who emigrated or were expelled from the country, fifty-five entries signal specific bans or repressions, fifteen entries name artists who were arrested (with most of them serving prison time), and eleven entries name artists who were executed. The preface claims “students and the general public” as the volume’s target readership, “not necessarily the expert” (xi). While non-experts will certainly get good value here, much is likely to go over their heads. For example, the Okhlopkov entry refers to “his carceral Hamlet (1953)” (281), but there is no explanation here—nor is there an entry on Shakespeare on the Russian stage—to explain what is better known as the “Iron Curtain Hamlet” or even to suggest why there were so many productions of Hamlet following the death of Stalin. Given the intensity of the Russians’ affinity for Shakespeare, there should be an entry tracing the Bard’s fortunes there, besides the brief Shakespeare section in the bibliography. I noted a dozen or so other names and topics that ought to have had entries in view of their recurring mention elsewhere. Prominent among these would be the actress Kolosova, Andrei Zhdanov, Victory Over the Sun, and Story of a Horse. The latter title raises another quibble: Senelick tends to use nonstandard translations of play titles. Americans know the latter play as Strider, but that rendering appears nowhere in the book. Similarly, Senelick gives us On the Run for the Bulgakov play more readily found under the title Flight; No Fool Like a Wise Fool for the Ostrovskii play most of us know as Diary of a Scoundrel or Too Clever by Half; Paddle Your Own Canoe for Ostrovskii’s Don’t Sit in Somebody Else’s Sleigh; and so on. The problem is that without a section in the bibliography for Russian plays in English translation, the students for whom the book is intended will be hard pressed to find the plays de{ 240 }
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spite Senelick’s helpful fifty-page listing of the original Russian titles of plays (alphabetized according to his own English versions of the titles). The forty-two-page bibliography is very useful for its inclusion of so many journal articles, although this feature is offset by the odd omission of some fairly important books; the privileging of articles would seem to serve the expert better than the student. Among the thousand or so dictionary entries, I spotted only four typos: Aleksandr for Aleksandra Ekster (173), omission of boldface to cross-reference a play title that has its own entry (208), Podrostok given as the Russian title for The Minor (247, but correctly listed as Nedorosl on 478), and “ingenious” for “ingenuous” (507). Sixteen pages of well-chosen photographs enhance this invaluable work. — F EL ICIA HA R DIS O N L O N D R É University of Missouri–Kansas City
\ A History of Asian American Theatre. By Esther Kim Lee. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 264 pp. $99.00 cloth.
Esther Kim Lee’s work offers an overview of the history of Asian-American theatre from 1965—the year in which the first Asian-American theatre company, the East West Players, was founded—to the first years of the present century. A well-documented and informed study, it explores the formation and development of Asian-American theatre, placing the Asian-American artist at the center. Lee is a theatre history scholar, and her goal is to introduce the reader to “the most basic facts” about Asian-American theatre, that is, its “causes and effects, the progress, the stasis of its history” (2). Unsurprisingly, her study is based on numerous interviews of those artists associated with Asian-American theatre companies in the U.S. mainland (Hawaii being exempt from her analysis) who partook in what is now a well-established and recognized ethnic theatre in the United States. This perspective is precisely what distinguishes Lee’s work from publications that tend to center on an interdisciplinary, critical, and literary theoretical analysis of Asian-American drama, such as Josephine Lee’s Performing Asian America: Race and Ethnicity on the Contemporary Stage (1997), Dorinne Kondo’s About Face: Performing Race in Fashion and Theater (1997), or Karen Shimakawa’s National Abjection: The Asian American Body Onstage (2002), to mention a few examples. { 241 }
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Lee’s work is divided into eight chapters that follow, chronologically, the key events in the making and development of Asian-American theatre. The first chapter provides background information about the history of Asian immigration to the United States, relating it to stereotypical images of Asians and Asianness in U.S. culture and, subsequently, to their representations on the American stage from the nineteenth century to the first half of the twentieth century. Lee devotes the following chapters to her main concern as manifested in the book’s introduction: to provide the reader interested in initiating studies on Asian-American theatre with “the who, what, where, how, and why of Asian American theatre as told by the artists and as interpreted” by the author (6). Chapters 2 and 3 offer a general picture of the contributions by Asian-American actors and the first four major Asian-American theatre companies, respectively. “Actors