THE JOURNAL OF

AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE

Volume 21, Number 3 Fall2009
Founding Editors: Vera Mowry Roberts and Walter Meserve
Editor: David Savran
Managing Editor: Naomi Stubbs
Editorial Assistant: Rayya El Zein
Circulation Manager: Tori Amoscato
Circulation Assistant: Ana Martinez
Martin E. Segal Theatre Center
Frank Hentschker, Executive Director
Professor Edwin Wilson, Chairman, Advisory Board
Professor Daniel Gerould, Director of Publications
Jan Stenzel, Director of Administration
THE GRADUATE SCHOOL AND UNIVERSI1Y CENTER
OF THE CITY UNIVERSI1Y OF NEW YORK
EDITORIAL BOARD
Philip Auslander
Una Chaudhuri
William Demastes
Harry Elam
Jorge Huerta
Stacy Wolf
Shannon Jackson
Jonathan K.alb
Jill Lane
Thomas Postlewait
Robert Vorlicky
The Journal of American Drama and Theatre welcomes submissions. Our aim is to
promote research on theatre of the Americas and to encourage historical and
theoretical approaches to plays, playwrights, performances, and popular theatre
traditions. Manuscripts should be prepared in conformity with The Chicago
Manual of Style, using footnotes (rather than endnotes). We request that articles
be submitted as e-mail attachments, using Microsoft Word format. Please note
that all correspondence will be conducted by e-mail. Our distinguished Editorial
Board will constitute the jury of selection. Please allow three to four months for
a decision. Our e-mail address is jadt@gc.cuny.edu. You may also address edi-
torial inquiries to the Editors, JADT /Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, CUNY
Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10016-4309. Please
visit our web site at web.gc.cuny.edu/mestc.
The Journal of American Drama and Theatre is support-
ed by generous grants from the Vera Mowry Roberts
Chair in American Theatre, the Sidney E. Cohn Chair in
Theatre Studies, and the Lucille Lortel Chair in Theatre at
the City University of New York.
Martin E. Segal Theatre Center Copyright 2009
The Journal of American Drama and Theatre (ISSN 1044-937X) is a member of
CELJ and is published three times a year, in the Winter, Spring, and Fall.
Subscriptions are $15.00 for each calendar year. Foreign subscriptions require an
additional $5.00 for postage. Inquire of Circulation Manager/Martin E. Segal
Theatre Center, CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, New
York 10016-4309.
All journals are available from ProQuest Information and
Learning as abstracts online via ProQuest information
service and the International Index to the Performing
Arts. All journals are indexed in the MLA International
Bibliography and are members of the Council of Editors
of Learned Journals.
THE jOURNAL OF AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE
Volume 21 Number 3
CONTENTS
LYNN SALLY
"It is the Ugly That is so Beautiful": Performing the Monster/
Beauty Continuum in American Nco-Burlesque
J. CHRIS WESTGATE
Poverty, Philanthropy, and Polemics: Edward Sheldon's Salvation
Neff and Theatre History
AHMED S. M. MOHAMMED
Dialogic Problems and Miscommunication: A Study of David
Mamet's Oleanna
JOHNS. BAK
Long Dong and Other Phallic Tropes in Hwang's M. Butteif!J
CONTRIBUTORS
Fall2009
5
25
49
71
83
JOURl'\JAL OF AMERICAN DRAMA AND THEATRE 21, NO.3 (FALL 2009)
"IT IS THE UGLY THAT IS So BEAUTIFUL": PERFORMING THE
MONSTER/BEAUTY CONTINUUM IN AMERICAN NEO-
BURLESQUE
Lynn Sally
The Horrible Prettiness of Nineteenth-Century Burlesque
Many argue that when Lydia Thompson and the British Blondes took the
New York theatre world by storm in 1868, the modern burlesque move-
ment was born in the United States.
1
A "boom of leg shows" capitaliz-
ing on the brevity of ballet dancers' costumes and spectacular scenery
within the pretense of highbrow sensibility began in the 1830s, and by
the 1860s leg shows had became synonymous in the public imagination
with burlesque.
2
Lydia Thompson and the Blondes provided a decidedly
different type of leg show; unlike feminized spectacles that resorted to
(over)using classical themes in predictable ways-as one contemporary in
the leg business put it, serving as a "clothes-line on which to hang the
expressive costumes, dancers, scenic displays, etc."-Lydia Thompson
and the British Blondes "lampooned classical literature and contempo-
rary culture alike."3 The performers in her troupe talked in a way that
often shocked Victorian-era sensibilities; dialogue was filled with double
entendres and puns and the script could change daily to reflect current
events. Nothing was safe from the Blondes' parodic grip. Not only did
these little ladies sing bawdy songs and parody highbrow and popular cul-
ture alike, they did so while inverting gender roles. The women of the
British Blondes played the men's parts in their burlesque plays which
allowed for them to appear on stage in (abbreviated) men's clothing, to
the satisfaction of some and the chagrin of others.
One such critic, William Dean Howells, famously said of bur-
1
See for instance Robert Allen, Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture
(Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1991); Maria Elena Buzsek, Pin-Up
Grrrls: Feminism, Sexuality, Popular Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006); Rachel
Shteir, Striptease: The Untold History of the Girlie Show (New York: Oxford University Press,
2005); and Bernard Sobel, Burlesque: An Underground History of Burlesque Dcrys (New York:
Farrar & Rinehart, 19 51).
2
Buszek, Pin-Up Grrrls, 35; Allen, Horrible Prettiness, 108.
3 Allen, Horrible Prettiness, 11 0; Buszek, Pin-Up Grrrls, 42.
6 SALLY
lesque performers like Thompson and the Blondes: "though they were
not like men, (they] were in most things as unlike women, and seemed
creatures of a kind of alien sex, parodying both. It was certainly a shock-
ing thing to look at them with their horrible prettiness."4 It was
Thompson and other burlesque performers who created new ways of
being that called into question how women could be represented both on
stage and off. The fear of this image of the brazen woman parodying not
only highbrow and popular culture but gender itself-all the time "aware
of her own awarishness"-was one of the driving forces behind critiques
surrounding burlesque.s As Richard Grant White put it in 1869, "(t]he
peculiar trait of burlesque is its defiance both of the natural and the con-
ventional. Rather, it forces the conventional and the natural together just
at the points where they are most remote, and the result is absurdity,
monstrosity."6 Reflecting on the explosion of burlesque in the prior two
theatrical seasons, what the productions and the performers had in com-
mon for White was this monstrosity, this celebration of the "incongru-
ous and unnatural."
7
Burlesque as "monstrous" was for White, and is for
me, one of its defining characteristics.
Neo-Budesque as Monster/Beauty
These critiques of burlesque as monstrous, absurd, and defying of the
conventional could be read as a calling card for many nee-burlesque per-
formers. In the 1990s, performers and producers in multiple urban loca-
tions were creating burlesque-inspired shows and, often unbeknownst to
each other, setting the stage for a burlesque revival that has exploded in
recent years. There was a "collective unconscious" of sorts as artists
across the country began working within the lexicon of burlesque past to
create characters that were, in the spirit of nineteenth-century burlesque
performers, aware of their own awarishness. Some performers claim they
were not consciously creating burlesque but that this nomenclature was
applied to their work by the press or spectators. As the World Famous
*BOB* explains, "My performance art was already known for partial
nudity, and the next thing I knew I was doing burlesque quite by accident.
4 Quoted in Allen, Horrible Prettiness, 25.
5 Buszek, Pin-Up Grrrls, 42; Allen, Horrible Prettiness, 129.
6 Quoted in Allen, Horrible Prettiness, 25.
7 Quoted in ibid.
"IT IS THE UGLY THAT IS So BEAUTIFUL" 7
Someone said, 'I love your burlesque,' and I thought, 'Oh, that is kind of
what I'm doing.' It was a subconscious inspiration."
8
In 2001, the Tease-
0-Rama convention allowed burlesque aficionados to meet face to face,
often for the first time, and realize that the underground shows and per-
formers that had bubbled up in urban locations across the country were
not isolated, local events. A neo-burlesque movement was emerging.
While covering the entire scope of nco-burlesque is an impossi-
bility in this short essay, there are some characteristics common to the
work of all these performers. Trying to define burlesque is somewhat
fruitless; it is a dynamic art form that has and continues to change in
response to its social and historical context. While deducing what a
cabaret-singing, fire-eating "faggot" dressed up as a blue bunny has in
common with a traditional fan dancer brings methodological challenges,
it is important to begin theorizing the continuities in burlesque not to
codify it but rather to open up a critical space that allows for continued
dialogue about this ever-changing art form. The following characteristics,
then, are offered in the spirit of encouraging such dialogue. Neo-bur-
lesque is glamorous, campy, parodic, excessive, and salacious (or blue). It
has an "anything goes" sentiment that implicates both performers and
spectators in its all-consuming path, creating a participatory space.
Influences differ for individuals but they may include drag and club cul-
ture; pin-up iconography and Hollywood glamour; clowning, circus, and
side show arts; the swing scene and rockabilly; performance art, theatre,
dance, and musical theatre; and striptease, to name a few. Though not all
neo-burlesque performers are striptease artists, many consciously utilize
the signifiers of striptease to dismantle (or, at the least, to question) the
stigma associated with the unveiled form. Striptease in this context is not
solely about "taking off" but about "putting on" layers of meaning
through the juxtaposition of what I call the four Cs: choice of music,
choreography, costuming, and concept. Many nco-burlesque acts are nar-
rative and the end of a performance is often more about the "twist" than
the reveal- that subversion of theme or defying of expectations that
makes audience members laugh out loud or groan at the bad pun or, as
with all art, think about its meaning. And neo-burlesque is always already
monster/beauty.
Joanna Frueh offers the concept of monster/beauty to theorize
the meanings of the (aging) female body builder and it provides a
provocative framework to apply to burlesque: "Monster/beauty is arti-
8 Quoted in Michelle Baldwin, Burlesque and the New Bump-n-Gn.nd (Denver:
Speck Press, 2004), 28.
8 SAU.Y
fice, pleasure/ discipline, cultural intervention, and it is extravagant and
generous . ... Ideal beauty attracts, whereas monster/ beauty very likely
attracts and repulses simultaneously."9 It is this simultaneous attraction
and repulsion that interests me here, what Buszek calls the "'bait-and-
switch' technique that can suspend viewers' 'disgust over the subversive
and turn it into desire."'JO By offering that burlesque is monster/beauty I
do not mean only the simultaneous use of the seemingly divergent signi-
fiers of monster and beauty, though such stagings offer a rich reading of
this concept. Rather, with monster/beauty I want to highlight the slash
that suggests a space of continuity or fluidity between these terms. Put
simply, extreme forms of beauty can be monstrous just as extreme forms
of monstrosity can be beautiful. Monster/beauty offers up the possibili-
ty that these categories are always co-constituting and that this is a nec-
essary possibility for their being, namely that one does not operate with-
out the other.
"It's the Ugly That is So Beautiful": Performing Monsters in
Neo-Bwlesque
Monster/beauty suggests that there is something beautiful about mon-
strosity: something human, or hyper-human, about extreme representa-
tions. It is a seeming contradiction that by showing one's monstrosity, one
demonstrates one's humanity and one's beauty. Bella Beretta's creation of
the Gun Street Girls highlights this relationship between the ugly and the
beautiful. She was inspired by a Tom Waits performance in which "he was
taking his very sinister, twisted view of what the world is like, where it's
very ugly, but it's the ugly that is so beautiful, and that's what I wanted to
create with burlesque."
11
Monster/beauty, then, irlhabits both fields
simultaneously: she is both monster and beauty, human and animal, some-
thing to be revered and reviled. As Scotty the Blue Bunny has succinctly
put it, burlesque performers are "beautiful monsters."l2 From Jo "Boob"
Weldon's Godzilla Act to Darlinda Just Darlinda who often dons a bear
9 Joanna Frueh, Monster/Beauty: Building the Bot!J if Love (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2001), 11, 2-3.
10 Ibid., 104.
11 Quoted in Baldwin, Burlesque and the New Bump-n-Grind, 90.
12 Scotty the Blue Bunny, guest lecturer, "History of American Burlesque,"
New York University, New York, 1 August 2006.
"IT IS THE UGLY THAT IS So BEAUTIFUL" 9
Figure 1: Little Brooklyn as King Kong/Fay Ray. Photo by Chris Zedano.
suit (thereby opening up a space for the obvious pun on "bare'') to Little
Brooklyn's half King Kong, half Fay Wray number (figure 1), countless
neo-burlesque performers use prosthetics, masks, and icons of monsters
in their work.
Black Cat Burlesque uses the moniker "Monster Burlesque" to
describe their work that celebrates ghoulish aesthetics, mythological
themes, and features monsters such as Frankenstein, Darth Vadar, the
Grim Reaper, and the Phantom of the Opera. Influenced by horror
movies but disenchanted with the portrayal of women as "either the vic-
tim or something to be rescued," the troupe was intrigued with turning
the horror movie "genre on its head" by reinventing women as powerful
agents who are active and in control.13 Devilicia, one of the founders of
the troupe, identifies two major parts she plays in Monster Burlesque.
l3 D'Amour, Carrie (a.k.a. Devilicia), e-mail to author, 13 February 2007.
10 SALLY
One is the figure of the beauty, the glamorous counterpart to the mon-
ster who uses "my feminine wiles to escape or 'rescue' myself ... only to
discover the monster is my kind of guy."
1
4 The second is to perform as a
monster, "to present the 'monster' itself as the object of desire" rather
than a "beast" who transforms into something "beautiful" or pretty in
the end.IS As Devilicia puts it, "I like to juxtapose the eroticism of
striptease with images that most do not relate with sex or glamour."16 In
this, she explicitly invokes the sentiment of monster/beauty that Frueh
articulates: "Because extremity is immoderation--deviation from con-
vention in behavior, appearance, or representation-and starkly different
from standard cultural expectations for particular groups of people,
monster/beauty departs radically from normative, ideal representations
of beauty."1
7
Bambi the Mermaid is another artist who plays with this depar-
ture from normative representations in her performances and through
her "CORNSTAR: Freak Pin-Ups" series project. Bambi produces the
Sideshow by the Seashore's Burlesque by the Beach performed on the
stage of the Coney Island side show during the summer months. She is
also the creator of the "Miss Coney Island" burlesque pageant that uti-
lizes while subverting the concept and signifiers of beauty pageants.
During the 2006 Miss Coney Island pageant, one of the contestants, Rose
Wood, competed in the swimsuit component of the pageant with a biki-
ni made out of hot dogs. The hot dogs served as a homage to the famous
Coney Island eatery, Nathan's, while simultaneously provided a jarring
juxtaposition of phallic icons and show-girl glamour: dozens and dozens
of members hung around the hips of the performer. The swimsuit com-
petition also featured Miss Tickle who parodied the image of the perfect
beauty queen by wearing a very large maxi pad which protruded out of
the sides and back of her thong bikini. Bambi the Mermaid and the con-
testants delight in such excessive displays that utilize while dismantling
images of the beauty and pageant.
In addition to her producing and live performances, Bambi the
Mermaid also stages the monster/beauty continuum in her "Freak Pin-
Ups" series, begun in 1994. The pin-up photography series presents "girls
whose physical attributes challenge mainstream ideals of conventional
14Jbid.
15Jbid.
I6Jbid.
17 Frueh, Monster/ Beauty, 11.
"IT IS TilE UGLY THAT IS So B EAl!TIFUL"
Figure 2: Bambi the Mermaid as the Dog Faced Girl, part of the Freak
Pin-up Series.
11
beauty."l8 The dog-faced girl (figure 2), the show girl with a parasitic twin
protruding from her middle or a Siamese-twin head mirroring her own,
and chicken- and lobster-girls all utilize the signifiers of sideshow freaks
and pin-up iconography to call into question the division between
"attraction and repulsion."t9 Bambi "celebrates the triumph of flaws and
deformities to transform" the concept of "extreme beauty."20 An image
of a pretty girl putting on her makeup with Coney Island in the back-
ground becomes a case study in extreme beauty: she goes "too far,"
applying layers of makeup beyond the realm of normal so that her reflec-
tion is clown-like, grotesque, monstrous, suggesting that perfect repre-
sentations of female beauty are simply part of a continuum of unob-
tainable, abnormal, and deformed images of women.
l8 Womaniztr, Exhibition Catalogue, Deitch Projects (New York, 2007), n.p.
19
Ibid.
2
0 Ibid.
12 SALLY
Through such stagings of monstrosity and extreme beauty,
Bambi the Mermaid, Black Cat Burlesque, and many other neo-burlesque
performers are what Kathleen Rowe calls "unruly women," women who
self consciously "make spectacles of themselves for themselves" in pub-
lic forums. 21 The unruly woman, Rowe argues, has the possibility of
reconfiguring "visibility as power" and unsettling social hierarchies.22 By
making a spectacle of one's self literally and figuratively, many nee-bur-
lesque performers produce this image of the unpredictable, unruly
woman. And, as Rowe provocatively suggests, the unruly woman is relat-
ed to the notion of monster/beauty: "Associated with both beauty and
monstrosity, the unruly woman dwells close to the grotesque."23 The pro-
liferation of neo-burlesque performers who utilize monsters and mon-
strosity in their acts clearly shows that many have an affinity for
grotesque and extreme representations of unruly women. Recognizing
that beauty and desire are embedded withirl such images of monstrosity
is pivotal to understanding the monster/beauty continuum in neo-bur-
lesque.
The Monstrosity of Beauty and Beauty Performativity
Understanding how beauty is always already monstrous, however, may
not be as simple as the above examples that illustrate the monster/beau-
ty continuum. The "horrible prettiness" Allen speaks of and uses as the
title for his pivotal work on nineteenth-century burlesque begins to hint
at the simultaneous fear and fascination surrounding the burlesque beau-
ty that dates back almost 150 years. What I want to suggest here is that
there is somethirlg extreme in the presentation of even the most appar-
ently picture-perfect burlesque performers, an exaggeration and underly-
ing grotesqueness that belies the natural. Ultra-glamorous show girls
painstakingly construct themselves as classic beauties and serve it up for
spectators' consumption on a Swarovski-encrusted platter. I will show
how beauty in the world of burlesque is performative, and that "painting
on" one's image is a form of drag that in the world of burlesque has
destabilized the concept of beauty and even gender itself.
Burlesque has a long history of "painted ladies." As Kathy Peiss
21 Kathleen Rowe, The Unru!J Woman: Gender and the Genres of La11ghter (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1995), 11.
22Ibid., 11, 19.
23 Ibid.
"IT IS THE UGLY THAT IS SO B EAlJT!FUL" 13
shows in her study of the making of beauty in American culture, stage
performers influenced Victorian-era women's relationship to beauty
products and the presentation of self in the public sphere. Peiss argues
that the "novel self-presentation" of burlesque performers such as Lydia
Thompson inspired "the most daring women to emulate them."24 These
performers, and the women who emulated them, blurred the categories
between public and private and began to suggest that the theatrical could
be incorporated into everyday life and that, in turn, everyday life was a
type of performance. Peiss suggests that the "heightened importance of
image making" offered women the possibility of remaking their faces, all
the while reminding women that even "being natural-was itself a pose."
2
5
As it became socially acceptable for everyday women to wear makeup,
beauty products allowed women the ability to "put on" a different face
every day.
I am not suggesting that putting on makeup and changing one's
appearance be read solely as a liberatory act, particularly when one fac-
tors in the beauty industries' dictation and commodification of standards
of beauty. What I'd like to suggest, however, is that beauty is not an
essentialist designation; because it can be constructed, it can occupy a
contested site of self-ownership. As Dita Von Teese aptly puts it, "we
burlesquers tend to be beauties of the created kind."26 Interestingly, some
of the most successful nco-burlesque performers celebrated for their
beauty and glamour are almost unrecognizable out of their "drag."
Makeup as drag is a fitting metaphor for understanding the performative
efficacy of glamour and nco-burlesque: drag has had both practical and
conceptual influences on the neo-burlesque movement. Some perform-
ers began performing in gay clubs and the influence of drag on the aes-
thetic sensibilities of nco-burlesque is instantly recognizable. Others have
articulated an indebtedness to drag for the over-the-top theatricality,
physical display of excess, and ability to create and sustain a public per-
sona that is obligatory in nco-burlesque. I will return shortly to the seem-
ing irony that an art form that celebrates female beauty directly utilizes
signifiers of drag culture, but what interests me at the moment is the pos-
sibility that beauty, or at least glamour, can be performed and is, I want
to argue, performative.
24 Kathy Peiss, Hope in a Jar: The Making of America's Beaury Culture (New York:
Owl Books, 1998), 48.
25 Ibid., 49.
26 Dita Von Teese, Burlesque and the Art of the Teese/Fetish and the Art of the Teese
(New York: Regan Books, 2006), 15.
14 SALLY
Juclith Butler has famously offered the concept of gender per-
formativity, the idea that gender is constituted through its performance.
In Gender Trouble, Butler proposes that "acts, gestures, enactments, gener-
ally construed, are performative in the sense that the essence or identity that
they otherwise purport to express are fabrications manufactured through
corporeal signs and other discursive means."2
7
Here Butler suggests that
gender has no "ontological status apart from the various acts which con-
stitutes its reality."28 She uses drag to demonstrate the performativity of
gender: "drag implicit!J reveals the imitative structure of gender itse!f."29 If gen-
der is constituted through its performance-through what Butler identi-
fies as a "stylized repetition of act!' -then the "appearance of substance is pre-
cisely that, a constructed identity."30 But in Bodies that Matter, she clarifies
that she was not proposing that "gender was like clothes."31 She argues
that gender is not something we can simply put on and take off, "that one
woke up in the morning, perused the closet or some more open space for
the gender of choice, donned that gender for the day, and then restored
the garment to its place at night."32
I am interested in extending to beauty Butler's concept of gen-
der as artifice, as something that can be taken on and off, in the context
of neo-burlesque.33 For beauty is not an absolute designation. And by this
I do not mean simply that "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" but that
it can be constructed or, quite literally, "painted on." This, to some
degree, undermines the power that beauty holds in our media-saturated
culture that dictates what constitutes conventional beauty. Beauty in bur-
lesque is about being able to fabricate and execute an image that ulti-
mately destabilizes the hegemony of beauty. That beauty and glamour are
used to undo those same designations may seem like an unnerving para-
dox. But it seems that we can in fact employ "pretty things" as a tool, or
27 Judith Buder, Gender Troubk: Feminism and the Subversion of ldentiry (New York:
Routledge, 1990), 136.