in the 1960s and 1970s” provides an interesting analysis for the understanding of Asian-American theatre, paying a well-deserved homage to actors by recognizing their role in the innovation and development of theatre, oftentimes diminished by the general trend to give priority to playwrights, directors, producers, and theatre venues. The fact that actors from various backgrounds associated in order to fight racist practices such as yellowface and stereotypical, nonrepresentative images of Asian Americans on the stage was the starting point for the birth of the first Asian-American theatre companies. Chapter 3 is devoted to the first four (and still) major Asian-American theatre companies in the U.S. mainland: East West Players (Los Angeles); Asian American Theatre Company (San Francisco); Northwest Asian American Theater (Seattle); and Pan Asian Repertory Theatre (New York City). This chapter provides more than a survey of these companies; by emphasizing their founders’ concerns, interests, and agendas, Lee demonstrates how these institutions, and the artists involved with them, have influenced, shaped, and defined AsianAmerican theatre. Chapter 4 concerns those theatre groups and artists who, during the same period, conscientiously rejected “the regional theatre model that privileges the written text” followed by the first four Asian-American theatre companies (92). Initially, these artists were influenced by the Vietnam antiwar and the third world movements, enabling them to establish links between domestic issues, that is, racism in the United States, and the nation’s imperialistic foreign policy. Lee introduces two examples representing this tendency: solo performance artist Nobuko Miyamoto, and scholar and playwright Roberta Uno, founder of the Third World Theater (later renamed as New WORLD Theater). Lee also refers to “transnationalism and intercultural theatre” (101), one that re-
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flects the need felt by some artists to establish identifying links with Asia. This is achieved by incorporating traditional elements from Asian theatre in their works, a phenomenon related to the recent diaspora and to community-based theatre groups. The final part of the chapter explores the beginnings of performance art, multimedia, and alternative theatre, paying particular attention to the careers of the avant-garde artists Ping Chong and Jessica Hagedorn. The common denominator of these artists is their endeavor to broaden notions of Asian-American theatre, both formally and thematically; that is, they use their experiences and cultural backgrounds as a means of exploring wider issues affecting contemporary societies, such as alienation and displacement, rather than race or ethnicity. Having identified the most important trends of Asian-American theatre during the years of its consolidation, Lee devotes chapter 5 to the second-wave playwrights who benefited from the achievements of their predecessors and, consequently, were able to work in mainstream theatre. However, the following chapter on solo performance (a form that, until recently, has not received as much scholarly attention) is one of the most interesting in the volume. Methodologically coherent, Lee provides us with a chronological overview of AsianAmerican solo performers from the 1970s to the 1990s. She exposes how AsianAmerican artists have evolved, from challenging monolithic representations of Asian America to becoming more experimental in form and thematic contents, embracing fluid notions of identity. Chapter 7 centers on the controversy of the early 1990s around the musical Miss Saigon, particularly in relation to its initial casting decisions and content. Although the musical’s reappropriation of offensive stereotypical oriental roles undeniably represented a backlash “in terms of how the economic power of mainstream theatre has utterly dictated minority theatres” (178), a briefer account would have sufficed to make the point. The last chapter, “Asian American Theatre in the 1990s,” by contrast, seems too succinct, particularly when compared to the sections on theatrical production from the 1970s throughout the 1980s. Nonetheless, it manages to highlight the multiplicity of identities and experiences implied in the term “Asian American.” Whereas for the third-wave playwrights of the 1990s and early twenty-first century, Asian Americanness is only a part of their lives, artists from the new diaspora, mainly from the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia, feel the need to express pride in their origins, tendencies that reflect the diverse, complex, and non-essentialist nature of Asian-American theatre. Overall, in her clear exposition, choice of examples, and case studies, Esther
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Kim Lee convincingly conveys the multiple notions and concepts, throughout time, of what Asian-American theatre is as viewed by the protagonists themselves. — M A R ÍA IS A B E L S E G U R O University of Barcelona
\ “Divine Thalie”: The Career of Jeanne Quinault. By Judith Curtis. Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, vol. 8. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, University of Oxford, 2007. xi + 229 pp. $101.00 cloth.