2
8 Ibid.
29
Ibid.
30 Ibid., 140, 141.
31 Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ':fex" (New York:
Routledge, 1993), 231.
32 Jbid., X.
33 Ibid.
"IT IS THE UGLY THAT IS SO BEA\JriFUL" 15
a weapon, if you will, to dismantle the power those things have over us.34
One of the most salient and often remarked upon features of
the nee-burlesque movement is that it is inclusive of a wide range of
body types, ages, and physical appearances that offer different images of
what constitutes beauty in our culture. As Miss Astrid, creator and host
of the Va Va Voom Room, coyly puts it in her dominatrix-inspired, fake
European accent: "Does an eagle cry because it is not a swan? No. Is a
dove sad because it's not a flamingo? No. And so it should be, ladies and
gentlemen, with women. Different shapes, different sizes, tall, short, fat,
thin all are beautiful."35 Some troupes and performers exploit their phys-
ical difference as an asset. Selene Luna, formally known as Bobby Pinz,
is a 3'10" burlesque performer who capitalizes on her diminutive stature
to give a different image of what glamour and sex appeal are.36 The Fat
Bottom Review and the Glamazons are two troupes who require mem-
bers to be "plus size" beauties. As Michelle Baldwin explains, "[f]eeling
sexy and powerful onstage and knowing that you are possibly changing
the way the world looks at you and others who look like you is an incred-
ibly rewarding by-product of the burlesque experience."3
7
The inclusive-
ness of multifarious body types in nee-burlesque can be liberatory for
both performers and audiences and has ultimately reconfigured, albeit in
a small way, what constitutes "beauty" both on stage and off.
Hyper Femininity and Transgressing Gender: "Is that a Dude?"
Though the nee-burlesque stage has embraced the presentation of phys-
ical extremity, many performers and audience members are not necessar-
ily interested in the transformative staging of monster/beauty or the
"performance art" side of burlesque. Many performers wish, quite sim-
ply, to create phantasmagorias of glamour and beauty. Claiming to have
been an average-looking child, Dita Von Teese has made an art out of-
and has received national attention for-constructing and performing a
hyper-feminine beauty ideal.38 Influenced by cheesecake pin-ups, MGM
3
4
See Liz Goldwyn, Pretty Things: The Last Generation of American Burlesque
Queens (New York: Regan, 2006).
35 Quoted in Baldwin, Burlesq11e and the New Bump-n-Grind, 55.
36 Ibid., 57.
37
Ibid., 59.
38 Von Teese, B11rlesque and the Art of the Teese, 14.
16 SALLY
Technicolor movies, the queens of burlesque-Lili St. Cyr, Sally Rand,
Gypsy Rose Lee-Von Teese's mantra, "Glamour above all else," is the
impetus behind her creation of dream worlds of excess and illusion.39
She is, in every sense, a glamour queen, a case study in pin-up perfection.
But her hyper-femininity is hardly "normal"-she fabricates her own
beauty and pushes it to a level of spectacular excess. With perfect Betty
Page bangs, tiny waists cinched with corsets, and miles of rhinestones
and ostrich feathers, performers like Von Teese stage the excesses of
glamour and hyper-femininity which, to some degree, further perpetuate
the artifice of gender. On the surface, it is difficult to locate the "mon-
strosity" in such stagings of beauty and glamour. What I would like to
suggest, however, is that the space of the neo-burlesque stage has recon-
figured even these picture-perfect representations as a form of extremi-
ty, an exaggeration that implicates the monster/beauty continuum in their
spectacular stagings.
In a proto-typical neo-burlesque show in New York City, the pic-
ture perfect pin-ups share the stage with the monsters of burlesque and
a handful of biologically male burlesque (or "boylesque" as it has been
termed) performers. The boylesque performers range from Rose
Wood-a gender performer whose oeuvre includes acts as a nun, a
"Hooter's girl" (exploiting the ultimate signifiers of masculine desire:
beer, chicken wings, and tits) and, of course, a glamorous showgirl-to
Tigger! who pushes the boundaries of gender and self-representation in
hyper-acrobatic acts and exaggerated theatrical styling (figure 3). Many
performers explicitly test preconceived notions of gender binaries in
their performances and the ways they define themselves. Often burlesque
performers refer to themselves as "female drag queens" and describe
dressing as "getting into drag." Leroi the Girl Boi is a "gender blender"
performer who performs in "drag"-both in male and in hyper-feminine
show girl drag.4o The World Famous *BOB* refers to herself as a "female
female irnpersonator"- a term that Rowe Kathleen also uses to describe
39 Ibid., xi, xix.
40 Mignon Moore makes a distinction between androgyny and "gender
blender": "Rather than a de-emphasis on femininity or masculinity, gender-blenders com-
bine specific aspects of both to create a unique look" (125). Though for the purposes of
her case study, Moore argues that "gender-blenders" are specifically "nonferninine" in
their styling, others have defined gender blenders more broadly as a "blending" of both
masculine- and feminine-labeled sensibilities. R. Mignon Moore, "Lipstick or
Timberlands? Meanings of Gender Presentation in Black Lesbian Communities," Signs:
Journal of Women in Culture and Sociery 32, no. 1 (2006): 113-39.
"IT IS THE UGLY THAT IS SO BEAUTIFUL" 17
Figure 3: Tigger! as Tawny the Tigress by Ted D'Ottavio
Mae West-as she elaborates on in her one-woman show entitled
"FTf."41 This reference to "female to female"-a label used by some
transgender people to designate that although born with male bodies,
they always considered themselves female-has interestingly been codi-
fied by a monthly show in New York City called "Victoria," a queer per-
formance and party geared towards "FTFs, faux queens & the gay men
trapped in our vaginas."42 These performers and producers are toying
with the hegemony of gender binaries by offering up gender fluidity and
aligning their presentations of self with queer-identified performance
spaces, histories, and people.
The appropriation of terms such as "FTF" or "drag queen" by
female performers performing in female drag is conceptually fascinating
but potentially problematic. While literature on and by transgender com-
munities has clearly argued that transpeople be able to self-identify, there
seems to be an important distinction between the female-gendered
41 Rowe, The Unru!J Woman, 30 and 132.
42 Victoria, http:/ /www.myspace.com/ftfvictoria (accessed 14 April 2008).
18 SALLY
woman who identifies as "FfF" and the transperson who identifies as
"FTF."
4
3 And while I do not care to replicate dominant culture's dictat-
ing what constitutes appropriate behavior and self-representation of par-
ticular bodies, it is important, at the very least, to open up a discussion
about the appropriation of terminology invented by and used by mar-
ginalized subjects. When I presented this very conundrum to Rose Wood,
she replied, "(Female drag queens] are excessive but not subversive.
That's the difference to me."44 There is a material difference between a
woman dressing up as a hyper-feminine woman and a man dressing up as
a woman, a material difference that may very well have punitive effects in
particular contexts. At the same time that I concede material difference,
acknowledge Wood's important distinction, and raise concerns over
appropriating language, I'd like to suggest that what happens on the nco-
burlesque stage can be transgressive and that stagings of hyper-femininity
by biological women can be (though they are not necessarily) subversive.
4
s
Further scholarship is needed on the relationship between the
female-bodied woman performing a hyper-stylized representation of
woman and the history of drag subculture. While Pamela Robertson
provocatively sheds light on "feminist camp practices," she also concedes
that "[a]ny discussion of women's relationship to camp will inevitably
raise, rather than settle, questions about appropriation, co-optation, and
identity politics."46 Even Esther Newton in her groundbreaking study of
female impersonators acknowledges women artificially construct the
image of woman, albeit in a footnote.47 Others such as Robertson and
43 On self defining, see, for example, Jason Cromwell, Transmen and FTMs:
Identities, Bodies, Genders, and Sexualities (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), partic-
ularly Chapter 1.
44 Rose Wood, interview by Lynn Sally, Diva Ball, New York University, New
York, 24 October 2007.
4
5 This debate goes back to nineteenth-century burlesque and into the neo
movement. This issue was recently debated on NPR: The Steiner Show,
http:// www.steinershow.org/ radio/ the-marc-steiner-show /july-9-2009-hour-2 (accessed
30 September 2009).
46 Pamela Robertson, Guilty Pleasures: Feminist Camp from Mae West to Madonna
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 9.
4
7 Though Newtown focuses on "female impersonators" in Mother Camp, she
interestingly notes that "[ijt seems self evident that persons classified as 'men' would have
co create artificially the image of a woman, but of course 'women' create the image 'arti-
ficially' too" (Esther Newton, Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America [Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1979], 5, fn14).
"IT IS THE UGLY THAT IS So BEAUTIFUL" 19
Cleto have continued tracing and theorizing the relationship between
female boclies and camp sensibility. Though "resolving" this conundrum
is an impossibility, I would like to offer up the possibility that women pre-
senting hyper-feminine images can be considered a form of drag that is
intimately related to camp culture.
48
What interests me here- and what I
want to highlight- is the juxtaposition of different stagings of gender on
the neo-burlesque stage and the multifarious effects of such collisions. By
sharing the stage, the "femme drag" performers and "boylesque" per-
formers and the "monster/beauties" of burlesque create "dreamworlds
of phantasmagoria" where a traditional concept of gender is turned on
its head.
49
And this brings us to one of the most baffling yet conceptually
rich byproducts of the neo-burlesque stage, a phenomenon that will help
us think through my proposition that stagings of hyper-femininity can be
subversive and transgressive: at times the picture perfect feminine ideal of
beauty gets misrecognized as a man. When Rose Wood first saw Delirium
Tremens-a traditional burlesque performer whose accolades include
winner of the "Miss Betty Page" contest-Wood asked, ' 'Who is that
fabulous transvestite?"
50
While Wood invokes this story as a playful intro-
duction to Tremens's act, others occasionally seem genuinely confused by
the representations of gender that they are witnessing. One often hears
audience members question glamorous female performers: "Is that a
dude?" Hyper-femininity in this space of transgression can and does get
misrecognized. Outside the space of the neo-burlesque stage (or other
stagings of gender transgression) it is inconceivable that women like
Delirium Tremens or Harvest Moon or Julie Atlas Muz (figure 4) could
be misrecognized as men. It is as if they are too pretty to be girls, that
such perfections of beauty (and gender) could only be copied by an imi-
tator. They become, in their hyper-femininity, an emblem of the artifice
of gender that throws unknowing bystanders' perceptions for a loop and
suggests that gender ideals can be copied and that, ultimately, what is
"feminine" is not reducible to appearance or essence. This is nothing new
48 In Guilry Pkasures, Robertson raises some of these questions about the rela-
tionship between camp and women and Fabio Cleto's ground-breaking anthology, Camp,
includes thorough readings of the history and theories of the term as weU as articles on
feminism and camp.
49 Term from Rosalind H. Williams, Dream Worldr: Mass Consumption in Late
Nineteenth-Century France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).
50 Rose Wood, Starshine Burlesque, performed at Raffifi, New York, 8 March 2007.
20 SALLY
Figure 4: Julie Atlas Muz. Photo by Karl Giant.
in feminist theory; but how do we account for the "punitive damages" for
even those who "do their gender right," as these cases of misrecognition
suggest? As Butler offers, "Performing one's gender wrong initiates a set
of punishments both obvious and indirect, and performing it well pro-
vides the reassurance that there is an essentialism of gender identity after
all."Sl "Performing their gender well" in this instance does not codify an
"essentialism of gender identity" but instead suggests that reductive gen-
der binaries are always already suspect, even by those indebted to main-
taining such binaries.
Though misrecognizing a hyper-feminine woman as a man may
seem inconceivable, I understand the audience's confusion. There is a
certain expectation one may have when going to a burlesque show.
51 Judith Butler, "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution," in Performing
Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre, ed. Sue-Ellen Case (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1990), 279.
"IT IS THE UGLY THAT IS SO BEAUTIFUL" 21
Burlesque offers a heterosexual posturing of sorts, a tease that may allude
to a narrative of heterosexual foreplay. As Ann Pelligrini has pointed out
in the case of male and female bodybuilding, "[w]hat emerges most con-
spicuously from this heterosexual posturing is precisely its sexual indif-
ference."S2 By indifference she does not mean nonchalance but rather a
difficulty in deciphering. Similarly, neo-burlesque capitalizes on such het-
erosexual posturing while offering up sexual indifference. In this world of
gender inversion, gender play, and hyperstylized representations of
"woman," what is "shown" can be misrecognized: picture-perfect female
forms become emblematic of men's attempts to imitate women. The
monsters of burlesque, the boylesque performers, and the general inver-
sion of social norms can create a transgressive space that makes even
"straight" representations of women suspect. Like Howells's critique of
nineteenth-century burlesque performers as "creatures of an alien sex,"
beauty becomes a monstrosity of gender confusion, a space where pin-
up perfection becomes alien and other.
The neo-burlesque performer is always already monstrous, and
through these exaggerated and extreme representations she becomes
something to be feared. If a "monster" is a sign of imminent evil, a phys-
ically malformed being that belies nature, then the impending evil of this
ideal of beauty and object of desire may be that she's hiding a "little
secret" between her legs. 53 Misrecognition in this instance may be read as
an attempt for heterosexual male audience members to avoid homosexu-
al desire. Denying the female performer her gender becomes, ironically, a
way for some audience members to safeguard their heterosexuality. Yet
there is a deliciously subversive byproduct of these attempts to maintain
heteronormativity; namely, that such a response unknowingly contributes
to queering of the neo-burlesque space. Utilizing the signifiers of glam-
our, femininity, and sexual (and sexualized) excess, neo-burlesque per-
formers are able to dismantle the permanence of those designations and
of gender itself. I would like to suggest that occupying this space of the
slash, for lack of a better term, between monster/beauty not only desig-
nates a "third space" but radically transforms the staticness of the other
two terms. In other words, not only can one occupy, simultaneously, bina-
ry opposites, but both are necessary possibilities for the other to exist.
Performers of the neo-burlesque stage can be both monsters and beau-
52 Ann Pelligrini, Performing Anxieties: Staging Psychoanalysis, Staging Race (New
York: Routledge, 1997), 160.
53 Reference to comment made by Venus Xtravaganza in Paris is Burning, dir.
Jennie Livingston, Miramax Films, 1991.
22 SALLY
ties, human and animal, masculine and feminine. And the monster/beau-
ty of neo-burlesque transforms the monster as beautiful and the beauti-
ful as monstrous.
Towards a Conclusion: Neo-Burlesque Performers as Image and
Image Maker
Ultimately and unavoidably, an art form that celebrates the reclaiming of
the sexualized body will likely be a site of contestation. It is difficult to
divorce the scantily-clad female form on stage from preconceptions of
what that connotes in our social order. Even some scholars who have
written extensively on burlesque are unable to get past the assumption
that striptease is ultimately (and reducible to) stripping.s4 As Allen aptly
warns, we should avoid viewing "resistant forms of cultural production
as unproblematically and unambiguously progressive."ss While sexualized
images of women are undeniably exploited on the neo-burlesque stage,
the use of the signifiers of the Playboy bunny and the burlesque queen
in such a self-conscious way ultimately calls into question the problems
that arise when reducing such iconography into a simple binary. Boys
dressing up as girls, and girls wanting to dress up as boys dressing up as
girls, and girls simply trying to be pretty being misidentified as boys
throws a wrench in the simple equation of "girl - clothes = google-eyed
boy." Vivian Patraka describes the explosion of such binaries as "binary
terror," "the terror released at the prospect of undoing the binaries by
those who have the most to gain from their undoing."s6 Part of this ter-
ror, I want to suggest, is bound up in the central role monstrosity plays
in neo-burlesque.
Neo-burlesque is a decidedly queer art form wrapping itself up
in a genre built on misogyny; it is post-post feminism that has turned
around and found delight in showgirl glamour and has appropriated the
icon of the pin-up as a possible site of transgression. As Buszek provoca-
tively argues, the pin-up represents a paradoxical representation of "not
54 See, for instance, Rachel Shteir's Striptease where she erroneously collapses
neo-burlesgue with commercial stripping, particularly in her conclusion.
55 Allen, Horrible Prettiness, 32.
56 Vivian M. Patraka, "Binary Terror and Feminist Performance: Reading Both
Ways," Discourse 14, no. 2 (Spring 1992): 176.
"IT IS THE UGLY THAT IS So BEAUTIFUL" 23
just feminist sexuality, but of feminism itsel"5
7
Similar in many regards
to Lydia Thompson and the British Blondes' groundbreaking nineteenth-
century burlesque plays, neo-burlesque is often about parody, poking fun,
and pushing the boundaries of what are "acceptable" representations of
women in the public sphere. One could argue that these performers are
both object and subject or, in the words of Carolee Schneemann, "an
image and an image-maker."58 What I'd like to suggest is that conceding
the point that burlesque is not "unproblematically or unambiguously pro-
gressive" does not contradict the idea that neo-burlesque is
monster/beauty. In fact, it seems to serve as a catalyst for such a discus-
sion, opening up a space where the scantily clad female on stage can be
progressive, can invoke discussion, and, in the spirit of this paper, can be
both monster and beauty. As Frueh puts it, the "monster defmes expec-
tation" and it is in that carnivalesque space where anything goes that neo-
burlesque resides in all of its monstrous beauty and beautiful monstrosi-
ty. 59
57 Buszek, Pin-Up Grrrls, 20.
58 Quoted in Frueh, Monster/ Beauty, 30.
59 Frueh, Monster/ Beauty, 26.
JOURNAL OF AMERlCAN DRAMA AND THEATRE 21, NO.3 (FALL 2009)
POVERTY, PHILANTHROPY, AND POLEMICS: EDWARD
SHELDON'S SALVATION NELL AND THEATRE HISTORY
J. Chris Westgate
In Mrs. Fiske and the American Theatre, Archie Binns describes a theatrical
production that, seemingly consolidated play and praxis. The play was
Edward Sheldon's Salvation Nell, which became a box-office sensation
during its 1908 debut in New York City and a subsequent touring pro-
duction with Minnie Maddern Fiske in the title role. In part, this enthu-
siasm came from the stunning verisimilitude of the first and final acts,
which brought a Cherry Hill saloon and street corner to the Hackett
Theatre.l In part, too, this enthusiasm was for the tale of Nell Sanders
who teeters melodramatically at the threshold of ruin: with child and
maltreated by her lover, without anywhere to live and fired from her job,
and facing the specter of prostitution just to survive-before being res-
cued by the Salvation Army. Along with substantial praise for her per-
formance, Mrs. Fiske received a letter from J. G. HalLimond,
Superintendent of the Bowery Mission, which marked the praxis.
Beginning with a description of the "pathetic sight" of the poor gather-
ing for the breadlines, Hallimond describes the incident that precipitated
his letter: "A gentleman in elegant evening dress, accompanied by a lady,
arrived in his automobile just when breakfast was in progress, and, after
watching for a few moments, announced, 'My heart has never been
stirred so deeply before. Here is $30, which is all the cash I have in my
pocket. I will come again and bring an automobile load of young men,
and I will insist upon each one of them giving you a handsome contri-
bution for your noble work."'
2
If this charity was not extraordinary
enough, there was additionally the explanation offered by this anony-
mous benefactor: "A few hours ago I was sitting in the Hackett Theatre
listening to Mrs. Fiske in 'Salvation Nell' when the impulse was created in
my heart to go out at once and do something for my unfortunate fellow
creatures in the underworld."3
1 Brenda Murphy writes at length about the advances of realism in Sheldon's
play. See her American &a/ism and American Drama, 1880-1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1987).
2
Archie Binns, Mrs. Fiske and the American Theatre (New York: Crown Press,
1955), 208-9.
3 Cited in ibid., 208-9.
26 WESTGATE
Based on this kind of reception, which bridged Bowery slum and
New York privilege, Sheldon's Salvation Nell has been described as epito-
mizing the Progressive Era. Defined as the years between 1900 and 1917,
the Progressive Era was marked by reformism in many arenas: political
corruption, public health, banking trusts, and most notably for this argu-
ment, urban poverty.
4
Sheldon's play registered and, for many, became a
vehicle for propagating this reformist impulse. Elsewhere Binns describes
the reactions to the production of Salvation Nell: ''After many curtain
calls, the audience poured into the lobby to exult or horrify over the
starkest realism ever seen on a New York stage."S Building on Binns's
book, Albert Cohn describes how the exultation-and perhaps horror-
led to philanthropy: the "tambourines of Salvation Army girls who post-
ed themselves at the Hackett's exits [were] filled with a generous tinkle of
coins" at intermission and after the play.6 In fact, Cohn argues that
Salvation Nell represents a "milestone" in progressive theatre not just
because of its realism but because of .its advocacy of social concerns:
"few plays of today ... can be cited as creating such an effect on their
audiences as to send members out into the street burning to relieve their
guilt."? In Edward Sheldon, Loren Ruff offers further evidence of the play
translating to praxis: "Alexander Woollcott recalled that one of his
friends, Alicia Rudd, was so greatly affected by the play that between acts
she tore a corsage from her dress and 'thrust' it into the tambourine of a
Salvation Army lassie standing in the lobby."S Making a link between
Sheldon's play and the Social Gospel movement, Ruff contends that "as
a social document, Salvation Nell made people think about social condi-
tions in the slums because it was 'from the heart of the times."'9
According to Binns, Cohn, and Ruff, the 1908 production of Salvation
Nell became a nexus for poverty, philanthropy, and progressivism.
4
For details about these other concerns, see Richard M. Abrams, The Burden of
Progress: 1900-1929 (Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman and Co., 1978); and David Ward,
Pover(y, Ethnici(y, and the American Ci(y, 1840-192 5: Changing Conceptions of the S fum and Ghetto
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
5 Binns, Mrs. Fiske, 204.
6 Albert Cohn, '"Salvation Nell': An Overlooked Milestone in American
Theatre," Educational Theatre ]ourna/9, no. 1 (1957): 21.
7
Ibid.
8 Loren K. Ruff, Edward Sheldon (Boston: Twayne, 1982), 62.
9 Ibid., 64.
POVERTY, PHILANTHROPY, AND POLEMICS 27
In making this argument, all three writers subscribe to a com-
mon methodology. They consider Sheldon's play against an already-
deflned set of values that exemplify the Progressive Era, speciflcally,
assuming that this era accepted philanthropy as an effectual means of
overcoming urban poverty. Necessarily, this conclusion begins with the
movement from Victorian to more "modern" deflnitions of poverty.
During the nineteenth century, poverty was deflned through a conspicu-
ously moral paradigm. The causes of poverty were divided between "mis-
fortune" and "misconduct," terms which were eventually codifled in the
dichotomy between poverty and pauperism, with the latter term deflning
some personal source of this misery. In 1877, for instance, the Tenth
Annual Report of the State Board of Charities declared, "the greater number
of paupers have reached that condition by idleness, improvidence, drunk-
enness, or some form of vicious indulgence," deflning misconduct as the
source.10 Poverty as "misfortune," by contrast, typically described wid-
ows, children, and the elderly, or those lacking an able-bodied wage-earn-
er. While philanthropic organizations like the Charity Organization
Society gave charity to the poor, they argued vehemently against philan-
thropy for paupers on the grounds that it would aggravate pauperism.11
Toward the turn of the century, this paradigm underwent profound
changes: environmental replaced moral causes for poverty. This change
emerged originally with the Social Gospel movement, and the change was
further advanced by the rise of social science, originally at Columbia
University, with its attention to tenements and social conditions.
1
2 In this
new paradigm, philanthropy was deflned not only as efflcacious but as
the responsibility of the middle class.
Within this history of poverty and philanthropy, Salvation Nell
and the reaction it engendered certainly appear to be at the vanguard of
progressive response. The problem, though, is that this progress from
Victorian to Progressive deflnitions of poverty was gradual and irregular.
In American Hungers: The Problem of Poverty in U.S. Literature, 1840-194 5,
Gavin Jones documents published accounts of poverty toward the end of
the nineteenth century that suggested lingering notions of pauperism. In
10 Cited in Ward, Poverty, Ethnicity, and the American City, 55.
11 For details about the Charity Organization Society, see John Louis Recchiuti,
"Introduction: 'The Greatest Social Science Laboratory in the World,"' in Civic Engagement:
Social Science and Progressive-Era Reform in New York City (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 1-19.
1
2 See ibid., for discussion of the rise of social science in New York.
28
WESTGATE
People We Pass (1896),Julian Ralph argued that tenement dwellers "make"
themselves poor through indolence and degeneracy.13 In Tramping with
Tramps (1899), Josiah Flynt related the "homeless problem" to disease.
14
This "persistence of pauperism" leads Jones to describe "a wholesale
ambivalence within even the most Progressive thinking" about poverty
and to suggest that the progressive definition of poverty "was always in
tension with more regressive explanations."
15
This tension imbued the lit-
erature of the Progressive Era with competing arguments about pover-
ty. 16 Because of this, Jones suggests that poverty be considered as a
"polemic" in this literature, a debate across classes about the very consti-
tution of a society determined by "contestation and instability."
17
In this
polemic, literary representations of poverty responded to and even per-
petuated arguments about social responsibility, upward mobility, and the
nature of poverty itself. Susan D. Moeller's work in "The Cultural
Construction of Urban Poverty" nicely complements Jones's book.18
Moeller argues for an important-even polemic-link between the
expansive growth of urbanism and the function of popular entertain-
ment in the Progressive Era. Surveying representations of poverty across
a spectrum of high and low styles, including newspapers, songs, dime
novels, and even plays, she concludes that representations well into the
twentieth century often defined the poor through caricature and con-
demnation.
Building on the work of Jones, Moeller, and others, this argu-
ment considers Sheldon's Salvation Nell in terms of poverty "as a
polemic" in and about Progressive-Era New York City. In other words,
this argument approaches the play inductively: reading it as a reflection
and a negotiation of "poverty" and "philanthropy" near the midpoint of
13 See Gavin Jones, American Hungers: The Problem of Poverty in U.S. Literature,
1840- 1945 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 68.
1
4
Ibid.
1
5 Ibid., 75.
16 Like most studies of literature and poverty during the Progressive Era, Jones
works primarily with novels, suggesting a reading public. His concerns, however, provide
a valuable starting point for considering the interplay of theatre, poverty, and reception.
17 Jones, American Hungers, 4.
18 Susan D. Moeller, "The Cultural Construction of Urban Poverty: Images of
Poverty in New York City, 1890-1917," Journal of American Culture 18, no. 4 (1995): 1-16.
POVERTY, PHJLANTHROI'Y, AND POLEMJCS 29
the Progressive Era, rather than deductively, or against the already-
defined field of values about progressivism evident in the arguments of
Binns, Cohn, and Ruff. Bringing this historicism to Salvation Nell (both
the play and the production) involves a number of benefits. First, it con-
tributes another case-study to Jones's project in American Hungers and
therefore further redresses the "neglect of poverty" as a "category of
critical discourse" in the study of American literature.t9 Second, this essay
reconsiders the paradigm used in theatre history to read Progressive-Era
plays and their productions by defining "poverty" and "philanthropy"
not as fixed categories but instead as polemical discourses that reflect
ongoing tensions in society. This does not mean repudiating the promi-
nence granted Sheldon's play. Instead, it means reassessing the terms of
Ruff's claim that "Sheldon's social dramas," including Salvation Nell,
"exemplify the Progressive Era" by examining both the play and the peri-
od.ZO Finally, this essay discusses the reactions to Salvation Nell as a mirror
of middle-class audiences who were-paradoxically-consuming repre-
sentations of poverty even as they were primarily responsible for philan-
thropic outreach to the poor. Underlying these projects is the polemical
tension between the progressivism and regressivism evident in the public
discourse about urban poverty.
"Where'll I Go?": The Promise of Salvation
The fundamental question about the progressivism of Salvation Nell is
this: How did the play inspire the philanthropy documented in
Hallimond's letter? This question, however, is best considered within
another query: How does Sheldon's play represent the poor and their
poverty? Opening onto Sid McGovern's Empire Bar in the Cherry Hill
slums of New York, the play includes well-known portraits of what
Jacob Riis called the "other half": prostitutes trying to induce enthusiasm
among potential customers; toughs demonstrating their bravado; and of
course, drunks half-asleep or stumbling into the free-lunch counter. Into
this misery comes Nell Sanders, dressed in "dirty clothes" and carrying a
bucket and scrubbing brush, which she immediately puts to use in sop-
ping up spilled pickles and beer. She has come to this indignity through
recent adversity: she is pregnant by Jim Platt, one of the bar toughs and,
because of the pregnancy, lost her job and the room she was renting.
Hounded by Victorian opprobrium, she now lives in the basement of the
19 Jones, American Hungers, xiii.
20 Ruff, Edward Sheldon, 163.
30
WESTGATE
bar and cleans up after drunks while trying to avoid their lurid behavior.
Importantly, Nell is defined as living and working in the bar but not if the
bar. She has reached this misery, in other words, through misfortune
(falling in love with Jim, who takes her money, cheats on her routinely,
and leaves her for weeks at a time) rather than misconduct. This repre-
sentation of Nell, which was certainly intended to elicit sympathy, marks
a distinctly progressive notion about poverty. She is poor due to circum-
stances rather than inherent degeneracy, which suggests a way of dealing
with this poverty. Unfortunately, her situation worsens before it
improves. When Jim sees Al McGovern, another tough, kissing Nell, he
beats him nearly to death. After the police arrest Jim and threaten to
revoke Sid's license, he turns his frustration onto Nell: "I'll give you fif-
teen minutes to sneak it, an' if yer not gone by then, I'll kick ye out
myself, s'elp me Gawd!"2t In desperation, she pleads, ''Wh-where'll I
go?"22
Nell's tremulous question defines her dilemma in complementa-
ry ways: literally having a place to stay that night, and figuratively finding
her place in society. Before Nell is confronted with this dilemma, two
women enter the bar and define these problems thematically. The first is
Hallelujah Maggie, a Salvation Lassie who regularly goes into the slums
and saloons to redeem the poor religiously and socially. When she enters,
she unleashes a blaring "Hello boys!" which is met with a chorus of
cheerful responses that defines the camaraderie she enjoys with the
patrons.23 In fact, she engages in playful taunting with Sid, who offers
free drinks in honor of her arrival despite the Salvation Army's involve-
ment in the temperance movement. Hardly offended, Maggie responds
laughingly, "The devil's in you, Sid McGovern, an' some day he'll up and
tell yer so!"24 Her purpose this time involves Nell, who was noticed by
Major Williams, the leader of the local chapter of the Army. When the
bar empties out to watch the police raid on the local brothel, she turns to
Nell: 'Won't yer let us try an' help ye?"25 When Nell refuses help, Maggie
leaves to counsel the prostitutes being arrested. With Maggie's exit comes
21 Edward Sheldon, Salvation Nell, in The Best Plays of the Ear!J American Theatre:
From the Beginning to 1916, ed. John Gassner and Mollie Gassner (New York: Crown
Publishers, 1967), 572.
22 Ibid., 574.
23 Ibid., 565.
2
4
Ibid.
25 Ibid., 567.
POVER'IY, PHILANTHROPY, AND POLEMICS
31
Myrtle, one of the prostitutes who escaped the raid and is now taking
refuge in the bar. Knowing Nell from sweatshop work years earlier and
learning of her being thrown out of Sid's, Myrtle offers another choice:
"Yer've gotter come back with me .... Says,you?l make a hit! They're all
crazy over blondes."
2
6 With Sid threatening violence unless she leaves
promptly, Nell gathers her meager belongings to continue the allegorical
fall to immorality common in turn-of-the-century literature.27 But Maggie
suddenly returns and confronts Myrtle: "I know what yer tryin' to do, an'
ye'd better look out!"
2
8 Myrtle and Maggie argue over Nell's future until
Nell "flings her arms around Maggie's neck" and "bursts into an agony
of tears," crying piteously "Help me-help me-there ain't no one-
else."29
However contrived for melodramatic effect, this peripety in
Salvation Nell was, in fact, premised on real Salvation Army rescue work.
According to Norris Magnuson's Salvation in the Slums: Evangelical Social
Work, 1865-1920, the Salvation Army established the "Garret, Dive, and
Tenement Brigade" in 1889, which involved charging Army officers,
mostly women, with "visiting, helping, and reclaiming the lost."30 This
rescue work was the product of a philosophical shift that occurred in the
Army in the 1880s, contends Lillian Taiz in Hallelt!fah Lads & Lassies:
Remaking the Salvation Army in America, 1880-19 30. Before this, "leaders [of
the Army] in the United States focused their energies on typical mission-
ary goals, 'the proclamation of the gospel and the planting of church-
es."'31 Not long after Maud and Ballington Booth (daughter and son-in-
law of General William Booth) took over administration of the U.S.
Salvation Army, they "expanded these goals to include rescue work in the
slums."32 This new mandate derived from the Maslow-like recognition
26 Ibid., 573. Emphasis in original
27 The fall toward prostitution was, of course, evident in novels like Stephen
Crane's Maggie: A Girl of the Street and further evident in the popularity of the fallen
woman genre.
28 Sheldon, Salvation Nell, 574.
29 Ibid.
30 Cited in Norris Magnuson, Salvation in the Slums: Evangelical Social Work, 1865-
1920 (M:etuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, 1977), 34.
31 Lillian Taiz, Hallelujah Lads & Lassies: Remaking the Salvation Army in America,
1880-1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 40.
32 Ibid.
32 W ESTGATE
that fulfill.ing the spiritual ambition of the Army was doubly difficult if
the poor lacked food, shelter, or other basic needs. With it came the pro-
gressive notion that poverty had environmental origins and therefore
could be combated with philanthropic intervention. This intervention
took two forms that were especially relevant for Salvation Nell. The first
was the building of Morris Cottage in 1886, "the Army's first 'rescue
home for fallen women,' in New York City."33 This home was important
in that it suggested the shift from moral to social obligations for the wel-
fare of women and children. The next was more far-reaching in terms of
the progressive rescue work of the Army: "In 1889 the Salvation Army
also began to institutionalize a working-class style of mutual aid when it
organized its 'Slum Brigade'" in which "female officers known as Slum
Sisters moved into small, dingy, sparsely furnished tenement rooms.
Living little better than their neighbors, these women went out each
morning to pray, distribute bits of scripture, tend the sick and dying,
assist working mothers . . . and perform other 'neighborly duties."'34
Anything but incidental, the reformism of the Salvation Army
informed Sheldon's play in complementary ways. According to biogra-
pher Eric Wollencott Barnes, the original idea for Salvation Nell emerged
during a chance encounter Sheldon had with a Salvation Army meeting
in "a poor section of Boston" in 1907.35 Listening to the female speaker
leading the open-air meeting, Sheldon became intrigued by two things.
The first was "the thrilling sincerity with which she spoke" along with
"the rapt interest of the bedraggled group gathered about her."36 The
second was that while this woman was clothed in official Salvation Army
attire- uniform and bonnet-she nevertheless "carried some faint sug-
gestion of a lurid past" and Sheldon "wondered by what route she had
arrived at her present state."37 In truth, Sheldon knew little about pover-
ty or even the Salvation Army because of his privileged background. But
having taken George Pierce Baker's English 4 7 Workshop at Harvard, he
had been introduced to the emphasis on research that was part of the
33 Ibid.
34 Ibid., 41-2.
35 Eric Wollencott Barnes, The Man Who Lived Twice: The Biugrap*' uf Edward
She/dun (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1956), 41.
36 Ibid.
37 Ibid.
POVERTY, PHILANTHROPY, AND POLEMICS
33
movement of realism.38 While visiting family in Chicago and later in
Denver, Sheldon went to Army headquarters, watched and once took
part in open-air meetings "to absorb the emotional flavor and the idiom
of street corner evangelism."39 No evidence exists of Sheldon observing
Salvation Lassies making their rounds in saloons, but accounts of such
reformism were available and well publicized, suggesting that Sheldon's
characterization of Hallelujah Maggie owed much to slum brigade
work. 40 Beyond models for characters, Sheldon found a philosophy in the
Army's rescue work that would inform Salvation Neils representation of
poverty and philanthropy in relation to the eponymous character. When
Maggie tells Sid that "Cap'n Williams says he saw a girl last week .... He
said she has an awful sweet face- Too sweet for this joint," it's more than
just a jab at Sid.4J It suggests the progressive definition of poverty as orig-
inating from misfortune instead of misconduct: the individual can be res-
cued and redeemed from the slum environment.
Informing Salvation Neils answer to Nell's tremulous question,
then, is this progressive philosophy about poverty. In fact, the plot of
Sheldon's play unfolds according to this premise: removed from the
Empire Bar to a Morris Cottage-like rescue home, where she has her
baby, Nell is transformed at the opening of act 2. Now a mother, she
dotes upon her son, Jimmy, and has joined the Army as a Slum Sister,
who divides her time between mothering her son and tending to the
needs of her neighbors. The nature of her ministrations is defined when
Mamie, one of her tenement neighbors, asks for Nell's help. "Pa's tanked
again," Mamie says desperately, "an actin' up something flerce!"42 In this
case, Nell brings temperance into Mamie's home, soothing the drunken
husband and avoiding the sorts of domestic violence represented in
Stephen Crane's Maggie: A Girl of the Street. Devoted to such ministra-
tions, Nell establishes a rapport with her neighbors, something suggested
briefly here and again later when Major Williams arrives for a visit.
38 See Wisner Payne Kinne, George Pierce Baker and the American Theatre
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1954).
39 Ibid., 42.
4
0 The name given this character sounds remarkably like the sorts of names
found in the history of the Salvation Army such as "'Shouting Annie,' 'Charlie, the
Salvation Wonder,' and 'Glory Milt."' See Taiz, Hallelujah Lads & Lassies for more details.
41 Sheldon, Salvation Nell, 566.
42
Ibid., 580.
34 WESTGATE
Bringing Nell flowers, he says, "I bought them from a poor old thing
down the block. She's one of her finds, isn't she?"43 When Nell asks how
he knew, he says, "Because when she asked me where I was going, she
chose the best on her tray, and insisted on wrapping them up in that
newspaper. To 'keep them clean,' she said, 'for Nelly."'
44
Symbolically,
Nell's transformation reflects the progressive philosophy about poverty
and philanthropy. While in Sid's bar, she teetered on the brink of
immorality- not because of anything inherently wrong with her, but
because this environment gave her few options to survive. While living in
the rescue home, Nell flourishes, undergoing a spiritual and social awak-
ening that doubly benefits society: her redemption and her ministrations
to others. In acts 2 and 3 Nell epitomizes the best outcome imagined by
progressive reformism.
If this philosophy informs Sheldon's dramaturgy in Salvation
Nell, Sheldon's dramaturgy simultaneously advocated this philosophy.
Sheldon did so through developing what might be defined as a "salvation
narrative": the story of one living in poverty being rescued by philan-
thropy and consequently becoming a contributing member of society.
Salvation Nell does this in two ways. Initially, it does this through the biog-
raphy of Nell: following Nell from her near descent into immorality at
the end of act 1, through her work as a Slum Sister in act 2, to her tak-
ing the leading role in the open-air meeting that concludes the play.
Without the intervention of the Salvation Army, Nell would have ended
up at the brothel. With this intervention, she gains access to the upward
mobility that becomes evidence of the value of philanthropy.
Additionally, at the end of the play, Sheldon borrows the Salvation
Army's strategy of turning biography into testimony. Standing at a podi-
um, Nell uses her story as an illustration to advance the progressivism of
Salvation Army rescue work: ''You've sunk to the bottom, you know the
bitterness and the cruelty of life, an' it's to you Christ wants to show the
beauty an' the glory an' the light. When you an' me who have fallen rise
again, we're greater than our sins."
4
5 Here, Nell's audience are denizens of
the tenements who have been gathered by the band and parade spectacle
that the Salvation Army used to win attention, and perhaps souls, of the
poor.
4
6 To them, she uses her salvation narrative to argue that they too
4
3 Ibid., 583.
44
Ibid.
45 Ibid., 615. Emphasis in original
46 See Diane Winston, ''All the World's a Stage: The Performed Religion of the
Salvation Army, 1880-1920," in Practicing &ligion in the Age of the Media: Explorations in
POVERTY, PHILANTHROPY, AND POLEMICS 35
can benefit from philanthropy if only they will make the effort. At the
same time, however, Sheldon has Nell speak to the middle-class audi-
ences of Salvation Nell. The play doesn't just end with Nell's testimony; it
becomes an extension of that testimony. Becoming the female preacher
Sheldon saw in 1907, Nell becomes his advocate for philanthropy.
This dramatization of progressive philosophy in Salvation Nell
benefited the Salvation Army's philanthropic work during the early
decades of the twentieth century. In fact, Sheldon's play drew the notice
of Commander Eva Booth, a daughter of General William Booth and
then leader of the U.S. Salvation Army. After the first matinee, according
to Binns, Booth called on Mrs. Fiske in her dressing room "to thank the
actress for Salvation Nell, which had proved a boon to her organization."
4
7
Sheldon's play was a "boon" for the Army in two ways. First, the pro-
duction translated directly to contributions. Although attending plays was
forbidden to members of the Salvation Army, "the leaders of the organ-
ization recognized that the favorable image of the Salvation Army creat-
ed in the play provided a financial opportunity to elicit audience dona-
tions," so "shortly after the opening, the Salvation Army placed young
women at the doors of the theatre, and between the acts had them go
throughout the audience soliciting contributions."
48
Evidence of their
success comes in the account of Winthrop Ames, director of the New
Theatre, who wrote to Sheldon: "It seems to me a fine, sincere piece of
work with precious accent of life throughout! The silence of the audi-
ence that left the theatre and the dollar bills in the tambourines ... were
eloquent proof of the impression created by the play."49 Salvation Nell
also proved a boon through the publicity it offered: by dramatizing the
dilemma of poverty and the means for combating it used by the Salvation
Army, it aided efforts to win donations from the wealthy. But what did
Salvation Nell contribute to the poor beyond these donations? To put
another way, did Sheldon's play advance the progressive paradigm of the
Social Gospel movement for confronting poverty through philanthropy?
Media, Religion, and Culture, eds. Stewart M. Hoover and Lynn Schofield Clark (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2002), 113-37; and "'The Cathedral of the Open Air': The
Salvation Army's Sacralization of Secular Space, New York City, 1880-1910," in Gods of
the City: Religion and the A merican Urban Landscape, eds. Robert A. Orsi (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1999), 367-92.
47 Binns, Mrs. Fische, 207.
48 Ruff, Edward Sheldon, 62.
49 Ibid., 66.
36 WESTGATE
"I Can't be Anythin' Else": The Threat of Pauperism
More scrutiny of the poverty from which Nell is rescued is needed to
answer questions like these. Lengthy and meticulous, Sheldon's opening
stage directions provide a blueprint for the verisimilitude which has
become the crux of criticism about Salvation Nell. Simultaneously, the
stage directions define the nature of what Jacob Riis called the "other
half." Around the bar are "a number of shabby, ill-dressed, poor-looking
men of all ages, already jovial with liquor"; in a corner, "three ragged
Italians in corduroys, bandanas about their necks" play a "popular air on
a violin, harp, and flute"; in the ladies' buffet are four women: two of
whom are described as "sodden" and "wretched," and two of whom "are
shabby, painted street-walkers."50 Notably, Sheldon combines two forms
of description here: first, the visual rhetoric of depletion or decay evident
in their clothing and metonymically extending to their lives; second, the
rhetoric of behavior in drinking, soliciting clients, or indulging in "vicious
indulgence." Intentionally or not, Sheldon's stage directions reinforce
what Moeller describes as "image clusters": "a group of images that
repeatedly appear [in cultural entertainment of the time] and comprise
implicit coded messages" about the subjects. 51 In Salvation Neils opening,
these messages correspond with establishing what Sheldon describes as
an "atmospheric effect," that is, the right tone and feeling of the Cherry
Hill bar reproduced in the Hackett Theatre. Surely, Sheldon's attention to
detail led to the advances in scenographic realism attributed to this play.