In her exhaustively researched study of Comédie-Française actress Jeanne Quinault, Judith Curtis labors to establish the importance of Quinault in eighteenth-century France as actress, adviser, and mentor in the productions and dramatic literature of the Comédie-Française and, outside her work at the Comédie-Française, as a salonnière and organizer of private theatricals. Curtis meticulously charts the life of Jeanne Quinault, a figure previously known only through passing reference in “a few anecdotes in old dictionaries of actors and from a handful of highly questionable sources” (5). By accessing recently uncovered “authentic contemporary documents,” Curtis takes pains to refute the dominant picture painted of Quinault as the epitome of the eighteenth-century amoral actress in the 1818 “memoirs” of Mme d’Épinay (6). Answering anecdote with archive, Curtis gives us a detailed account of Quinault, not as iconoclastic freethinker but as a “socially acceptable and morally commendable” actress striving “to build an air of décence into the gatherings she hosted and into her style of life generally” (5). While Curtis’s work provides a record of Quinault’s life and the world of private société theatricals, it is not until the conclusion that Curtis draws out the paradoxes of Quinault’s life, briefly contextualizing actress and woman in the social world of eighteenth-century France. Curtis chronologically charts Quinault’s life, death, and memorialization in eleven chapters. Within this chronology, Curtis pauses to highlight particular relationships, such as Quinault’s friendships with playwright Alexis Piron and aristocrat/archaeologist Anne-Claude-Philippe de Tubières, compte de Caylus, detailed in her fourth chapter. In her first chapter Curtis studiously works through baptismal records, marriage licenses, police reports, private correspondences, and Mercure reviews
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to untangle the often confused histories of Quinault, her four siblings, and one sister-in-law, all of whom appeared on the Comédie-Française stage. Chapter 2 takes the reader deeper into the theatrical careers and accompanying backstage intrigue of the Quinaults at the Comédie. Curtis strays from a strict reporting of archival evidence in the third and fourth chapters to explore the world of private entertainments. Daniel Gerould’s fascinating Gallant and Libertine gave a brief overview and tantalizing taste of these illicit events; Curtis provides further detail of their construction through Quinault’s organization of and participation in the société des lazzistes. The lazzistes (including, among others, Piron, Caylus, and Secretary of State Jean-Frédéric Phélypeaux, comte de Pontchartrain et de Maurepas) staged intimate entertainments as diverse as magic lantern shows, trained dog acts, and short performances—lazzi—composed by society members. Freed from the censorship of the official theatre and the opinion of the public, Quinault would cross-dress as Maurepas, satirizing all that was “legitimate” through whimsical performances of transformation and parody. Chapter 5 examines Quinault’s growing role as a mentor and adviser to playwrights in the “legitimate” theatre. As a member of the now established and powerful Quinault clan of actors at the Comédie-Française, she was able to directly influence which plays were staged at the Comédie, who acted the parts, and, through her mentorship, how those plays were written. The “divine Thalie,” as Voltaire named her, advised and mentored a number of playwrights, including Voltaire himself and Françoise de Graffigny (77). Seemingly in contradiction to her enjoyment of the raucous “uncensored” private entertainments of the lazzistes, Quinault publicly advocated the emerging comédie larmoyant genre with its heavy doses of bourgeois morality. Post-retirement, Quinault established herself as a salonnière with the Diners du Bout-du-Banc, chronicled in chapter 5. Focused more on the literary endeavors of its members than the société des lazzistes, the salon produced several printed collections edited by Quinault. Chapters 7 and 8 describe Quinault’s private life, examining finances (giving the reader a brief view into the difficult social and economic conditions faced by an actress at this time), family, and friends (providing brief biographical sketches of, among others, Françoise de Graffigny). Chapter 9 further details the Graffigny friendship through Quinault’s suggestions for and support of Graffigny’s hugely successful comédie larmoyante, Cénie, and Graffigny’s participation in Quinault’s second rendition of the Bout-du-Banc. The final two chapters chart Quinault’s retreat from the social life of Paris, her death, and the often quite erroneous recordings of her life.
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It is in the conclusion that Curtis firmly situates her biography in current scholarship and the life of Quinault in the social world she inhabited. Curtis analyzes how Quinault’s paradoxical championing of the moralistic comédie larmoyant aligns with her love of the more “unregulated and untrammeled entertainments” of private theatricals—both reflect an attempt to improve her marginalized position as an actress in society through a genre aligned with middle-class values and through salon activities that fostered “proper” social connections (202). Curtis leaves us with the intriguing thought that Quinault herself, straddling the line between actress and salonnière, between disrepute and décence, as well as other women whose “careers are not so well documented,” occupied a unique position “between the lines and in the margins of the texts laid out for them,” at times “stepp[ing] outside the roles assigned” (206). I wish that Curtis had woven this argument throughout her text, providing less of a bald description of Quinault’s life and more of an analysis of how that life was held within and broke outside the “text” laid out for it. “Divine Thalie” is, however, quite explicitly a biography of Jeanne Quinault. It is through her that the reader views the life of an actress and the practice of her art in eighteenth-century France. Curtis only briefly delves into a reading of this life, barely engaging in the contentious, and important, debates on how women and their salons function in the discourse of the Enlightenment. Curtis, at times, is unable to resist providing evidence for even the most arcane detail, tracing the histories and interrelationships of even the slightest Quinault acquaintances. Her primary mission, however, was to provide a documented accounting of the life of Jeanne Quinault, freed from rumor and jaundiced anecdote. She has successfully done this; it is now up to future scholars to more fully situate this life of a woman and an actress in the text of Enlightenment France. — JEA NNE W I LLC O X O N St. Olaf College
\ Contemporary African American Women Playwrights. Edited and with an introduction by Philip C. Kolin. London: Routledge, 2007. 207 pp. $120.00 cloth.
Contemporary African American Women Playwrights brings together two practiced hands at introducing readers to the drama. Kimball King is general edi-
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tor of Routledge’s exemplary Casebooks on Modern Dramatists series, and Philip C. Kolin, editor of the present volume, has provided outstanding analysis of the lesser-known plays of Tennessee Williams, among others. Kolin here turns his attention to fourteen African-American women playwrights of remarkable variety and accomplishment, assembling a collection of essays that serves as a valuable introduction for the general reader, for the specialist in drama, and for the playwright. Even a moderately experienced reader may be unfamiliar with some of the writers represented here and struck by the wide range of dramatic styles they represent on a continuum from realistic to experimental. David Krasner demonstrates in his essay on writers of the Harlem Renaissance that both Georgia Douglas Johnson and Zora Neale Hurston write plays on the realistic model, with strong connections to folk theatre, but Krasner links Marita O. Bonner to expressionism, using Strindberg as a comparison. This variety may also be seen in the startlingly different characteristics of three plays that serve as touchstones in these essays: the “social realism” of Lorraine Hansberry’s Raisin in the Sun, the Broadway production that marks a watershed in the production history of African-American plays; Ntozake Shange’s “choreopoem” for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf (presented in a model essay by James Fisher); and the “surrealistic effects and characters” (Kolin) of Adrienne Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro. A casebook presents themes and questions that point the reader toward further investigations. One such theme is possible characteristics of AfricanAmerican playwriting that distinguish it from that of other racial groups. A number of authors and their subjects in this volume