But since Sheldon develops little else about these members of the "other
half," his description becomes a kind of definition: that is, before Nell
makes her entrance, the poor are defined entirely through their ragged
clothing and degenerative behavior. Sheldon, in effect, defines poverty
synonymously with drunkenness, indolence, and immorality. These char-
acters become types-drunks, toughs, prostitutes-that correspond with
Victorian moralism and which reviews recognized and readily accepted.5
2
Description becomes judgment in Salvation Nell.
Ironically enough, this judgment becomes increasingly harsh
when Sheldon develops the lives of those patronizing the Empire Bar. It
emerges from a series of failed encounters between poverty and philan-
SO Sheldon, Salvation Nell, 558.
51 Moeller, "The Cultural Construction of Urban Poverty," 3.
52 See "'Salvation Nell' A Theatrical Report on Life in the Slums: An
POVERTY, PHILANTHROPY, AND POLEMICS 37
thropy which precede Nell's entrance. The first involves Susie Callahan, a
little girl who ventures into Sid's bar with a pitcher to get a quart of beer
for her mother---on credit. While Sid fills the pitcher, halfway, she relates
the following story: "They give me a pink stockin' over to the Mission
'cause I ain't ben late t' Sunday school once, an' it had an orange 'n a bag
o' candy, an' a dime, but Pa pinched the dime's soon's I got home, an' I
et the orange already so Ma couldn't give it to the kid."53 "The Mission"
likely refers to the Salvation Army missions that were actively providing
basic needs such as food, clothing, and coal for heat. But the efforts of
giving to Susie's family, however minor, prove futile. Not only does her
father "pinch" her dime, he enters the bar shortly thereafter to buy drinks
with it, illustrating the Victorian concern about the bar threatening the
family. The philanthropy becomes ineffectual at best and wasted at worst.
The same conclusion is suggested when Jim makes his entrance and
when Susie leaves, bringing a ticket for the Salvation Army Christmas
dinner.5
4
As Jim proudly tells the story, he "met one o' them hymn-
screechers an' she says to me . . . 'Promise to stop swearin' an' I'll give yer
one. 'N I say to her, 'Damn my soul if I don't!' an' then she cracks a smile
'nd hands me out the ticket."S5 This incident certainly underscores the
progressivism behind the Salvation Army's rescue work which often priv-
ileged social along with spiritual needs. But it simultaneously conveys
how uncertain the relationship was between philanthropy and redemp-
tion. Quite unlike Nell, who changes radically, Susie's family and Jim take
charity without any long-lasting, much less transformative, effect.
Behind this representation of the "other half," lurks a funda-
mentally regressive notion about poverty. During the Victorian period,
debates about the poor made a crucial distinction between poverty and
pauperism, with the latter defining "chronic, character-based" impover-
ishment. Charles Loring Brace's The Dangerous Classes of New York (1872),
for example, "defined pauperism not as the consequence or symptom of
disease but as the disease itself, a weakness and dependence."56 The
Exhibition to Satisfy Morbid Curiosity Which is Photographically Realistic in Detail and
in Which Mrs. Fiske, Holbrook Blinn, and Others Act Impressively," New York Times 22
November 1908, X7; and "Acting Redeems Play of Sordid Life," New York Times 18
November 1908, 5.
53 Sheldon, Salvation Nell, 560.
54
Ibid., 562.
55 Ibid.
56 Cited in Ibid., 72.
38 WESTGATE
nature of this weakness and dependence was "essentially a degradation
of character, a loss of manhood, and self-respect."S7 Notably, this desig-
nation stood in direct contrast to progressive arguments that poverty
derived from environmental or social forces, which are evident in the
"salvation narrative" associated with Nell. The Tenth Annual Report of the
State Board of Charities in New York (1877) made this distinction clear in
"The Causes of Pauperism," in which the study concludes that "the num-
ber of persons ... who have been reduced to poverty by causes outside
their own acts is ... surprisingly small." Instead, the study claims that
paupers reach their condition "by idleness, improvidence, drunkenness,
or some form of vicious indulgence."S8 In How the Other Ha!f Lives
(1880), Jacob R.i.is insists on the distinction between "honest poverty and
pauperism," the former describing those descended into misery through
misfortune rather than misconduct.S9 Elsewhere R.i.is contends: "The
truth is that pauperism grows in the tenements as naturally as weeds in a
garden lot. A moral distemper, like crime, it flnds there its most fertile
soil."60 Here can be heard the Lamarckian assumptions underlying pau-
perism: while the pauper was one who, through his acts, ends up in the
tenement, the tenement still subsidized degenerate actions. More pro-
gressive than others, R.i.is's assessment confirms the basic premise that
pauperism emerges from an inherent degeneracy. So common was this
premise that Oscar Craig, former president of the New York State Board
of Charities argued in 1893, that "poverty and pauperism are words
which should not be used as equivalents or even as synonyms."6
1
However much Salvation Nell may endorse progressive notions
about poverty through Nell's rescue by the Salvation Army, the play nev-
ertheless reflects persistent Victorian attitudes about pauperism. It does
so through what might be described as a "condemnatory narrative."
Derived from the discourse of pauperism, this narrative depicts someone
who is permanently mired in poverty, largely because of some inherent
failure, degeneracy, or immorality-which puts him or her beyond the
reach of philanthropy. This narrative is best dramatized through Jim.
5
7
Ibid.
58 Cited in ibid.
59 Jacob A. Riis, How the Other Half Uves: Studies Among the Tenements of New
York, ed. David Leviatin (Boston: Bedford of St. Martin's Press, 1996), 90.
60 Ibid., 222.
61 Cited in Jones, American Hungers, 72.
POVERTY, PHILANTHROPY, AND POLEMICS 39
When he first enters the bar, he is dressed in "ragged clothes" and already
"a trifle drunk," linking him with the nightly denizens of the bar
described above.G2 More notably, he is marked by "vicious indolence."
Not working because he lost his job, he plans to exploit Nell by conspir-
ing with Sid. "Nell gets two a week? ... Now if I was to make her say
she'd do it for one-fifty, wouldn't yer pay me what ye owe her?"63 One of
the abiding traits of pauperism is unwillingness to work however able-
bodied (as Jim demonstrates himself to be when he beats Al nearly to
death). Instead, Jim is parasitic: he drifts from opportunity to opportuni-
ty, trying to manipulate others. When Jim finds Nell after his release from
prison, in act 2, he justifies his intended participation in a jewelry theft:
"I worked 'round, did some haulin' down on West Street. ... Then I got
a little by shoveling' snow an' street cleaning, but I couldn't stand the
work-it's awful hard."64 Here Sheldon defines Jim's indolence as chron-
ic, as something that he cannot change about himself, suggesting inher-
ent failure. Jim describes himself this way when he laments, "If I'm a
thief, it's 'cause the Gawd yer always gassin' about's made things so I can't
be anythin' else!"65 This speaks to the very nature of the condemnatory
narrative: there is no way of redeeming such figures because of chronic,
inherent flaws that prove impervious to philanthropy. (Though Jim
defines this narrative for much of the play, he seems to be changed at the
end. To be fair, he may exist between salvation and condemnatory narra-
tives).
In other characters, the condemnatory narrative is less ambigu-
ous. During the first act, Callahan enters the bar shortly after Susie leaves
with the beer for her mother. Already drunk, he waves the "pinched"
dime and orders another rye whiskey. If audiences did not make the con-
nection on their own, another bar patron establishes Callahan's identity:
"Say, here's the feller what swiped the dime from his kid's stockin'!"G6
Here, Callahan represents the indolence of pauperism: his unwillingness
to work (the dime is the only money he or his family has) and his indul-
gence in drinking (a marker of degeneracy). Implicitly, Sheldon makes an
argument here about the nature of the "other half" who indulge in indo-
62 Sheldon, Salvation Neff, 561.
63 Ibid., 562.
64
Ibid. , 586.
65 Ibid., 596.
66 Ibid., 564.
40 WESTGATE
lence and drunkenness regardless of the efforts of the Salvation Army.
Not limited to Callahan, this argument recurs with Nellis, another bar
patron, when Maggie enters and chastises him: ~ n yer wife 'n kids wait-
in' fer you at home ... with never a cent in their pockets an' the fire gone
out!"67 Here, Maggie makes clear the depravity of Nellis's indulgence
while his family faces a winter without enough coal to heat their tenement
apartment: there is an immorality to this behavior that would have
undoubtedly rankled Sheldon's audiences even more than it rankles Sid,
who sneers at Nellis. In extending this depravity from Callahan to Nellis,
Sheldon suggests that the failure to support the family, because of drink-
ing and indolence, is chronic not just with the two men but as a general-
ized principle about the "other hal" During the scene when Mamie calls
Nell away because of her husband having come home "tanked" again, the
same premise is at work. The implications of his frequent drunkenness,
Mamie's turning to Nell, and Nell's efforts, suggest a futility in trying to
help these people. Despite philanthropic intervention, these men and
women cannot be lifted out of poverty, suggesting inherent degenera-
cy-not environment- as cause of their misery. In effect, they are per-
manently condemned to poverty because salvation is beyond them.
Because pauperism argues for inherent degeneracy, it was con-
cerned with heredity, in particular, how it might genealogically condemn
members of the "other half" to impoverishment. In 1877, Robert
Dugdale published what became a rather influential srudy, The Jukes: A
Study in Crime, Pauperism, Disease, and Heredity. Studying the Jukes family in
tenements of New York City, the study tracked the behaviors of several
generations. "The result is a breed of hereditary paupers who suffer from
a disease of character, a weakness, a lack of will power, a desire to follow
the line of least resistance," maintains Jones, that condemned the Jukes
to the tenements across generations.6B Lamarckian in its premise, this def-
inition of pauperism informs Sheldon's depiction of parenting and chil-
dren among the poor. In her story of the Salvation Army Mission, Susie
Callahan demonstrates this premise in Salvation Nell. Like her father, she
is impervious to the philanthropic efforts of the Army. As her father
steals the dime from her, she eats the orange so that her mother cannot
give it to her younger brother. Certainly this behavior is, to some degree,
learned. But Sheldon includes competing examples of nurturance in this
story: the family that privileges self-interest over communal responsibili-
6
7
Ibid., 566.
68 Jones, American Hungers, 72.
P OVERTY, PHILANTHROPY, AND P OLEMICS 41
ty directly contrasts with the Mission where she attends Sunday school
and, if Maggie's chastising of Nellis is any indication, privileges family
over personal needs. That Susie follows her family rather than the Army
Mission suggests that she, like her father, may be incapable of learning
the religious and social training that would produce the salvation Nell
enjoys. Implicitly, Susie is condemned by Lamarckian inheritance, where
the indolence and self-indulgence of her father are passed on through the
generations. Anything but an anomaly, Susie is the first that seemingly
endorses the sort of hereditary pauperism described by Dugdale. At the
opening of act 3, several boys assault another to get his popcorn in ways
that parallel the behavior of Jim, Al, and even Callahan. And act 3 reveals
Sheldon again generalizing the condition of pauperism by having anoth-
er girl, this time named Sally, going to get a pitcher of beer. These exam-
ples suggest the chronic association of children of paupers with degen-
erative activities like indolence, violence, and drinking.
This representation of pauperism in Salvation Nell makes a dif-
ferent argument about philanthropy than the representation of Nell. If
philanthropy was transformational for Nell, it was futile and even dan-
gerous for the rest of the "other half." In this, Salvation Nell corresponds
more closely with Victorian principles of philanthropy, like those guiding
the Charity Organization Society (COS). Although one of the earliest
philanthropic organizations in New York, the COS argued that philan-
thropy would simply worsen pauperism. As Jones contends, "the so-
called scientific philanthropy movement [typified by COS] ... held that
indiscriminate almsgiving produces the opposite of its intentions, active-
ly pauperizing those it would save."69 Charitable giving would, paradoxi-
cally, further condemn the poor. More hardcore social Darwinists like
William Graham Sumner even "argued for the complete absence of insti-
tutional care, allowing the poor to succumb to poverty ... and thus ensur-
ing the progress of the race."70 Although these arguments against phi-
lanthropy come from decades earlier, they have corollaries in Sheldon's
play. The first involves Jim and the ticket for the Salvation Army dinner.
When the "hymn-screecher" gave him the ticket it was, however tongue-
in-cheek, based on his stopping his cursing, which becomes a joke at the
expense of the Army. The implication is that such philanthropy cannot
change Jim or those like him. The second example is Callahan spending
his daughter's dime on rye. When another drunk recognizes Callahan, he
says, "Gee, I'll bet they [the Salvation Army] never thought that dime was
69 Ibid., 7 4.
7
0 Ibid.
42 WESTGATE
goin' into Sid McGovern's cash register!"
71
The money bestowed on the
Callahan family at Christmas time subsidizes his indolence and drinking,
two behaviors that the play unmistakably condemns. Sheldon's play there-
by exonerates audiences from philanthropic responsibility in this case.
This supplies a different answer to the question whether Salvation Nell
advances the progressive paradigm for confronting poverty through phi-
lanthropy.
"Face the World Again": The Construction of Social Knowledge
Instead of one, Salvation Nell offers two contradictory answers to this
defining question, one distinctly progressive and the other distinctly
regressive. Certainly, Sheldon privileges the progressive nature of Nell's
salvation from poverty. After Maggie takes Nell from the bar, the plot fol-
lows Nell's restoration to social norms in ways that correspond with the
criteria defined by Magnuson.7
2
If not evident from the plot, this pro-
gressive argument is articulated by Major Williams in act 3 when he tells
the story of his conversion to rescue work: the evening when be wit-
nessed a beggar try to kill himself on a park bench, an incident that made
him "face the world again."73 Facing the world again is based on the
notion that poverty can and should be confronted by those with the
resources to change the environmental conditions of poverty. No doubt,
Sheldon intended Salvation Nell to compel audiences to "face the world
again" and deal with the crisis of poverty. The words of the anonymous
benefactor documented in Hallimond's letter suggest that this goal was,
in part, successful. But this progressivism was mediated by regressivism.
In making the argument about Nell's redemption, the play casts many of
the "other half" through the discourse of pauperism: in the bar where
the patrons are defined by indolence and drunkenness; in the second act
where Nell's work as Slum Sister depends on the chronic misbehavior of
neighbors; in the third act when the half-drunken men loiter at the bar's
entrance watching the Salvation Army meeting as a distraction but not as
a first step toward their redemption. This representation of pauperism makes
its own argument about philanthropy, complicating the mandate of "fac-
ing the world again" by suggesting the futility of trying to rescue these
characters. Even if unintended, this contrast of progressivism and
71 Sheldon, Salvation Nell, 564.
72 Magnuson, Salvation in the Slums, 88.
73 Sheldon, Salvation Nell, 607.
POVERlY, PHILANTHROPY, AND POLEMICS 43
regressivism reveals how deeply polemical Sheldon's depiction of pover-
ty was.
Salvation Nell thus falls within a broader pattern of representa-
tions of poverty during the Progressive Era. Considering how "cultural
artifacts," from newspapers comics, songs, and plays to "journal articles,
social scientific essays, welfare proposals" from 1890-1917 depict the
poor, Moeller argues that these depictions "divide naturally into two gen-
eral categories."74 On the one hand, they represented the poor in ways
"that pertain to behavior threatening the urban fabric" such as drunken-
ness and indolence, violence and criminalityJS On the other hand, they
represented the poor in ways "that pertain to the suffering of the poor,"
often depicting women and family, children and the elderly suffering
within povertyJ6 Importantly, these competing representations did not
occur along the progressive trajectory imagined by Binns, Cohn, and
Ruff; in other words, they do not move from Victorian anxiety about the
threat of poverty to progressive concern about the suffering of poverty.
Instead, Moeller observes, the competing definitions inhere within indi-
vidual works across the progressive period. "No matter which conception
of poverty was in the fore," the cultural artifact often included both
"sympathetic portraits" and "harsh portraits" of the poor, as is evident
in Salvation Ne/1.77 Why this was the case brings us closer to the question
about whether Sheldon's play advanced progressive notions about phi-
lanthropy and poverty. Read deductively, or through the traditional nar-
rative of steady advancement from Victorian to Progressive definitions
of poverty, this contrast of sympathetic and harsh portraits suggests the
pains of transition: at once, the sincere impulse to confront poverty col-
liding with the self-serving anxiety about defending class boundaries. In
this way, it is possible to situate Sheldon near the end of this transitional
discourse on poverty even if the play has not completely shed Victorian
notions. But read inductively, assuming that individual works reflected
and negotiated the values of the period, this contrast becomes more
complicated and revealing. What brings together harsh and sympathetic
images is the common reference point defining them: the middle class
74 Moeller, "The Cultural Construction of Urban Poverty," 2.
7
5 Ibid., 3.
76 Ibid.
77
Ibid., 2.
44 WESTGATE
which defined the "social order" against which the poor were judged.78
In other words, these representations of the poor reaffirmed the values
of the middle class first and were only secondarily about facing the world
agam.
Certainly, this reading rings true with the "harsh portraits" of
poverty in Salvation Nell. Defined by indolence and drunkenness, paupers
are represented as not just individual failures but threats to the middle-
class definitions of family. Callahan's buying whiskey with the money
given his daughter, Susie, by the Salvation Army; Mamie McGone vio-
lently shaking a baby for crying while she is attempting to read; Mrs.
Baxter forgetting to feed her baby because of getting into fights about
her philandering husband- these instances condemn the poor for what
Bruce Bellingham described as "impaired or defunct filiation."79 This
phrasing derives from Bellingham's study of the records of the Children's
Aid Society in the 1850s, which show that the poor were frequently
depicted in public discourse as anything but concerned about the welfare
of their children. Instead, the poor were depicted as indifferent and cal-
lous as parents, particularly prone to child abandonment, which themati-
cally is the source of conflict between Jim and Nell in the second act.
Recently released from prison, Jim has come to get Nell to leave New
York with him for Denver, after the jewelry robbery. When Nell asks,
"You an' me-that all? ... And-what about-Jimmy?" his answer is
revealing: ''Wot's he gotter to do with it? Ye don' suppose we kin lug
'round a kid, do ye?"80 Notably, this scene carries more weight themati-
cally than structurally: the argument of Salvation Nell rather than the plot
depends on this scene. Abandonment of the child becomes the defining
issue between Nell and Jim, with Jim seeing paternity only as an impedi-
ment to his distinctly criminal ambitions. If the threat to family was not
clear enough, Sheldon exaggerates it with the further contrast to Major
Williams, who has become almost an adoptive father of Jimmy, reaffirm-
ing the family structure valued by the play and threatened by the poor.
Like the rest of the poor, Jim is judged harshly against middle-class def-
initions of family. Worth noting, too, is that Bellingham's study from the
7
8 Ibid.
79 Bruce Bellingham, "Waifs and Strays: Child Abandonment, Foster Care, and
Families in Mid-Nineteenth-Century New York," in The Uses of Charity: The Poor on Relief
in the Nineteenth-Century Metropolis, ed. Peter Mandler (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1990), 124.
80 Sheldon, Salvation Nell, 591. Emphasis in original.
POVERIT, PHILANTHROPY, AND POLEMICS 45
1850s concludes that claims of "defunct filiation" were exaggerated to
condemn the poor, which makes Sheldon's echoing of these claims, sixty
years later, even more distressing.
More intriguing is the argument made about the social order
through the "sympathetic portrait" of Nell Sanders. Judged against the
poor of the Cherry Hill slum congregated in Sid's bar, Nell is certainly
worthy of being rescued: even before she makes her entrance, she had
been doubly victimized, first by Jim's romantic advances which led to her
pregnancy, and second by society's opprobrious judgment of her fallen
condition. In fact, Sheldon goes out of his way to mark Nell as different
from the others through a melodramatic tableau in which she hugs Jim to
her chest while the drinking and debauchery continue around them. But
this raises an interesting question: How did Major Williams, who sent
Maggie to find Nell, recognize what differentiated Nell from the others?
The answer has to do with another, implicit, judgment of Nell in relation
to the values of the middle class. Already during this first scene some
link, however nascent, is established between Nell and these values: in
part through her loyalty to Jim and, more notably, in her longing for love
and a family underlying this loyalty. Because Sheldon never makes it clear
what it was about Nell that drew Major Williams's attention, this inter-
pretation is speculative, but the subsequent characterization supports it.
Once Nell is rescued, her links with the middle class are actualized so that
when audiences see her at the opening of act 2, she is fully transformed.
Now, she devotes herself to reading the Bible to Jimmy, making sure he
has adequate food and clothing; additionally, she has dedicated herself to
the Salvation Army's Slum Brigade, which was envisioned as a network to
support families. She takes on, in other words, more and more traits of
the middle class: nurturance of children, prioritizing of family, adherence
to religious teaching, etc. Her rise into something approximating middle-
class respectability is confirmed when Major Williams, himself from (and
an emblem of) the middle class, proposes marriage to her. In making Nell
sympathetic, then, Sheldon underscores her affiliation with middle-class
values and, in so doing, suggests that she was rescued because she was
"predisposed to the social order."Sl However progressive the rescue of
Nell may be, it is premised on the Victorian distinction between the wor-
thy and the unworthy poor-thereby reafflrming the social order of mid-
dle-class values.
Whether considering the "harsh" or "sympathetic" portraits, the
consequences for this intersection of poverty and philanthropy are the
8! Moeller, "The Cultural Construction of Urban Poverty," 2.
46 WESTGATE
same. The middle class becomes the norm by which the "other half" is
judged worthy or unworthy; or alternatively, in which philanthropy is
judged feasible or futile. In either case, the values of the middle class
become naturalized through the collision with poverty and pauperism.