suggest that the difference lies in the tradition of spontaneous performance; in Hurston’s words, “No matter how joyful or how sad the case there is sufficient poise for drama. Everything is acted out” (14). This characteristic is ideal for the transformation of witness into dramatic shapes. Such observations lead to a further question raised by this casebook, the relation of the aesthetic to the moral. None of the writers included here aspires simply to write “good” plays, because what would such a description mean in the face of a life’s experience in a society that is frequently both racist and sexist? Is a writer then compelled to take “political” positions? The playwrights often answer this question by drawing on history. Soyica Diggs shows how Alice Childress uses the well-made play to give voices to her characters that historical circumstances would otherwise deny them. Kolin’s essay on Adrienne Kennedy shows how she roots her plays in historical events
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but treats those events as nightmares with real nightmares behind them. Beth Turner demonstrates that Pearl Cleage has moved from experimental to traditional theatrical forms, even as her presentation of character grows more nuanced. Aishah Rahman, as described by Brandi Wilkins Catanese, consciously draws on both the leading figures and the feel of jazz, mixing the fantastical and the historical. Freda Scott Giles describes how Glenda Dickerson creates “pastiches” setting up “a dialectic with history, memory, and culture” (132). Joan Wylie Hall shows how Anna Deavere Smith researches actual community events and creates monologue-plays that reach deep into the collective mind torn by racial tension. Debby Thompson finds in the works of the remarkable Suzan Lori-Parks dreamscapes, juxtapositions, puns, and history working in tandem. Another issue raised is whether one can present one’s own “movement” in a critical light, or if a committed playwright must act as though all right is on one side. The casebook shows this tension in the works of Sonia Sanchez, who positions herself in the middle of the revolutionary movement but also from a womanist point of view. One may then ask if the African-American woman playwright must give privilege of place to issues of racism or of sexism, a dialectic seen in criticisms that Ntozake Shange has received for her portrayals of males, in Rahman’s explorations of obstacles to black women both outside and within their community, and in the “articulation of feminist opposition to the interlocking oppressions of sexism, racism, and classism” (99) of Pearl Cleage, who in turn was greatly influenced by Shange’s for colored girls. The previous questions also relate to issues of form and content. Even acknowledging that the two cannot really be separated in a meaningful way, the essays ask whether plays lose their political effectiveness as they become more experimental in form. There may be reason for optimism on this point, considering the impact of both Raisin in the Sun and for colored girls on white audiences, but Broadway success hardly erases the question of whether one writes for the “committed, engaged audience” that Jacqueline Wood, in her essay on Sonia Sanchez, suggests is critical to “the African concept of artistic expression” (48) or for a broader, more generalized, and probably more Caucasian audience. Giles shows how Glenda Dickerson continually redefines her desired audience as she goes, while Lynn Nottage, as described by Sandra G. Shannon, focuses not on the audience but on the work. When asked by Shannon, in the one interview in the book, what male writers think of her work, Nottage replies, “I don’t know, and I don’t care. I honestly don’t know” (201). A casebook does not settle questions but provokes them. This volume stimu{ 248 }
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lates far beyond its relatively small size. In particular, playwrights will find inspiration in the African-American women writers they meet in this book. — KIR K W OO DWA R D Artistic Director Troupe of Vagabonds Theater
\ Querying Difference in Theatre History. Edited by Scott Magelssen and Ann Haugo. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007. 190 pp. $59.99 cloth.