This is why Moeller contends that "harsh" and "sympathetic" represen-
tations of the poor during this period are, ultimately, "efforts by the dom-
inant power groups ... to control the 'other half"' by defining them
against "the social order."sz Mentioned briefly in Moeller's argument,
Sheldon's play makes an excellent case study here because it is funda-
mentally about the intersection of the poor and the privileged, both in
terms of authorship (what Sheldon knew about tenements or slums) and
reception (what audiences at the Hackett Theatre experienced and in
many cases translated into charitable giving). Bringing together both sal-
vation and condemnatory narratives are the unquestioned assumptions of
the middle class in Salvation Nell: those who deserve salvation possess the
values of this class, while those condemned to poverty explicitly lack
these values. This brings us, then, to the basic question about whether or
not Salvation Nell advances the progressive paradigm regarding poverty
and philanthropy. The answer would seem to be yes-but only as long as
it benefits the middle class, or put another way, as long as it does not
question middle-class values. This doesn't mean that Sheldon was delib-
erately exploiting the poor but instead that his representation of poverty
was based upon (and limited by) his ideological perspective as a member
of the middle class. As Peter Mandler has described in The Uses o/ Charity,
"the places where the rich and poor interacted-where social knowledge
was acquired" were biased by and toward the middle class.83 This was true
for Sheldon in 1908 and unfortunately remains true in criticism of
Sheldon's play today.
What, finally, should be the place of Salvation Nell in theatre his-
tory? Of course, this depends upon the methodology used to consider
Sheldon's play. If read deductively, Sheldon's play looks distinctly un-pro-
gressive. While the play includes Slum Brigades and rescue homes for
women, it makes little mention of the vast array of social services insti-
tuted by philanthropic organizations like the Salvation Army in the late
1880s and which were common by 1908, particularly programs for out-
of-work men. More notably, the play does not reflect the growing disci-
pline of social science, which was displacing Victorian notions of pover-
8Z Ibid.
83 Peter Mandler, "Poverty and Charity in the Nineteenth-Century
Metropolis: An Introduction," in The Uses of Charity, 1.
POVERTY, PHILANTHROPY, AND POLEMICS 47
ty and philanthropy in popular d.iscourse. Instead, Salvation Nell, philo-
sophically, draws from what look like Victorian notions about poverty,
pauperism, and philanthropy. Intriguingly, the very premise guiding the
read.ing of Binns, Cohn, and Ruff undermines their conclusions that
Sheldon's play epitomizes the progressivism of its age. But the purpose
of my argument is not to downplay the significance of Salvation Nell; in
fact, nothing could be further from my point. Instead, this argument
intends to outline and amend the flaws in reading Sheldon's play so that
its value in theatre history becomes fully evident. Read inductively,
Salvation Nell becomes a seminal text for the Progressive Era: it reveals
the ambiguity of demarcation between periods like Victorian and
Progressive; it reveals the limits of perspective in the composition and
reception of texts about poverty; and it reveals the impulse toward
reformism that genuinely guided efforts to represent poverty. The ques-
tion is no longer if Salvation Nell is more or less progressive than its age,
but instead, what this text and its production reveal about the tensions
between progressivism and regressivism within its age. Anything but
resolved, these tensions were intensely polemical, suggesting how the
terms of poverty, pauperism, and philanthropy were contested and nego-
tiated during this period. Sheldon's play and the reactions to it, then, sup-
ply theatre history invaluable documentation of this contestation and
debate. In this way, Salvation Nell may "epitomize" the Progressive Era,
though in ways still to be considered.
jOURNAL OF AMERJCAN DRAMA AND THE.\TRE 21, NO.3 (FALL 2009)
DIALOGIC PROBLEMS AND MISCOMMUNICATION: A STUDY OF
DAVID MAMET'S 0LEANNA
Ahmed S. M. Mohammed
Since its debut in May 1992, David Mamet's 0/eanna, has become one of
his most famous and controversial plays; it "has been the object of more
widespread public rage, debate, celebration, and reproval than even the
most extreme of the performance pieces he condemns."t Oleanna has
been widely acclaimed for its treatment of issues in American society of
the 1990s, such as gender problems and relationships, sexual harassment,
political correctness, and the manipulation of power.2 In their emphasis
on the sexual harassment references, Mamet's critics have mostly relied
on the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings) For example, Craig Walker
could not avoid or dismiss the impact of such hearings as he notes that
"there could hardly have been a more incendiary issue than sexual harass-
ment for the time, and the play seemed to weigh right into the national
debate."
4
In addition to this, Leslie Kane regards the play as "a tragedy
on the dystopia of academe."S Elaine Showalter indicates that the action
in Mamet's Oleanna projects "the audience's reservoir of emotion from
1 Sandra Tome, "David Mamet's Oleanna and the Way of the Flesh," Essqys in
Theatre 15, no. 2 (1997): 164.
2 Christine Macleod, "The Politics of Gender: Language and Hierarchy in
Mamet's 0/eanna," Joumal of Ameni:an Studies 29, no. 2 (1995): 199.
3 The Hill-Thomas Hearings were conducted by the United States Senate
Judiciary Committee and were eventually televised to the whole nation on 11-13 October
1991. The hearings were conducted to investigate Anita Hill's allegations of previous sex-
ual harassment by Clarence Thomas, a Supreme Court nominee. To the public, they sym-
bolized a referendum on sexual harassment and other gender issues in America during the
last decade of the twentieth century. Jill Smolowe, Julie R. Grace, Julie Johnson, and
Andrea Sachs, "Anita Hill's Legacy." http:/ /www.time.com/time/magazine/arti-
cle/0,9171,9767703,00.html (accessed 22 September 2009).
4
Craig S. Walker, "Three Tutorial Plays." Modern Drama 40 no. 1 (Spring 1997):
149.
5 Leslie Kane, "David Mamet," Contemporary Jewish-American Dramatists and
Poets, ed. Joel Shatzky and Michael Taub (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999), 122.
50 MOHAMMED
the Hill-Thomas hearings."6 To James Kendrick, 0/eanna "is about anum-
ber of things-sexual harassment, higher education, the battle of the
sexes, the role of the middle class-but more than anything, it is about
power,"7 while Mark Bourne notes that 0/eanna is "a furious probing of
power politics, sexual harassment hysteria, ideological agendas, academia,
the excesses of what is fatuously called 'political correctness."'S However,
Mamet did not acknowledge the claims relating his play to the Hill-
Thomas hearings, indicating that he had started working on his play
before the hearings, and that it appeared after the hearings only because
he had problems with the last act. Mamet also claimed that he did not see
0/eanna as a play about sexual harassment and that he only meant to
structure it as "a tragedy about power. These are two people with a lot to
say to each other ... [but] at the end of the play, they tear each other's
throat out."9 Controversial as it has been, 0/eanna remains persistently
impelling and irresolvable. While most of Mamet's critics address the
play's treatment of sexual harassment, J. K. Curry sees that "the problem
with 0/eanna is that it is not really, or not primarily, about sexual harass-
ment, but rather about false allegations ... or distorted claims of harass-
ment."10 However, since these problems have been frequently discussed
and scrutinized, this essay aims to study dimensions of the dialogic prob-
lems and difficulties which seem to have impaired communication, hin-
dered the possibility of proper understanding between the characters,
and consequently led to the tragic end of the play. My interest has also
developed out of the realization that "the life in Mamet's theatre is in its
language, in the funny pathetic dialogues that capture the American
6 Elaine Showalter, "Acts of violence: David Mamet and the Language of Men.
Review of Glengarry Glen Ross and Oleanna, by David Mamet," Times Literary Supplement
6 (November 1992): 17.
7
James Kendrick, "Oieanna," http://www.qnetwork.com/?page= review&id=
597 (accessed 22 September 2009).
8 Mark Bourne, "Oieanna." http:/ /www.dvdjournal.com/ -reviews/o/oleanna.
shtml (accessed 22 September 2009).
9 Cited in Walker, "Three Tutorial Plays," 150.
IO]. K. Curry, "David Mamet's 0/eanna as Commentary on Sexual Harassment
in the Academy." A paper presented at the Third Annual Conference on Intellectual
Freedom, Montana State University-Northern, April 1997. http:/ /mtprof. msun.edu/fall
1997/ JKCURRY html (accessed 22 September 2009).
D IALOGIC PROBLEMS ~ N O MiSCOMMUNICATION 51
idiom."
11
In regard to his dramatic design, Mamet indicates that "the strict-
ness of the dramatic form should conduce to a greater level of commu-
nication between the audience and the playwright."1
2
Although the
dramatist has achieved the dramatic strictness he protests, his strictness
in Oleanna seems to be designed to reflect, by necessity, the impaired com-
munication between the characters which stands positively as a motive
and justification for the problematic end; a matter that can be evidently
noticed in the conflicting visions and the varied responses to the play. In
spite of John's apparent distraction, his language seems to be controlled
by two factors: his masculine tone, and his sense of and desire for dom-
inance. As for his voice, Mamet's major plays, "either totally exclude or
marginalize women."13 In spite of John's uneasy feelings and distraction,
the language he uses in this phone call shows his masculine drive as well
as his priggish attitude.
Like most of his other plays, 0/eanna is characterized by its min-
imal plot structure, small cast, and clipped text, which Steven Ryan
describes as "staccato, often elliptical dialogue."14 In 0/eanna, the dialogue
has been structured in a way to reflect a number of problems and diffi-
culties. These difficulties impair communication between the two charac-
ters and anticipate greater problems that surfaced among the readers and
critics of the play. The first structural difficulty which causes controver-
sy among the readers is based not on the use or level of language but on
contextual propriety or impropriety. It arises from the play's title and the
two subsequent epigraphs. The first epigraph from Samuel Butler's The
Wtry of All Flesh reads:
The want of fresh air does not seem much to affect the
happiness of children in a London alley: the greater part
of them sing and play as though they were on a moor in
Scotland. So the absence of a genial mental atmosphere
11 Esther Harriott, American Voices_ Five Contemporary Pltgwrights in Esstgs and
Interviews Qefferson, NC: McFarland and Company Inc., 1988), 6L
12 Cited in ibid., 92.
1
3 David Radavich, "Men among Men: David Mamet's Homosocial Order;'
American Drama 1, no_ 1 (1991): 46.
14 Steven Ryan, "0/eanna: David Mamet's Power Play," Modern Drama 39, no_ 1
(1996): 393.
52
MOHAMMED
is not commonly recognized by children who have never
known it. Young people have a marvelous faculty of
either dying or adapting themselves to circumstances.
Even if they are unhappy-very unhappy-it is aston-
ishing how easily they can be prevented from finding it
out, or at any rate from attributing it to any other cause
than their own sinfulness.1s
The epigraph involves an image of youngsters who enjoy life regardless
of their social circumstances. In Marner's plot, a female university student
appears who has intellectual and psychological problems that she attrib-
utes to a deficiency in her own personality. Carol repeatedly asserts her
inability to cope with the level of study-"I'm stupid. And I'll never
learn"- and emphasizes her inability compared to peers, ''And every-
body's talking about 'this' all the time. And 'concepts,' and 'precepts' and,
and, and, and, and, WHAT IN THE WORLD YOU ARE TALKING
ABOUT? ... I DON'T KNOW WHAT IT ALL MEANS AND I'M
FAILING" (1 4). Remarkably, the plot development suggests antithetical
implications to those maintained in the Butler epigraph. In spite of this
difficulty, Walker does Mamet a favor by indicating that the epigraphs
"provide support for the play's argument. ... In the context of the quo-
tation from Butler, the implication must be that the fault lies not with
Carol but with the circumstances in which she finds herself."16
Walker's attempt to find a justification relies on a hypothesis
diminishing Carol, the teenager university student, to a little child.
Besides, Walker refers to a certain fault, not with Carol, but "with the cir-
cumstances,'' while the problem, I believe, is truly more with Carol than
with her circumstances. Carol is too adult to decide and identify the rea-
son why she fails to understand the course. Confused and discouraged as
she is, Carol admits the problem and stresses: "There are people out there.
People who came here . . . . But I don't understand. I don't understand. I don't
understand what anythi ng means" (12). By italicizing the verb "under-
stand' twice, Mamet emphasizes the problem of comprehension.
The second epigraph (from a folk song) follows immediately and
it seems irrelevant and vague. If it has any significance, it could be only
because it ushers the readers to the origin of the play's title:
15 David Mamet, Oleanna (New York: Vintage Books, 1993). All subsequent ref-
erences are to this edition and indicated in parentheses.
16 Walker, "Three Tutorial Plays," 157-8.
DIALOGIC PROBLEMS AND MISCOMMUNICATION
"Oh, to be in 0/eanna,
That's where I would rather be.
Than be bound in Norway
And drag the chains of slavery."J7
53
It is difficult to see a relationship between the development of the plot
and the ancient folk tale; unlike Ole Bull's "Oleana," Mamet's 0/eanna
aims at providing a precise image of the failure to achieve success in an
academic Utopia. "The obscure title, Oleanna," Schwartz notes, "is taken
from a folk tale of a husband (Ole) and wife (Anna) selling worthless
swampland to farmers investing their lives' savings and then disappearing
with all the farmers' money."
1
8 Despite the obscurity of the title and the
seeming irrelevance of the context, Walker endeavors again to explain the
title, as he notes: "Mamet has identified the world of the play as a utopia
gone bad. And putting this notion together with the reading of the first
epigraph, it would seem that what has gone wrong is the pedagogy."
1
9
Both epigraphs provide difficulty not in their interpretation, but in their
cross reference.
However, Walker's notion that the world of Mamet's play has
been "identified with a utopia gone bad" can be even more expressive of
Mamet's dramatic work, for, I believe, Mamet holds a shocking vision of
the American condition of the time. In addition to expressions of criti-
cal problems in his plays, the dramatist indignantly declares:
the national culture is founded very much on the idea of
strive and succeed. Instead of rising with the masses,
one should rise from the masses. . . . That American
17 The folk tale of Ole Bull (1810-1880) is about a talented Norwegian musi-
cian who toured around the world, continuously playing his violin until he arrived in
Pennsylvania. He liked the place and bought a wide area of land hoping to establish an
idyllic community. He called it "Oleana," and hoped that his fellow Norwegians would live
peacefully away from the tyrannies and suffering of their homeland. Unfortunately his
enterprise failed because the land he bought was barren and impossible to farm. Losing
a great deal of money and effort, Bull and his fellow Norwegians were obliged to go back
to their native land. The site of his venture is now the Ole Bull National Park. Walker,
"Three Tutorial Plays," 158.
1
8 Dennis Schwartz, May 2006: http:// www.sover.net/ -ozus/ oleanna.html
(accessed 22 September 2009).
19 Walker, "Three Tutorial Plays," 158.
54 MOHAJ\.IMED
myth: the idea of something out of nothing. And this
also affects the individual. It's very divisive. One feels
one can only succeed at the cost of someone else ... at
the cost of the failure of another which is what a lot of
my plays ... are about.20
In other words, the problem Mamet presents in Oleanna is not precisely a
problem of American academia but rather a problem of the nation. And
by his use of American academia and emphasis on the characters' failure
to understand one another, Mamet is heightening the tragic effect. Not
only in Oleanna but also in Mamet's other plays, a greater part of the char-
acters' problems lies in their failure to communicate properly. As Harriott
explains:
The characters in Mamet's plays express their muddled
ideas in uncompleted sentences and sputtered obsceni-
ties, decorate their language with ornate malapropisms,
pronounce their platitudes with the triumph of fresh
discovery. The desperation of their lives is echoed and
intensified in their desperation to be understood. Part of
their suffering comes from the state of their language,
and Mamet is writing about the state of that language in
that language. It is an interesting paradox: to compose a
spoken art form about the failure of speech.21
Mamet's emphasis on the failure to communicate threatens to make
America "an urban inferno inhabited by victims who victimize one anoth-
er."22
Mamet's second epigraph would better suit his Pulitzer Prize and
New York Drama Critics Circle Award-winning play, Glengarry Glen Ross
(1984). In this play, Mamet deals with the theme of American business
through a group of unethical real-estate salesmen who attempt to sell
worthless tracts of swampland to unsuspecting buyers. Plot develop-
20 Matthew C. Roudane, "David Mamet," in Speaking on the Stage: Interoiews with
Contemporary American Playwrights., ed. Philip C. Kolin and Colby H. Kullman (Tuscaloosa,
AL: University of Alabama Press, 1996), 178.
2
1 Harriott, American Voices, 75-6.
22 I bid., xiv.
DIALOGIC PROBLEMS AND MISCOMMUNICATION 55
ments, character types, and the language used are all related to the ideas
of land, deceit, and loss expressed in the second epigraph.
In terms of its academic and linguistic mode, Mamet's Oleanna
can be easily distinguished from his other plays. It is characterized by a
distinct and careful choice of words (i.e., respectable, formal, and devoid
of derogatory, offensive, or profane expressions except for the final
scene when John loses control and bursts out in anger, offending Carol),
linguistic sophistication, and scholarly notions and concepts (mainly on
John's part). In Oleanna, the use of language differs from the language
used by the real-estate dealers of Glengarry Glen Ross or the junk retailers
of American Buffalo, as noted by Roudane:
Not only the texture of his characters' language, but, too,
the quality of human relationships [is] defined and con-
fined by that language. Within his junk shop or trashed
office settings Mamet places his characters, whose
predicaments and responses to their lives define a post
modernist world in which loss, betrayal and ethical per-
versity dominate.23
Nevertheless, Mamet's plays have one dialogic aspect in common which
appears in the characters' lack of powers of expression-an inability to
communicate. In Glengarry, for example, Lingk confesses to Roma:
Lingk: I can't negotiate.
Roma: What does that mean.
Lingk: That ...
Roma: ... what, what, scry it. Say it to me.
Lingk: I .. .
Roma: What . .. ?
Lingk: I . . .
Roma: What .. . ? Say the words.
Lingk: I don't have the power.2
4
In Oleanna, Mamet intentionally uses a number of dialogic
devices which reflect varying levels of difficulty through which the prob-
lem of impaired communication can be easily traced and diagnosed.
23 Roudane, "David Mamet," 178.
24 David Mamet, Glengarry Glen Ross (London: Methuen, 1984), 54.
56 MOHAMMED
Among these devices, the multiple phone calls are significant in the sense
that they frequently interrupt the conversation and divert both audience
and characters in ways that inevitably distort and hinder clear perception
and mutual understanding. Throughout the play, there are nine incoming
phone calls. Five of these calls occur in act 1 when John and Carol need
time for concentration, only one in act 2, and the remaining three in act
3. The structural distribution of these calls throughout the play reflects
the actual size and texture of the three acts. Because act 1 is the longest,
five calls take place to disrupt the meaning and foment misunderstanding
between John and Carol.
The action of the play begins with the first of these calls. It is
the longest (it takes up nearly the first two pages of the play) and most
significant since John appears preoccupied with personal and familial
affairs. Carol- who comes to John's office without an appointment-is
seated on a chair and keeps listening. She waits anxiously for John to fin-
ish his phone call to present her problem. On the phone, John utters a
number of distracted, incomplete, clipped, and hazy phrases that place
the focus on language:
JOHN: (On phone) . ... Look, I'm not minimizing it. The
"easement." Did she say "easement"? (Pause) What did
she s ~ is it a "term of art," are we bound by it ... I'm
sorry ... (Pause) are: we: yes. Bound by ... Look: (He
checks his watch.) before the other side goes home, all right?
"a term of art." Because: that's right (Pause) The yard for
the boy. Well, that's the whole ... Look: I'm going to
meet you there . . . (He checks his watch.) Is the realtor
there? All right, tell her to show you the basement again.
Look at the this because ... Bee .. . I'm leaving in ten or
fifteen ... Yes. No, no, I'll meet you at the new ... That's
a good. If he thinks it's necc . .. you tell Jerry to meet . ..
All right? (1 -2)
John's three pauses and glances at his watch indicate his irritation and
unwillingness to indulge in a prolonged discussion. Since John appears
worried and busy, Carol could have been a little more considerate-it
might have been better for her to arrange another meeting. Instead, Carol
chooses to delay the unwilling John and does not state her problem plain-
ly and directly.
From the start, both characters experience difficulty understand-
ing one another, partly due to the difference in language competency
DIALOGIC PROBLEMS AND MISCOMMUNICATION 57
between professor and student. Normally, the discourse of university
people, especially on campus, is distinguished by a set of constraints and
values imposed by academic traditions. This language is often formal and
scholarly. Consequendy, "the discourse of academe," as Lakoff notes,
"seems especially designed for incomprehensibility ... . [W]e know, you
cannot understand, you may not enter. But for insiders they are a secret
handshake."
2
S Of course any educational institution is made up of "a
community of unequals, as manifested through its communicative struc-
tures."26 Mamet illustrates these communicative structures through the
verbal inequality between John's sophisticated style and Carol's inability to
perceive. The first sentence that Carol utters in the play (''What is a 'term
of art?'" [2]) shows that she is stuck in a semantic dilemma leading her to
forget that she is there only to discuss a personal problem. Thus, Carol
gives the first indication of her failure to communicate positively and
constructively.
John's cynical answer and the subsequent repartee illustrate how
the dialogue fails to achieve verbal or non-verbal communication. It is
not only because of the differences in their linguistic competence, but
also because of their manner and mood during the discourse. Because
they are hazy, irritated, and uncertain, they parry and reflect their confu-
sion and mutual mistrust: "Is that what you want to talk about?"(3). John
answers Carol's question reluctandy, while trying to simplify the diction
and clarify the meaning: "Let's take the mysticism out of it, shall we?
Carol? (Pause) Don't you think? I'll tell you: When you have some 'thing.'
Which must be broached. (Pause) Don't you think ... " (3). Ironically,
John's reply adds more mysticism rather than removing it. Moreover, by
doing this he leads Carol to develop an implicidy aggressive tone:
CAROL: . . . don't I think ... ?
JOHN:Mmm?
CAROL: .. . did I . .. ?
JOHN: ... what?
CAROL: Did ... did I ... did I say something wr ... (3).
Likewise, John's attempt to communicate with Carol fails because his
explanation of the "term of art" seems so dubious and uncertain that
Carol's instant reaction reflects implicidy indignant feelings of mistrust.
25 Robin Lakoff, Talking Power: The Politics of Longuage (New York: Harper
Collins, 1990), 143.
26 Ibid., 155.
58 MOHAMMED
JOHN: It seems to mean a term, which has come,
through its use, to mean something more specific than
words would, to someone not acquainted with them ...
indicate. That, I believe, is what "a term of art," would
mean. (Pause)
CAROL: You don't know what it means ... ?
JOHN: I'm not sure that I know what it means. It's one
of those things, perhaps you've had them, that, you look
them up, or have someone explain them to you, and you
say "aha," and, you immediately forget what . .. (3-4).
With such uncanny tone, hesitant manner, and impractical knowledge,
John fails either to satisfy the academic standards demanded by the insti-
tution he works for, or to convince Carol. The professor's extensive doc-
toral studies should have made him a better observer and instructor. It is
shocking indeed that John falls into trouble early in the play when he fails
to give a clear definition of the phrase he himself used. In addition to
John's failure to understand and decode the signals Carol uses to com-
municate, he also fails as an instructor, for the educational process must
by necessity embody the teacher's capacity to understand and follow the
academic progress and achievement of his students. Why else are evalu-
ation systems set and considered essential to any academic program? The
professor's failure would only lead to an awkward exchange that will
inevitably lead to confusion and misunderstanding.
This early scene marks the difficulty both characters create, as
Leibler notes: "In his plays, Mamet invariably deals with his characters'
difficulties with communication, and the obstacles they meet and create
when trying to establish intimate contact with each other."
2
7 As a student,
Carol is seeking to learn language proficiency and skill. As a professor,
John has the privileges and the experience to send and receive clear mes-
sages in an educated but not bombastic style. Ironically, John interrupts
and cuts short his student:
CAROL: ... but how can you ...
J 0 HN: . . . let us examine. Good.
CAROL: How ...
27
Pascale Hurbert Leibler, "Dominance and Anguish: The Teacher-Student
Relationship in the Plays of David Mamet," in David Mamet: A Casebook, ed. Leslie Kane
(New York: Garland Publishing Inc., 1992), 75.
DIALOGIC PROBLEMS AND MISCOMMUNICATION
JOHN: Good. Good When . . .
CAROL: I'M SPEAKING ... (Pause)
JOHN: I'm sorry.
CAROL: How can you ...
JOHN: ... I beg your pardon.
CAROL: That's all right.
JOHN: I beg your pardon.
CAROL: That's all right.
JOHN: I'm sorry I interrupted you (30-1).
59
In fact, John is devoid of the emotional and intellectual faculties that his
status as an instructor requires. Instead, he is very proud of himself, his
theories, his affairs, and his career, which he rates above everything.
Conceited as he is, John does not properly communicate with the out-of-
campus world. His frequent assertion that he "can't talk now" and that he
will "call later" makes it clear that things are still hazy and undetermined.
John is also disconnected by his isolation in the office space with only
Carol whom he sees but fails to understand. However, the only chance
for better communication between John and Carol appears immediately
before the end of act 1 when Carol starts to open a new channel and tell
him about something that she has "never told anyone" (38) . But, as usual,
this is aborted by the fifth phone call after which he shifts abruptly to his
tenure "surprise" (40). John fails here also because he is emotionally dry.
In addition to the numerous pauses John makes in his uncon-
vincing explanations, he fails to communicate properly with Carol
because of his pretentious terminology: "broached" (3), "concepts,"
"precepts" (14), "index" (24), "charts" (36), "pedantic," "paradigm" (45),
"The Stoics" (47), and many other unnecessary phrases which Carol does
not understand. When he tells her that a "paradigm" is simply "a model,"
she reluctantly asks: "Then why can't you use that word?" (45). The
responsibility for this whole course of misunderstanding lies not only
with John's choice of diction and vocabulary, but also with Carol's way of
thinking, talking, and feeling. As Christopher Bigsby notes, Carol's "lan-
guage is confused and confusing . . .. She seems to fail to understand what
he is telling her, or respond to his attempts to put her at her ease."28
When the phone rings for the second time, John is already out of
sorts. The ringing goes on for a while to interrupt a dialogue which has
already been impaired by vexation and disrespect. These frequent phone
28 Christopher W. E. Bigsby, Modern Ame1ican Drama: 1945-2000 (Cambridge:
Cambridge Universiry Press, 2006), 232-3.
60 MmIAJIMED
calls represent the channel that connects John with his out-of-campus
world. Henceforth, they disrupt the ongoing teacher-student line of
thought. John's high-pitched conversation with Carol makes him appear
so outrageous that he briefly ends the second call with Jerry. Jerry is call-
ing for important details concerning the purchase of a new house, but
John's tone and method indicate how irritable and confused he is:
JOHN: ... in class I ... (He picks up the phone.) (Into
phone:) Hello. I can't talk now. Jerry? Yes? I underst ... I
can't talk now. I know ... I know ... Jerry. I can't talk
now. Yes, I. Call me back in ... Thank you (10).
Obviously, John is unable to discuss anything properly. The repetition of
the phrase: "I can't talk now'' emphasizes his distraction; a state of mind
described earlier in the play: "I'm sorry that I was distracted" (5).
John's distraction is again emphasized by the third telephone call
when he appears entirely divided between two channels of impaired com-
munication. The first channel is ''Within the teacher- student paradigm
. .. the motivation and the finalities underlying the exercise of power,"
where Mamet, as Leibler notes, "unveils the desires and the deficiencies
which his uncultivated quasi-aphasic characters are unable to express
openly or even acknowledge to themselves."29 The second channel is with
the world outside through the phone. John fails to communicate because
his attention is always divided:
JOHN: .... (The phone rings.) Through .. . (To phone.)
Hello ... ? (To CAROL:) Through the screen we create.
(To phone:) Hello. (To CAROL:) Excuse me a moment.
(To phone.) Hello? No, I can't talk nnn . .. I know I did.
In a few ... I'm . . . is he coming to the ... yes. I talked
to him. We'll meet you at the No, because I'm with a stu-
dent. It's going to be fff ... This is important, too. I'm
with a student, Jerry's going to .. . Listen: the sooner I get
off, the sooner I'll be down, all right? .. . (He hangs up.)
(To CAROL:) I'm sorry (19-20).
The next phone call bears structural significance because it
weighs paradoxically with the plot development. It is the only call which
John does not answer and the characters are interrupted only by the ring-
29 Leibler, "Dominance and Anguish," 75.
DIALOGIC PROBLEMS AND M!SCOMMUNICA'nON 61
ing of the phone. Probably John's leaving the phone unanswered can be
interpreted as an attempt to avoid communication disruption with Carol,
but unfortunately, he makes an odd offer that leads Carol to an entire
misunderstanding:
JOHN: ... (The telephone starts to ring.) Wait a minute.
CAROL: I should go.
JOHN: I'll make you a deal.
CAROL: No, you have to ...
JOHN: Let it ring. I'll make you a deal. You stay here.
We'll start the whole course over. I'm going to say it was
not you, it was I who was not paying attention. We'll
start the whole course over. Your grade is an ''A." Your
final grade is an ''N' (The phone stops ringing.) (25).
John's offer to give Carol an ''N' as a final grade is ridiculous since it is
neither based on logic nor on academic achievement- Carol must be
truly confused. Even if he is innocent about trying to help Carol, she
must be excused when she misinterprets John's deal for two reasons: first,
the semester is almost "only half over" (25); and, second, she must sus-
pect that John will definitely demand a price for this, especially as he
insists: ''Your grade's an 'A.' Forget about the paper. You didn't like it, you
didn't like writing it. It's not important'' (25). In their discourse system,
Leibler notes that, "there also exists a gestural code of obedience by
which the teacher expects the student to abide."30 But, since Carol can-
not easily accept the offer, misunderstanding and confusion become sup-
plemented by overt incredulity and suspicion:
CAROL: But we can't start over.
JOHN: I say we can (Pause) I say we can.
CAROL: But I don't believe it.
JOHN: Yes, I know that. But it's true. What is The Class
but you and me? (Pause)
CAROL: There are rules.
JOHN: Well. We'll break them (26).
Is John so nai:ve that he shows readiness to break the rules to grant Carol
an ''N'? Is it because he feels that they are "similar" (21), or because he
"likes" her (27)? Without necessity, too, he punctuates his offer with a
30 Ibid., 72.
62 MOHAMMED
sarcastic view of higher education: "It's a sick game. Why do we do it?
Does it educate? In no sense. Well, then, what is higher education? It is
something-other-than-useful" (28). Moving from misunderstanding to
questionable intentions, Carol continues but with a sly purpose now:
"What is something-other-than-useful" (28)?
Carol neither believes nor understands John simply because what
he offers is beyond the legal methods of belief. But, according to Leibler:
"when the teacher chooses to operate within the question-answer struc-
ture, the student is granted the right to speak, but only the form of the
duty to answer."31 Obviously, Leibler refers to the implicit power and
domination assumed and practiced by teacher over student. Therefore,
John never imagines that Carol will refuse the offer since she must react
within the circle he has drawn for her. In fact, this sense of domination
provides a good justification for communication failure. Proper commu-
nication and understanding occur naturally and normally between parties
of equal power.
As the phone calls obstruct the communication, they render the
situation more symbolically significant as the first act begins and ends
with relatively long calls. Further, the fifth call provides structural signif-
icance because it is central. Given this location, the fifth call marks the
climax of the dialogic problem in the plot development, for Carol, who
is now filled with bitterness, gathers her power to launch her attack and
exchange power roles with John in the subsequent two acts. Immediately
after John hangs up, she begins to recollect herself and gather the neces-
sary information she needs to use against John: "the tenure announce-
ment," "the new house" (40) . Carol assumes power to press hard on John
and this develops their misunderstanding even further. Carol becomes so
articulate that she gives John a moral lesson:
CAROL: You love the Power. To deviate. To invent, to
transgress . . . to transgress whatever norms have been
established for us .... But to the aspirations of your stu-
dents. Of hardworking students, who come here, who slave
to come here-you have no idea what it cost me to
come to this school-you mock us. You call education
"hazing," and from your so-protected, so-elitist seat you
hold our confusion a joke, and our hopes and efforts
with it. Then you sit there and say "what have I done?"
And ask me to understand thatyou have aspirations too.
31 Ibid.
DIALOGIC PROBLEMS AND MISCOMMUNICATION
But I tell you. That you are vile. And that you are
exploitative (52).
63
Carol's power gives her license to express the suppressed feelings she
could not previously reveal to John. She has become able to defend her
fellow students, but also her gender: "Don't call your wife baby. You
heard what I said" (79). However, it remains true that the major problem
is a problem of understanding and communication. Carol rebukes John
by denying she is looking for revenge:
CAROL: YOU FOOL. Who do you think I am? To
come here and be taken in by a smile. You little yapping
fool You think I want "revenge." I don't want revenge. I
WANT UNDERSTANDING (71).
Obviously, Mamet is keen to emphasize the problem of understanding.
The only phone call in the second act occurs near the end when
John already knows of Carol's complaint to the tenure committee. He
knows that she has raised a number of charges against him. Realizing
how colossal the blunder is, John chooses to avoid any distraction: "can't
talk about it now. Call Jerry, and I can't talk now. Ff ... fine Gg ... good-
bye. (Hangs up.) (Pause) I'm sorry we were interrupted" (55). John apolo-
gizes for the interruption caused by his frequent phone calls. Likewise,
John has become aware of the emotional dimension of human commu-
nication:
JOHN: You said "Good day." I think it is a nice day
today.
CAROL: Is it?
JOHN: Yes, I think it is.
CAROL: And why is that important?
JOHN: Because it is the essence of all human commu-
nication. I say something conventional, you respond,
and the information we exchange is not about "weath-
er," but that we both agree to converse. In effect, we
agree that we are both human (53).
It is ironic that John is trying now to converse with Carol though he must
understand that she does not wish to get into a rational discussion with
him.
In act 3, three calls take place which continue to impair commu-
64 MOHAMMED
nication. Like the other calls, these three graphically depict the gradual
collapse of John's nerves and his destruction. The first call (i.e., seventh
in the play) interrupts the dialogue at a very critical point:
JOHN: ALL RIGHT. ALL RIGHT. ALL RIGHT. (He
picks up the phone.) Hello. Yes. No. I'm here. Tell Mister .
. . No, I can't talk to him now . . . I'm sure he has, but
I'm fff . .. I know ... No, I have no timet ... tell Mister
... tell Mist ... tell Jerry ... (62).
Growing more irritable, John fails to utter a single meaningful sentence.
When he hangs up and goes back to converse with Carol, the whole mat-
ter turns into an even more complex development, leaving the issue of
Carol's accusations unsettled.
The last two calls are equally significant as they take place as the
tragedy approaches its end. When the phone rings John does not wish to
reply, but Carol advises: "you'd better get that phone. (Pause) I think that
you should pick up the phone (Pause)" (77). Disruption and misunder-
standing reach a summit everywhere around John so that he becomes
unable to understand anything. Everything is now vague and incompre-
hensible: "What does this mean?" (77) John shouts at Carol in sheer
panic. Apparently, anger impairs the communication process and the
dramatist's use of language "reflects both the inner pressures of his char-
acters and the confusion of the urban environment."32 Realizing that he
must move to rescue his career and future dreams, John is obliged to look
for another channel: "I have to tatk to my lawyer" (78).
Before he finishes the last phone call, John's blinding outrage and
failure to communicate or compromise with Carol lead him to order
Carol to get out of his office. Before she does so, he grabs and knocks
her down to the floor, picks a chair and approaches her. Carol's reaction,
on the other hand, is densely expressive: "Yes. That's right. (She looks awqy
from him, and lowers her head To herself) ... yes. That's right" (80) .
Marner's ending the dialogue with this short speech bears exam-
ination. It could imply that both characters feel defeated because they
know they have reached a cul-de-sac. In 0/eanna, as in his other plays,
Mamet is keen on using dramatic language suggesting that "communica-
tion frequently has less to do with actual language than with the silent
32 Leslie Kane, ed. David Mamet: A Casebook (New York: Garland Publishing
Inc., 1992), 284.
DIALOGIC PROBLEMS AND MJSCOMMUNICATION
65
empathy that exists between the speakers."3
3
To this effect, it remains
unclear if Carol's final declaration is a sign of her acceptance or rejection
of John's destructive behavior. In its dramatic action as well as dialogue
structure, Oleanna presents a problem, but Mamet "seldom tells us direct-
ly that he is doing so, and even more rarely offers any kind of clear solu-
tion to the problems."3
4
The structure of this last scene asserts Mamet's
dramatic vision that '"the theatre is not a place where one should go to
forget, but rather a place where one should go to remember"' and that
"the participant who reflects is then led on to questions of further explo-
ration."35
In addition to the interruptions caused by the phone calls,
Mamet's dialogue is designed, on purpose, as a supplementary structure
that gives a linguistic expression of a problem. Mamet uses distinctive
dialogic language which he himself describes as "poetic language. It's not
an attempt to capture language as much as it is an attempt to create lan-
guage. The language in my plays is not realistic but poetic .... It's lan-
guage that is tailor-made for the stage."36 Obviously, Mamet's previous
dramatic experience shows that he creates such a dialogic exchange of
clipped, disruptive statements, phrases, or words to demonstrate the
characters' inability to concentrate or understand:
CAROL: You don't do that.
JOHN: ... I ... ?
CAROL: You don't do .. .
JOHN: ... I don't, what ... ?
CAROL: ... for ...
JOHN: ... I don't for ...
CAROL: . .. no ...
JOHN: ... forget things? Everybody does that
CAROL: No, they don't.
JOHN: They don't ...
33 Anne Dean, Language as Dramatic Action (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson
University Press, 1990), 25.
3
4
David Skeele, "The Devil and David Mamet: Sexual Perversity in Chicago as
Homiletic Tragedy," Modern Drama 24, no. 4 (December 1993): 513.
35 Edward J. Esche, "David Mamet," American Drama, ed. Clive Bloom (New
York: St. Martin's Press, 1995), 168.
36 Roudane, "David Mamet," 180.
66 MOHAMMED
CAROL: No.
JOHN: I think so, though. (Pause) I'm sorry that I was
distracted (4-5).
As noted by John, distraction overwhelms the dialogue. Both characters
are distracted and John does not even give Carol a chance to fmish her
sentence by clipping the word "forget." They become aware of their dif-
ficulty and John attempts to diagnose the problem, attributing it to "some
basic missed cornmuni[cation]"(6), but Carol considers the misunder-
standing a problem of John's language:
CAROL: I'm doing what I'm told. I bought your book,
I read your ...
JOHN: No, I'm sure you ...
CAROL: No, no, no. I'm doing what I'm told. It's diffi-
cult for me. It's difficult ...
JOHN: ... but .. .
CAROL: I don't ... lots of the language . . .
JOHN: ... please .. .
CAROL: The language, the "things" that you say ... (6).
Carol complains of the language John uses in his book, lectures, and dis-
cussions of the "things."
Like most of Mamet's other plays, Oleanna presents characters
"who play language games by manipulating others with monologic lan-
guage .. . naturally invit[ing] us to consider the ways in which trickery
operates in his own narratives."37 In 0/eanna, each character shows a ten-
dency to ignore the other. William Herman notes, "nearly all of Mamet's
plays hinge on the opposition of two individuals, the nature of the rift,
and the energy available for reconciliation."38 In 0/eanna, the dialogue
between John and Carol seems problematic because it fails to bridge or
narrow the rift. As Deborah Geis explains, the "unbalanced relationship
between speaker and listener suggests that even though characters' meet-
ings are cast as dialogic exchanges, the operative force ... is primarily a
3
7
Deborah R. Geis, Postmodern Theatric(k)s: Monologue in Contemporary American
Drama (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 90.
38 William Herman, Understanding Contemporary American Drama (Columbia, SC:
University of South Carolina Press, 1987), 126.
DIALOGIC PROBLEMS AND MISCOMMUNICATION
67
monologic one."3
9
They fail to communicate because each of them lis-
tens only to his or her own voice. Even at times when they appear self
controlled, John and Carol seem to be communicating through com-
pletely clisconnected channels:
CAROL: I feel bad.
JOHN: I know. It's all right.
CAROL: I ... (Pause)
JOHN: What?
CAROL: I . ..
JOHN: What? Tell me.
CAROL: I don't understand you.
JOHN: I know. It's all right.
CAROL: I ...
JOHN: What? (Pause) What? Tell me (37).
One more clialogic problem that marks miscommunication
between the characters arises from their inability to control their nerves.
The action takes place in an academic environment where John and Carol
are supposed to talk and behave within a respectable code of ethics.
Communication between them should be based on a kind of mutual
understancling not only of language levels, but also of their roles and lim-
its. Instead they keep on pressing and exercising powers and prejudices.
John's sense of superiority controls his attitude as if he were the only one
who possesses the absolute knowledge and truth:
JOHN: Sshhhh.
CAROL: No, I don't under . . .
JOHN: Sshhhhh.
CAROL: I don't know what you're scrying ...
JOHN: Sshhhhh. It's all right.
CAROL: ... I have no . ..
JOHN: Sshhhhh. Sshhhhh. Let it go a moment. (Pause)
Sshhhhh ... let it go. (Pause) Just let it go. (Pause) Just let
it go. It's all right (Pause) Sshhhhh. (Pause) I understand .
. . (Pause) What do you feel? (36-7).
Here, John places himself in a position where he has the right to approve
or deny Carol's attempts to understand him. He interrupts her speech and
39 Geis, Postmodem Theatric(k)s, 91.
68
MOHAMMED
reroutes the conversation according to his own desires. Consequently,
they both fail to perceive the complex levels of language. "The power of
the lecturer and the weakness of the students derive from their respec-
tive and relative status, not from their sex."40 They disregard the limits
partially because Mamet "appropriates the stage with a singular vision.
This unity of vision most often flnds its expression in terms of an implic-
it critique of a contingent and decidedly ambiguous universe."
41
According
to Skeele, Mamet "uses the groping inarticulations and dizzying verbal
constructions of his characters to form a chorus of complaint against
spiritual emptiness at the core of America."42 On an individual level, this
feature could have been a product of his early life and family influences.
His father,
was a labor lawyer and a man who paid close attention
to semantic propriety; his mother, Leonore, was a
teacher of retarded children. The Mamets were divorced
when he was ten, and though he has been deliberately
silent about his childhood, he has evidently been espe-
cially marked by the event .... The toughness of lan-
guage, irony, and comedy that play around rhis basic
division may be related to rhis fundamental event in the
playwright's life.43
John and Carol adamantly defend the right of expression yet
interrupt each other while tacitly claiming right and power over each
other. Eventually this "leads them down the slippery slope to a point
where, at the end of the play, they tear each other's throat out."
4
4 Mamet's
0/eanna seems to expose the moral disaster in such an academic atmos-
phere where hierarchical differences must be recognized. In fact, the play
deals with failure, not only for Carol to pass the course, but also for both
people to read and understand one another. John fails as an instructor
and as an educated individual. It becomes clear that when dialogue lacks
40 Macleod, "The Politics of Gender," 204.
41 Roudane, "David Mamet," 177.
42 Skeele, "The Devil and David Mamet," 512.
43 Herman, Understanding Contemporary American Drama, 126-7.
44
Cited in Walker, ''Three Tutorial Plays," 150.
DIALOGIC PROBLEMS AND MISCOMMUNICATION 69
toleration and forgiveness, understanding becomes impossible and both
sides lose.