Scott Magelssen and Ann Haugo’s Querying Difference in Theatre History is an exciting volume of short essays ideally suited to teaching in the theatre history classroom. As Haugo and Magelssen explain in the critical introduction, the essays, which began as conference papers for the 2006 Mid-America Theatre Conference meeting with the same theme, were written to “draw out the dilemmas that emerge when attempting to constitute ideas about difference from ideological or scientific points of view, and offer new modes of inquiry and critical vocabulary for contemporary scholars of theatre history” (1). The “differences” the volume engages include sexuality, gender, class, and ethnic identity. In essence, the volume opens up discussions of the “how” as well as the “what” in the increasingly diverse field of theatre history studies. Rather than organizing the book according to the types of differences the essays elucidate, the editors have arranged the essays methodologically, with sections on historiography, performance and cultural exchange, and imagined communities and the performance of cultural identity. The historiographical section includes essays on anti-queer performance and radical democracy (John Fletcher); the use of theatre reviews in theatre historiography (Henry Bial); British restoration theatre historiography (Robert Shimko); and intersections of radical politics of sexuality and class in French theatre (Alan Sikes). The next, and considerably longer, section on theatre and cultural exchange includes essays on gender in antebellum performance (Shauna Vey); Ira Aldridge and the politics of British theatre censorship (Kate Roark); British productions of “Chineseness” on the early-twentieth-century stage (Dongshin Chang); the theatrical construction of California’s Mexican past (Andrew Gibb); and the historiographical imaginings of East-West exchanges in the work of Ping Chong (Kay Martinovich). The third section on imagined communities and the performance of cultural identity brings to{ 249 }
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gether essays on the representation of African Americans in brothel plays (Katie Johnson); a reconsideration of “American” optimism in the plays of Serbianborn playwright Steven Tesich (Michael Rothmeyer); 1970s Native American performance (Julie Pearson-Little Thunder); the vagaries of representations of Native Americans in Barrie’s Peter Pan (Jodi Van Horn-Gibson); Timberlake Wertenbaker’s diasporic poetics (Sara Freeman); non-San Juan-based Puerto Rican theatre (Elena Garcia-Martín); and the complex performative politics of battle reenactments (Leigh Clemons). Many of the essays use methodologies germinal to performance studies, gender studies, political theory, and critical race studies, whose emergence in theatre historiography over the last twenty years has radically changed our field. Yet, some of the most intriguing essays clearly elucidate ethical, theoretical, and historiographical dilemmas our field struggled with before these sea changes in methodology, such as the decentering of Euro-American perspectives, positivist history, and the addition of gender, race, and class analysis. For instance, Henry Bial’s examination of reviews of the New York production of Angels in America asks us to consider exactly what we do with theatre reviews when we attempt to write histories of reception of particular performances. Going beyond simply acknowledging the bias and so-called expertise of reviewers as ideal spectators, Bial demonstrates how reviewers often produce categories of difference rather than merely reflecting them. Bial calls for theatre scholars to enjoin Althusserian and Butlerian theories of the interpolation of the subject when these reviews hail difference, maintaining awareness of the fact that these cultural objects are not subjects. Ultimately, this critical stance requires a double movement in which these reviews may be taken as evidence of spectatorship, even as we must historicize whom the reviewers were speaking to as part of the process. Katie Johnson brings up a common dilemma, at least for those of us who write about historical artists of color. Her essay on David Belasco’s 1926 Lulu Belle asks how and when we can recover agency for the African-American extras in a production that used racist modes of representation, in this case blackface minstrelsy performance and the staging of an archetypical tragic mulatta. Although recognizing the fact that the play’s producers, not the artists of color involved in the production (104), were the “real profiteers,” Johnson argues that Lulu Belle’s mixed cast ultimately destabilized essentialist notions of race and provided a site of liberation for later queer subcultures, which valorized the lead character. Alongside Clemons’s and Gibb’s essays, which detail the limited agency that Mexican Americans claim in battle reenactments of the Alamo and re-creations of Mexican California at the Padua Hills playhouse, Johnson’s { 250 }