John and Carol fail to compromise because they are continually
under pressure as they manipulate their power and desire to suppress one
another. Bigsby notices that "there is little sign of sentimentality" and
that the play "is, flrst and foremost, a study of power."45 In consideration
of their relationship, John's language is very much influenced by his rec-
ognized power. At the beginning, he seems boastful and proud of his fac-
ulties as he criticizes "the Artificial Stricture, of 'Teacher,' and 'Student"'
(21). In his priggish attitude, John begins to practice this overriding
power in his conversation with Carol: "I know how ... believe me. I know
how ... potentially humiliating these ... I have no desire to ... I have no
desire other than to help you" (5). Unfortunately, this method fails
because of the difficulty of sustaining a relationship between unequal
parties. When he recognizes this failure to communicate with her, he
turns to reprimand Carol: "Look. Look. I'm not your father" (9).
In regard to the manipulation of power, MacLeod believes that
"the power of the lecturer and the weakness of the student derive from
their respective and relative status."
4
6 Therefore, John derives his power,
his pride, and self-esteem from his status as faculty member. In this, he
exceeds Carol's limits. Eventually, John's conceit leads him to deprecate
the entire education system: "I came late to teaching. And I found it
Artificial. The notion of 'I know and you do not'; and I saw an exploita-
tion in the education process" (22). John's negative vision shows that he
dismisses and elevates himself above everything else in the system.
JOHN: The tests, you see, which you encounter, in
school, in college, in life, were designed, in the most
part, for idiots. By idiots. There is no need to fail at
them. They are not a test of your worth. They are a test
of your ability to retain and spout back misinformation.
Of course you fail them. They are nonsense. And I ...
CAROL: ... no ...
JOHN: Yes. They're garbage. They're a joke. Look at me.
Look at me. The Tenure Committee. The Tenure
Committee. . . . Come to judge me. The Bad Tenure
Committee. . . . lTJhey had people voting on me I
45 Bigsby, Modern American Drama, 232.
46 Macleod, "The Politics of Gender," 204.
70 MOHAMMED
wouldn't employ to wax my car (23).
John's angry language shows his readiness to monopolize the conversa-
tion to demonstrate his own worth and power. Even when his posicion is
at risk near the end of the play, he insists: "It's my name on the door, and
I teach the class" (76). In fact, Mamet italicized John's "name," and the
pronoun "I' to stress the fact that John is more interested in his person
and name than in other tasks and duties.
By and large, Mamet's dramatic dialogue is skillfully designed to
mediate his major thematic problems. For this purpose, the dialogic prob-
lems lead to misunderstanding and communication breakdown. These
problems take various forms and methods: telephone calls, short and
abrupt linguistic stops, interruptions, and the failure to find a proper
method for communication. Along with these comes the overcomplica-
cion employed by John when conversing with Carol who, in turn, reflects
a remarkable inability to understand her professor. Communication
between them fails because of their manipulation of power. In this way,
the disruptive voices of Mamet's plays "reflect the American dream ...
of communication," Geis notes, "Mamet's characters pretend to speak, to
communicate, and to relate with other people, in a world where everyone
is isolated. The wires have been cut."4
7
47 Geis, Postmodern Theatric(k)s, 103-4.
JOURNAL OF AMERJCAN DRAMA Al"JD THEATRE 21, NO.3 (FALL 2009)
LONG DONG AND OTHER P ~ I TROPES IN HWANG'S
M Bc.rrmRFLY
JohnS. Bak
CHIN: Aaaa-ya! How can you use such sickening lan-
guage?!
SONG: My language ... is only as foul as the crimes I
committed ...
David Henry Hwang, M. Butterf!J
I'm not interested in subtext or subtleties. I'm more
interested in creating layers of a structure that have
reverberations, one upon the other.
David Henry Hwang
1
Given that Hwang's M. ButterflY is based Qoosely) on the real-life story of
a Western man who loved an Asian "woman" for twenty years and then
claimed never to have known that "she" was in fact a man, it is only nat-
ural that the phallus should figure as prominently as it does in the play.
As both object of dramatic irony and signifier of sexual, racial, and polit-
ical hegemony, this absent phallus is so "visible" throughout the play that
Song's final revelation of it produces an anti-climax as much for the aucli-
ence as for Rene Gallimard himself. That visibility stems in large part
from Hwang's conscious use of an idiomatic language in M. ButterflY that
layers meanings in such a way that audiences are repeatedly "shown" the
phallus that is not present onstage. Innocent, everyday words take on sex-
ual meanings in male discourse when spoken in or alongside a phallic-rid-
den American slang. While nearly every critic who has written about the
play has already discussed to a large extent how the phallus functions
within the play's sexual economy, none has yet examined the ways in
which Hwang reveals, or does not, that phallus through icliomatic lan-
guage, and to what extent the audience is privileged or not as a fourth-
wall voyeur.2
I Bonnie Lyons, "'Making His Muscles Work for Himself': An Interview With
David Henry Hwang," The Literary Review 42, no. 2 (Winter 1999): 232.
2 The play's fourth wall repeatedly collapses, and the audience actively partici-
pates (depending on one's point of view) in Gallimard's emasculation/sexual liberation.
Hwang confirms his audience's role as voyeur right from the srart of the play:
72 BAK
Similar to the hide-and-seek game Song Liling plays on
Gallimard with respect to his/her own penis, Hwang reveals his play's
"textual" phallus to the audience through a complex series of embedded
tropes, jokes, and allusions, some literal and comic, some metaphoric and
satiric. Each reference not only reminds the audience of the role the phal-
lus plays in Song and Gallimard's relationship but also reinforces Hwang's
commitment to exposing the mechanisms of political elitism. And yet, by
equating the play's text with Song's body and the Western reader/ specta-
tor/ critic with a version of Gallirnard who also imagines himself to be in
a position of epistemological authority, Hwang incites his audience's
desire to know the truth about the affair-rather than about the sociopo-
litical consequences behind it which are part and parcel of the same cul-
tural chauvinism responsible for both Puccini's opera and the Vietnam
War. If the hidden or displaced phallus in M. Butterfly is a dramatic trick
that Song uses to dupe Gallirnard into believing him to be the perfect
woman, it is also a theatrical trick that Hwang uses to gull his ethnocen-
tric American audiences into thinking that Gallimard's presumed homo-
sexuality or failed construction of a gay identity is more the result of his
isolated fantasies than their own endemic inability to divorce the sexual
from the political.3
Phallic Tropes and the Sexist Natu.re of American Slang
M. Butteif!J, simply put, is bursting with phallic references. Some are obvi-
ous and meant to generate a chuckle or two; some are obscure but fuel
the play's sociopolitical commentary. Together, they work to overexpose
the phallus in one way precisely to draw attention away from it in anoth-
er. The result is that the audience becomes so saturated with phallus and
Marc walks over to the other side of the stage, and starts waving and smiling at
women in the audience. [. . .] Callimard notices Marc making lewd gestures.
GALLIMARD. Marc, what are you doing?
MARC. Huh? (Sotto voce) Rene, there're a Iotta great babes out there.
David Henry Hwang, M. ButterflY (New York: Plume, 1989), 9. Further references will be
given parenthetically in the text.
3 Robert Skloot has already argued that Hwang "forces the audiences of his
plays into complicity with the discovery, dismantling, and re-establishment of theatrical
illusion, while at the same time confronting them with challenges to traditional cultural
and gender assumptions." While Skloot posits that Hwang does this to demonstrate "that
what we assume about gender depends on what we see, or don't see," he does not examine
how the play's visual or embedded jokes, puns, and double-entendres transmit that mes-
sage. Robert Skloot, "Breaking the Butterfly: The Politics of David Henry Hwang,"
Modern Drama 33, no. 1 (1990): 59, 63.
LoNG DoNG AND OTHER PHALLIC TROPES 73
penis jokes that it either fails to look beneath their surface humor or dis-
misses them entirely and the criticisms they mask. As the play opens, for
example, Gallimard (as Pinkerton) asks Marc (as the American Consul
Sharpless), "How's it hangin'?"-a foreboding question to be sure, one
that Gallimard could have literally asked Song (5) . The question, posed in
an idiomatic American English that offended many of the play's early
critics as being inappropriate to the material, is intended to get a rise out
of Broadway audiences, who would readily equate the meaning of the
phrase ("How are things going with you?") with its phallic synecdoche
(the penis as locus of a man's well-being). Delivered in American English
and not in the French that they would actually be speaking, the phrase
alerts the audience right from the start that everything spoken in the play
will be idiomatic and phallogocentric in nature.4
While a rather obvious attempt at comedy, Marc's idiomatic
phrase is revisited later in the play for satiric effect. Hwang repeatedly
resorts to this strategy, which those who have criticized the play for its
use of slang have failed to recognize. In act 2, for example, we find a sec-
ond reference to the "hangin"' phallus idiom, but now stripped of its
metonymic language. Renee, Gallimard's curious Doppelganger ("Weird.
I'm Renee too" (54), offers up this caustic assessment of male genitalia:
"But, like, it just hangs there. This little ... flap of flesh" (55).5 Renee's
comment castrates not only Gallimard but, as she will soon point out, the
entire Western male population, whose habit of invoking the phallus in
male discourse is ridiculed. Rendered impotent as a signifier in male lan-
guage games, the phallus can no longer serve as a means to communicate
between male friends or posture between potential enemies. The joke,
once implicit in Marc's original greeting to Gallimard, now shoulders the
weight of Hwang's indictment of Western phallocracy. Still, these two
references are separated by some fifty pages (which would translate
roughly into an hour of stage time), forcing audiences to step outside the
vernacular of Marc's and Renee's language and to recognize Hwang's
4
This is not to say that the French are not themselves culturally obsessed with
the phallus (which they are), but that they arc not as predisposed to use the penis in
idiomatic expressions of greeting, even if only between male friends, as Americans are.
Common French equivalents to this American expression are "c;:a roule?" (literally,
"How's it rolling?'') ou "c;:a gaze?" (How's it going/gassing?")-neither carries a sexual
implication, however.
5 Hwang often resorts to the use of ellipses to help carry the pregnant weight
of insinuation. Any ellipses cited in this essay that are not part of the original quote are
set off in square brackets to distinguish my editorial practices from Hwang's dramatic
usages.
74 BAK
attack on the chauvinism inherent in its daily use. Again, whether
Gallimard and Renee are actually speaking French or English during the
scene matters little (Hwang does not inform us); all semantic duality is
gone, and the only thing left dangling is a modifier.
Hwang's strategy of offering up one obvious phallic reference
only to deconstruct it with another later in the play is conjoined with his
liberal use of loaded words that, in any other context, would simply not
carry the ulterior meanings that I suggest they do here. Yet in a play
ostensibly about phallic legerdemain, these everyday words underscore
Hwang's American slang with a discrete political agenda. Again, though,
these phallic or sexual innuendoes serve comic ends first. When Marc, for
example, tempts the younger Gallimard with a potential orgy at his
father's condo in Marseilles, Gallimard hesitates. What seems at this point
of the play as an example of Gallimard's prudery is used later as evidence
of his suspected homosexuality. His response to Marc, "You go ahead . ..
I may come later" (9, emphasis added), is more than a little sexually prophet-
ic in the story, since Isabelle is reported to have used the word explicitly
in its sexual sense a few scenes later: "I'm coming!" (34). Even Song
beckons Gallimard to climax moments before performing fellatio on
him:
SONG. "Vieni, vieni!"
GALLIMARD. "Come, darling" (41).
That climax arrives for real in scene 9, after Gallimard's second
encounter with Song at the Chinese opera. When he returns home late
that evening, his wife Helga asks him where he has been: "Something
came up" (23). An innocent comment for certain, given the play's reliance
upon contemporary vernacular, but it becomes double-edged when
Hwang purposefully plays on the phallic nature of the slang expression,
which is something Helga intimates in her rejoinder to her husband:
"Oh? Like what? (23).6 Chin makes a similar knowing comment when she
asks Song if s/he is violating Chinese Communist Party principles in
"gathering information" through homosexual relations with Gallimard:
"Remember: when working for the Great Proletarian State, you represent
our Chairman Mao in every position you take." Song cheekily replies: "I'll
6 Elsewhere, Hwang plays on the double-entendre of cliched sexual expres-
sions, such as premature ejaculation with "Don't jump the gun" (37) or "Someone just
wasn't on the ball, there" (37) (he had prepared us earlier for this joke with his use of the
slang expression "to ball" for having sexual intercourse: "Right. You balled her" [33]).
LoNG DONG AND OTHER PHALLI C TROPES 75
try to imagine the Chairman taking my positions" (48). And finally, when
left in prison with his girlie magazines and the bittersweet memories of
his affair with Song, Gallimard responds to Marc's inquiry if he would
"wanna come" and join him on a date: "Of course. I would love to
come" (76). Marc's parting remark leaves little doubt as to Hwang's con-
tinued punning on sexual climaxing, here through masturbation in a
prison cell: " Pause. Marc: Uh---on second thought, no. You'd better get a
hold of yourself first" (76).
As with the use of the word "hangin'," the innuendoes implicit
in the verb " to come" (strictly in a male sexual context throughout) or in
the noun "positions" offer Hwang endless opportunities to tease his
reader/ spectator with sexed (and sexist) language. Arguably, even the
most casual reader / spectator would have picked up on these rather obvi-
ous sexual jokes and double-entendres, especially if they were empha-
sized for comic effect during a performance. And yet, by recognizing
them as jokes, the audience falls simultaneously into Hwang's trap: name-
ly, that in reading too much into the "text" and often in sexual terms (as
Hwang's Western characters do in the play), we compromise its meaning;
but not reading into the text at all (as Gallimard fails to do) is to privilege
casual banter over political critique. In other words, if we read Hwang's
language precisely for its sexual innuendo, we align ourselves with the
Western newsmen and judges whose predilections for Gallimard's trial
are based not on the political fallout from the affair (i.e., "What secrets
did you tell him?") but rather on the salacious details of its "How did you
not know?" premise.? If, on the other hand, we accept Hwang's slang at
face value, we miss the political messages with which he infuses it in sub-
sequent usages. Both "reading" acts of Hwang's text, then, force us to
reproduce either Gallimard's sexist chauvinism or his political ignorance,
in spite of our presumptions of being his intellectual and epistemologi-
cal "superior" because of our privileged status as reader/ spectator.
Many of the play's early critics who did not like this "TV sitcom
style" of dialogue were simply missing the point here. Hwang insisted
repeatedly in his interviews that he used American slang to demonstrate
the "butting up of unlikes" in the play: "So I made a very conscious
choice to be American and use a lot of American slang. In particular in
the male bonding scenes between Gallimard and Marc, the way they talk
7 Near the end of the play, a Judge asks Song directly, "There is one thing that
the court- indeed, that all of France- would like to know. ( .. . ] Did Monsieur Gallimard
know you were a man?" (81).
76 BAK
about sex is very American."S In M. Butterf!J, the political is accessed
through the linguistic, no matter what the language or the environment in
which it is spoken-be it bedroom, newsroom, or courtroom. But the
linguistic may not always reveal the political, at least not when a word or
gesture appears in isolation. For this reason, Hwang recasts his phallic
tropes and puns in a different light later in the play. Gone now is the gra-
tuitous humor. Instead, we are given slang expressions that implicate
racial relations as much as the previous idioms had focused on gender
ones.
The Phallic Trope as Political Commentary
Near the end of act 2, Song announces that s/he has called her son
"Song Peepee," a name that the phallically-insecure Gallimard finds
abominable: "It's worse than naming him Ping Pong or Long Dong or-"
(67) .9 While racial jokes such as these might raise a smile among Hwang's
predominantly Western audiences, he is quick to point out their useful
sociopolitical ends:
there is a lot of tension in the culture about issues of
race and gender, and sometimes laughter is a way to
release that. I make jokes in my own plays that depend
on that. In M. Butterf!J, the whole idea that a child would
be named Long Dong is a really cheap shot, but the fact
is that the humorous response to that comes out of
something that exists in the culture and something
which is a little bit of a put-down of another culture.IO
8 John Louis DiGaetani, "M. Butterfly. An Interview with David Henry Hwang,"
TDR 33, no. 3 (Autumn 1989): 148, 152. Hwang had expressed a similar sentiment to
David Savran in their May 1987 interview: "Even in M. Butterfly American slang butts up
against a more classical language." See David Savran, "David Hwang," In Their 01vn Words:
Contemporary American Playwrights (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1988),
120.
9 Significant here is Marjorie Garber's critique of Hwang in Vested Interests as
being both homophobic and misogynistic, noting that he is as blinded by stereotypes of
Asian women as Gallimard is.
1
0 Jackson R. Bryer, ed., The Playvmgh6 Art: Conversations with Conte11porary
American Dramatists (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 142.
LoNG DoNG AND OTHER PHALUC TROPES 77
For Gallimard, if he could not imagine his son's name having any associ-
ations with the phallus, particularly one reproduced in a classically
Western racist joke, it is only because the joke is now on him, and to a
large extent upon those of us in the West watching him, whom Hwang
has made bear witness to Gallimard's confession.
One extended example of Hwang's "phallic" sleight of hand
involves the various meanings of the phallic words "pin" and "needle" in
the play and their relationship to Western political hegemony.tt Earlier in
M. Butterfly, for instance, while ogling over the girlie magazines he pur-
chased in prison, Gallimard flashes back to the day when he first discov-
ered magazines like these in his uncle's closet: "One day, a boy of twelve.
The first time I saw them in his closet ... all lined up-my body shook.
Not with lust-no, with power. Here were women-a shclfful-who
would do as I wanted" (10). His epiphany here, which interpolates his
first vision of Song performing Butterfly's suicide aria, produces a pinup
girl on stage dressed "in a se:x:y negligee' (10). The girl attempts, in
Gallimard's imagination at least, to seduce him with a strip tease: "Then,
slowly, I lift off my night dress. [ ... ] I toss it to the ground. [ ... ] I stand
there, in the light, displaying myself" (11). While fascinated with the
pinup girl, Gallimard is not sexually aroused by her: "My skin is hot, but
my penis is soft. Why?" (11). The obvious answer is that Gallimard, a sex-
ually confused individual, is only now interpreting that adolescent
episode as singular proof of his latent homosexuality. But if we recall
that he is projecting onto the scene with the girl what the (still unknown)
male Song had already done for him, then issues of sex give way to those
of power. In other words, given that this epiphany occurs some twenty
years after Gallimard and Song first met, it suggests that Gallimard is
more interested in dominating his sexual partner than in being dominat-
ed by her.
Gallimard's life, in fact, has been a string of failed heterosexual
encounters with Western women who force him into assuming the infe-
rior position. He was first ''pinned to the dirt" (33, emphasis added) by
Isabelle and is now being needled by his wife Helga "with the same old
voodoo" (SO) about producing a child. This trend continues with Renee
as well, whose sexual inhibition "like those [pin-up] girls in the maga-
zines" makes her seem "almost too ... masculine" (54). Immediately fol-
lowing their first sexual encounter, for instance, Renee compliments
Gallimard on his sexual prowess:
1
1 Hwang is no doubt familiar with two emasculating American expressions,
"pin-dick" and "needle-dick."
78
RENEE. You have a nice weenie.
GALLIMARD. What?
RENEE. Penis. You have a nice penis (54).
BAK
Gallimard is taken aback by Renee's comment, however, igniting a debate
about the gender, social, and political semantics involved in referring to
the male genitalia:
RENEE. Most girls don't call it a "weenie," huh?
GALLIMARD. It sounds very-
RENEE. Small, I know.
GALLIMARD. I was going to say, "young."
RENEE. Yeah. Young, small, same thing. [ .... ]
GALLIMARD. I suppose I just say "penis."
RENEE. Yeah. That's pretty clinical. There's "cock,"
but that sounds like a chicken. And "prick" is painful,
and "dick" is like you're talking about someone who's
not in the room (54-5).
When Renee asks Gallimard innocently if he has ever "looked at one?"
he responds, "No, I suppose when it's part of you, you sort of take it for
granted" (55). His comment has reverberating ironies when we take into
consideration his relationship with Song (whose "weenie" he has not
seen, and has thus taken for "granted") and his prior impotence, literal
and figurative, when faced with awkward heterosexual situations.
The conversation is more than purely genitalogical, however, for
Hwang places the play's essential critique of Western geopolitics in the
mouth of a schoolgirl. While raising issues about the problems of mas-
culinity in Western societies, for instance (which the masculinity studies
of the 1990s were to explore more fully), Renee's commentary resonates
truths about the U.S.'s failed involvement in Vietnam, where the penis is
singled out as the sole cause of political hegemony:
And there's so much fuss that we make about it. Like, I
think reasons we fight wars is because we wear clothes.
Because no one knows-between the men, I mean-
who has the bigger ... weenie. So, if I'm a guy with a
small one, I'm going to build a really big building to take
over a really big piece of land or write a really long book
so the other men don't know, right? But, see, it never
LoNG D ONG AND 0rHER PHALUC TROPES
really works, that's the problem. I mean, you conquer
the country, or whatever, but you're still wearing clothes,
so there's no way to prove absolutely whose is bigger
(55).12
79
Delivered by a deceptively naive nymphomaniac, the speech is perhaps
more biting when we consider the irony of Gallirnard's French magis-
trates, who show less interest in what state secrets Gallimard passed on
to Communist China and more in how he never knew, during his twen-
ty-year affair with Song, that she was actually a he.13 Thus, why Gallimard
sees Renee as a mere "schoolgirl who would question the role of the
penis in modern society" (58), Hwang sees her as an accurate mouthpiece
for the reasons behind the West's imperialist blunders in the East over the
last century. Song's "clip[ping] the stems o/ flozvers she's arranging in a vase' at
this passage's close conjoins Renee's emasculation of Gallimard with
Asia's of France and the U.S. (56).
Unable to dominate Western women, Gallimard thus turns to the
submissive geishas of the East for compensation. For Hwang, this is the
greatest of all political insults that the West has visited upon Asia not just
because the geisha is a Western invention but because it equates racial
with gender inequality. But Hwang does not hold Gallimard up as an
example of Western ridicule (Gallirnard manages to do that pretty well by
himself); instead, he takes aim at those in the West who think themselves
superior to Gallimard but who nonetheless recapitulate his lack of lucid-
ity in separating the political from the sexual. During Gallimard's trial, for
example, Song confirms Renee's theory that "[m]en always believe what
they want to hear," which includes women saying, "This is my first time"
or "That's the biggest I've ever seen" or "both--which, if you really think
about it, is not possible in a single lifetime" (82). Like men, Song suggests,
entire nations can be easily duped into forgetting that the mind, and not
the phallus, determines sexual, gender, and political ideologies (to say
nothing of the chauvinist myths that inscribe them). France's, and then
12 Many scholars over the years have parsed the intercourse-laced language used
by American politicians to equate the withdrawal of troops from Vietnam as a sign of
American emasculation.