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work suggests that performances of minoritarian identities under hegemonic constructions of difference will always pose problems for historiographers who want to write these performances into a more democratic constellation of theatre history. John Fletcher goes even further by suggesting that violently antiqueer preacher Fred Phelps’s protests are an example of a fundamental political difference that forms a limited point of Chantal Mouffe’s notion of radical democracy and, by extension, any historiography based on Mouffe’s principles. In this volume of querying difference, Fletcher’s interrogation of Phelps’s despicable acts, and his own reactions to them, is a warning to us to be aware of our scholarly self-righteousness and sloppy thinking about democratic tolerance of difference. By default, all the essays in this collection expose the limits of using a multiculturalism infused with liberal humanist ideology to frame the insertion of “difference” into our curricula and research agendas. It is not surprising, then, that the foci of the volume are contemporary British theatre, American theatre, race in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century U.S. and transatlantic performance, and contemporary nontheatrical performance, all objects of study that demand methodological innovation in dealing with difference. In this sense, the volume is a logical extension of the important historiographical work done in the 1990s on race, class, nation, and gender in nineteenth-century U.S. performance by scholars including Rosemarie K. Bank, Bruce McConachie, and Eric Lott, and work on diasporic and transnational performance by scholars such as Joseph Roach and Eng Beng-Lim. It is hoped that this volume will encourage more work on thinking difference in theatre history, some of which moves outside of the confines of Englishlanguage performance in Europe and the United States. Neoliberal globalization necessitates these inquiries and the need to rethink difference in contemporary societies and to examine these societies alongside and within their historiographical genealogies. In summary, Querying Difference in Theatre History is an important contribution to the field. Although the brevity of some of the essays occasionally leaves one wanting more, this conciseness makes them ideal for teaching in undergraduate theatre history and historiography courses. — PATR ICIA Y B A R R A Brown University
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Bartels, Emily C. Speaking of the Moor: From Alcazar to Othello. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. Benedetti, Jean, trans. An Actor’s Work by Konstantin Stanislavsky. London: Routledge, 2008. Brady, Susan, and Nina Couch, eds. Documenting Lighting Design. New York: TLA, 2007. Chatterjee, Sudipto. The Colonial Staged: Theatre in Colonial Calcutta. London: Seagull Books, 2007. Coleman, Bud, and Judith A. Sebesta, eds. Women in American Musical Theatre. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2008. Everett, William A. Sigmund Romberg. London: Yale University Press, 2007. Fisher, James. Understanding Tony Kushner. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2008. Fliotsos, Anne, and Wendy Vierow. American Women Stage Directors of the Twentieth Century. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008. Friedman, Sharod, ed. Feminist Theatrical Revisions of Classic Texts. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2008. Gale, Maggie B. J. B. Priestley. London: Routledge, 2008. Garcia, Laura E., Sandra M. Gutierrez, and Felicitas Nuñez, eds. Teatro Chicana: A Collective Memoir and Selected Plays. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008. Glow, Hilary. Power Plays: Australian Theatre and the Public Agenda. Sydney: Currency Press, 2007. Holdsworth, Nadine, and Mary Luckhurst, eds. A Concise Companion to Contemporary British and Irish Drama. Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell Press, 2008. Johnson, Claudia Durst. Church and Stage: The Theatre as Target of Religious Condemnation in Nineteenth Century America. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2008. { 253 }
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MacArthur, Benjamin. The Man Who Was Rip Van Winkle: Joseph Jefferson and Nineteenth Century American Theatre. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. Magee, Gayle Sherwood. Charles Ives Reconsidered. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2008. Magelssen, Scott. Living History Museums: Undoing History Through Performance. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2007. Marranca, Bonnie. Performance Histories. New York: PAJ, 2008. Martin, Carol, and Saviana Stanescu, eds. Global Foreigners: An Anthology of Plays. London: Seagull Books, 2007. McKinnie Michael. City Stages: Theatre and Urban Space in a Global City. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007. McMullan, Gordon. Shakespeare and the Idea of Late Writing: Authorship in the Proximity of Death. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Powell, Isabel Washington, with Joyce Burnett. Adam’s Belle. Springfield, Va.: DBM Press, 2008. Rozik, Eli. Generating Theatre Meaning. Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2008. Saal, Ilka. New Deal Theater. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Sagala, Sandra K. Buffalo Bill on Stage. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008. Wilson, Ross. Theodor Adorno. London: Routledge, 2008. Witmore, Michael. Pretty Creatures: Children and Fiction in the English Renaissance. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007. Woodruff, Paul. The Necessity of Theater: The Art of Watching and Being Watched. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Wright, Patrick. Iron Curtain: From Stage to Cold War. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Zarhy-Levo, Yael. The Making of Theatrical Reputations: Studies from the Modern London Theatre. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2008.