13 As James Moy notes, ''As audiences leave the theatre( ... ) racial/sexual iden-
tity is not an issue; rather, most are simply incredulous at how for rwenty years Gallimard
could have confused Song's rectum for a woman's vagina." See James Moy, "David Henry
Hwang's M. Butterffy and Philip Kan Gotanda's Yankee Dawg You Die: Repositioning
Chinese-American Marginality on the American Stage," Theatre Journa/42, no. 1 (1990): 54.
80
BAK
America's, failure to dominate Southeast Asia resulted from its wronged
sexist ideology that Asians are too weak and too effeminate to stop them,
which is precisely Gallimard's disastrous prediction (57-8). Song's duping
of Gallimard, then, carries wider political implications: the West only
thought it was screwing Vietnam, when all along Vietnam, in drag, was
actually screwing it. Hence Hwang's famous assessment of Western sex-
ual politics, 'We [have] become the Rice Queen of realpolitik" (99).14
Renee's final comment to Gallimard proves prophetic on both
the local and the global levels that the play addresses: "The whole world
[is] run by a bunch of men with pricks the size of pin!' (56, emphasis
added). Her use of the word "pin" is appropriate on two levels of polit-
ical and sexual discourse. First, it recalls that sexual fiasco to Gallimard's
earlier inability to become aroused with the ''pinup girl" (11), as well as
Gallimard's sexual inferiority of having been "pinned to the dirt" (33)
with Isabelle. And second, it establishes an intertextual relationship
between M. Butterfly and Madame Butterfly upon which the entire post-
modern pastiche is hinged: in Puccini, Butterfly sings to Pinkerton that
she fears being "pierced with a pin,"lS just as Gallimard imagines Song as
"a butterfly who would writhe on a needle" (32).16 While that "needle"
textually foreshadows the hara-kiri knife that Gallimard, like Butterfly in
Madame Butterfly, uses to kill himself in the end of the play,17 it also
reminds us of the fact that Song has been literally writhing on the end of
Gallimard's phallus to obtain state secrets: ''Yes, my experiment had been
a success. She was turning on my needle" (36).18
1
4 Hwang claimed to have read Edward Said's Orienta/ism only after he wrote M.
Butterfly. See DiGaetani, "M. Butterfly," 142.
IS Giacomo Puccini, Seven Pucdni Librettos, trans. William Weaver (New York:
Norton, 1981), 215.
16 Dorinne Kondo has already examined the play's intertextual borrowings
from Puccini's opera, but she does not explore the forms of pastiche that these puns and
tropes take. See Dorinne Kondo, "M. Butterfly. Orientalism, Gender, and a Critique of
Essentialist Identiry," Cultural Critique 16 (Fall 1990): 5-29.
17 If Song is an appropriate name for an opera singer, Rene, or "re-ne"
("reborn''), is also fitting for someone who, at the moment of his death, resembles a
caterpillar leaving its chrysalis to become a butterfly.
18 Ilka Saal has rightly caUed Song's expression of love to Gallimard- "But what
would I love most of aU? To feel something inside me--day and night-something I know
is yours. (Pause)" (51)-"ambiguous" in that it semantically refers "both to the baby and
the penis." Ilka Saal, "Performance and Perception: Gender Sexualiry, and Culture in David
Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly," Amerikastudien/ American Studies 43, no. 4 (1998): 636.
LoNG o : . ~ G AND OTHER PHAlliC TROPES 81
Unlike the obvious phallic jokes and gentialogical puns that
Hwang casts throughout M. Butteif!y, the complexity of this pin-up/nee-
dle trope helps him to couch his political criticism within language that is
already ripe with sexual innuendo, challenging readers/viewers to sup-
plant the play's use of idiom for theatrical humor with one for dramatic
irony. His audiences, however-and this is Hwang's essential point in M.
Butteif!y (and elsewhere in his oeuvre)-are made up of Westerners
indoctrinated by the same stereotypical ideologies that motivated
Gallimard to pursue Song in the first place. In order to deprogram them,
Hwang had to ultimately convince his audiences that this story was not
so far-fetched, and that they behave much like Gallimard, sustaining an
illusion to feel superior.
Conclusion
Each of the examples of linguistic (fore)play studied here, then, should
and should not be read as sophomoric attempts to exploit sexual discourse
for comic ends. Hwang's use of common words and expressions only
begin to look jaded because our prurient ears or eyes claim them to be so.
These idioms provide Hwang with the authority to say that his play
means nothing more than it says, while at the same time meaning so
much more than we at first think. Ultimately, though, we are responsible
for those additional meanings, and, in discovering them, we invariably
unveil our political selves. If M. Butteif!J personifies the realpolitik of East
meets West in a dramatization of Gallimard's "failed construction of a
gay identity through the stereotype of an Asian woman [ ... ] (that] expos-
es the prison-house of heterosexism," as Andrew Shin writes, then the
reading/viewing of that play positions an audience member (male and
female alike) in a similar voyeuristic role of wanting to "see" the missing
phallus that Song and Hwang deliberately hide, displace, and finally
expose with all its racial, sexual, and political implications.19
In his 1987 interview with David Savran, Hwang admitted open-
ly that he had wanted "to seduce the audience" with M. Butterf!J, to "trick
19 Andrew Shin, "Projected Bodies in David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly,"
MELEUS 27, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 182. Shin writes that the play "does not confront
Orientalist stereotypes so much as indirectly renovate them by exposing the sexual and
ethical limitations of Western masculinity as traditionally conceived: that is, Hwang writes
as a Westerner with an interest in the East" (182). In other words, M. Butterfly "dislocate[s)
moral and sexual agency from a normative white male body and offer[s] provocations to
postcolonial and queer discourses by reconceiving notions of acting and imposture"
(179) . To this end, "M. Butterfly interprets the Vietnam Era through the metaphor of the
gay male body," which France and then America violate (180).
82 BAK
them" into believing that Song/Shi Peipu could actually be a woman.ZO
To have shown the audience from the start that Song was a man would
have shattered the play's theatrical illusion and denuded Hwang's text of
its bitterness toward Western attitudes concerning the East.2
1
Just like
Song him/herself, then, Hwang's text flirts with us coquettishly, precipi-
tating our fascination more with the sexual hide-and-seek Song plays with
Gallimard with the phallus than with Hwang's sociopolitical critique. As
such, Hwang does not sellout his culture by creating "laughable and
grossly disfigured" characters that appeal to predominantly white
Broadway patrons, as James Moy suggests, but instead makes those
patrons laugh without being aware that they are inherently laughing at
themselves.zz And like Gallimard, who must confront his own ignorance
and chauvinism vis-a-vis Song, we too must acknowledge our epistemo-
logical blunder in buying into Hwang's bait-and-switch of a light drag
comedy for a complex political allegory of a West that may only vaguely
be aware of the criticism leveled against it. In the same way that Song
pleases Gallimard "[w]ith her hands, her mouth ... " (49) all the while pre-
tending to be a woman, Hwang satisfies his audience with one play dis-
guised as another. In short, both adhere to the maxim that you can have
your phallus and eat it too.
20 Savran, In Their 011m Wordr, 127-8.
21 To insure that audience members could not determine Song's sex prior to the
play's performance, producers listed Bradley Darryl Wong, the actor who played Song on
Broadway, as ''B. D. Wong" in the playbill. Hwang, who also understood that the actual
display of the male genitalia on stage would work against the play's ultimate message, told
DiGaetani that ''if you have a penis here and you have Sir Laurence Olivier there, every-
body looks at the penis" (150).
22 Moy, "Repositioning," 55.
CONTRIBUTORS
John S. Bak is Professor of American Studies at Nancy-Universite in
France. He has published widely on American drama and theatre in such
journals as South Atlantic Review, Mississippi Quarter!J, Theatre Journal,
American Drama, Tennessee Williams Annual Review, and Modern Drama. His
latest book is entitled Homo Americanus: Ernest Hemingwcry, Tennessee
Williams, and Queer Masculinities (2009).
Ahmed S. M. Mohammed is an Associate Professor of Drama in the
Department of English, Faculty of Arts, Assiut University, Egypt. In the
early 1990s he was a visiting scholar working on his PhD at KSU, Ohio.
He has taught English and American Literature (drama in particular) in
several universities in Egypt (South Valley University, Beni Sweif
University, and Assiut University), AI Baha University, Saudi Arabia, and
recently Guly 2009) he was invited as a visiting professor at Ryazan State
University Russia.
Lynn Sally is an assistant professor at Metropolitan College of New
York. She has published in the Journal of Popular Culture, and Senses &
Society Journal, and her dissertation, Fighting the Flames: The Spectacular
Peiformance of Fire at Conry Island, was published by Routledge Press. She
is currently working on the proliferation of girlie shows at Century of
Progress World's Fairs.
J. Chris Westgate is an Assistant Professor in English and Comparative
Literature at CSU Fullerton, with a specialization in modern and con-
temporary drama. He has published articles in journals such as Modern
Drama, Theatre Journal, and Comparative Drama. His most recent, long-term
project involves investigating the interplay of slumming and early realism
in Progressive Era New York City.
MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER PUBLICATIONS
Barcelona Plays: A Collection of New Works by
Catalan Playwrights
Translated and edited by Marion Peter Holt and Sharon G. Feldman
The new plays in this collection represent outstanding
playwrights of three generations. Benet i ]ornet won his
first drama award in 1963, when was only twenty-three
years old, and in recent decades he has become
Catalonia's leading exponent of thematically challeng
ing and structurally inventive theatre. His plays have
been performed internationally and translated into four-
teen languages, including Korean and Arabic. Sergi
Bel bel and Llu"lsa Cunille arrived on the scene in the late
198os and early 1990s, with distinctive and provocative
dramatic voices. The actor-director-playwright Pau Mir6
is a member of yet another generation that is now
attracting favorable critical attention.
josep M. Benet I }ornet: Two Plays
Translated by Marion Peter Holt
]osep M. Benet i ]ornet, born in Barcelona, is the author of
more than forty works for the stage and has been a lead-
ing contributor to the striking revitalization of Catalan the-
atre in the post-Franco era. Fleeting, a compelling
"tragedy-within-a-play, " and Stages, with its monological
recall of a dead and unseen protagonist, rank among his
most important plays. They provide an introduction to a
playwright whose inventive experiments in dramatic form
and treatment of provocative themes have made him a
major figure in contemporary European theatre.
Price US$2o.oo each plus shipping ($3 within the USA, $6 international)
Please make payments in US doll ars payable to :Marti n E. Segal Theatre Center.
Mail Checks or money orders to: The Circulation Manager, Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, The CUNY
Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY1oo16-4309
Visit our website at: http://web.gc.cuny.edu/mestc/ Contact: mestc@gc.cuny.edu or 212-8171868
MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER PUBLICATIONS
Czech Ploys: Seven New Works
Edited by Marcy Arlin, Gwynn MacDonald, and Daniel Gerould
Czech Plays: Seven New Works is the first English-lan-
guage anthology of Czech plays written after the 1989
"Velvet Revolution." These seven works explore sex and
gender identity, ethnicity and violence, political corrup-
tion, and religious taboos. Using innovative forms and
diverse styles, they tackle the new realities of Czech
society brought on by democracy and globalization with
characteristic humor and intelligence.
Price US$2o.oo plus shipping ($3 within the USA, $6 international)
}on Fabre: I Am A Mistake. Seven Works for the Theatre
Edited and forward by Frank Hentschker
Flemish-Dutch theatre artist )an Fabre is considered one of
the most innovative and versatile artists of his day. Over
the past twenty-five years, he has produced works as a
performance artist, theatre maker, choreographer, opera
maker, playwright, and visual artist. This volume repre-
sents the first collection of plays by )an Fabre in an English
translation. Plays include: I am a Mistake (2007), History
of Tears (2005), je suis sang (conte de fees medieval)
(2001), Angel of Death (2003) and others.
Price US$1s.oo plus shipping ($3 within the USA, $6 international)
Please make payments in US dollars payable to : Martin E. Segal Theatre Center.
Mail Checks or money orders to: The Circulation Manager, Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, The CUNY
Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY1oot64309
Visit our website at: http: //web.gc.cuny.edu/ mestc/ Contact: mestc@gc.cuny.edu or 212817-1868
MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER PUBLICATIONS
roMANIA After 2ooo
Edited by Saviana Stanescu and Daniel Gerould.
Translation editors: Saviana Stanescu and Ruth Margraff.
This volume represents the first anthology of new
Romanian Drama published in the United States and
introduces American readers to compelling playwrights
and plays that address resonant issues of a post-totali-
tarian society on its way toward democracy and a new
European identity. includes the plays: Stop The Tempo
by Gianina Carbunariu, Romania. Kiss Me! by Bogdan
Georgescu, Vitamins by Vera lon, Romania 21 by ~ t e f n
Peca and Waxing West by Saviana Stanescu.
This publication produced in collaboration with the
Romanian Cultural Institute in New York and Bucharest.
Buenos Aires in Translation
Translated and Edited by Jean Graham-Jones
BAiT epitomizes true international theatrical collabora-
tion, bringing together four of the most important contem-
porary playwrights from Buenos Aires and pairing them
with four cutting-edge US-based directors and their
ensembles. Throughout a period of one year, playwrights,
translator, directors, and actors worked together to deliv-
er four English-language world premieres at Performance
Space 122 in the fall of 2006.
Plays include: Women Dreamt Horses by Daniel Veronese;
A Kingdom, A Country or a Waste/and, In the Snow by Lola
Arias; Ex-Antwone by Federico Leon; Panic by Rafael
Spregelburd. BAiT is a Performance Space 122 Production,
an initiative of Salon Voldin, with the support of lnstituto Cervantes and the Consulate
General of Argentina in New York.
Price US$2o.oo each plus shipping ($3 within the USA, $6 international)
Please make payments in US dollars payable to: Martin E. Segal Theatre Center.
Mail Checks or money orders to: The Circulation Manager, Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, The CUNY
Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY10016-4309
Visit our website at: http: / /web. gc.cuny.edu/mestc/ Contact: mestc@gc.cuny.edu or 212-817-1868
MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER PUBLICATIONS
Witkiewicz: Seven Plays
Translated and Edited by Daniel Gerould
This volume contains seven of Witkiewicz's most impor-
I \./' .. ' , t ~ \ . 1 t I ' ~ ' ; t ;'
tant plays: The Pragmatists, Tumor Brainiowicz, Gyuba/
Wahazar, The Anonymous Work, The Cuttlefish, Dainty
Shapes and Hairy Apes, and The Beelzebub Sonata, as
well as two of his theoretical essays, "Theoretical
Introduction" and "A Few Words About the Role of the
Actor in the Theatre of Pure Form."
I
I
SEVEN PLAYS
Witkiewicz ... takes up and continues the vein of dream
and grotesque fantasy exemplified by the late Strindberg
or by Wedekind; his ideas are closely paralleled by those
of the surrealists and Anton in Artaud which culminated in
the masterpieces of the dramatists of the Absurd . . .. It is
high time that this major playwright should become better
known in the Eng/ish-speaking world. Martin Esslin
Price US$2o.oo plus shipping ($3 within the USA, $6 international)
Four Works for the Theatre by Hugo Claus
Translated and Edited by David Willinger
Hugo Claus is the foremost contemporary writer of Dutch
language theatre, poetry, and prose. Flemish by birth and
upbringing, Claus is the author of some ninety plays, nov-
els, and collections of poetry. He is renowned as an enfant
terrible of the arts throughout Europe. From the time he
was affiliated with the international art group, COBRA, to
his liaison with pornographic film star Silvia Kristel, to the
celebration of his novel, The Sorrow of Belgium, Claus has
careened through a career that is both scandal-ridden
and formidable. Claus takes on all the taboos of his times.
Price USSts.oo plus shipping ($3 within the USA, $6 international)
Please make payments in US dollars payable to : Martin E. Segal Theat re Center.
Mail Checks or money orders to: The Circulation Manager, Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, The CUNY
Graduate Center. 365 Fifth Avenue, New York. NY10016-4309
Visit our website at: http://web.gc.cuny.edu/mestc/ Contact: mestc@gc.cuny.edu or 212-817-1868
MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER PUBLICATIONS
Theatre Research Resources in New York City
Sixth Edition, 2007
Editor: Jessica Brater, Senior Editor: Marvin Carlson
Theatre Research Resources in New York City is the most
comprehensive catalogue of New York City research
facilities available to theatre scholars. Within the
indexed volume, each facility is briefly described includ-
ing an outline of its holdings and practical matters such
as hours of operation. Most entries include electronic
contact information and web sites. The listings are
grouped as follows: Libraries, Museums, and Historical
Societies; University and College Libraries; Ethnic and
Language Associations; Theatre Companies and Acting
Schools; and Film and Other.
Comedy: A Bibliography
Editor: Meghan Duffy, Senior Editor: Daniel Gerould
This bibliography is intended for scholars, teachers, stu-
dents, artists, and general readers interested in the theo-
ry and practice of comedy. The keenest minds have been
drawn to the debate about the nature of comedy and
attracted to speculation about its theory and practice. For
all lovers of comedy Comedy: A Bibliography is an essen-
tial guide and resource, providing authors, titles, and pub-
lication data for over a thousand books and articles devot-
ed to this most elusive of genres.
-------
___ ......_
Price US$1o.oo each plus shipping ($3 within the USA, $6 international)
Please make payments in US dollars payable to: Martin E. Segal Theatre Center.
Mail Checks or money orders to: The Circulation Manager, Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, The CUNY
Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY1oo16-4309
Visit our website at: http: / / web.gc.cuny.edu/mestc/ Contact: mestc@gc.cuny.edu or 212-817-1868
MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER PUBLICATIONS
Four Ploys From North Africa
Translated and edited by Marvin Carlson
This volume contains four modern plays from the
Maghreb: Abdelkader Alloula's The Veil and Fatima
Gallaire's House of Wives, both Algerian, Julila Baccar's
Araberlin from Tuni sia, and Tayeb Saddiki's The Folies
Berbers from Morocco.
As the rich tradition of modern Arabic theatre has recently
begun to be recognized by the Western theatre community,
an important area within that tradition is still under-repre-
sented in existing anthologies and scholarship. That is the
drama from the Northwest of Africa, the region known in
Arabic as the Maghreb.
The Arab Oedipus
This volume contains four plays based on the Oedipus leg-
end by four leading dramatists of the Arab world. Tawfiq
Al-Hakim's King Oedipus, Ali Ahmed Bakathir's The
Tragedy of Oedipus, Ali Salim's The Comedy of Oedipus
and Walid lkhlasi's Oedipus as well as Al-Hakim's preface
to his Oedipus on the subject of Arabic tragedy, a preface
on translating Bakathir by Dalia Basiouny, and a general
introduction by the editor.
An awareness of the rich tradition of modern Arabic the-
atre has only recently begun to be felt by the Western the-
atre community, and we hope that this collection will con-
tribute to that growing awareness.
Edited by Marvin Carlson
Price US$2o.oo each plus shipping ($3 within the USA, $6 international)
Please make payments in US dollars payable to : Martin E. Segal Theatre Center.
Mail Checks or money orders to: The Circulation Manager, Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, The CUNY
Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY100164309
Visit our website at: http://web.gc.cuny.edu/mestc/ Contact: mestc@gc.cuny.edu or 2128171868
MARTIN E. SEGAL THEATRE CENTER PUBLICATIONS
The Heirs of Moliere
Translated and Edited by Marvin Carlson
f' Olil UthC.tt C0Mt01U Or THt
n ANI> T6 CUfTI.AIU
Ea ..... ......
r-c--..:c.-
Cit)""--"" ......... ,.._
._ .... ... ._
I " \11 J: u<n' u
.. (. ,.J(l\
This volume contains four representative French comedies
of the period from the death of Moliere to the French
Revolution: The Absent-Minded Lover by ]ean-Fran\ois
Regnard, The Conceited Count by Philippe Nericault
Destouches, The Fashionable Prejudice by Pierre Nivelle de
la Chaussee, and The Friend of the Laws by Jean-Louis Laya.
Translated in a poetic form that seeks to capture the wit
and spirit of the originals, these four plays suggest some-
thing of the range of the Moliere inheritance, from comedy
of character through the highly popular sentimental come-
dy of the mid-eighteenth century, to comedy that employs
the Moliere tradition for more contemporary political ends.
Pixerecourt: Four Melodramas
Translated and Edited by Daniel Gerould & Marvin Carlson
This volume contains four of Pixerecourt's most important
melodramas: The Ruins of Babylon or }afar and Zaida, The
Dog of Montargis or The Forest of Bondy, Christopher
Columbus or The Discovery of the New World, and Alice or
The Scottish Gravediggers, as well as Charles Nodier's
"Introduction" to the 1843 Collected Edition of Pixerecourt's
plays and the two theoretical essays by the playwright,
"Melodrama," and "Final Reflections on Melodrama."
Pixerecourt furnished the Theatre of Marvels with its most
stunning effects, and brought the classic situations of fair-
ground comedy up-to-date. He determined the structure of
a popular theatre which was to last through the 19th centu-
ry. Hannah Winter, The Theatre of Marvels
Price US$2o.oo each plus shipping ($3 within the USA, $6 international)
Please make payments in US dollars payable to : Martin E. Segal Theatre Center.
Mail Checks or money orders to: The Circulat ion Manager, Martin E. Segal Theatre Cent er, The CUNY
Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY1oo16 4309
Vi sit our website at: http: / / web.gc.cuny.edu/ mestc/ Contact: mestc@gc.cuny.edu or 2128171868