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JOS EPH BROMFIELD is a recent graduate of Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida. As a Rollins Cornell Scholar, he received his B.A. in Theatre Arts with an Emphasis in Performance in May 2009. He is a native of Chattanooga, Tennessee, where he graduated from The McCallie School in 2005. Joseph now plans to pursue his theatrical interests via postgraduate study in the United Kingdom or regional theatre work in the United States. J ACK S ON R . BRYER is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Maryland. Among the books on American dramatic literature he has edited or coedited are Selected Letters of Eugene O’Neill; The Playwright’s Art: Conversations with Contemporary American Dramatists; Conversations with Lillian Hellman; The Actor’s Art: Conversations with Contemporary American Stage Performers; The Facts on File Companion to American Drama; The Art of the American Musical: Conversations with the Creators; Conversations with August Wilson; and The Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder. J ENNIFER JONES C AV ENAUG H is Chair of the Theater and Dance Department at Rollins College. Her book Medea’s Daughters: Forming and Performing Women Who Kill was published in 2003 by Ohio State University Press. She has published articles in theatre journals such as Modern Drama, New England Journal of Theater, Theater Notebook, and American Drama, and has chapters in several anthologies, including Passing Performances: Queer Readings of Leading Players in American Theater History and Women in the American Musical Theater. She has also cowritten a play about Annie Russell with Joseph Bromfield titled Stage Fright.
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L AR RY D. C L ARK is Dean Emeritus of the College of Arts and Science and Professor Emeritus of Theatre, University of Missouri–Columbia. He specializes in the history of the American theatre, focusing on the theatre and drama of the 1920s. He is coauthor of the acting text Acting Is Believing, now in its tenth edition. PAUL COR N W ELL has a diploma in Primary Education (Cambridge University) and a M.Ed (Leicester University). He spent five years researching the life of Terence Gray for a biography, Only by Failure: The Many Faces of the Impossible Life of Terence Gray (Salt, 2004). Two other articles came out of that study: “Pirandello in Cambridge” (Pirandello Studies 22 [2002]) and “American Drama at the Cambridge Festival Theatre” (Eugene O’Neill Review 27 [2005]). His current research interests include Cambridge theatre during the interwar period and creative playmaking in the English primary school. CHR IS T IN ESSIN is an Assistant Professor of Theatre Studies at the University of Arizona. Her research examines theatrical design as an artistic and cultural practice that reflects historical circumstances and shapes people’s perceptions of the everyday landscapes they traverse. VALLER I J. HOH M AN is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre at the University of Illinois. Her areas of focus include production dramaturgy, adaptation, and Russian-American cultural exchange between 1890 and 1930. Her work appears in the New England Theatre Journal, the Journal of American Drama and Theatre, African American Dramatists, and the Encyclopedia of Modern Drama, and is forthcoming in the Dictionary of Literary Biography. She is currently writing a book about Russians in the American theatre. M ARC M ART INEZ, a Senior Lecturer at the University of Bordeaux, is a specialist of eighteenth-century English comic literature who has published widely on theatre and pantomime. He coauthored a study of satire in English and French literature—La satire (Armand Colin, 2000). ELIZ ABET H OSBOR NE is an Assistant Professor in Theatre Studies at Florida State University. Her research interests focus on early-twentieth-century American theatre, particularly the Federal Theatre Project, and the relationship between theatre and its surrounding community. She has presented her research at the International Federation for Theatre Research, the American Society for Theatre Research, the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, { 256 }
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the America Library Association, Theatre Symposium, and the Mid-America Theatre Conference, and her work has appeared in Theatre Symposium and the Journal of American Drama and Theatre. C AROLY N D. ROARK is editor of Ecumenica, a journal dedicated to the study of religion/spirituality and performance. She is also Focus Group Representative for the Association for Theatre in Higher Education’s Religion and Theatre group, an occasional puppeteer, and a generally useful person. At present she is at work on a book project concerning puppets and death. ROBERT S HIMKO is Assistant Professor of Theatre History and Dramaturgy at the University of Houston. His writing has appeared in Theatre Journal, Theatre Topics, and the anthology Querying Difference in Theatre History. He is currently co-chair of theatre history symposia for the Mid-America Theatre Conference.
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